Derivatives and You

Again and again, the media keeps stating that nobody understands derivatives, that it is too complex for most people to understand, as if as a kind of apology for the market meltdown.

But, derivatives aren't actually that hard to understand.

Which begs the question – why is nobody explaining it? Do they really actually not understand themselves? Do they just accept that they won't understand, and so don't even try? Or are they merely pretending not to understand?

Or maybe no one wants the public to look to closely, because looking closely requires take a look at the structure of loans, and the finance system does NOT want that.

So, everybody kinda knows what loans are to them – you, the lendee receive a bundle of money which you have to pay back, with interest. Or, more basically, a person who earns $1000 a month who takes out a $1000 loan in January (that must be paid back in November) suddenly has $2000 to spend in January, making that person much more wealthy that month. Yet along comes November, and the bill for the $1000 loan, and then that month this person has no income. But that's not all – then the interest bill comes due, so in December this person pays out another $500, leaving them with only half their income.

So, what is a load, really? It's a way of giving banks your money.

Now, the counterargument to that has always been: with that loan money in January, you will buy things (like a TV), and the enjoyment that you receive for having that TV for all those extra months (instead of saving up for it and buying it with your own money) makes up for the extra money that gets paid out in interest – or, in other words, makes up for those later months of being poor while you pay back the loan bills.

Of course, the counter-counterargument to that is: if you'd saved the money, you could buy a TV and Blu-ray player with the money you would have otherwise paid out in interest, and the enjoyment you would receive for BOTH objects over the coming years, as well as the enjoyment of not being in debt, far outweighs the enjoyment for having the TV right NOW.

But, really, that is kind of an aside, because that is what a loan is to the lendee.

What we need to look at is what a loan is to the lender – ie the bank. The bank lends out a bundle of money, making them poorer now, but with the expectation that they will be getting that money back plus a bundle more in interest.

So, for them, a loan is an investment. An investment with potentially high returns these days, what with the abandonment of usury laws.

And, like any potentially profitable investment, there are other folks out they seeking to cut in on a slice of the action, and the banks are willing to do that. They will sell of a share of the loan, say $100 worth, for say $110 – the bank then loses out on the full interest of that share of the loan, but no longer holds any risk for that share if the loan doesn't get paid back, and can then turn around and loan the $110 they just got to someone else.

That's generally how things were done, until recently – a fairly safe, stable system. It has its quirks, but there were a bunch of financial rules preventing most of those quirks from having any major effect on the overall economy.

Now, banks rate each of those loans on the likelihood of their being repaid, basing that rating on a lot of things, such as assets, income, and the like. Triple-A is the best rating, usually reserved for wealthy, stable countries. Major currencies receive Triple-A ratings, in other words, but people don't.

A certain portion of loans fail. That's a given. Which is problem for investors. Lower ranked loans have a higher risk of default, and investors don't like risk. So, banks are forced to sell shares of the loans at a lower price, thus offering higher potential profits, in order to attract interest from investors.

However…now we come to the gimmick.

Through experience, banks have figured out what percentage of loan failures there will be at any given ranking – that's just a matter of adding up all the loans of a given rank for a year and finding out what percentage of those loans failed, and then keeping track of the failure rate year-to year for each rank.

Nothing special about that.

But, knowing the failure rate of each rating, what if you took a $100 share from 100 different loans and combined them together to form a new $1000 piece of loan property. Sure, a certain percentage of the shares of that loan property will fail, but the bulk of the shares it is made up of wouldn't, so the new loan property would earn.

The earnings wouldn't be as high as a successfully paid-back loan, since a certain portion of those shares would fail, draining the income. On the other hand, there would be a lot less risk in the overall loan investment, since most of those shares would earn.

Then, taking that idea a step further, the bankers theorized that an ideal set of shares could be co-mingled from shares of loans from all of the different ratings to make an loan property (or investment vehicle, to put it their terms) that would be guaranteed to earn a profit.

With that theory centermost in their minds, the banks hired some techs to design a computer program that would plot a formula of loan shares that would do just that – and so prove the theory, while also making them a whole lot of money.

And that's a derivative – a thing whose value is derived from something else (a loan), but whole value is not directly affected by that something.

And so, the program got made, and they stared earning money with their loan properties. And almost immediately, trouble crept into the system.

Much has been made of the fact the formula thus crafted was a "lab formula," and so could only survive in a completely controlled lab environment, as it took so few real-world factors into account, and that's true.

But that's not where trouble crept in first.

First was how these loan properties got rated. Due to financial deregulation and the usual theories of benefits of lax oversight, these loan vehicles got rated Triple-A, since they "could not fail," making them as good as money. Money being an asset.

And banks loaning their assets to other people for a profit.

You might already see where this is going. Banks make money by making loans with the money that public stores in them in the savings accounts. And one of the causes of the Great Depression was systemic bank failure caused by banks having loaned so much of that money out that they couldn't make pay-outs when the public started demanding their savings, and the banks went belly-up, and everyone who banked there lost everything.

That wasn't exactly an uncommon occurrence before the Great Depression, either – the Great Depression's bank failure was just so much more widespread. And because of it, the government instituted two rules – government-insurance on money that the public placed into a bank, up to a certain point, and a requirement that banks keep a certain percentage of their assets in reserve on their premises, so that they will always have enough money on hand to pay out to people who want their savings back.

The key here is – assets. These new loan properties were considered Triple-A, making them assets, which the banks could then keep instead of real assets, like money, or they could even make new loans based on their new loan properties.

Or, in other words, they started making loans on the promise of earnings from loans that they had made earlier.

Then, on top of that, since the banks were keeping less real assets on hand, in order to cover emergencies, and so that any bank could show real assets when they had to, such as for government inspections, a shadow banking system developed. Again, only because of financial deregulation. The shadow banking system would make overnight loans to any bank that was strapped for cash, and so propped up the thin reserves of the banks.

But, this shadows banking system really only exacerbated the problem, since the shadow banks weren't covered by reserve requirements either, and so they loaned out their assets to a far more extensive degree than even the regular banks were on their new loan properties system.

With everyone that over-extended, no one could survive even the slightest tremor to the system. One hint of trouble, and the over-extended system would collapse. However, the new loan properties were guaranteed to earn, and everyone was making hordes of money, so no one looked too closely at the over-extensions.

But, that's not even all. With so much money being made, crime started to leak into the system, inevitably. And with deregulation, there was no one keeping a close look-out for it. Fraud, among other things, became rampant.

The loan companies needed fresh loans to plug into their loan formula, so they could make new loan properties, but they needed a certain ratio of loans from the different loan ratings in order to obey the formula. After a while, though, they ran out of new loans in certain ratings, even with the newly lax lending laws, and so some people (many people) started fudging their loan packages. Whether out of belief that the system was so perfect it wouldn't matter if a few loans were set into the formula improperly, or more direct fraud, load officers began inflating lendee assets (sometimes conspiring with the lendee, often not) in order to give them a higher rating, and so gather more loans of the right kind in order to make more loan properties.

But if you mess with the formula like that, then more of the shares that make up that loan property are going to fail, which will cause the earnings of the loan property to be weakened, and eventually even to the point that will cause it to go bust.

But, even that is not all. All of these new loans are based on a product, in this case mostly real estate. Which caused a building boom. And people were taking out loans to build vast tracks of property in anticipation of other people taking out loans to invest in the property in anticipation of some future people wanting to purchase that property to live in.

And, well, that ain't gonna work.

Some of those buildings loans are going to go bad. Whether because they were built in the wrong place, or without amenities, or the market changed, or any number of problems, some are going down. Which is going to bring not only the building loan down, but all of the investment loans as well. Which is going to make some of those loan properties go bust. Which, since those loan properties are supposed to be Triple-A, guaranteed, is going to shake the foundations of the system.

And that's still not all. With so many loans being made with so little oversight, and since the loans properties were guaranteed, nobody paid much attention what loans were cut into which properties and where those properties were then sold. It was just cut and sell, as fast as you can. And that means, if any – that's ANY – loan ending up having a problem at some point, nobody could track down who carried the note, who was now responsible for it, who made the error, how to correct the error, or even, sometimes, who was now lawfully in control of the loan.

Instead, third-party institutions were put into place to administer the loan properties that they weren't in any other way responsible for. Which just added another layer of chaos to an already unmanageably hard to administer system, which should never have been allowed to even have arisen in the first place.

And all of that is on top of the structural problems of the loan formula itself. Not only did the formula not take into account systemic failures, such as downturns in the economy, it didn't even take into account local and quite visible downturns in real estate, in places such as Detroit, where real estate was going for 1/100th of its original sales value. Nor did it take into account the actual effect of averages – that formula did make a much safer loan property, but ALL loans have the potential to go bad, and it was just going to happen – even in an ideal non-fraud-based situation – that one loan property was going to have enough shares go bad that it was going to go bust. The only reason that this hadn't happened yet was the fact that the loan properties were such a hot commodity that they were inflating the appearance-value of even horrid-looking loans and not quite enough time had passed yet for the first un-refinanceable loan to come due. But it was coming.

With all that over-extension, fraud, and lab-only-formulas, it isn't actually a question of whether or not the derivatives market was going to collapse, it was a question of which part of the whole house-of-cards was going to fall first.

And that's what the derivatives-market was: a weak, overloaded, logically-bankrupt, and sometimes even fraudulent idea destined to fall apart in the first slight wind of trouble.

America in Decline? - Conclusion

So, with all of those things out, what should one look for to determine the decline of an empire?

As I said, that is a huge topic, and one that I'm not sure has ever been satisfactorily answered by anyone. The best things, possibly, to do, though, would be to take a historical look at the decline of the other large empires. Not an interpretive look, but a historical one.

The Greek Empire: It's difficult to say this far out and with as few resources as there are, but the current best guess was that when the alliance between Athens and Sparta died, the Greek Empire died with it. The Empire existed as a unity between various city-states, with Athens and Sparta as the mind and the backbone respectively. The Empire couldn't survive with one of each of those things.

So, to relate that to today – if the US states start to break off, the US empire would come to a crashing end. Which seems eminently logical.

The Roman Empire: Despite the Church's gentle re-writing of history, it wasn't hedonism that brought down the Empire, and it wasn't really barbarian attacks either. It was the structure of the Empire itself. The Roman Empire was made Christian and split by Emperor Constantine into two halves, and the eastern half survived intact well into the Age of Imperialism, and an argument can be made that they survived very nearly to the modern day. The western side, what some call True Rome, did break apart, bit by bit, but there is one part still with us even today – the city of the Roman Catholic Church. The Church ruled medieval Europe as much as, maybe even more than, the Empire did, and it is a strong influence on the nations of the world today. So, in a way, the Roman Empire is STILL with us.

But what made its military control break apart? The Romans never had that large a military. Unlike the peoples around them, every male person of a certain age who could wield a sword wasn't a warrior. The Romans had an army. Which does add a great deal of skill and professionalism to your warriors, but it also means that only a narrow fraction of your available populace fight. So, the Roman Empire hired mercenaries, and mercenaries have to be paid. Which aggravated an already sore problem.

The Empire was based not on conquest, but on loot. Every country that Rome invaded was subsequently looted of the treasure, and then also had to pay a tribute of (lesser) wealth every year. All those new territories have to be governed, though. Which costs money. And all of their rebellions have to be put down, which costs even more money. And the administration of such a vast empire causes the need for an equally vast bureaucracy back home to administer it, which costs even still more money. Which is fine as long as new conquests are rolling in every generation to pay for the empire. But eventually, you run into the difficulty of having too much of your army and wealth occupied controlling the territory you've got, and no one close who's wealthy enough to bother conquering. And then your empire starts to starve for money.

Which was a problem made even worse by debt. The Roman Empire ran on debt, especially when no new conquests were rolling in, and the costs of Empire never went down, and the non-unified and fractious peoples of the west were an ever-rebellious drain on Roman coffers.

Due to the tax structure and the powerful and controlling financial system of the Roman Empire, Rome essentially went bankrupt. It decided it couldn't afford maintaining all those rebellious – and now rather poor, after all the looting – colonies any more, and so it began to retreat. Not all at once, but bit by bit, letting the more costly and distant countries go, until it retreated altogether.

So, if the US government ever becomes financially exhausted, in debt way over their head to the uncaring financiers, with no ability to print money to inflate that debt away, then the US Empire will break apart due to inability to pay for it. Which would likely happen even faster than it did for Rome, since the loot of the US Empire (of which there is great deal, by the way), doesn't get distributed to the US much at all.

Many people site the Roman Empire in comparisons to the US Empire, drawing many parallel conclusions therein, but a far better comparison would be the Spanish Empire. The Spanish Empire was founded on looting a vast overseas network of colonies, taking both the wealth, goods, and labor of many different peoples and enriching a very few merchant-lords.

Interestingly enough, even with all that loot rolling in, the Spanish Empire only grew more mired in debt. The larger the Empire, the more enemies it made, but also the more arrogant it became, losing what allies it had already won, until it was all alone. The nature of its army allowed it survive, alone and in debt like that, its soldiers often unpaid and even unfed, for a very long time.

But the loot rolling in didn't do much for the rest of Spain, either. It made a few people very rich, but in doing so, it utterly ruined the Spanish economy. The loot was often in the form of large amount of gold, which was essentially money, which essentially worked about the same as if the government had started printing hoardes of money. Those who were part of the looting did well, often very well, but everyone else ended up starving, and with so much work being done out in the colonies, unable to find much work to stave off the hunger. All that, with a growing number of enemies who attacked Spain wherever they could, who then had to be fought, which wars had to be paid for by ever-more borrowing, but also thus needing a great many more soldiers, which, being the only work available, they could have, but that just left an increasing large number of trained soldiers loose and hungry in the cities whenever there wasn't a war on, and an ever-increasing number of maimed citizenry, who usually had to subsist as beggars. It wasn't pretty, and it went down hard, riddled on every side by enemies attacking it from every direction, until it started losing territory, and losing it all fast.

The US Empire is structured quite similarly to the Spanish Empire, so if the war merchants and the colonizers ever end up being completely divorced from the economy, and the US ends up still paying to defend all of that group's interests without sharing in the loot, with an increasingly poor and unemployed populace back home, but still arrogantly making enemies abroad until all it faces is a sea of enemies on every side, attacking it from every direction, then the US Empire will collapse, yanked out of its hands by all of the others peoples of the world.

So, look most of all to the level of US arrogance and its number of enemies that it thusly engenders. Therein will you likely see the US Empire's fall.

America in Decline? - Answers Part V

Declining wages and an addiction to beauty.

It might seem disingenuous to put those two things together, but it isn't. The theory, as the media define it, is that as a culture declines, there is a concurrent rise in fascination and preoccupation with beauty and entertainment - a kind of sap to the ego, if you will.

The media's foremost example of this is actually quite ahistorical, but still widely believed - the Christian explanation for the fall of the Roman Empire. But, we don't even have to get into the theories behind the fall of empires in order to break this argument, because America is NOT currently addicted to beauty.

Do we even need to go beyond beauty contests?

Beauty contests, which only a few decades ago America was inundated with, can't even buy an audience today. The most famous of them all, the Miss America Pageant, is no longer even on network TV, and was only barely saved from oblivion.

But, what about the plastic surgery shows that the media cite so often and with such vigor. I don't know what fascination these shows have with the media, but for people they are actually part of the currently widespread culture of self-improvement. Though cult might be a better word.

Psychological remodeling. Attitude remodeling. House remodeling. Fashion remodeling. Health remodeling. Physical remodeling. Wealth remodeling.

Remodeling. That is the real addiction. Even the shows about models, which you'd think would only be about beauty, are watched by an audience primarily of women, and most of those shows have a hard time surviving without involving a more-than-healthy dose of game-show competition and soap-opera intrigue.

Movies these days have to have character arcs, but, like a lot of terms these days, the term no longer has anything to do with character or arcs, but now means a 'journey of self-improvement.' Some people these days say that written art without a character arc isn't a story at all, but is instead an essay. That is how dominant the culture of self-improvement has become.

It isn't about beauty. It is about being the perfect being, in all aspects. Of course, this is one single idea of what a perfect being is that has been defined by a small subset of the world population, which has certain other connotations to it, but that is another essay.

Many in the media say that the abundant use of sex on television, billboards, magazines, and movies is another aspect of the growing addiction to beauty. But this is a use of sex that is foisted on America by the media. That media culture might one day permeate the culture of the common America, but it has not yet done so. While people are more open to talking about sex than they have been, they are less prone to doing it than they were even a few decades ago, and they are still much less open to talking about it than people are in Europe.

So, as wages (and therefore personal power) falls, America is supposed to become more and more addicted to beauty. It hasn't, so the arguement need go no further. But I will discuss wages anyway.

Wages have gone down. That is an undeniable, recorded fact. The thing is, Alan Greenspan stated that he believed American wages were too high. So too did Reagan and Bush Jr. and Rubin and Clinton (sorta) and Gingrich and Cheney and.... Well, you get the picture.

All of these people in charge of the Treasury and the government, as well as a good chunk of the Senators and Representatives in the House, all believed that American wages were too high, that it was making America uncompetitive, and they stated that they wanted to change that.

And they did.

Which I point out because, if the powers that be systematically reduce the wages of a nation, that is a CHOICE. And the fact that it was a CHOICE, means it has nothing to do with decline.

And so, the whole statement is false from start to finish. Wages aren't lower because of decline, but because of choice. And there is no addiction to beauty caused by the decline in wages and power. There is no addiction to beauty at all. Just an addiction to business and self-improvement.

America in Decline? - Answers Part IV

Collapsing bridges, collapsing dikes, falling buildings, eroding roads. America's infrastructure is crumbling. How do these things happen in a wealthy, advanced country?

The advocates of decline state that crumbling infrastructure is a result of corruption - political, corporate, and religious. They declare that a disease of greed and corruption has claimed all of the powers of America, and that everyone else has succumbed to a malaise.

However, crumbling infrastructure actually is nothing new in the US. From railroads to dikes to bridges, things get built cheap, they aren't maintained properly, and then they break down.

The first large-scale railroad ties laid down were fashioned of poor material and were poorly fitted, causing them to bend into 'U's when heavy loads were run across them, inevitably leading to derailments and death.

The Hanford Nuclear Reactor is a disaster area because its pieces fit together so poorly.

There are bridges that didn't survive their first windstorm, much less their first earthquake.

Things get built on the cheap. Why? Because the builder gets paid on the margin between what it costs to build and what the buyer is paying. So the builder gets more profit with cheaper materials. And the builder gets more work with cheaper bids. So, low-quality materials, low-skilled labor, and corner-cutting become the norm rather than an aberration.

But there's more.

Once the infrastructure gets built, it often is poorly maintained or not maintained at all. Why? Because, while roads and other infrastructure are highly useful to people once they're built, to the government that had them built, infrastructure is just endless seas of red ink going on forever.

As soon a road or a bridge or anything like that gets put in, it immediately starts to weather and degrade, which means it has to be maintained. However, roads and bridges never earn any money to pay for their maintenance, they just keep having to be paid for, forever. The more roads and bridges that get built, the more that has to be paid out to maintain them.

Well, unless your constituency lets you put in those ever-popular toll booths, or something like them.

That's why governments don't really like to build roads. There's just no money in it. Unlike say re-development projects. There isn't even any prestige, such as there are with vanity projects (name in the papers, bumps in the polls - vanity).

Infrastructure also tends to stick around for a while, even when it's poorly built, as weathering and decay is a slow, decades-long process. So, for a government looking to make a profit (and the philosophy of the last few decades was everything has to make a profit), it is actually quite cost-effective in the short term to short infrastructure maintenance and apply all those saved funds to development or vanity projects. Things with money or prestige involved.

And you keep putting it off. And then your successor puts it off, because he doesn't want to look like he can't do as much as you did. And then, eventually, the unmaintained infrastructure start to break down.

It's all part of the fast-buck. The fame game. The culture of NOW. i.e. America. America as it is as it always has been. And so, declining infrastructure has nothing do with any mark of decline. It is only another blow to the illusion so many had of a special, infallible, and benevolent race of people in America.

America in Decline? - Answers Part III

One of the most often cited arguements for the decline is the "Rise of China and India."

This one is actually rather simple. Because the real question is, "Are China and India really on the rise?" And the answer is: no, not yet. Well over 90% of China's economy is still of foreign origin. And India isn't much better.

And as Ireland has discovered, foreign investment comes rapidly can go just as rapidly. China and India hold that foreign investment only as long as the cheap labor exploit that that is being taken advantage of their remains available, as long fuel prices are kept low keeping the exploit viable, and as long as no other country captures the investment with an even more advantageous exploitable resource or an undercutting of their resource of cheap labor with even cheaper labor.

If any of those things happen, all of that investment disappears.

China and India know that, which is why they are trying hard right now to get their local economies brewing. The idea has always been that they would do as Hong Kong and Puerto Rico did before them -- take the infrastructure and skills that foreign investment built and trained them in, and use those to rapidly advance their own internal economies.

Only, for every Puerto Rico, there is a Cuba. For every Hong Kong, there is a Detroit. For every Japan, there is a Russia.

Likewise, all of that growth is based on a trade relationship with America and to a lesser extent Europe, and trade relationships are not stable. The current relationship is based on a nest of laws, agreements, and exploits on both sides. If anything should happen to alter that relationship -- an insult, a tariff, a culture shift, anything -- then the whole thing could collapse overnight.

Rapid foreign investment is no guarantee of an economically successful future.

More to the point, though, is the question -- has a country really risen when so little of their growth is from their own economy, when all of their growth is based on an exploit that could collapse at any moment and for several different reasons, when their rapid growth is so completely based on a trade relationship that could change at any time.

No.

China and/or India might be able to navigate through the rocky shoals of rapid foreign investment and soon begin to rise, following the path of Japan, Hong Kong, and Puerto Rico. But not yet.

America in Decline? - Answers Part II

One of the supposed reasons that I find particularly interesting is "The Increasing Coarseness of American Culture."

This regular accusation by politicals and political media seems to have three, very related aspects - 1, vulgar language, 2, decadence, and, 3, indifference to others.

Decadence is a difficult one to assess. Is America more decadent than it was? Beauty pageants can't even buy an audience anymore. Dance halls are all but gone. The make love, not war days are in the increasingly distant past.

True, people are more open to talking about sex, but not so much in a vulgar fashion once a ways past puberty.

There is only one place where the din of conversation is actually increasingly decadent - advertising and entertainment. There are so many advertisers and shows out there, the din of voices has become so loud, that it is difficult to be heard above the cacophony. In order to be heard, they turn to things that will catch the public's attention - like humor and sex. Someone pushes the envelope in order to be seen. And then everyone else that also want to be heard do the same, and on.

But why is that old bit of reasoning important? Because, outlaw the use of that imagery over public airwaves, and all of it disappears instantly, because that decadence isn't a part of the culture of the PEOPLE of America. It is only a part of the culture of the business of America.

The only part of American culture that has actually changed to any measurably degree in this area is to become increasingly closer to allowing American business to do or say anything they want.

The casual indifference to the people around you is partly tied into that same business culture. American business wanted a mobile workforce, and America increasingly gave it to them.

A mobile workforce means a workforce ready and willing to go wherever business is or wants to go, instead of business having to set up where people are. That means, no extended ties of family, place, or community. If you have ties, you aren't mobile.

So, cut those ties, and what do you have left? No family, no place, no community. A group of strangers.

This isn't actually a new phenomena either. It is the ancient problem of cities. You might live in close proximity to a million people, but you know none of them, they are all strangers. And it is part of the nature of humanity not to trust or much empathize with strangers.

Tie that in with the old merchant-middle class values of wealth and competition, along with the increasingly numerous middle class in America, and you have an increasing indifference to the people around them.

But, to point it out more directly, increasingly large cities and an increasingly middle class are not signs of decline. Just the opposite.

The last, and most interesting, of these accusations, though, is the "increasing coarseness of the language." The frequency in which people curse with words like f*ck and sh*t.

And it is true that cursing is in much more common use that in recent times past. But, why?

To understand that, you have to understand the nature of curse words, or taboo words. An English professor of mine pointed this out to his classes long ago.

Every culture has taboo words. But they do not always have the same taboos from one era to another. Times change, cultures change, and Taboos change with them. So, the question then becomes, why does a culture make certain words taboo.

Why were words like f*ck taboo in America?

Most of America's old taboo words were just regular Saxon words. But when the Normans conquered the Saxons, they brought their French culture to Britain, and they considered the Saxons to be little more than barbarians, and considered their language to be coarse and vulgarly barbaric.

Back then, you didn't want to use Saxon words because you didn't want to be seen as vulgar, and, worse, common (the Saxons being the underclass under the ruling Normans).

And on down through history, people who cursed were told: "Don't be vulgar!" Or crude. Or common.

But then, there was a sea change in American culture during the 60's and 70's, and it became not just acceptable to be seen as common, it became the ideal. People took pride and power in being common during that time, and trailing on into the 80's.

And in doing so, the old Saxons words lost their taboo.

But, that doesn't mean that America no longer had any taboo words. Instead, it had new taboo words. N*gg*r. Ch*nk. M*nk*y. Those were the taboo words of the day.

American culture hasn't became suddenly debased or immoral. It simply changed, at least for a while, from taboos of the common and vulgar to the taboos of racism and slavery. In doing so, morality-wise, American culture became more moral, for a while.

The taboos of class began to return in the 90's, however, until it has become once more okay to say: "You want to be a janitor? Why? That's a job for a Mexican."

So, America is heading back to its more traditional taboos. But even if it weren't, it would have shown America to be more moral than it had been, instead of having the same level of morality it has traditionally had.

In other words, nothing much has changed in the coarseness of American culture. And, really, a quick trip down the memory lane of the Wild West could show you that. No, the one part of American culture that has actually changed is the American people's relation with its businesses.

That Syrupy Thing

If you look, you might be surprised how many of the foods you eat use high-fructose corn syrup. It’s in soft-drinks and candies, sure, but it’s also in ketchup, cereal, crackers, breads, bacon, protein bars, and beer.

Yeah, it’s everywhere. Which makes it easy to take in way too much of it. Way, way too much of it.

Eating too much of any food is bad for health, can make you immediately sick, and can even poison you. But I would suggest that in the case of high-fructose corn syrup, ANY is way too much.

A debate has started about the use and astounding prevalence of high-fructose corn syrup. Not a debate debate, of course. It’s more of an argument—people saying that they don’t want to eat high-fructose corn syrup, and the industry declaring that yes, they do.

People are reacting to the fact that studies are starting to come out showing that high-fructose corn syrup can lead to weight gain, high triglyceride levels, copper deficiency, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and obesity. Seeing that, people naturally start to gravitate away from high-fructose corn syrup. However, the industry is counter-arguing that this reaction is only based on fear, and that high-fructose corn syrup is just another sugar, and is not worse for the body than sugar.

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America in Decline? - Answers Part I

Well, let's start with the big, hairy, ugly one right from the start. War.

The media looks at America's inability to win the Aphganistan War and the Iraq War (some say Iraq War II), and declare that that shows America has fallen far in its power.

But does it really?

I really don't know where they're looking for all of these successful American wars. America has always has a pretty terrible war record. Shall we count the losses? Lets.

The French & Indian War (yes, the unsuccessful fighting goes back a long ways), the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. A lot of losses, in other words.

Then in middling kind of wins there's the Revolutionary War (won not through means other that combat), World War I (where we came in only at the end and at a much smaller scale than the European participants), and World War II: European Theatre (same as WW I).

And in the winning column is the Kuwait War (or Iraq War I), the Spanish American War, and World War II: Pacific Theatre. That's it. And only one of those successes is a real full-scale war.

Yeah, it's not really a lot to hang your hat on.

Of course, you could add various Indian wars, but that's not one America tends to be proud of.

And it's still not a lot to hang your hat on.

So, when it comes down to it, we shouldn't be asking the question "Why is America losing these two simple wars?" We should be asking the far more pertinent question of "Why does America think it should easily when any war?"

Or, more to the point - "Why does America keep losing its wars?"

Why, when America spends more on arms than all of the other countries of the world combined, why does it still lose so often.

Now, the answer to that question is complex, but there a few basic facts which tell much of the reason.

First. Yes, America spends a LOT on defense. But, by heaps and mounds, the vast bulk of that money goes to Support (that would be rockets, artillery, special forces, satellite technology, medics, etc). After all, Donald Rumsfeld and his predecessors were in charge of the armed services for a long time, and they were advocates of turning the American military into a small, highly-advanced, mobile army. And you can't have the leadership of the armed services advocating that for that many years without the armed services at least starting to become that.

Look at what we did with rocket technology in the last few wars. Historically, rockets were one of the most inaccurate weapons ever made. You could fire them from a fixed position at a target a few dozen feet away that isn’t even moving and still miss because the rocket spun away to the side. But we have developed the technology to be able to fire rockets not from the next street over, not from the nearby hills, not from a nearby city, but from the ocean complete outside of the country that contains the target. In things like rapid response. satellite technology, and medical response, America is what it says it - in a class by itself, in all of these area of...Support.

And that's the problem. The very nature of Support.

Support can help you win any battle, and there may not be any battle anywhere in the world that America can't win. But wars are more than winning battles, much more. Wars are a succession of battles and others tasks performed in order to achieve a goal.

Take one example. Missiles can defeat lots of enemies. But missiles can't hold territory. If you're taking hostile territory and you defeat the enemy in that territory, that's not the end. Far from it. Then you've got to control that newly taken territory. Security. Missiles can't help you with that.

For that, you need ground forces. Boots on the ground, in modern parlance. Troops and tanks and the like. And in that area, America has been skimping for several decades. Our tanks are now well beyond the technology curve, we don't have enough armored vests and armored transports to go around, and, most of all, we have too few soldiers to secure and control hostile territory.

As I said, you can't have Donald Rumsfeld and his predecessors in charge of the armed services for that many years without the military becoming what they advocated.

This is like Military Tactics 103, by the way. Not exactly high-end, you know. But any military commander who stated it at the time was immediately fired. And that's called Supporting the Troops.

But, the problems with the Rumsfeldian Philosophy go even deeper than that. The army said flat out that not only did we need a lot more soldiers for these wars, we needed set, achievable goals before any combat. Goals such as Removing the Taliban From Power or Arresting These Al Qaeda Agents on Our List.

But instead, we got goals such as Prevent the Taliban From Ever Being in Power Again. Forever as in FOREVER. That means we have to be there FOREVER, or at least support puppet-leaders there who will act in our name FOREVER. That kind of war implicitly can't ever be won. That is the nature of FOREVER. It goes on FOREVER.

And even with puppet-leaders, the old Roman Imperial rules stated that a newly conquered colony would resist for about 100 years before settling down (and don't think I didn't notice you Senator McCain advocating America being over there for 100 years).

So, we have a small, poorly-equipped army led by yes-men generals (anyone who said anything got fired, remember) fighting a war with no goal, just FOREVER. A war that can be lost, but can never be won.

That's the war war that America set out to fight in Aphganistan and Iraq.


No, America hasn't lost any of its ability to win battles. Nor any of its ability to listen to ignorant elites over military specialists. Nor any of its ability to lose wars anywhere in the world.

In all things military, America is still the country it has always been.

America in Decline?

The big essay I have been working on for some time, which kind of got waylaid by RPG design - craziness.

Anyway, back to the musings on the world.

America in Decline. I keep hearing that statement again and again from many different sources of media. It seems they have all made the assessment, and they are all in agreement - yes.

But is there anyone in the world actually learned enough in the nature of the peoples and cultures of the world to make that assessment? I've come to have my doubts.

I certainly don't have that level of knowledge.

But I am more than qualified enough to rip apart the poor reasoning that those media outlets keep dredging up to make their arguements. And not only can I do so, I am going to.

Their stated arguements are many. Here is the list just those that I have heard ad-infinitum, in no particular order:

A growing addiction to beauty
Inability to prosecute even a small war successfully
A rising courseness of culture
Crumbling infrastucture
Declining wages
Declining economy
A growing lack of respect in the world
The rise of Chaina and India
Erosion of the family structure
Non-competitivenss of US children in math and science.

It's a long and disheartening list, so I'm going to ransack my way through it over a couple of posts.

Games

So, probably the craziest thing I have done, recently I decided to design an entire, and very complex, game.

See, I enjoy a good video game, but the genres of games that I used to like have died out one by one. My personal favorite were Tactical RPGs. Now, these days, while RPGS still exist, technically, it's really in name only.

One of the highest profile RPGs are the ones designed to mimic good old D&D. I used to play the old pen & paper version back in the 80s, back when it was almost a pure tactical wargame. It's nothing like that now.

A little bit incensed at the direction the Video Games have shown D&D to be going, and having heard about the latest changes being adapted to the games from 4th Edition (which essentially are turning the game more and more to a MMORPG, even the Pen & Paper version), and greatly missing the old tactical feel in everything, I decided to spend a bit of time making a high-end tactical version, or the direction that I would have taken the games (argueably unpopular though those decision might have been, seeing as how much money the MMORPG-influenced RPGs are making), which has turned from a gentle pastime into a time-eating, mutli-month odyssey.

So, anyway, here it is Aaroneous Lives again!

Marketing

Thanks to a recommendation from Lindsay, I've finally gotten around to setting up a site at Author's Den, not that there won't be anything on there that isn't on here.

On the other hand, I have gotten around to making my own website, which eventually WILL have everything on there. In time.

McDonalds is Evil

(This is a crazy speech I wrote back in High School, polished up a little bit. It is a satire.)(That would be almost twenty years ago now, if anyone's counting.)


McDonald’s is Evil.

...I bet you think I said that because of the nature of their food. But, that is not the case. Yes, it is true McDonald’s food is high in salt, sweeteners, and fats. But all of that is only a statement of Health, and has nothing at all to do with Evil.

Evil is something else. Evil requires insinuation, corruption, taint.

No, I speak not of food. I speak of actual Evil—their advertising. Specifically, the manner in which McDonalds advertises to children.

McDonalds uses many different characters in its advertisements to children. For the most part, people view these characters as simple children’s cartoons, of a kind with the many cartoon characters used to entertain children in many children’s television programs.

But, no, this is not so. At all.

Let’s take a quick look at the Hamburglar—a round-faced man dressed in an old-style striped prison suit and a bandit’s mask who says “Rubble rubble” when he talks. Picture that. Now, this guy’s thing is: his desire for hamburgers is so great that he ends up stealing them from children so that he can eat them for himself. But always, before he can eat them, Ronald McDonald steps in and saves the hamburgers and restores them to the children. And the Hamburglar is left to make a “Aw, darn’it” gesture.

A simple tale, really. And quite common in children’s television. Considered trivial and silly in its utter commonness.

But now, take a closer look at it. Take a closer look at the things its very commonness has caused you to ignore.

Look at the story again. ...The Hamburglar, an older character, short, round and red of face, and who speaks in an unintelligible, rumbly accent while he goes around stealing things—the very epitome of the old stereotype of the Eastern European immigrants.

You see, the Hamburglar comes from a time when the West greatly feared the Eastern Europeans. So, this Hamburglar comes and steals our children’s food. But, in the end, Whitey comes in and saves the day, restoring order and returning the children’s food to them.

Ronald McDonald—the ultimate white father figure.

And there you have the insinuation. But if that’s not enough for you, just wait, there’s a whole lot more.

Yet, as if the insinuation isn’t bad enough, these advertisements work on an even more insidious level, because they treat the thefts in the friendly manner that they do.

The Hamburglar is stealing. It’s in his name, right? Burglar. But, he’s not depicted as a bad guy, just a guy who can’t resist stealing hamburgers. Can’t resist. Because, you know, he’s addicted to them.

Addicted and stealing, and yet he is never punished or treated for any of it. He is not even shunned for his criminal and uncivil behavior.

The addiction is never even mentioned. It is simply accepted. More than accepted, expected. Everyone just laughs.

Look at those things. Look at them closely. Beyond the racism, it is saying that addiction isn’t just okay, it is accepted. And so is theft in order to feed that addiction. Ie corruption. Of our children.

Now, if this was all just one commercial, or even a series of commercials, I would allow that this might all just be accidental imagery—advertisers making a cartoon-like commercial, and not accidentally not noticing the larger messages they were making.

But, look at the other characters of McDonald’s children’s commercials. First, there is Grinace. I don’t know what he’s like now, but when I was a kid he was a guy so addicted to milkshakes that he would drink down any of them he found, no matter whose they were. And giggle about it. Giggle—like a stoner?

And then there are the Fry Guys—a gang of young hoodlums who are so greedy for fries that they run around stealing them from children. Young, multi-colored thieves who are fleet of foot (you might just as well read black) who run around stealing from white kids. But, once again, everything is restored and made safe once more by Whitey, everyone kept safe from the thievery and addictions of the colored races.

And thus, we have a pattern. A pattern of racism—of depicting the colored races as thieves and addicts, but you just have to accept that from the lesser races because they can’t do any better, but it’s all okay anyway because Whitey will always step in and save the day. (And also hinting that a little addiction is okay, anyway.)

A nasty message, yes. Insinuating and corruptive, yes. But that, by itself, is not quite enough to declare McDonald’s Evil. Evil still also requires taint—the infection of others into their corruptive and insinuating ways.

And so McDonalds does.

Their business is so profitable that many other companies that produce food made for children have been drug into the wake of McDonald’s taint, seeking to acquire for themselves a piece of McDonald’s riches, no matter the cost to their souls.

And so, children’s company after children’s company has fallen to Evil, their commercials now bearing the marks of the taint.

Cocoa Puffs with its Cuckoo Bird. A bird who is addicted to the Puffs, but who has none of his own so goes out to steal them, and who is sent into a wild dreamland whenever he tastes them.

Sugar Smacks—often derided for having SUGAR actually in its name. But whose real evil lies in the Dig-Um frog. The Dig-Um frog, once again, loves his Sugar Smacks, and so breaks and enters into homes, where a cat—this poor cat, who’s only trying to protect his and his family-s home, gets beaten up, laughed at, and his things stolen, while being depicted as the Bad Guy, all because the Dig Um has to have Sugar Smacks and the cat is trying to stop him. Yep—because he’s “Gotta have my Smack...s.”

And then there is the Trix rabbit. A poor rabbit who is, of course, addicted to Trix and tries to steal them. But he isn’t allowed, thus teaching our kids not just how to be exclusionary and racist, but that it is proper that they should be so. “Yes, Virginia, Trix really are JUST for kids.”

So, yes, McDonald’s is evil. Not because of its food. But because of the way it has sought to insinuate, corrupt, and taint everything around them, but especially our children. Shame on them. And shame on anyone who continues to support their Evil corporate regime.

American Stories now Required to have a Morale

Yeah, just like the Greek’s with their philosophical morales, and the early Christians with their religious moraels, modern American stories are now also “required” to have a morale—in the form of a character arc.

Okay, they’re not actually required. The actual term used is: “It is the highest form of Art” to include one. Which, in practice, means that it becomes a requirement, anyway. Because, the stronger the belief that something is a necessary part of Art, the more the gatekeepers will bend their acceptances towards that which includes the required theme.

So, to toll the death knell of what this has caused: No more Screwball comedies. No more Who-done-its. No more Adventure. No more Noir. No more Art films. No more…on and on.

(Yeah, and don’t email with the title of the latest film marketed as Action where the main character runs around emoing it up, instead of just staying in one place emoing it up. Films are short. Being marketed as Action doesn't make a film an Action film. If you fill a Coming of Age story in with a bit of Action, it's still a Coming of Age story. The Action is part of the setting. Because, if you've only got ten minutes of Action, and an hour and twenty of emo Coming of Age, the story isn't about the action, so it's not an Action film. Sad though it is that this has to be explained.)

But, they’re just requiring character arcs, not morals, right? Where do I get off claiming that morales are being required?

Mm. Lets take a closer look at those “character arcs.” The classical definition of a character arc is—how a character is changed by the events of a story. These changes can be positive (like in Up), or negative (like in Taxi Driver), or neutral, or can bounce around, or whatever.

But there is no such variety in the "character arcs" being foisted upon the Art world. For one, those “character arcs” are not of a character in a story, but must be of the main character of that story. Even if every other character but the main character has a character arc, that still will not be right. The main character must have an arc, and it makes no difference if any of the other characters do or not, one at all.

For another, and more importantly, these arcs must be positive. Anything else will not be considered a real “character arc.” A character must learn from their experiences, and it is implied that all learning is, by definition, positive.

Which is not actually the case, of course. But, as ever, that requirers aren't concerned with details.

Concurrently, the definition of “character development” has changed away from the classical "expounding upon a character’s personality so that they seemly fully-rounded." Now, it is defined as a character’s growth through their character arc.

Growth. That's a key word here. Because, those are no longer descriptive terms of critiquing, they are a theme. The theme would be “personal growth.” Personal growth is the moral that is now required in modern American stories.

And, yeah, personal growth is really hot right now. Which has exacerbated this problem.

So, what effects has this had on art?

Well, 90% of films are now the big three easy life changing events—Coming of Age, Epiphany, and Realization of Imminent Death. And most of the remaining 10% are other Life Stage films. So, if you don't like Life Stage films, you're screwed.

If you're a creative person, and want to see something different when you go to the theatre, you're screwed.

Artistically, it also offends creative people (artists are often creative people, by the way) to start making requirements in order to call something Art, because requirements are Ritual, not Art—everybody doing the same thing over and over again. Which isn’t saying anything against Ritual, I like a good ritual. But, it offends creative people to start claiming that such and such Rituals are the highest Art, so they better start including it in everything they do.

In a series, it takes a quirky Sherlock-Holmes-like character and within a few episodes makes him utterly bland. No more misogyny, no more, ridicule, no more cocaine habit. No more personality.

But then, once a series character gets "fixed," they don't generate any more drama. So, generally the character will somehow generate a new series of quirks, these too to soon be healed from. And on and on, until the characters seem to be utterly neurotic. Either that, or they go through relapses ad infintum so they can keep going through the same personal growth experience, sometimes shockingly even twice in the same scene—now there is an unstable personality.

And, it offends creative people most of all because, despite what keeps being said, all of this isn’t even a new development in the realm of Art. A modern genre has been doing this kind of work, and doing it better than anyone else, for decades. And that genre Soap Operas. And, yes, it offends creative people to demand that everything they do and everything they can see becomes a Soap Opera.

But, there is a larger scale problem with this requirement, as well—revenue. Yes, a large portion of the population (yay Baby Boomers) is completely satisfied with Personal Growth stories.

Yet, over time, those who are not will begin to drift away to other entertainment that they find more satisfying. Also, the theme which speaks so well to one generation will have increasingly less impact on successive generations, leading to a steady decrease in the numbers in the core group, as well.

Specifically, someone like me who used to spend hundreds of dollars a year at Hollywood theatres and film festivals now spends all that money on cable television.

The Bottle and the Genie of Globalization

Before I get into the main issues, I’d like to take a short, linguistic aside about the whole “bottle and genie” metaphor.

When you get down to it, it does NOT seem to be the metaphor that proponents of globalization really want to be using. Why not? Because the bottle and genie metaphor as I remember it comes from the old myths of evil djinn being freed from their bottles, whereupon they immediately begin wreaking havoc (they often don’t even grant wishes), and they are usually very difficult to get back into imprisonment in their bottles.

So, using this metaphor to describe globalization is to associate globalization with EVIL djinn, which I am sure is not the intent of the PROPONENTS of globalization.

Also, users of the metaphor tend to also be implying that globalization cannot be put back in its bottle. But in the myths, the evil djinn usually are only difficult to trick back into their bottle – implying that globalization would only be difficult to trick back into its. Which, again, would not seem to be an association that proponents want.

And finally, since the evil djinn are EVIL, everyone WANTS to trick them back into imprisonment in their bottles. That would seem to me to be, most of all, an association that proponents of globalization would want to avoid.

Okay, stepping down from the linguistic soapbox now.

*

Over the years, I have seen lots and lots of discussions about globalization, both defending and attacking it. However, I have never seen anyone discussing globalization’s actual Achilles heel. Yes, it has one, and it is a big one. And that is – security.

There is actually a lot of evidence of this. Because, despite many modern reports to the contrary, this is not the first time a global specialized system has been implements. On the contrary, it has been implemented many, many times in the past – going all the way back two thousand years, in fact, to the Roman Empire’s world trade network, spanning Europe and parts of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. And going all the way forward to the British Imperial trade network.

Globalized systems have risen and fallen many, many times, and they would seem to tend to arise during times of general peace in the world.

Actually, I would suggest that they ONLY arise during those times. Global specialized networks (as opposed to just a global trade network) need a kind of absolute peace in order to work. Because of that, it is only during eras where a general peace has lasted for long enough that someone, somewhere, somehow comes to think that the world has reached the “End of History.” Only during periods of belief in the End of History can a specialized system become achievable, or even be seen as desirable.

For those who don’t know, the idea of globalization is that each country in a trade network should specialize in whatever it is “best” at. Or to put it another way, each country should channel all of its wealth and resources into producing those goods and services that it can do better than anyone else, and only those goods and services.

To illustrate: The people of an island nation whose climate and soil is not conducive to producing food, but is conducive to producing tobacco, these people should not be producing their own food; they should be producing only tobacco, selling it, cashing in, and buying all of their food from another country whose climate and soil IS conducive to producing food, while using the remainder of their income from tobacco sales to purchase other needs and to make themselves wealthy.

Or, to put it into modern terns: Japan should specialize in producing technology, South America should specialize in farming, Mexico should specialize in industriousness, China should concentrate on maintaining a cheap labor force, and the US should specialize in finance. (Or you can give it the opposite spin, if you want: Japan should specialize in making nifty electronic gizmos, South America should specialize in large corporate cash cropping, Mexico should specialize in training lots of service people, China should concentrate on making lots of babies, and the US should concentrate on gouging a piece out of everyone else every step of the way.)

Why specialize? Because a lot of money can be made really fast with specialization – as long as the peace is maintained. And it MUST be maintained, because otherwise what it makes really fast is hunger and deprivation.

Generally, I have seen globalization cited for the way those of its members specialized in resources (or the banana republics or the cash croppers, or whatever you want to call them) seem to lose the ability to adapt to ANY fluctuation in the marketplace, or the heavy market inequities it constantly engenders, or the way it spreads the lowest common denominator of immorality of every country involved throughout the network, and the social strain that all of these things impose on every culture involved in the network.

Security is never even mentioned. But security is the greatest difficulty and hazard of sustaining a global specialized trade network. Indeed, it is the thing that most often takes them down.

The security issue is immense. A global specialized network cannot bear to have instability in any of the countries involved in the network. A global specialized network cannot bear to have any instability in the countries next to any of the countries involved in the network. A global specialized network cannot bear to have any instability in the countries next to any of the major trade routes involved in the network.

And, mind you, that is any instability – whether economic, social, political, cultural, combative, revolutionary, or piratical.

Why? Because, if any instability happens anywhere that touches upon the system, (through disrupted trade routes, spreading tensions, accidents, displaced markets, or any number of other negative possibilities), it can remove a member’s ability to provide its specialization to the network, and, in such a specialized system, that immediately takes the entire network down.

If instability affects the country supplying – say – food, the entire network loses access to food, and starves. If instability affects the country providing manufactured goods, then the entire network loses access to the tools it needs to continue to provide things like food and shelter, and people starve. If instability affects the country financing everything, then everyone loses access to the money they were using to conduct the entire network, everything stops moving, and people starve.

Which is why so many resources must be used to defend the stability of any globalized network.

You can’t have any war (and here we’re talking about real war, not brush wars or police actions or putting down rebellions, or whatever name they’re currently going by), you can’t have any revolutions, you can’t even have any real democracy - because you never know when those pinkos might decide to nationalize something that is a necessity of the network.

And that is why the network must involve itself in forcing stability in every region that the network exists in. It must in order to maintain not just its success, but its own existence. The network must enforce continuity of trade, continuity of social systems, continuity of leadership, and continuity of agreements in all of its members and all of the regions of its members.

Thus: police actions, elections interference, corruptive bribings, trade embargoes, revolution fostering, and assassinations galore. Those things are the price of maintaining the global specialized system.

For as long as the global system is in place, the network must continuously involve itself in the politics, culture, and trade of every region of the world.

That is why global specialized networks tend to arise in eras of relative peace – it is the only time when the world has been stable enough for long enough that such a specialized, easily toppled system can seem to be a good idea. Only when there is that kind of peace for long enough that people start to believe that this is how it will always be will someone, somewhere, somehow think it is an excellent idea to necessary goods and services produced only in one place that must then be transported across immense distances.

Lots of things can take such an easily toppled system, but the thing that takes most of them down is war. Real war.

Global specialized networks are highly vulnerable to war, because necessary goods have to be transported against such long distances and have to pass through so many hands, giving an attacker an infinite number of points of attack. It is challenging to protect even one long supply line that involves only one group; it is impossible to protect a network of such long lines that involves many, many groups of people. So, war takes a network down hard, and it takes it down fast. As Europe can well attest after the World Wars.

Which is why any such a network has to maintain a stranglehold on the entire world – in order to prevent such a war (or any other major threat) from ever happening, and because the End of History periods never last, and the specialized network that arose during it becomes harder and harder to protect without such a stranglehold.

Inevitably, then, even if the network is not Imperial at its beginning, it becomes Imperial in order to maintain not just the gobs of wealth it is generating, but its very existence. To do otherwise would invite starvation and collapse.

That is, without a great deal of civic planning to re-assemble a more self-sufficient economy, it does.

So, we have the globalization of the modern era – an aggressive, reckless, overly-simplistic system that generates a lot of money really fast while destroying the sovereignty, security, and safety of every country in the world. It is a system of people who look only to the NOW, never to the future. ie It is a system reckless, arrogant fools.

The Nature of Politics, and why the Left/Right illustration of it is an utter failure

The US political spectrum is usually depicted as a left/right line, with Liberals on the left side and Conservative on the right, throwing Moderates in in the center and everyone else plotted somewhere on the line - which is a woefully inaccurate system for describing politics in the modern area.

The Left/Right graph makes common sense, certainly - the US has a two-party system, so it makes a certain amount of sense that any representation of it would have two sides. And it is also simple, and we do like to keep things simple. But doing this greatly distorts what the two parties really are.

Each party is actually a coalition of many disparate groups who are only loosely bound together inside the party’s philosophy. Those groups tend to come and go from the parties over time, changing as the politics of the day changes. And as those groups come and go, the change in members naturally changes the overall political philosophy of the party.

But — it has been argued — even if the nature of the philosophy of the two parties might change over time, there are still only two parties, so there is still only only a need of a left/right representation of them, even if the nature of what makes up "left" and "right" changes over time.

And that’s where the errors start to creep in.

First, the more minor point. Because of the winner-takes-all structure of the US political system, US politics doesn't really support having any more than two major political parties. Usually, after a few elections, any major third parties that might have arisen are either absorbed into one of big two, or they break one of the big two and replace them.

However, for those brief times that three major parties have been in existence in US politics, the Left/Right line does very little to explain the nature of the political debate of the time. Most often, in order to force the three-way debate onto the rigidity of the Left/Right line, the third party's philosophy is plunked down somewhere on the line, thus declaring it to be - for instance - a party of the Right, but not so Rightwards as the regular party of the Right, even though doing this very likely does nothing to illuminate the nature of three-way debate.

Actually, doing that to the third parties probably isn’t only just inaccurate; it probably is also actually misleading in its representation of where the third party really stands in relation to the other two. Often, a particular debate can elicit three different opinions, and the third party will have arisen to stand in opposition to both of the other parties.

Yet, that is all just the politics of the moment, and that is easily glossed over by the passage of history - since the US political system doesn't support having three major political parties for any length of time, you can just ignore the three-way debate until it goes away, with any excess political debate of the time that doesn’t fit within the simplistic Left/Right line roughly trimmed away, thus preserving the simplicity. Which is why this was the more minor point.

Far more problematic, however, is the Left/Right system’s complete inability to describe the politics of the modern era (even though describing politics is, technically, its sole purpose).

The foremost reason for this complete failure of accuracy on its part is the assumption built into it that politics will always and ever be a Left/Right divide. But, the major political debate of the 20th century was the dispute (one-sided though it might have been) between Progressives and Populists, not the dispute between Conservatives and Liberals.

To illustrate: Why does everyone in politics always talk about Reform, not just reform but Reform — as if reform itself were somehow a value? Why does the same kinds of legislation get passed, no matter who you vote for? Why does nothing seem to change no matter which of the two parties is in power?

Classically, the answer to these questions is: It is because of a grand conspiracy of power, wealth, and corporatism.

But, this is wrong. It is actually because just about everyone in positions of power and/or influence — from politicians to international experts to reporters — in the 20th century were all Progressives. They might have had their Liberal or Conservative leanings, but the core of their belief was Progressive.

In fact, for a while there, just about every politician in office, whatever their political persuasion, was even identifying themselves as being a Progressive - hat’s how deep Progressive thought was running in US politics during that era. They might not all have known the history of Progressive thought, but they were identifying themselves with it anyway.

Which might seem strange, even impossible, when Liberals and Conservative supposedly forms the core of the Democratic and Republican parties. However, neither Liberals nor Conservatives were much in power in either party. For most of the 20th century, Progressives have controlled both parties, though their influence did wax and wane over time.

While it is true that the Progressive party name hasn't really been on the ballot since Teddy Roosevelt's time, its power and influence were definitely alive and well. Certainly, its anti-Populist furor has been felt in every election since the rise and fall of the Populist party at the turn of the previous century.

The Progressives, with their ideals of Reform, Progress, Exceptionalism, Corporatism, Aggression, and more Reform, pretty much dominated US politics for an entire century, while Conservatives and Liberals mostly seethed in the wings. And while the Populists were repeatedly savaged by the Progessives, until even the word "Populist" because something actually even worse than a sneering slur — it became political death to be saddled with it.

That was the political divide of the modern era - a four-way split, heavily lop-sided though that divide might have been. And because that was that nature of the political debate of the modern era, I would propose that we stop using the simplistic Left/Right model of politics, or the simplistic X-axis graph, and start using an X/Y graph - leaving Liberals and Conservatives on the left and right hand sides, but adding Progressives to the top (Elitists that they are) and Populists to the bottom (being of the masses as they are).

This fuller grid would far more accurately represent the nature of the disputes of modern politics.

And if we wanted to be even still more accurate, we could add the Zed-line, putting Individualist on one end of that line and Socialist on the other. Then the different political groups could be plotted out on a three-dimensional grid, with bubbly spheres drawn around whatever the current coalitions of the two major parties happen to be at any given moment. You could even, then, run a kind of time-lapse over it, and show how the nature of the political parties changes over time. It would also naturally depict the philosophies of third parties far more accurately, and how those philosophies relate to and affect the rest of the political spectrum.

We don't need to go so far as the 3-D version, though. The X/Y grid version by itself would add so much more to the illustration of the nature of the debate. I would very much like to see the terms "Progressive" and "Populist" re-enter the political spectrum in describing the politics of the 21st century.

(Of course, the current movement amongst certain Liberals to adopt the word Progressive for their own to describe Liberalism might mess this X/Y system up a bit. That is, if it turns out that they aren’t actually Progressives-with-liberal-tendencies anyway.)