Smallville Democracy

Everytime the President has wished to crush someone or to steal something from someone, he has always spoken in the jargon of "democracy", as in "exporting democracy" to some benighted corner of the globe which was suffering hideously and needed a shot of good old free marketry to bring it around. Pure nonsense. If Democracy were exportable, we would have made a "Bubble" out of it and gotten out of the present economic malaise. Democracy is people with self-respect and pride and self-assurance. It is people used to running their own lives. It is the small city-states of ancient Greece, a myriad hodge-podge of independent and stubborn units who famously would act in concert only after the greatest effort. Their independence, although celebrated, has often been bemoaned by the latter-day Western Geopolitical Media and Speakers: had they only created some sort of federal union, they may have resisted Alexander and Rome itself! Right. And why exactly would resisting Rome be so great? To resist Rome, one has to be like Rome; i.e., an overbearing pagan empire run by slavery! No thank you. Some fates are worse than death. When the USSR fell apart, I asked the question when would it be the USA's turn? At the time, everyone thought that USA won and got the gold medal at the Cold War Olympics, but to me it seemed the USA had lost its way and felt insecure having lost its vision that existed since World War II: save the world from Evil in every form, and make a profit while we did so.

The USA did not feel comfortable in a peaceful world. Now, as I watch the USA create bonds between the government and supposedly free market institutions that are deemed "too big to fail", I am indeed reminded of the USSR where the State owned and controlled the realm of finance. Our biggest threat now lays ahead of us: whether we shall continue down the road where institutions are "too big to fail", and thus become part of the assets of government, or whether we maintain free markets and democratic institutions. Keep in mind that Nazi Germany was an amalgam of State, Corporations, Church, and Ideology. The participants are always present, but the mind set that allows the individuals of the amalgam to lose their individuality and be melded together is eeriely present today, whereas it would have been hard to discern as recently as 10 years ago. Senator Phil Gramm's infamous banking reform was a harbinger of this situation. At the time of its passage, critics correctly and presciently pointed out that it ensured that any future banking problems would be IMMENSE and countrywide, nay world wide; there would no longer be such a thing as regional banking problems. Of course, wide spread banking problems existed in the past, but the future was to see globalized banking problems. The larger the network and the more connected, the greater the risk of concommitent failures. There are no managerial skills extant to handle the Banking Dinosaurs that have been created in this new Jurassic age; none, that is, other than intervention by the State. There are asteroids, however, on the way, one of which, Sub Prime alpha, has already impacted the Earth. It is being followed by others. Democracy is not immense, it is small. It is individuals and families. The bigger democracy becomes, the more it begins to resemble autocracy. The idea of spreading democracy by the agency of a nation whose military budget is greater than the next five largest nations' budgets combined is palpable nonsense. You may spread authoritarianism and globalized slavery, but you cannot spread democracy:

YOU MUST INSPIRE DEMOCRACY!