The Seldon Vault Opens

Hari Seldon

note: I used a photo of Asa Kasher to represent Hari Seldon.

Once again, the Hari Seldon vault opened, and there was a flock of dignitaries. They filled the chairs and the standing room. This time, the display was piped outside to a large crowd who had gathered. As soon as Professor Seldon's image appeared, an absolute hush descended. "Welcome. By now, we are well into the first of the stages of global dissolution, as I described in my previous message. I quote: A handful of analysts have been warning for years that the wholesale deregulation of financial markets and the wrong-headed privatization of the public sector during the past two decades would threaten the viability of free-market capitalism. Yet ideological neoliberal fixation remain firmly imbedded in US ruling circles, fertilized by irresistible campaign contributions from profiteers on Wall Street, methodically purging regulatory agencies of all who tried to maintain a sense of financial reality. This ideology of "market knows best" has allowed the nation to slip into an unsustainable joyride on massive debt giddily assumed by all market participants, ranging from supposedly conservative banks, investment banks and other non-bank financial institutions, to industrial corporations, government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) and individuals... At present, the first stages have remediated, and you are thinking yourselves well on the way to recovery, lengthy though it may be. I caution you that nothing has changed, particularly the nature of the people in charge. The ruling class is still the same people who designed, created, and fostered the crisis. To imagine that they will entirely give up a system which is so lucrative for them - neglecting the nation at large - is wishful thinking. You are watching the Conservatives rail and scream against the new President. This President is somewhat unusual, as there is no established influential national school of thought that fostered him: he is almost a mutant, a sport, if you will, that almost threw PsychoHistory off course. The trajectories will have been worked out by PsychoHistorians by now. The President will not be followed by one such as himself; there is no one. There will not be politicians such as him until those in their twenties and early thirties begin to fill elected positions. What is most likely is that the Right Wing will end their nonsensical attacks and actually try and develop ideas, something they have not done for 15 years or more. Both sides of the political class, however, will come to a tacit realization - and agreement - that the old system with its incredible inflated levels of money available was just too rewarding and lush to let die off. It will be resurrected by the next Right Wing President into a system with more regulation, but it will be a regulation that tempers the more outrageous acts of the piratical participants. It will do nothing for the vast majority of the population, who will sink into a morass of constant 10% - or higher - unemployment, stagnant wages, and diminishing access to higher education, all the while suffering from the new feudalism of a stagnant real estate market; their houses cannot be sold and will become their prisons...and their eventual tombs. " At this point, a great outcry came from the outside, among those gathered to listen to the speech outside. There was a commotion at the main entry way...