Romneyworld

Face it:  a world where Willard Mitt Romney reports $21.6M of unearned income in 2010—and pays 13.8% FICA—a rate lower than a family earning 80,000--is a dystopian world.

A world I fear never gets fixed; where the one percent never have a “change of heart” and return excess pre-crash profits; where crony “Citizens United” democracy refuses, in the wake of the greatest economic collapse since 1929,  to “claw back” any amount evoking fairness.

No.  The die is cast.  Marx was right about unfettered capitalism.  When the economic gamesmanship is over, working people always lose.  Or perhaps it can be said that each has a 1/100 or 1/1000 chance to reach Romneyworld, as if anyone wanted that much of anything.

Romneyworld is for money hoarders.  As for the rest of us, we buy a lottery tickets or occasionally imagine ourselves, through media, languishing in his kind of remorseless success!

Consider these facts:

  • When my father was born (1941) there were 2 billion people on this planet.  In his 71 years, world population has nearly quadrupled.
  • But has life sustaining technology quadrupled to satisfy basic human needs like clean air, water, healthy food or medicine?
  • Is there four times more oil today?  Yet we still run our core economy on it—as if it was 1912 not 2012.

  • No.  Except for money printing, which primarily benefits Romneyworld and undermines wages through ever higher prices, especially since Nixon abdicated the gold standard in 1971; except for Moore’s Law—but you can’t digest an iPad--there exists few real commodity, economic or technological indicators having quadrupled to match population.

Still, for centuries, workers have muddled along, winging away like Foreman versus Ali in their famous match in Zaire.  Then in 2008, the “rope-a-dope” phase abruptly ended and a knockout ensued.

So what comes next?  Will Romneyworld manifest completely through war?  As a final, unfixable fiat monetary collapse?  As a series of manmade plagues the very richest and Machiavellian are perhaps already preparing  for?

I can’t say exactly.  Frankly, the Romneys seem nearly as insipid as the rest of us—except for their perfect, capitalist sociopathy, a unique, distinctive penchant for earning money while harboring zero empathy.

We can only be sure that:

  • Extended lifespan via organ replacement and stem cell therapy will not be for us.
  • Sub-orbital or under-sea-colonization will not be for us.

Instead, for us, says Romney, it’s time to process the Kubler-Ross stages of the new normal; to accept decline and devolution.

  • Denial (you may be here)
  • Rage (I spend most of my time here)
  • Bargaining (I’m struggling here, trying to live an objectively  moral life, breathing better, taking prescriptions to control panic, striving not to damage others when my worst inclinations trend--but it’s not easy--not when taking is your nation's, your neighbors' and perhaps your future President’s way of life).
  • Depression (why collapse under what we can’t control; like being angry at the weather, it’s pointless and silly;  skip this stage—or work in parallel with rage--nothing says these phases are linear;  undoubtedly some overlap, like waves cresting a barren and rocky shore)
  • Acceptance (alive, still and ready for whatever comes)
    • Learn to hack computers, centrifuges, power grids...
    • Learn to splice genes and develop vaccines
    • Learn to grow food
    • Learn to survive if dropped from a helicopter anywhere
    • Form family or community survival and continuity pacts (practicing “survivalists” are decades ahead of us; we need to catch up fast)

Today, we non-Romneys have been found guilty and wanting, for believing in an extraction economy, only to realize very late that we have been extracted.

Or, like Neo in the Matrix, can we cease debating possible, positive Romneyworld outcomes (there are none)?   Can we stop fixating over our score in the Romneyworld hierarchy?  Can we stop obsessing over its failure?  Can we reject winner-take-all, Romneyworld economics and attain meaning and purpose through lives far removed from the reaches of Cayman Islands investing accounts?

Stranger things have happened!