Socialist Utopian Dream Now a Nightmare – Wall Street Underground

By Nick Guarino | March 26, 2010

Now on to one of the great socialist lies.

The masses have been brainwashed. They now believe, heart and soul, the liberal fantasy: “I breathe. Therefore I am entitled to food, shelter, education, health care, work, car(s), sex, drugs and endless rock and roll. All paid for on the backs of someone else.”

It doesn’t matter if they work a bullshit job. If they give bullshit effort. It doesn’t matter if they screw off as much as they can.

They believe life entitles them to every exotic medical procedure. To a fine house. A new car. Endless entertainment. And don’t forget the obligatory summer vacation.

They are entitled to full retirement. Preferably on some tropical island. The grateful natives must serve them drinks with fruit stuck on a little umbrella, as they lounge on the beach. Again all paid for by other people.

These people, with their pina colada beach dreams, are in for the shock of their lives!

Life guarantees you nothing. Reality promises you even less. The world -– especially the developed world -– is about to relearn that lesson.

Our prosperity is not a right. It’s a privilege. One that, if taken for granted and not earned on a daily basis, can be easily lost.

No man is promised a nice life. In fact, not even a good one. Half the planet can attest to that. They have no guarantee of regular meals. Of clean water, a place to live or even freedom or a peaceful existence.

To put it bluntly, the masses of the northern hemisphere have been spoiled rotten. For 60 years we have lived an unsustainable lifestyle. All financed by enormous sums of private, corporate and government debt.

That debt will never get paid back. Never mind the new debt it will take to cover the latest batch of promises, fantasies and social engineering. Or the mega-banks’ losses, that our asshole Wall Street buddies shifted to the public sector, with the bailouts.

The free lunch is over. Now it’s time to pay the piper. The masses are about to get a devastating reality check. Prosperity is leaving the world they know. I call it the Africanization of America and Europe.

What is the difference between Europe, the U.S., and sub-Saharan Africa? Europe and the U.S. have been allowed to amass debt of over a thousand trillion dollars. Derivatives alone account for $900 trillion. Government debt is hundreds of trillions more.

The poor bastards in Africa can’t borrow. So they don’t have the privilege of living an unsustainable lifestyle, financed by other people’s money (usually from the future). They are at bare sustenance level.

The masses in Africa haul water from a dirty water hole, where what few scrawny cattle they have left shit in it. They use a stick and an ox to plow their rock-hard soil. They plant a seed, and hope that between the droughts, their neighbors and the endless revolutions, something will grow. Then they and their children might be able to eat.

It’s not a pretty picture. And it behooves us to pay attention to it. Because much of that lies in our future as well — if we are not damn careful and get it right.

Not so very long ago (100 years) most people in America lived on a farm. 54.4% of all Americans to be exact. Farmers or not, most everyone planted gardens. They canned their food for winter.

Electricity is a hundred year experiment. Before that, you might have had gas lights, if you lived on a city -– and were lucky. Most people used candles and lanterns for light. They went to sleep when it turned dark, and woke up when the sun rose.

They heated and cooked with wood. Hot water was boiled and poured into the bath tub. Giving the old meaning of “hot tub.”

They hauled water from the well, in buckets and pitchers. The kitchen sink had a hand pump. A toilet was a hole in the ground. When you were done, you threw some lime on it.

We believe we are past those times. But who says that is so? Where is it written you must have plumbed water? Electricity? An indoor flushing toilet? Paved roads to drive your car along? The latest million-dollar medical treatments?

Truth is, in today’s world no one pays anywhere near the true cost of their lifestyle. For example, we pay a fraction of what our water system really costs. And most water systems are so old they leak over half the processed water they provide.

Sewage systems and flushing toilets are one of the great bargains of our life. But they are in need of constant maintenance. We can’t afford that anymore.

In fact our sewage systems leak like sieves. Raw sewage flows into the ground water systems. That is why we are abandoning more and more underground water supplies. They are too dangerous to use. We are turning to surface water and recycled sewage water for supplies. In many cases, this water is not fit to drink. Hence the bottled water boom.

Electricity is the most subsidized utility there is. Power grids average 50 years old. Generation systems built in the 1950s are not only outmoded. They still have not been paid for. The money needed for upgrades has been used to refinance and patch together the old systems. Also to subsidize escalating costs, that tariffs don’t begin to cover.

Roads and bridges are too expensive to build and maintain. So we pay for them over 100 years, with ultra long-term financing. We constantly refinance them. Problem is, by the time their useful life has ended, we still owe on them.

Police, hospitals and fire department systems cost vastly more than we can afford now. So municipalities finance these CURRENT expenses for 30 years into the future. The mountain of debt compounds for decades. Now even the interest payments have to be financed.

For 100 years we have gone an endless borrowing orgy. Borrowing from the future, to pay for today’s infrastructure. To subsidize our unsustainable lifestyles. Now two things have happened.

One, the existing systems (still not paid for) are crumbling. 90% of America’s infrastructure needs wholesale maintenance. That alone would cost us tens of trillions of dollars. 70% of our systems will need to be replaced in the next decade.

Two, we can’t fix them. We can’t build new systems. We don’t have the money or credit.

And guess what? Our society is in denial. About all this.

2000 years ago, the Romans had plumbing. They had a vast system of paved roads, bridges and aqueducts. Then their society collapsed. The fall of Rome.

1900 years passed before the world got paved roads, flushing toilets, and hot and cold running water again. Think about that.


You must be logged in to post a comment.