Hi folks,

Please check out my new essay on Reality Sandwich, "When the Other Show Drops", looking at hard evidence for an approaching financial meltdown in the US, and providing a meta-analysis of the situation we are entering.

The piece is currently at the top of the page at realitysandwich.com , and you can also reach it directly here:

www.realitysandwich.com/when_o...e_drops

Below is a short excerpt from the essay. I am hoping that the comments following the essay on the Reality Sandwich site will stimulate a serious debate about the issues raised in the piece.

Hope you find time to check it out.

Yours,
Daniel

Right now, we appear to be approaching a severe breakdown of the US financial system, with deep repercussions for the global economy. The ongoing meltdown of the subprime mortgage market is, according to this hypothesis, stage one of this process, and a crisis in personal debt will be the second stage - the dropping of the other shoe. Below, I have enclosed a summary of the economist David Martin's recent speech to The Arlington Institute, a futurist think tank in Virginia. Two years ago, Martin made a speech at Arlington where he foresaw the subprime mortgage market meltdown with impressive acuity (a transcript is available on the Arlington's website). His analysis of the credit landscape suggests that mass defaults on personal debt, starting in December, are going to overwhelm the capacity of banks and insurers, who will not be able to find bailouts. Bank insolvencies would lead to the failure of the privately held Federal Reserve. Currently, OPEC and China are shifting their holdings out of US currency, and the Euro is becoming the reserve currency around the world.

Martin proposes that by March we will be entering an entirely transfigured economic landscape. The logic of his argument seems compelling to me. As bank failures and mass defaults begin to mount up, people are going to need interpretive tools to understand their new situation, in order to react to it practically and deal with it psychologically. During a crisis, there is the potential for a major opening of awareness and compassionate understanding, or for a large-scale retraction into fear-based belief systems and Fundamentalisms. Sometimes you have both at the same time.

The imminent economic plunge, if it happens, cannot help but act as a multi-generational wake up call. These days, when I talk to people – especially people in their twenties – I often find myself stunned by their ignorance of the economic and social situation that surrounds them. And yet, I grew up with the same attitude of jaded indifference and the senseless assurance that nothing about politics, economics, or the environment had any real meaning, or would ever affect me in any tangible way.

This jaded indifference is the result of intensive conditioning by the media – the phenomenon of the "flattered self" brilliantly described in Thomas De Zengotita's book Mediated – and an alienated education system which "produces subjectivities" that fit the status quo. These manufactured subjectivities are cut off from any sense of responsibility for the social reality or the life-world that sustains them, and they are carefully conditioned to identify with this alienation as a mark of pride -- celebrities like Mick Jagger and Jack Nicholson, or their younger iterations, are patron saints of cynical hipness and smug narcissism. The concept of the "production of subjectivity" is a major one for Negri and Hardt, who see it as the most important form of production in post-industrial civilization.