Elite Heading America into the Perfect Storm

In October 1991, three dangerous weather systems -- a tropical hurricane (Grace), an extratropical cyclone (a Nor'easter) and a strong high pressure front from Western Canada – converged in the North Atlantic to form the Perfect Storm. These three individual storms converged to make a storm of historic proportion. Today, an unstable economy, a corrupt politics and an exhausted military are converging and threatening historic change to our way of life. America is sailing straight into a Perfect Storm.

The civic storms we face are real and imminent. Changing technology in every sector of our society over the past 40 years has brought what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called “gales of creative destruction.” If these winds of change are properly harnessed they bring innovation and revolutionary progress. Neglected, they bring bloody awful revolution. So far we've done little or nothing.

Unfortunately, while the nation is pulled to the center of this vortex, our governing class is betraying us. A governing class, an elite, is essential to any nation state, including ours, however much we might wish otherwise. An elite is doing its job if it puts the good of the country first; it is failing if it confuses its self-interest with the good of the country.

Our elite, the governing class of politicians and pundits, captains of industry and financiers, lobbyists and the wealthy who control the majority of our assets are not on-board with the rest of the community. They are not ready to take the good with the bad. Our financiers and the politicians that they bought are putting their own bonuses and reelection above everything else, acting as though they have a right to be above the storm.

A really big storm restructures everything and that is what is happening to our economic, political and military/security institutions in this Great Recession. This is the stuff of revolution.

The economy that we knew post-1950 is gone, washed away beginning in 1980 and completely destroyed over the last 10 years. Our once proud steel, auto and home appliance industries are gone along with their unions and their great distribution systems. The bankruptcy of General Motors symbolizes the last step in the shift from a manufacturing economy to a financial services economy.

The financial sector is the big winner. It has taken over everything and messed everything up. The revolution in financial innovations brought us collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps and the whole panoply of toxic derivatives. This revolution washed huge, unimaginable amounts of wealth away from the working class and through the financial sector to the governing elite.

The collapsing economy needed that stimulus package, and maybe still needs another one, but the fact is that the big deficit and all that money sloshing around are undermining our political structures. President George W. Bush used the political and economic storm to strengthen the presidency at the expense of the Congress and the people. He stress tested all of our systems with his extra-constitutional signing statements, bank bailout package and novel use of presidential war powers. President Barack Obama continues too much of this.

In our military, two wars and maybe a third in Yemen have produced a subversive mix of robotics, unmanned drones, satellites and the mercenaries we euphemistically call contractors. Our military, especially the reserve and guard units, are near to exhaustion. Yet the generals clamor for ever more troops. Politics and economics, not military needs, drive military spending.

The gathering storm has driven our economy politics and the military beyond our ability to control them. The citizenry is well aware that the ship-of-state is foundering in this worsening storm. Our entire system is under extreme stress but our elites will not agree on what is to be done. Ideology is supposedly the driving force, and the sticking point, but money trumps ideology every time.

This convergence of economic and political disturbances that we call The Great Recession is still an intensifying storm, however exuberant and irrational the stock market might be. The real problem is a breakdown in community; everyone wants the benefits and no one is willing to share the costs of this revolution we are living through. We are headed for a political and economic gridlock that California is giving us a preview of.

This revolution has a ways to go. We can only hope that it will wash away the old governing class, those greedy politicians, financiers and generals who have been serving us so badly. If you fear a revolution now, you're probably on the wrong side.