Revolutionary Fire

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When Blake rhymed his metaphorical Tyger, it was early days of plutonomic revolution. Now the "choice is between who will be destroyed the banks, or labor" says Michael Hudson a trifle apocalyptically, perhaps.

“From Brussels to Latvia ... The aim is to roll back wage levels by 30 percent or more, to depression levels, on the pretense that this will “leave more surplus” available to pay in debt service. It will do no such thing, of course. It is a purely vicious attempt to reverse Europe’s Progressive Era social democratic reforms achieved over the past century. Europe is to be turned into a banana republic by taxing labor – not finance, insurance or real estate (FIRE).”

“'Join the fight against labor, or we will destroy you,' the EC is telling governments. This requires dictatorship, and the European Central Bank (ECB) has taken over this power from elected government. Its “independence” from political control is celebrated as the “hallmark of democracy” by today’s new financial oligarchy. This deceptive newspeak evokes Plato’s view that oligarchy is simply the political stage following democracy. The new power elite’s next step in this eternal political triangle is to make itself hereditary – by abolishing estate taxes, for starters – so as to turn itself into an aristocracy.”

“... Europe is ushering in an era of totalitarian neoliberal rule.”

Read full post here.

The FIRE economy pretty much works on thin air, thaumaturgically creating what we now call money, out of nothing more tangible than pixels, paper and debt. Here in the West we've almost entirely given up making anything real, and have tied our future, such as it is, to Finance, Insurance and Real Estate. Nice clean office jobs with no nasty iron-pumping testosterone or sweat or anything horrid like that. Just what Mother would approve.

Unfortunately for us though,  a "collapsing FIRE Economy is accompanied by debt deflation, falling demand, debt defaults, business failures, and rising unemployment. The Great Depression in the US in the 1930s is a famous example of a debt deflation that followed the collapse of a FIRE Economy. That debt deflation ended with WWII …" according to fireeconomy.com.