Pear-shaped economy: Reap, then rape, then say, YOU must Pare down.

The Voracious Vortex Swallows All.

The upside-down-pear shape of the Global economy got that way because the avatars of balanced budgets are the same people who benefit from swelling budget deficits. Meanwhile the poor, who want increased public spending, are the same folks who pay nothing into the public purse, and those demanding free healthcare are the very people who refuse to pay health insurance, so the malaise has gone viral. Because when the most successful people on the planet die, they get to pass on their ill-gotten gains to their progeny, which festers the entire sickness: the rising expectation of getting something for nothing infects rising numbers of the population. It is now considered a right by not only the rich, who always expect something for nothing, as it's their birthright, but now, the poor demand it as well.

As it has become increasingly clearer to increasingly large numbers of the populace that the rich get that way, not as they claim, by their cleverness, hard work and sobriety, but by rape of the government from whom they reap the benefits of their lobbyists' access to the public's representatives, and then demand the impossible of the rest of us: use our decreasing wages to increase our share of the tax burden, while simultaneously increasing our spending on consumables, to keep the economy humming, and increasing our savings, supposedly for our retirement,  but, as it turns out, so that they're easier for the rich to plunder, because the profits from business, and the river of money from the Capitol, is just not enough to satisfy the insatiable wants of  their royal-like families' growing numbers and appetites.

Thus, the only segment of the population left with a work ethic is the middle class, and the Rich are intent on the destruction of their wealth, whereas the poor are simply intent on their destruction. Though its proclaimed loud and clear that the War on Terror is alive and still the major foreign policy stance of the US, the rain of error it consists of fosters the pre-Reign of Terror-like conditions now festering in the OECD countries, those Nations who have the most, and therefore the most to lose.

The core of the problem, however, lies with the impossible economic structure of the Capitalist system that demands, and in fact needs, a globalized trading regimen, yet maintains the economics of the Nation-State, (or, if you prefer, Empirical structure, yet Democratic institutions) with financiers offering, as Lenin so aptly put it, to "Give them enough rope", and then, when they've pushed them out on the limb far enough, give them a shove and let them dangle in the wind: "Lynchenomics".

But because the only ones capable of financing the overstretched and unbalanced, are exactly the ones who'll, in their own twisted view, benefit from their failure, the falling Lehman syndrome, let's call it, brings the rest of the system down with it in a concatenated failure whose dynamics, once started, cannot be stopped. But what the masses don't understand is that this is exactly the way it's designed to work.

Let me explain: at the end of August in 2008, when the financial fiasco was well apparent, to none more so than the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, who, in order to stoke 'confidence', insisted that the economy, which had been in a recession for six months, was 'resilient', Chuck Prince, the head of Citibank, joked, as the entire globe balanced over the precipice, that he was still dancing. What that refers to in the parlance of financial economics, is loose monetary policy. The metaphor they always use, and still use even today, is to "take away the punch bowl".

As in any alcohol-fueled reel, once that happens, like in a game of musical chairs, you have a drunken stampede toward that island of safety to recover your senses and momentarily stop the sensation of  the room spinning around as your world spirals out of control. But, by design,  there are never enough chairs. So, of course, Someone has to fail.

 But the manner in which the system is now set up, that failure will cause the whole system to implode bringing everyone else into the swirling vortex of destruction. Because, via the mechanism of the derivatives known as credit default swaps, which are nothing more than gambling bets in the guise of insurance, the financiers have put the noose around their own necks, so using a complex structure of opaque mathematical formulations and using such public-funded guardians of the financial world as the SEC, to guard against anyone investigating the manner in which it's been rigged, the very avatars of Governmental prudence and fiscal responsibility have roped our governments into covering all their bad bets, using the public purse, and forcing the institutions, abetted by the scurrilous conniving of sniveling, traitorous, obsequious slime, such as Grover Norquist, to make sure that it's those (that would be us) who get nothing if the bets win, pay everything when the bets fail. They do this, naturally, by insuring that the rich pay a minimum of taxes, raising the federal deficit, which they then use, by buying the Treasuries that fund it, to reap yet another steady stream of income from the government which they then use, via leveraging, to double down on their bets and the reel spins even faster.

And then they scream about too much government debt, fiscal cliffs, deficit spending, and over-taxation of the wealthy job-creators. And that is how they disarm Earp, rape the public, reap the rewards from the very thing they bluster about, which turns the economic structure into an upside down pear, with them at the top, and then demand those they've raped to pare down their expectations. And that's how the patronage in the pear tree works.

Merry Christmas.