the second great depression

You usually find the seed-crystal of a complex of ideas in the most unlikely places. The other day I overheard an old rant by Penn Jillette where he made a passing reference to the First Great Depression implying that there was or would be a second. Within the last hour I've seen multiple G+ posts about the reported troubles and closures of Sears Holdings stores, and over the last few months I've been thinking about #Occupy, over the last 4 years about the Second Great Depression, and over the last 20 years about what has happened to the global society that has brought us such malaise.

Even if the Fed cannot bring itself to say so, we are in the Second Great Depression; naming the phenomenon something else is just a rhetorical game.

So in the context of all that, I found myself reading the most profound book review that I can recall. As no clear-headed thinker could dispute the simple, self-evident truth of Darwin's explanation, this little book appears to reveal the fundamental cause of what we have allowed the 0.05% to do to the entire world in my lifetime.

I can't read this review for you, and I've not fully wrapped my head around it yet, but this is big, requires no conspiracy, no secrets, no deep cleverness. You may, like me, have to gloss over the initial football analogy, but I'm not even sure that Denning grasps the importance of this.

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This post was ripped in its entirety from my post on Google+ because there is little permanence to be found in streams. I still have not fully understood the implications of the idea contained therein, but there are hints of this being an explanatory framework that can be applied to systems larger than just Wall Street.

what if they held a protest and nobody was allowed to go?

As noted in the New York Times article “Wall Street Protest Begins, With Demonstrators Blocked”:

For months the protesters had planned to descend on Wall Street on a Saturday and occupy parts of it as an expression of anger over a financial system that they say favors the rich and powerful at the expense of ordinary citizens.
As it turned out, the demonstrators found much of their target off limits on Saturday as the city shut down sections of Wall Street near the New York Stock Exchange and Federal Hall well before their arrival.

I had been only dimly aware of the protest better documented at its home site than I can do justice to. A brief except from their intent I do much agree with:

We need to address the core facts: these corporations, even if they were unable to compete in the electoral arena, would still remain control of society. They would retain economic control, which would allow them to retain political control. Term limits would, again, not solve this, as many in the political class already leave politics to find themselves as part of the corporate elites.

I've yet to see how the members of the protest make sense of what transpired today, but I think they were witness to an archetypal example of that which they are opposed to.