Porter Stansbury on the Decline of the Republic

Zerhedge has quickly become one of my favorite corners of the web, as their articles offer powerful insight into the global economy. Today they posted an article by Porter Stansbury titled The Corruption of America, where Stansbury lucidly outlines the political and economic corruption amongst Democrats and Republicans that have lead to the systematic erosion of American standards of living.

To put it mildly, Stansbury’s article was gripping, as he describes an America that has imported the worst forms of Socialism, and is in fact on the road of becoming a two-headed monster of socialism and fascism. According to Stansbury America’s per-capita GDP, which among other things indicates the purchasing power of the citizenry has been in sharp decline over the last 40 years, with the only thing propping this up being the massive accumulation of personal, corporate, and sovereign debt. The political left has been responsible through it’s social welfare systems of reducing our inner-cities to something resembling a third-world country. Under this corrupt system minorities who are most economically vulnerable and dependent on the system suffer under the welfare system with diminished access to meaningful education and economic opportunity, many of whom are now populating a skyrocketing prison population. The political right gets no better treatment from Stansbury, as they have propped up a corporate welfare system that has benefited the rich unimaginably while saddling the nation with massive debts as we have picked up the bill either directly for corporate largesse through bailouts, tax loopholes, or indirectly through the erosion of pensions and 401ks that have been pilfered by outright fraud and corruption at the highest levels of government and commerce.

What exacerbates this endemic status quo is much of the corruption cannot be properly policed since it takes place so often within the confines of the law. Stansbury does offer some solutions, such as holding elected officials more accountable for the policies which they enact, and making corporate heads personally and criminally liable for any acts of malfeasance that they are inclined to commit. But with the unlikelihood of real change coming without some sort of crisis coming to the surface, we are likely to be in for a very rough road before anything gets better.

I wish I could voice more disagreement with Stansbury on his analysis of America’s maladies, however I fear he is on the right track. As a Christian living in the inter-advental age, I realize that the best one can hope for is a world system that sort-of works, that it functions reasonably well in spite of the fact that it is marred by human depravity. Yet it would seem, without trying to read too much into God’s providential rule of the world, that he has allowed the world to go yet again into a season of incredible uncertainty and instability. As a citizen of the Heavenly Kingdom, I find myself reciting  the Lord’s prayer in our Sunday liturgy to be more urgent as we pray “…Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven…”. As a citizen of this world, with a family of my own marching on into an uncertain future, I sincerely hope that Americans will think long and hard about the future that is materializing in front of us and opt for real change. In all likelihood this means being willing to stomach some very real short term pain to restore order to the political and economic system, but the consequences will be unimaginable if the status quo continues and we collectively kick the can down the road

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~ by jedpaschall on December 20, 2011.