Tricks that Get the Fix

With tricks and spin the fix is in.

To lock-in the value accumulated into the upper class that resulted in the Great Recession (and a high level of deficit spending) without liability (without paying down the accumulated debt from the accumulated equity) requires effective techniques for negotiation and rhetorical devices. These techniques and devices are necessary to provide a descriptive legitimacy of the outcome and a prescription for conserving the value to avert crises it is sure to cause in the future.

It is necessary to arrive at a political settlement that does not assume the risk is a function of the accumulated reward. Instead, the reward is offset to the future. It is identified with an impending crisis that theoretically assumes measures are modeled to avert the crisis but, instead, cause it in practice.

These are psychological tricks that fix errors into the system and accumulate into an unavoidable gamma-risk proportion. Despite the rhetoric (whether Democratic or Republican) that policy measures are to avoid if not eliminate the risk, these measures are designed and predictably administered to consolidate and conserve the value of its accumulation, and anchor success to that proportion.

Democrats measure a successful accumulation by the level of deficit spending, Republicans by the extent of its reduction. In either case, the detriment the accumulative reward assumes (the inherent risk of loss fully assumed) is effectively offset. It is politically settled by anchoring it to the probable event of two detrimental alternatives, overtly derived by either bi-partisan conflict or cooperation that appears to be both legitimately pluralistic and, if need be, selflessly combined to administer the general welfare.

Operationalizing the concept of the general welfare as a collective, non-zero-sum consolidation of the risk (rather than a risk-averse, zero-sum deconsolidation that will avert the impending crisis that Republicans say we now inevitably face, for example, without Democratic support), allows bi-partisanship to falsely appear non-partisan (and risk-averse). It is a political trick that has structurally evolved to control the political extent of the risk assumed in the face of recurrent crises. It is a trick independents do not willingly fall for without the structural extortion of a two-party system subsequently translated as a genuine mandate derived by means of legitimate, popular consent.

Unfortunately, independents are only about 20 percent of the electorate. While a swing vote occasionally combines to indicate a non-partisan sentiment, it is never enough to deconsolidate the risk proportion. It is never enough to break the organized tautology of a binomial, political structure into the empirical, corrective value of a genuinely pluralistic, and legitimate, popular consent. The bag of tricks and rhetorical devices that dominate the political settlement stubbornly persist.


The fix is in with tricks and spin,
The devil's due through thick and thin.
The path to prosperity is a selfish lust
If not to boom we'll surely bust.

One thing's for sure,
We'll fix the budget
With a cup of tea
And a lot of fudge it!