The writer of the following New York Times editorial makes some very astute
observations. Basically, what he is saying is that what you are seeing, is
not what you are really getting. In his words, it is all theatrics designed
to make people erroneously think that the government, Big Business, and
other elitist entities, answer to them; that is, to the people, which is the
furthest thing from the truth.

In reality, as he explains below, governments, and the elite globalists who
run the current world, are becoming even more powerful with each passing
crisis, while we the people lose more rights and privileges with each
passing year.

If we apply what he is saying to a Biblical and prophetic perspective, then
it is no wonder that the world is headed towards an all-powerful One World
Government, or New World Order, headed by the Beast and the False Prophet.

We live in a world that is full of deceptive mirrors.


The Great Consolidation

By ROSS DOUTHAT - NYT

May 16, 2010


This feels like a populist moment. Americans are Tea Partying. Greeks are
rioting. Incumbents are being thrown out; the Federal Reserve is facing an
audit; Goldman Sachs is facing prosecution. In Kentucky, Ron Paul's son
might be about to win a Republican Senate primary.

But look through these anti-establishment theatrics to the deep structures
of political and economic power, and suddenly the surge of populism feels
like so much sound and fury, obscuring the real story of our time. From
Washington to Athens, the economic crisis is producing consolidation rather
than revolution, the entrenchment of authority rather than its diffusion,
and the concentration of power in the hands of the same elite that presided
over the disasters in the first place.

Consider the European situation. For a week after Greece's fiscal meltdown
began, all the talk was about the weakness of the European Union, the folly
of its too-rapid expansion, and the failure of the Continent's governing
class to anticipate the crisis.

But then the E.U. acted, bailing out Greece to the tune of nearly a trillion
dollars, and dictating economic terms to Athens that resemble "the kind of
thing a surrendering field marshal signs in a railway car in the forest at
the end of a bloody war," in the words of the Washington Post columnist Anne
Applebaum. If the bailout succeeds, the E.U.'s authority over its member
states will be dramatically enhanced -- and a crisis created by hasty,
elite-driven integration will have led, inexorably, to further integration
and a more powerful elite.

This trajectory should be familiar to Americans. The panic of 2008 happened,
in part, because the public interest had become too intertwined with private
interests for the latter to be allowed to fail. But everything we did to
halt the panic, and all the legislation we've passed, has only strengthened
the symbiosis.

From the Troubled Asset Relief Program to the stimulus bill, from the auto
bailout to health care reform, we've created a vast new array of
public-private partnerships -- empowering insiders at the expense of
outsiders, large institutions at the expense of small ones, and Washington
at the expense of state and local governments. Eighteen months after the
financial crisis, the interests of our financiers, C.E.O.'s, bureaucrats and
politicians are yoked together as never before.

A similar, quieter consolidation has taken place in the realm of national
security. After campaigning against the Bush administration's foreign-policy
overreach, President Obama has retained nearly all of the war powers that
George Bush took up in the wake of 9/11.

Yes, some of the previous administration's more sweeping claims have been
repudiated. But the basic post-9/11 architecture of executive power --
expansive powers to detain, interrogate and assassinate, claimed for the
duration of an open-ended war -- looks destined to endure for presidencies
to come.

Taken case by case, many of these policy choices are perfectly defensible.
Taken as a whole, they suggest a system that only knows how to move in one
direction. If consolidation creates a crisis, the answer is further
consolidation. If economic centralization has unintended consequences, then
you need political centralization to clean up the mess. If a government
conspicuously fails to prevent a terrorist attack or a real estate bubble,
then obviously it needs to be given more powers to prevent the next one, or
the one after that.

The C.I.A. and F.B.I. didn't stop 9/11, so now we have the Department of
Homeland Security. Decades of government subsidies for homebuyers helped
create the housing crash, so now the government is subsidizing the auto
industry, the green-energy industry, the health care sector ...

The pattern applies to personnel as well as policy. If Robert Rubin's
mistakes helped create an out-of-control financial sector, then naturally
you need Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers -- Rubin's proteges -- to set
things right. After all, who else are you going to trust with all that
consolidated power? Ron Paul? Dennis Kucinich? Sarah Palin?

This is the perverse logic of meritocracy. Once a system grows sufficiently
complex, it doesn't matter how badly our best and brightest foul things up.
Every crisis increases their authority, because they seem to be the only
ones who understand the system well enough to fix it.

But their fixes tend to make the system even more complex and centralized,
and more vulnerable to the next national-security surprise, the next natural
disaster, the next economic crisis. Which is why, despite all the populist
backlash and all the promises from Washington, this isn't the end of the
"too big to fail" era. It's the beginning.



Jeff Snyder, SysOp - Armageddon BBS  Visit us at endtimeprophecy.org port 23
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