The fiscal cliff; America gets Greeced

I've been following the "fiscal cliff" drama with disbelief.

It's a bipartisan cash grab. It's an assault on the American people by the leaders of... America's ruling class.

True, the plutocrats will for the moment lose a laughable "temporary" tax reduction.

But the pain is worth the prize.

And the prize is that in all this angst about the "fiscal cliff" the further erosion of what's left of a social safety net has become an inevitability.

We are all Greeks now.

Sell the house, or just walk away. Sell the kids too. Forget about a pension. Forget about health care.

We must all tighten our belts. We must all make sacrifices. If we don't, well, who knows what could happen.

The big banks, the ones with those trillions in outstanding derivatives that even their creators don't understand, hell, they could go tits up just like that.

And then where would we be?

Frankly, I'm one of those fiscal cliff agnostics who figures we'd pretty much be where we are right now. True, a handful of super-banks would find themselves in the dumpster of history overnight, and their legions of Rumpelstiltskin derivative inventors along with them.

And yes, that would be a hit. Porsche and Bentley dealers in the greater Manhattan area would feel the pinch.

Eight number mid-town apartments would see their value plummet to the mid seven-figures. Same with the Connecticut estates favored by the Rumpelstiltskin crowd.

But somewhere not too far away from that, the heart of America would keep beating. Somewhere there is a real economy, where real people build real stuff and provide real services.

So the think tank here at Falling Downs says the fiscal cliff might be just what it takes to wake up America.

Shake off the bipartisan yoke of those two parties doing the bidding of the plutocracy.

That could be the first step to reviving democracy in the USA.