The Free Market Religion

Phil Rockstroh, h/t mathman in the Big Picture comments:

One's sense of self and one's beliefs, as well as, the mythos and traditions of a people are inextricably bound with place, landscape, and social situation. When I was a child, growing up in Alabama and Georgia, on occasions such as backcountry fishing expeditions, I would, at times, come in contact with rural African American farmers who still lived by the agrarian rhythms of the nineteenth century.
Occasionally, taking refuge from the afternoon heat of high summer, we would lounge on wooden porches and snap green beans, and I would listen as they quoted scripture.
The Jesus of their belief system was born of humble beginnings (a mere seed) and grew beneath the hot sun, but, at the height of maturity, was cut down, sacrificed so they may live, then, like their life-sustaining crops, was resurrected as next year's seed crop. Suffused with a metaphoric analog of the criteria they lived day to day, these tales held resonance for these rural, farming people; the metaphors resounded with the verities of place and circumstance. The figure of Christ was as real to them as the snap beans beneath their fingertips.
Now, in an era in which the destination of most all of our objects and accoutrement is the landfill, Deep South mega-churches espouse a cosmology that resonates from a junk food paradigm: a Gospel of The Drive Thru Jesus…when The Rapture comes our corporeal bodies will be cast aside like fast food wrappers.
All in all, for both Christians and for secular-minded, market economy true believers, a belief in economic providence has proven our undoing -- an insistence on its miraculous influence left us mistaking ad-hoc, bubble-borne affluence for a soul-vivifying portion of divine grace. The corporate/consumer state's trickster gods of fast buck commerce offer drive-thru-window epiphanies. Members of the congregation of the Church of Free Market miracles believe their prayers will always be answered: Instantly, the consumer state's homilies of perpetual gratification arrive -- their voices crackling like a burning bush from drive-thru order-boxes.

It really blasts on working class hicks from Georgia and Alabama desperately clinging to their guns, religion and big trucks and SUVs, but it makes some interesting points, the veracity of which we will soon discover.  Actually, for me it was worth reading to find someone more pessimistic than I.

Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Today's link from naked capitalism: They're onto us, at MacroBusiness.  The post looks at Moody's downgrade of 4 large Australian banks and quotes the Moody's press release to highlight the strains on the Aussie economy:

Ouch. Put this down as the China warning. Australia’s entire economic model is being peeled back here. For well over a decade, Australia’s banks have funded huge swathes of the current account deficit. As well, over the past two commodities booms, much of the export income has been leveraged up and blown on housing and fancy living. Moody’s is effectively calling the risks of this model to account. And they’re still not finished:

It goes on to say that Moody's is indicating the four banks are too big to fail, and if the Australian government backs off on implicit guarantees, they'll really cut the ratings.  Way to protect the banksters and investors at the expense of taxpayers, again.  We've got bad stuff brewing in Asia and Europe, while we plod along looking at huge government cutbacks sooner or later with a still highly-leveraged private sector.  I don't see this ending well.