There is a crack; a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in. -Leonard Cohen

We’re on an old familiar road; a well worn path carved into the dried, caked terrain we call earth. Although well-traveled, this road is not paved. No one wants permanence to this route. It is ugly, dirty, dusty and pockmarked.

Being led down this twisting road we’re told around the next curve or over the next hill, we will see it: Hope. Hope will shine bright in the distance and when we reach Hope, all will be well and all wrongs will be righted and our children and our children’s children will be safe and prosper for generations to come. All we need is Hope. And it’s right around the corner.

They promise.

Bill Clinton sold hope. I have the letter postmarked from Hope, Arkansas to prove it. Barack Obama sold hope. Hope is Oz and hope is the straw we grasp when there is nothing left to cling to.

Hope is a strong selling message. That selling hope is increasingly relevant to voters today speaks volumes about the world we live in.

Orbán, however, did not sell hope. Hungarians are far too wise and realistic to buy any promise of hope. No, Orbán sold resurrection, rebirth and independence.

Hope is what the hopefuls often sell to win votes to overthrow incumbents. In defense, incumbents sell fear; fear of change, fear of the unknown, fear of the litany of enemies waiting to pounce, ready to strike, waiting to bring us to ruin. Evil lurks everywhere. Around every corner, behind every tree evil empires are waiting to destroy us, pummel our values and cast our children into a cauldron of servility. We must fight evil. We must have a War on Evil.

Evil, marketed properly, fuels war.

Hope, unfulfilled, fuels revolution.

This ugly little road we are on today is that very road to revolution. And at the root of the pending revolution is what is at the root of all war: inequity and money (or more to the point, lack of it). What we have today is the Marie Antoinette Syndrome: Power and wealth are too disconnected from what what ultimately gives them their power and wealth and that would be the workings of mankind. Humans.

We have entered a new age of servitude. Serfdom has been reborn, repackaged and dressed in a flimsy little garment we call ‘democracy’. The middle class is all but wiped out. And what is the hook to servitude, whether it is with the middle class or entire nations, (such as Hungary)? The hook to servitude and serfdom is a thing of beauty, if you can manage to brush aside its ugliness and look at it objectively.

The hook to servitude is artificially created debt.

Debt is the new landlord and there is beauty in it’s creation. Imagine if you had the ability to turn on a printing machine, print money with nothing more than paper and ink and then take that money and give it to a government but with a catch: Interest due. And the interest due, is passed on and on, always increasing, all down the food chain until it reaches some poor unsophisticated, most likely uneducated consumer who is paying almost 30% credit card interest charges on money that came off a printing press from nothing more than paper and ink. I give you America’s Federal Reserve and the banking cartel.

What we have is the puppet dance of democracy and pulling the marionette strings over the cheap little cardboard theatrical sets are the banks and the money Lords.

Did we take note at the international outrage when Fidesz asked not the taxpayers to bear an increased burden footing the bill for national survival but instead went to (among a couple of other sectors), the banks? This fueled the rage within the international community. Global telecoms did not (to my knowledge) bellow and protest at unjustified abuse. But the banking world did and with it came threats.

Rewind the tape and we see the American taxpayer bailing out the banking system; the many ‘too big to fail’ institutions to the tune of billions of dollars. How long did it take these on-the-verge-of-collapse banking institutions to pay back the money? Just a few months. And the bailout was paid back for a very simple reason: to keep the taxpayers (the government) off the shareholder list where they would have a say, a vote, a voice and some clout. Where was the international outrage over this abuse of taxpayers? It camped in shoddy tents, trying to occupy it knew not what, knowing only that something was terribly wrong in Oz. Who wasn’t arrested or evicted, simply faded away. Or have they?

The private banks will keep government out of their money-making business at all costs; costs usually passed down to someone else, such as today’s voting serfs as they trundle down this dusty road listening to yet another promise of hope, just around the corner, just after the next election, just after they cast their vote for Hope in the hope it has substance. And if it doesn’t? 1776. 1789. 1848. 1917. 1949. 1956. 1968. 1989. 2011. 2012. All years to remember to what can happen in the name of hope, unfulfilled.