Noli me vocare, Magister Mundi sum!

I was going to make a number of observations about the execution of Saddam and the apologetics and revisionist history of Ford, but better writers have made these points much more succinctly than i. Thus i will try to complete my thoughts on why our economy will be our ruin in the near future. Several post-holiday stories reveal that the overall retail sales were down, and did not even meet the lowered expectations proposed by financial analysts and corporate fiduciary spokespeople. This is not good news, but more than that, it hints at some serious miscalculations by the general population concerning their own well being.

First, we must realize, that no matter how much we all want to feel good about the way we live, our lifestyles are inordinately excessive in terms of planetary resources and the production of streams of human waste products. These wastes are beginning to extract a deadly toll on the planet. The lists are numerous and constantly in the news, and thus i don't need to go into that litany right now. What has been hidden, by our own choosing is the increasing costs of the infrastructure that our way of life requires. Our economy is structured in such a way that currency is exchanged for ever-increasing value (artificially induced) from which is extracted ostensibly miniscule percentages to provide direct development and maintenance of the infrastructure. In toto, we pay a remarkably large percent of our daily value to maintain our system itself, without regard for anything other than that system. This value is transfered directly to corporate accounts and further removed from the cycle as in any hierarchical rentier system.

Every aspect of our lives requires this extraction and capitulation of our own personal value to the system itself. We are paying and paying to just barely maintain that system, at the massive overwhelming personal benefit of a core group of human beings at the top of the hierarchy. When less than 1% of the citizens of the US are extracting and removing value from the other 300 million, each and every single day, we are living in an empire, a top down totalitarian state, mediated and hidden by our own paid for media. Look at everything in your immediate environment, calculate the cost and value of all that matter, how it got to you, how you acquired it, why you chose it, what it does, how it works, and realize that somewhere along the line an incredible stream of taxes, fees, excises, adjustments, etc are taken out and handed over to the corporations.

Our roads alone, upon which each and every one of these material products must travel demonstrate the hellish nightmare that is the economic ruin of our lives and the unsustainable destruction of the earth. How they are created, how they are maintained, how they are funded and paid for, how they are changed and altered--at each step of the process our own personal values are diminished and extracted. And if we simply no longer have any more value to give?? Well, fewer and fewer material resources will be available in the stream. The roads will degrade, the infrastructure that thrives from the use of those roads (food, energy, products, waste removal) will diminish, and the detritus of our failing economy will be expanding literally in our front yards. We cannot expect to continue to have our value extracted from us, mined from our beings in both physical and mental assets, and not become tailings and refuse ourselves. Look at the people of New Orleans. The hundreds of thousands of already poor who are now completely neglected at the expense of a few making whatever remaining efforts to extract the last vestiges of value from them (corporate contracts to provide: substandard housing, commodity foods that are toxic and unhealthy, and grossly mismanaged healthcare). As there becomes fewer and fewer chunks of value to extract from our cities and communities, the infrastructures will collapse.

This has all happened before, many times in human history. Often such precipitous collapses are linked to massive die-offs of people and their livestock. But now we have compounded the problem to such an extent that the causalities of collapse, the failing planetary economy and the inability to safely utilize the remaining available resources, are running smack into the most terrible of all proverbial walls: worldwide environmental collapse. The planet itself is reaching its threshold of sustaining complex lifeforms. Massive species extinctions are occurring at increasingly alarming rates. The list of new pathogens that can eradicate human beings has grown faster than research can fend them off. The death of the oceans is imminent, in terms of pollution, carbon changes, methane releases, and the melting of planetary ice. Dramatic weather and climate extremes will increase, placing even more demands on the artificial infrastructure to adapt, which it will not be capable of doing, given the failing economy.

And what i realize right now is that this isn't even the worst case scenario. NO, that involves that 1% of the population utilizing its remaining capacity to extract value to intentionally destroy wholesale infrastructures to keep for themselves the last resources. Can you say nuclear war???