Connecting the Dots

We seem to be watching some kind of horrific three-ring circus in which all the acts are interconnected but not acknowledged to be so…

Ring 1: Geological/Nuclear Disaster in Japan

On March 11^th a slippage of continental plates off the coast of Japan slammed that country with a massive 9.0 earthquake and a huge tsunami. As routine as quakes are in Japan and well prepared as the Japanese were for such, the scale of this one has totally overwhelmed them. The scenes of devastation and the total leveling that resulted from the a 30 foot wall water that washed in from the Pacific Ocean ironically reminds one of the 1945 photos of Hiroshima after being hit by an atom bomb. Twisted broken rubble stretches almost to the horizon with only a few stubborn hollowed-out concrete structures left standing, with dazed survivors wandering heartbroken hopelessly searching for lost relatives and friends. Cars upside down and crumpled share space with fishing boats washed into houses. The scale of loss and tragedy is immeasurable. And to add insult to injury the latest photos show a dusting of cold unwelcome snow hiding the rusty nails and laceration producing knife-sharp metallic edges under endless piles of once life sustaining property. All that remains are horizons of hideous trash still containing the remains of loved ones. Many thousands are unaccounted in for a country that leads the world in utilizing state-of-the-art electronics with almost a German-esque reputation for keeping track of things. But as dreadful as all this is, this is only the least of it. No, something potentially worse also has weighed in - a nuclear disaster.

Japan, like most of the industrialized world, fell for the siren song of the “Peaceful Nuke” even as they suffered horrendously as the only country to ever have had nuclear weapons used against them. Now the Japanese are experiencing the downside of a reliance on peaceful nuclear energy as their Fukashima Dassii nuclear power threatens to totally meltdown. Already there has a partial meltdown of at least two reactors, and even worse the exposure of 125 tons of fuel rods from a holding pond that is reported to now be totally dry.

The hubris of the nuclear power industry and the energy industry in general in assuming that they could design out all probable dire geologic events brings to mind our own tragic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. But it also brings to mind the 'boys of Wall Street' who believed they had designed out all probable dire financial events with their fancy oblique tranched mortgage bonds, collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps resulting in a global credit meltdown and a nasty deep recession that we have still not recovered from.

Ring 2: Middle East in Turmoil

This geological news from Japan rightly has pushed the geopolitical news from the Middle East rudely aside. The Middle East is experiencing an earthquake of another kind. Suddenly starting in the backwater North African country of Tunisia and spreading like a string of Chinese firecrackers, rebellion and potential revolution has erupted in one despot-ridden Arab nation after another. The Egyptians inspired by Tunisia have successfully jettisoned their dictator through a brave, relentless and essentially peaceful struggle. Their success has emboldened people all across the region to join resistance movements and wage protests.

Brutal repression and now a full civil war has erupted in Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’ 's private fiefdom, Libya. The US and its European allies have now militarily intervened on the side of the rebels essentially declaring war on the Libyan government in what may become another expensive, protracted quagmire. 'The Qaddafi approach' already has triggered similar harsh and desperate reactions from what goes governments in Yemen, Bahrain and now Syria. Where does intervention end? Most of these “republics” were considered stable “friendly” dictatorships and were not exactly on the US State Department's shit list with the exception of the dried up hellhole (and Al Qaeda stronghold) known as Yemen. Where and how this will all end is anybody's guess. One of thing is clear the Uncle Sam needs to be stuck in another war like he needs another hole in his head.

Ring 3: Demos and Repubs Locking Horns

With Japan on the ropes with an unimaginably bad triple whammy set of disasters and the oil rich Middle East unraveling in unprecedented ways, the US also finds itself in another kind of crisis, one of a classic political nature. The US recovering from a deep recession is also saddles with a record national debt. Yet care needs to be taken not to suffocate the baby of economic recovery in its proverbial crib. Continued if not increased government deficit spending seems counter-intuitive in the midst of a period of deep red ink. But that is is exactly what is prescribed by most economists. Yet suddenly the Dreaded Deficit is front and center (which must be remembered was run up by mainly the Reagan and Bush II administrations.) The right is using The Deficit and their control of the purse strings to 'go postal.' An unholy alliance of shady billionaires, crazed libertarian anti-tax hardliners, reactionary poorly educated evangelical Christians, left wing conspiracy believing gun freaks and bought-and-paid-for Republican Party hacks are lined up against a young inexperience president (prone to preemptive surrender on key negotiating points) supported by a divided Democratic Party that has long since lost its moorings with its real base – the middle, working and under classes.

With the US oil addiction as the linchpin for supporting unpopular, despotic and kleptocratic regimes in the Middle East coupled with the oil industry's untoward influence on US energy policy, it's possible to see the connections between these three events as interlocking. The ultra energy industry-friendly Republican Party is tactically and strategically angling for a re-accession to power through whatever means necessary. So oil dependency and nuclear industry rehabilitation (despite Japan's plight) will continue irrespective of the consequences if the Repubs have their way. The nuclear industry, long since a basket case without government support, is also solidly supported by laissez-faire Republicans. Oil as a major CO2 producing and climate damaging fossil fuel, and nuclear energy both are associated with long-term deleterious effects to the environment (with Japan now getting a first hand experience.) The most obstreperous and deluded defenders or oil and nuclear power can be found in the Republican Party. And these very same deniers of the deleterious long term harm of oil and nukes are the very ones threatening to paralyze the entire US government (and economy?) if they don't get their way on a whole host of stupid, ill advised budget cuts/social agenda initiatives that will have zip effect on the looming deficit (that they have suddenly rediscovered.)

The annual US budget negotiation process is always ugly. This is where the Democrats Party and the Republican Party perennially wrangle over their supposed ideological differences. A lot of it is show. Most of the budget is locked in, and only a small sliver (12%) is ever in play. Neither side can really touch the big chunks without major legislation – commitments to the elderly and incapacitated (Medicare and Social Security entitlements) and the sacrosanct military side. And increasing taxes even in good times is always off the table thanks to 30 years of relentless right wing propaganda. This time it is really bad. Due to nearly a decade of breathtakingly irresponsible policy from a Republican president (off-budget wars, taxes cuts and refusal to reform Medicare) and now a kings hell of a recession (which wipes out revenues,) the deficit is indeed looming large in both absolute and relative terms.

To make matters worse the Repubs have interpreted their victory in the mid term election as carte blance to take declare war on all fronts: environmental regulation, public sector unions, teachers, abortion rights, publicly supported media, you name it all in the name balancing the budget. At both the state and federal level they are on the move with draconian agenda that would even make their saint, the late Ronald Reagan, queasy. The American population is just waking up to the true dimensions of their agenda. These madmen have no real idea of the implications of their actions. But if they stall the recovery and make the joblessness worse ( the number one concern in polls), all the better. It can be blamed on the Obama presidency. The GOP just wants to crush the opposition and enact their half-baked ideas and the fully-baked bidding of their corporate overlords. This has all happened because the American voters are easily bamboozled and often vote for tin-hatted charlatans, or else are they become easily discouraged and don't vote at all. So a veritable fleet of of ships of fools have commandeered the US House Representatives and many statehouses and governorships. This is a serious state of affairs to say the least. Let's just hope people wake up pretty fucking soon!

The Wreckage of a Crashed Opportunity

As we pick through the post mid term election wreckage the recriminations and blame spews forth from all points of the political spectrum. While the gloating and back patting on the right commences. 'Overreach' and 'under reach' are oft used terms. Also the accusation of a ‘lack of focus’ is often thrown out (see Paul Krugman’s 11/5/10 NY Times column.) It is certainly ironic that Barack Obama would write a book titled The Audacity of Hope and would arrive on the political scene with such a resounding message of hope, and yet would show so pathetically little audacity. Month after month we watched in dismay as Obama tried to curry favor and offer humiliating compromises to his political enemies who responded by consistently moving the goal posts ever further away. It was obvious to the even the least politically astute among us that his opponents had only one thing in mind - his complete political destruction. Why someone as intelligent and politically successful would believe compromise and bipartisanship would work in this poisoned milieu will surely be hashed over by future historians.

If one side stops playing by the rules and begins misusing traditional Senatorial prerogatives such as the filibuster or the right for a single senator to hold up legislation or routinely blocking all executive appointments or refusing to even pretend to negotiate, why would the other side not counter with similar ‘creative’ maneuvers? It is like one side is playing big league baseball dirty, firing 92mph spitballs, why would the other side responds by playing elementary school softball by the rules?

Is it simply not in Obama’s DNA to match their guile and ruthlessness? Progressives had such a rare opportunity with big Democratic party majorities in both houses of Congress, a young fresh face in the White House and the America public ready to see some fur fly. Now all that is history. An ugly backlash was spawned and was allowed to reproduce itself into a dangerous virulent reactionary surge. We watched at first in bemusement and then increasingly in alarm as his enemies used his reluctance to press his advantage against him. The whole Tea Party thing could have been nipped in the bud had the President early on, with his wit and oratorical gifts, taken these crazies to task over their absurd allegations and laughable stupidity like “death panels” and “getting the government out of my Medicare” and the mismatch between lowering taxes and (a sudden belated) concern over a soaring deficit. It would have been so easy to show the absurdity of this crap on prime time. But for whatever reason they (Obama and his advisors) left it to the left and right wing pundits, editorial writers and bloggers to fight it out. And the corporate media loved it, since the function of the corporate news media is to entertain not inform. Provocations pseudo controversies and spectacles, like the early yell-fest tea bagger/party town hall meeting confrontations, were grist for their ‘infortainment’ mills. And the GOP biggies egged em on, some even joining in. When something is a boldface lie it should be the media’s job to expose not let it fester and evolve into a legitimate “point of view.” This is wrong and it is undermining are whole system.

Repubs have become a shrill but appealing one trick pony with a simple syllogism: taxes = bad, taxes = government, therefore government = bad. As political formation they have mutated into something far worse than simply the old GOP of the past, a party representing the American haut bourgeoisie and it’s small town wannabes. They now have become of party of the proudly ignorant, the staunchly anti-intellectual and the covertly racist, demanding we follow a path that will drive our country even faster downhill toward second tier world economic status. And the resulting public reaction to increased impoverishment could well trigger some very grim times indeed. Remember what happened to the democratic German Weimar Republic of the 1920’s.

The most ill informed and ideologically blinded now have the wind at their backs. Yet they are so full of shit on so many levels it is difficult to keep track. Some of the absurdities they believe are breathtakingly stark such as:

• Darwin’s theory of evolution can be easily called into question by religious theology.
• Global warming is a world-historical hoax and research on it is a scam mainly driven by the “liberal” scientific community seeking cushy government grants.
• Environmental protections should always and at all times be resisted.
• Capitalism works best without any restraints whatsoever.
• Lowering taxes especially for the very rich always results in aggregate economic expansion.
• The US military budget is sacrosanct.
• The deficit only matters with regard to entitlements.
• Unpaid-for wars and lowering government revenues through tax cuts can be ignored as a cause for a growing deficit.
• Our health care system was fine before “Obamacare” was enacted and needed only minor tinkering.
• Proposed ‘end of life counseling’ paid for by Medicare = Death Panels.
• The 2009 stimulus package failed to produce any jobs.
• The bank bailout of 2008 was the Obama Administration’s idea.
• Barack Omama is a socialist and/or Muslim and/or a Marxist and not a US citizen.

What do you do when your debating opponents who have their own bogus belief structure unfounded on reality? You can only debate something if certain rational ground rules are agreed upon, one of them being neither side is entitled to his or her own facts.

We can only hope that the Obama does not fall prey to the idea that further capitulation will help win him a second term. Somehow a popular counterweight of concern, anger and practical aggressiveness has to take hold or we are all destined for a collective slide into some new, awful reality.

Is this what ecocide looks like?

Ecocide is defined as murder of the environment. It is now happening and its being broadcast 24/7. I consider myself someone who can steel myself to view unpleasant things if I have to. But I cannot look at another miserable, dying, oil soaked pelican such as this. The horror show coming out of the marshes and beaches comprising the Mississippi Delta and the adjacent states has become unbearable. I grew up on the west coast of Florida on the Gulf of Mexico so I feel a special affinity for that body of water - swimming, fishing, snorkeling (and getting sunburned) there. It is absolutely heartbreaking for 50 days and counting to see on the news the grainy live image of ugly black matter uncontrollably spewing forth cloud-like, raw petroleum that was once safely sealed a mile below the sea in a layer of solid rock now gushing out uncontrollably destined to turn huge swathes of the Gulf into dead zones and poison the largest wetland in North America.

This count of days of unabated oil flow is mounting. And it is moving Barack Obama into hapless Jimmy Carter territory. President Jimmy Carter, also a ‘centrist’ Democrat, and also one prone to listening to the centrist Washington consensus including his hawkish National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. It was Brzezinsk who no doubt encouraged him to allow the disgraced Shan of Iran into the US for medical care when Iran was on the brink of revolution. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards countered by seizing all the employees of the US embassy and keeping them for over a year, until his right wing successor, one Ronald Reagan, negotiated their release. The whole affair totally undermined the Carter presidency as the iconic image of a blindfolded captive American with the numbers of days held so far was shown daily in the national media. Every added day of captivity served to underline in the public’s mind of Carter’s profound ineptitude.

Let’s hope that does not happen to Obama. Let’s hope Obama will not be forever remembered for this monumental environmental catastrophe - that keeps getting worse. If only Obama had learned from the health care reform debacle not to bargain with the ‘corporatocacy.’ But since the whole health care reform effort, once so close to total collapse, finally passed, it was interpreted by him, his staff and the corporate media as “a success.”

Apparently those early deals and sell-outs to the corporate health insurance kingpins and pharmaceutical oligopolies was to serve as a model for the upcoming climate bill struggle in Congress. So Obama several months ago announced that he was in fact supportive of ‘offshore drilling.’ In hindsight what a monumental blunder! Already he was making nice to the Energy-Industrial Complex and the Republican (and Demo) carbon based energy troglodytes in Congress and was perversely embracing his former arch-enemies’ mantra – ‘drill, baby, drill.’ This was of course a huge disappointment to the environmentalist community who had strongly supported Obama. Obama’s appointment of Ken Salazar as Secretary of the Interior, who had a mixed record on environmental issues, was already been a bad sign. So it was not totally a surprise that Obama would equivocate on offshore drilling. But this typical act of ‘splitting the difference’ with his opponents on the right has now bit him on the ass big time. It has totally undercut his moral authority on this issue as he stands in his rubber boots in a huge, nasty, ever-growing puddle of crude oil mixed with salt water containing dead birds and rotting fish. Indeed he is up to his knees in it. He has truly stepped into some shit!

Had he done the right thing and continued to oppose offshore drilling as he had during his campaign for the presidency, his standing now would be so much better. Had he remained opposed to offshore drilling even as there had been no serious underwater drilling spills in US waters in over 40 years (not since Santa Barbara in 1969) and even as a majority of Americans supported offshore drilling (who foolishly believe it will lead to cheap gas at the pump), he would in so much better shape. He would have a stone solid "I told you so! to throw back at the Repubs. But now the whole thing has made him look like a fool and exposed his strategy vs. the GOP as a peremptory sell out to Big Oil. Furthermore, he simply now looks helpless as BP continues to call the shots and control the information and fails to staunch the bleeding. Sure he now can call for drilling moratoriums, etc. Sure he can now call for reorganization of the pathetically inept and corrupt Minerals Mgt. Service (why didn’t Ken Salazar clean house there as soon as he got in?) And can sympathize until he’s blue in the face with the victims of this “Korporate Katrina’ but it’s too fucking late in so many ways. Even it the oil flow is stopped tomorrow, the damage environmentally and politically is done.

Many are calling for a new Obama to rise phoenix-like from this oil sump and declare a no-holds-barred FDR style a new 100 days of job creating environmental and infrastructure overhaul in concert with a real and robust effective new energy initiative that would be a model for the entire world. Let the Tea Party fools, who will call him a socialist and a left wing radical anyway, go bananas for a good reason. Why not really kick some ass? Not just BP’s ass, the obvious target, but the whole complex network of corporate slimelords who would (and are) feeding like vultures on this dying planet and it’s population - human, plant and animal.

Let them eat oil

Let’s see if we can list all the stuff that is happening, most of it awful, and maybe see how it is all connected:

• The Gulf of Mexico is being turned into a giant oils sump due to BPs breathtaking irresponsibility and the Minerals Management Service’s ineptitude and corruption.

• The European Union (EU) is in economic disarray as the PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) sink further into the muck - especially Greece.

• Unemployment in the US is back up again.
  

• The US Senate has passed some kind of financial reform – hope it has teeth.

• A new bear market is reflecting pessimism and fear.

• Thailand is near revolution (or would like to be.)

• North and South Korea are near war with a recent sinking by N. Korea of a S. Korean warship.

• The climate bill in Congress according to most environmental organizations is a dud of the first magnitude (and maybe DOA, anyway.)

Does anyone now doubt this fully industrialized phase of late monopoly capitalism is not lethal to the planet and its inhabitants? As I write this thick black crude oil is gushing into the Gulf of Mexico at a rate equivalent to an Exxon Valez oil spill every three days. They have no fucking idea how to stop it other than drill into it the reservoir from some other location – which will take weeks more! It is a horror show of the first order as the oils seeps into the biggest remaining wetland in the US, the Mississippi Delta, and gets into to a current that will take it to the Keys and on around encircling the entire state of Florida.


Moving right along. The European Union is in trouble. Its poorer members like Greece rode high while the whole global economy was living off of an inflated US housing marker, are now is hitting the skids. The bubble popped and trillions of euros, dollars, rubles, shekels, yens whatever vanished into cyberspace (just like your long winded email note does when your email word-processor acts up.) After all it was really never was any more than bits and bites in bank leased 'server farms.' No doubt the banks that financed Greece and the other major debtor states during the gravy years also invested in heavily in lots of BP common and preferred stock. After all BP was/is making billions in profit in 2009. The irresponsible financing of runaway expansion in the PIGS is all a part of the financial complex’s lust for easy money led by what we fondly call “Wall Street.” The banks European and worldwide are understandably in cahoots with the carbon extraction energy giants (like BP and Exxon-Mobil, Massey Coal) because they are so profitable. It is very profitable to kill a planet. When the oil corporations lobby Congress for regulatory leniency and (appallingly) subsidies they are only fronting for their real owners, the banks and investment houses.


No one really knows what the US banks are now worth. Since all of the high tech financial instruments, derivatives and various collateralized packages containing 'underwater 'mortgages are still owned by the banks and are still part of their reserves, their value is what the banks claim their value is. The big bailout that everyone resents so much merely put the US government in as co-signer on all this bad debt. Once confidence was restored between the banks, they could again return to making business as usual. With credit restored they can borrow from the Federal Reserve at nearly zero interest and buy US bonds essentially loaning money back to the government at interest. Kind of a good deal, huh? Obviously the EU is left out of this subterfuge to some extent and must support their poor sisters, like Greece, all by themselves. The EU, which mainly means Germany, is the most prosperous of the EU members but is hardly happy about the prospect. Economists say the EU crisis calls into question the whole concept of a unified Europe economy with one currency for rich and poor countries alike. Exacerbating the situation are currency speculators who make big money by ‘shorting’ (betting on the euros decline) thus making a bad situation worse by creating inflation forcing up interest rates.

The instability in Europe has had deleterious effects on the US stock market with the Dow Jones falling over a thousands points since late April – remember all the financial giants are hooked together is various ways. Also adding to the pessimism of the investor class is the fact that the Republicans have been unable to beat back the Democrat-led financial reforms since even the GOP’s own Tea Party base also wants the Wall Streets boys’ heads on poles. Also unemployment numbers went back up after months of improvement possibly indicating the 2009 stimulus may be petering out. A southward bound stock market leads to a consumer reluctance to spend, this fear of layoffs in turn actually creates said layoffs, which loops back as increased unemployment and feeds additional sell offs in the stock market. Paradoxically they in aggregate could create the dreaded ‘double dip’ they so fear. Such a self-perpetuating recessionary loop can only to be arrested by another deficit-increasing stimulus which is becoming ever more unlikely as comparisons of the US to Greece abound by both Republican and Democratic party 'deficit hawks' (see Paul Krugman and his commentators in the 5/21/10 NY Times.)

How does poor Thailand fit into all of this? Thailand is part of the global economy so times are hard there, too. Apparently the ‘Red Shirts” causing all of the turmoil are angry to the point of insurrection as a reaction to a 2006 military coup. In 2006 a putsch ousted then-premier Thaksin Shinawatra, a folk hero among the urban poor, a new-money business class and millions of Thais in northeastern farming country. They’re angry and want an election. - not unreasonable. It’s a typical class struggle situation.

And then there is North and South Korea and their lingering cold war. It was temporarily alleviated by a liberal government in the South making overtures to the North. But now that the conservatives are back in power in the South, the hostility is again making a comeback. The conservatives probably got back in because of dissatisfaction with their economy's performance. North Korea, a pariah state that is the best argument against police state socialism that ever existed, is by all accounts a basket case in every respect. Whatever could be done with them as far as integration into the world order never is done and they stay outside looking in. No doubt N Korea would love to emulate “Red China’s” economic takeoff. They hate being ignored and neglected so they cause some ugly incident every so often. My guess is that it is tacit and unstated in US foreign policy circles, Demo and Repub alike, to keep them permanently out in the cold and unhappy so we will have an on-going ‘serious threat’ as an additional justification for our massive military machine which props up to some our much or our economy.


Finally, climate legislation seems to be on everybody’s back burner. But this mother of all problems is not going away because 40% Americans don’t think it’s a problem; or that the carbon based energy complex (BP et al) has more money than God to buy off Congress; or that the Senate’s Kerry Lieberman bill sucks (”Kerry Lieberman”! doesn’t that say it all?); or that the Markey Waxman bill passed by the House strips the EPA of the authority to regulate greenhouse gases. The beltway boys are predicting the Gulf spill will undermine passage of Climate legislation. Maybe that’s good since doing a half-assed job (like they did with the Health Care bill) might cause more harm than good. At least with health care the problem can’t be ignored and if it fails to perform it can be fixed. With climate legislation our program is as much a signal to the world as it is an effective policy. If we set up something that looks inadequate, it will take on a life of its own for better or worse.

Let’s hope this unfolding world historical disaster in the Gulf of Mexico will be the catalyst for bold, robust, effective, visionary climate and energy legislation. The energy behemoths like BP now appear to the public as do the financial behemoths of Wall Street like Goldman Sachs as big, evil and greedy. Will Obama and the Demo controlled Congress respond or will they disappoint us again?

The Day the Earth Stood Still

A person who hates or distrusts humankind is called a misanthrope. Maybe I’m not yet at the hating level yet but certainly I am well into the ‘distrusting’ zone. I’m starting to believe human beings are simply ‘no damn good.’ The remake of the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still played with this misanthropic perspective. But unfortunately it was a crummy movie. Expensively made with high production values, it was the usual blockbuster dreck. It features terrible acting by Keanu Reeves in a role that actually requires him to be stiff and boring, much lame dialogue, some extremely annoying characters (Jennifer Connelly’s character’s kid is an unpleasant whinny little dreadnaught-haired jerk) and the usual over-reliance on big buck computer generated graphics to blow lots of big things up in a big way. Yet, the basic concept had promise, an updated more broadly misanthropic version of the 1952 version’s more simplistic anti-militarism message.

In the original version the aliens arrive in a modest little 1950s scale “flying saucer” and try unsuccessfully to bring about world peace but wind up mounting a massive defensive retaliation against our puny array of laughably ineffective weaponry. This time, besides the usual defensive retaliation against our primitive peashooters, the aliens have decided they must destroy us to protect the planet from us. An intergalactic confederation somewhere has decided we are destroying a very unique life supporting celestial vessel, our Planet Earth, and we must be stopped since we are incapable of change. The concept had great promise. Too bad the movie turned out to be an unwatchable mess that required recourse to the Eject Button before anything was actually resolved. But judging from how things were going, it would no doubt have been resolved in the finest Hollywood tradition. One of the lead characters would heroically, individually, ruggedly save the entire human race, the entire planet and maybe even the entire universe. Ho hum.

When one starts seeing the human race as unredeemable, the idea that this movie was working with, one is inadvertently backing into the concept of ‘original sin.’ If you accept the idea of original sin, or more secularly, the inherent limitations of the human animal, it stands to reason our morally challenged nature will be reflected in all of our institutions.

One prime example of this is that we have inserted (and even promoted to almost a virtue status) the once widely reviled sin of greed to be the actual mainspring of our economic order, known as Capitalism. So is it any wonder that we are constantly ill served and often in crisis if we have a system of resource allocation that encourages a known form of misbehavior? Yet even if "greed" is formally if not effectively removed from the equation in a collectivist alternative, such as Socialism, other “sins” or in secular terms “human defects” reassert themselves and undermine the operational integrity of said revised arrangement. Such ignoble human characteristics as pride (careerism, egotism and the will to power) and sloth (manifested as alienation, insubordination, alcoholism and lack of pride in workmanship) reemerge. At least they did in the prime model of ‘real existing socialism’, the erstwhile Soviet Union. But they had other serious disadvantages working against them, too, such as no tradition of democracy. But that’s another story.

And then there is that other major human institution, ‘our font of moral redemption’, our commonly accepted means to ‘explain the inexplicable’, the very underpinning of all of our cultures: Religion. Second only to the timeless struggle over issues of simple tribal dominance, nothing has caused more wars than disagreements over religious doctrine especially when linked with religio-political ideologies like Theocracy or monarchical Divine Right. Furthermore, religion as an institution is failing dismally to address our lemming-like march toward global ecological suicide. Stewardship of the planet seems to be never even on the radar of the most activist and troublesome fundamentalist sects such as Muslim jihadists, Israel’s ultra-orthodox Judaic sects and American evangelical Christians and their rabid ‘right-to-life’ movement. In fact religiously inspired horrific Jihadist terrorist spectacles such as 9-11 and the fascist reaction of the Bushian-led US government have served as a major distraction from serious recognition of the gravity of our present ever-worsening environmental crisis.

So as we end the first decade on this new millennium, humankind remains bitterly divided. Scores of nation states continue in confrontation, individually or as members of alliances with a small group of larger, more powerful nation states retaining their economically exploitive and politically dominate status. This while doomsday nuclear weaponry threatens to continue to spread to ever less coherent political entities. Add to this the diverse religious, ethnic and racial tensions that often mutate into hatred and distrust. Sitting astride this whole mess is a self-interest driven global ruling class, unacknowledged by a corrupt corporate controlled Fourth Estate, and operating primarily behind the scenes. These puppet masters pull the strings of the world’s elected and un-elected “leaders.” Despite idealistically conceived global institutions such as the United Nations that are intended to harmonize and unify, these nation states remain a quarrelling dysfunctional family. This ongoing Spectacle serves as constant distraction from the ongoing massive transfer of global wealth into ever fewer hands. This redistribution upward occurs whether the world economy sputters in recession (as now is) or hyperventilates itself another financial bubble.

This perpetual global discord and continuing spirit of nationalistic Darwinian survival- of-the-fittest distracts us from our ‘forced march to oblivion’ as the entire planet overheats. Scientists keep reminding us that this planetary overheating is fostering cascading changes through little understood feedback loops resulting in ever more grave and unpredictable secondary effects. And yet we dither while our resource devouring war machines, our atavistic internecine religious squabbles and our ever recurring geo-political maneuvering continues to distract and immobilize. All the while an ever-growing portion of the world’s myriad life forms, human and non-human, struggle for the means for survival.

Against this is a feeble and cacophonous resistance by a hodgepodge of liberals, leftists, religious do-gooders, journalists, intellectuals and artists of all stripes, each who contain within themselves a personal mixture of vanity, lust, ambition, self-absorption and other human frailties and shortcomings. So the “resistance” has no lock on being defect-free. Yet where would we be without these people throughout history - resisting slavery, monarchy, child labor, apartheid, torture, nuclear weapons, war and so on. Some small improvements have been made over the years (few would try to defend slavery these days.) But progress is always subject to reactionary reversal as has occurred in the ‘dark sided’ days of Bush/Cheney. Will any further progress be made? Barack Obama claims to be on the side of human progress. We shall see…