Storm Clouds on the Horizon

“Racial injustice, war, urban blight, and environmental rape have a common denominator in our exploitative economic system.”
-Channing E. Phillips
"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."
-Edward Abbey
"Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed."
-Mahatma Gandhi



According to some minds, the West is going through what the Soviets did some 20 years ago- economic crisis leading to massive social upheaval and reassessing the path we are on. That's what you get when your whole system is based on perpetual growth and wealth to maintain peoples support. It wont be long until the gloves come off and blood flows in the streets of the West as it has been in the colonies for some time. The people who own all the wealth are extremely intelligent, and have always managed to pass the blame on to miscellaneous patsies in such times. Seeing as how enlistment rates are skyrocketing as more and more families turn to military service for a salary, it looks like America will do what most Empires have done when things look bleak at home... go take shit from less violent peoples. Nothing like rivers of blood and gore to help placate an unruly populace. And if all that fails, their is always the jackboot waiting for a face to stomp on. Considering how completely pussified and cowardly most Americans are, it shouldn't take much to put them in line. At least we will get a taste of what we have been dishing out to the rest of the world... unlike them however, we deserve it. History has shown that the dominant culture will only see the folly of its ways when the very survival of it comes into question. That day is rapidly approaching for us Americans. May mankind have mercy on our souls.

Most Americans seem intensely baffled by what is happening the realm of economics. This no doubt stems from our comical education system and our collective proclivity towards willful ignorance. Luckily I recently found a great little story that does a marvelous job of explaining what the government is doing with the bailout, so enjoy-

Once upon a time a man appeared in a village and
announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys
for $10 each.

The villagers, seeing that there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest and started catching them. The man bought thousands at $10 and, as supply started to diminish, the villagers stopped their effort. He next announced that he would now buy monkeys at $20 each. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again. Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms. The offer increased to $25 each and the supply of monkeys became so scarce it was an effort to even find a monkey, let alone catch it! The man now announce d that he would buy monkeys at $50 each! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would buy on his behalf. In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers: 'Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has already collected. I will sell them to you at $35 and when the man returns from the city, you can sell them to him for $50 each.' The villagers rounded up all their savings and bought all the monkeys for 700 billion dollars.

They never saw the man or his assistant again, only
lots and lots of monkeys!

Now you have a better understanding of how the
WALL STREET BAILOUT PLAN WILL WORK !!!!

Ain't that a kick in the head

Athens- Protesters, described as mostly students, were seen smashing the glass doors of a Citibank, throwing a metal barricade at police lined up along a street and scuffling with police wearing white helmets.

Suicide bombing in Kirkuk kills scores and indicates an increase to the sectarian strife over control of the pivotal northern city.

MANAMA, Bahrain (AP) — The commander of the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet expressed doubt Friday about the wisdom of launching attacks against Somali pirates on land — a proposal the U.S. is circulating to the U.N. Security Council.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience…we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. -Ike (1961)

Unfortunately, you can't vote the rascals out, because you never voted them in, in the first place. -Noam Chompsky (1970)

In this brave new world the companies that arm our armies actually create the conflicts in much the way Nike supports sports. A system of lucrative crises profiteering has made all form of human suffering extremely appealing to the hardcore capitalist. Lockheed Martin now has become so vertically integrated that it literally makes the bombs that blow up buildings, owns a contracting firm to rebuild them, and runs a business to staff those buildings. The contracts that are signed with the American Military-Disaster complex are frequently no bid contracts that are guarenteed a profit (a process called cost plus which means that you just show how much you spend and they give you a certain percentage more). Such companies are being openly funded through massive billion dollar contracts in which the US Treasury cuts them a blank check, without any regard to efficiency, cost or even economic logic. Everything from a hurricane, to a war, to an earthquake is an economic boom if your business needs large government handouts to keep those stock prices high. The money pledged for Tsunami relief in 2004 went almost entirely to largescale Multinational Corporations focusing on developing new Tourism resorts in the recentely cleared beaches of Thailand and Sri Lanka, and various mineral and gas reserves in Indonesia; as well as many other projects that benefited business. In certain places people openly stated that the aid wasn't helping, but in fact, hurting them. This sort of ruthless exploitation and abuse frequentely leads to armed resistance, which is rapidly becoming more and more appealing than living a life of desperation and poverty under the twin rule of corrupt or coerced governments and the omnipresent Multinationals. All over the world groups too numerous to list have sprung up in response to the economic hopelessness of their situation and injustice of the system into which they are being led.

The closing of almost half of Iraqi factories by the US in a country where the majority of men have military training seems almost too demented to fathom. Unless of course you own stock in Blackwater or KBR, both of which provide $900 dollar a day mercenaries to protect the various companies contracted to rebuild Iraq. Even though rebuilding all that we destroyed in Iraq has been made almost entirely impossible because of the violence, business in the Green Zone never missed a beat. Its a savage and violent way of life that American and her Allies project upon the masses of the world. Death and destruction are not strangers to mankind, indeed they are our perential companions. The ruthless efficacy of the modern machine that makes and profits off it is just becoming more aggressive and confident. After what they have gotten away with so far, it would be foolish from a purely profit based perspective to change course.

Snapshots of history

The Surreal Tapestry

Things are certainly complex, and the web of wild weirdness seems only to be growing with each spin of the planet. The three cities pictured above are about as different as they could be, but they are all part of the network of human habitation that is coming to define earth. We stop rivers, blow up mountains, build bridges and construct massive cities to hold the incomprehensibly huge population that we have managed to produce. An insular species, we seem far more concerned with the other humans than about much else, even our own environment. This might have something to do with the pervasive struggle for land, but it might be something deeper. That human intelligence was derived and created not to deal with our sensory world, but with the minds of our fellow humans, which can be complex minefields of opinions, motivations and ambitions. One theorist (Geoffrey Miller) has posed the perspective that the reason the human brain evolved into this immensely powerful organ is because sexual selection favored the most intelligent specimens, which over time rendered a mind that could produce mentalities, realities and just anything else we can think of (literally). The human mind has swaggered onto the stage of evolutionary history like a megalomaniac Titan, annihilating species and altering landscapes en masse because it seems beneficial to us to do so. Having said all this we are still just a funky species of mammals whose only real claim to fame is our appetite for destruction, agriculture and making very complex tools to assist in our endeavors, which when looked at objectively doesn't really amount to much. No matter how serious we take ourselves and how much we hoot and holler, the surreal tapestry that we bipeds have weaved in our world is a perceptual poltergeist created for our own entertainment and survival. Of course thinking of yourself as some strange growth that came from bacteria ages past isn't a very romantic perspective, and it doesn't leave much room for our treasured notions of individuality and spiritual significance. All the wars we wage, the economic madness we manifest, the triumph and terror that is modern mans struggle with himself, it is all just an elaborate existential exhibition of ourselves. So we might as well sing and dance.
"We are like pygmies lost in a maze of haze. We are not at war, we are having a nervous breakdown,again." -HST
"It is easier to discover a deficiency in individuals, in states, and in providence, than to see their real import or value." -Hegel

Economics

“Even using the nuclear option of guaranteeing everything, providing unlimited liquidity, nationalising the banks, making clear that nobody of importance is going to be allowed to fail, even that has not helped. We are reaching a breaking point, frankly.” He [Nouriel Roubini] believes governments will have to come up with an even bigger international rescue, and that the US is facing “multi-year economic stagnation”.

The bond that binds us, economic interaction, is breaking down on a large scale and is causing many a human much confusion. The orgiastic days of yore when endless profits and trust in the system seem to be gone. How it will all work out is any ones guess. The economic slump could well be the beginning of an avalanche that sees the fundamental and complete collapse of the bourgeois mode of production. If this were to come to pass, the implications are endless to the average life of those who have gotten rather accustomed to regular meals and the ability to recieve payment for their work. Its an interesting time, of that much we can be certain.

Sublimely Savage

Some extracts from the world-
"Oil is now highly correlated with the stock market," said Clarence Chu, a trader with market maker Hudson Capital Energy in Singapore. "People are looking to the Dow for sentiment on the economy."
Some worry that if Barack Obama loses and there is suspicion of foul play in the election, violence could ensue in cities with large black populations.
Cities that have suffered unrest before, such as Detroit, Chicago, Oakland and Philadelphia, will have extra police deployed.
In Oakland, the police will deploy extra units trained in riot control, as well as extra traffic police, and even put SWAT teams on standby.
“Are we anticipating it will be a riot situation? No. But will we be prepared if it goes awry? Yes,” said Jeff Thomason, spokesman for the Oakland Police Department.

War

"It is well that war is so terrible - otherwise we would grow too fond of it."
-Robert E. Lee
"The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity."
-George Bernard Shaw
So here we sit, 6 billion plus strong just hanging out on planet earth eyeballing each other with curiosity and suspicion. Amidst the physical necessitates for our continued in habitation/occupation of the earth we have also constructed realities, or more accurately perspectives, that justify the various behavior we must engage in to do the various things we do. What is commonly called morality is simply what a group collectively agree upon as socially acceptable. A peoples ability to use morality as a weapon against its foes is generally what separates the rulers from the ruled. Chief Calgacus denounced the morality of the might makes right logic over 2,000 years ago in the brilliant observation that: "To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace." It may seem a distant and uncertain reality to those on the side of the presently dominant culture, but to those under threat from our bellicose armies that level whole countries when they are unleashed upon the world is always near. The long term explanation for why the West can deploy divisions and bomb at will the globe over is primarily the we have done it so we can do it. Our whole Civilization is based on conquest, killing and consumption; no amount of idealism can ever hide that fact. So it seems rather obvious that the sustaining of our system predicates violence on a large scale. Those who speak of humanitarianism and philanthropy are childlike in their naive belief that one can alter the ruthless rules of a centuries old contest to see who can exert the most influence upon the societies of humans. The death toll is already incalculable and grows every day. Every Palestinian shot, every Iraqi blown up, every African that starves to death and all the others who face death on a daily basis know that this world is at war. The pressures from our presence seems to make this natural antagonism an ordeal from whence there is no escape. As our world grows so does our capacity for slaughter and organized violence. The sad truth is that killing for whatever reason the day provides is one of the cornerstones of our civilization, and as long as we keep on the path that we have been traveling down for the past few centuries their is no extricating ourselves from the cycle of violence and aggression that permeates our world.
Idque apud imperitos humanitas vocabatur, cum pars servitutis esset Because they didn't know better, they called it 'civilization,' when it was part of their slavery -Tacitus