-- Posted Wednesday, 14 January 2009 | Digg This Article
| Source: GoldSeek.com
By James West
I feel like Harry Truman, the 83-year-old Mount St. Helens resident who refused to leave his mountainside residence, even though he knew a catastrophic event was coming. The explosive incinerating force that finally did roar down all sides of that mountain when it erupted killed everything within 5 mile radius. It was the deadliest and most economically destructive volcanic event in the history of the United States. Fifty-seven people were killed; 250 homes, 47 bridges, 15 miles (24 km) of railways, and 185 miles (298 km) of highway were destroyed. Harry Truman’s body was never found.
While the forces building behind the catastrophic U.S. economic policy of the last administration and the new one may lack the same single day impact, the destruction of livelihood and property that is just over the horizon will dwarf that of the 1980 eruption of Mount. St. Helens.
The slow pace of the system-wide implosion is testimony to the sheer scale upon which this unnatural disaster is unfolding. You can’t see it if you’re in it, but you can see it from space.
Here’s food for thought:
The number of millionaires and billionaires reached all time record highs globally prior to August 2008. The global competition to reach millionaire and billionaire status is the physical manifestation of a broadly human malaise: the valuation of material wealth over personal, familial, ecological and economic health. Greed, I think, is the common name for the disease.
But greed has now reached destructive proportions.
There exists a simple equation, yet to be published or even determined perhaps that goes something like this:
For each million dollars in private wealth, there is a proportional dollar value of resources that must be extracted from the earth and pressed into industrial service to become a part of or in itself a given product. Each of these million dollars in personal wealth then causes the requirement for purchasers and end users of such products. If an insufficient number exist, then technically that representative million dollars in private holdings should be diminished proportional to the reduced market for the correlated product. However, this equations logic fails in the face of credit. And expressing that consumption uniformly is next to impossible, considering the vastly fragmented nature of our economy.
Unfortunately, the correlation between elevated levels of private wealth and the global resource ponzi pyramid are not recognized in modern education and therefore current value systems as dangerous and terminal. On the contrary, private wealth is universally perceived as the reward for hard work and good citizenship. It is our value system that is corrupt, and that is in turn reflected in government, banking, education and family.
Assuming a future that survives this great economic catastrophe, there needs to be a revaluation of human activity.
With the advent of free information flow, education itself becomes somewhat obsolete, since all you can learn in a university can be learned through sources obtained online. That means a population that is increasingly educated, and therefore desirous of the same standard of living, theoretically, as the highest common denominator enjoys, since they come from the lowest, or at least, lower.
The resources and systems of the human race have reached a level of peak capacity, and since the resources of the planet are finite and now shrinking, it is incredibly myopic of us as a species to assume the outcome of this financial crisis will be a resumption of economic growth and development worldwide towards a mutually elevated standard of living.
Rather, the opposite is true. A resumption of the millionaire/billionaire race is sure to result in another version of the current situation.
Economists, as they are called by the post secondary education facilities (universities) they are churned out by, are saddled with the intellectually disfiguring and embarrassing mantra of perpetual growth. However, to criticize capitalism or suggest additional regulation is to be branded a socialist, or worse, a communist. These institutions are designed to churn out replicas and servants of the men who finance them. They no more comprehend the real essence of economics than they do the impossibility of perpetual growth, whose physics counterpart is perpetual motion.
The substitution of empire with economic hegemony in pursuit of that mantra is tyranny, whether practiced by a democratically elected or despotically confiscated government.
To forego this opportunity to evolve our understanding of ourselves and modify our pursuits (and our education institutions) accordingly is to guarantee the continuing disintegration of economy, ecology and ultimately population. For the surest outcome of all on a crowded planet of diminishing resources is warfare.
The opportunity and the lesson before us is to re-tool the whole value system to recognize that competition absent cooperation is self-destructive. If we don’t limit our desire and therefore our pursuit of private wealth, we ensure our limited capacity for growth, evolution, and survival.
For me, personally, the pursuit of millions and billions has been severely impaired by the forced revaluation of my financial arsenal. I had a higher net worth when I was in high school than now.
I’ve learned valuable lessons from this financial catastrophe, foremost among them is that if we all pursue a standard of living representative of millionaires and billionaires, we’re essentially doomed as a race.
Henceforth, my children will be taught that the pursuit of great personal wealth is essentially a criminal pursuit, and mastering the art of living modestly is the noble goal.
Visit us at http://www.CrimeoftheCenturyMovie.com to learn more.
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-- Posted Wednesday, 14 January 2009 | Digg This Article | Source: GoldSeek.com
