There was a news story on Slashdot just before Christmas that the Occupy movement that has managed to mobilise tens of thousands of people across the USA seems to have had little impact in Silicon Valley and the other 'High Tech' enclaves. I can sympathise to some extent with this attitude, if you have skills (as I do) that are at the moment in high demand then you have at the back of your mind 'I will always find something else' even if your current employer runs into financial trouble.
There is something deeper going on here than the grumblings of an increasing number of 'have nots'. What has grown up over the past hundred years or so is an economy based on bigger and bigger corporations with bigger and bigger investment needs which in turn has lead to more powerful banks and financial institutions to supply those needs. The upsides of all this investment is the modern world we now take for granted. Cheap manufactured goods to make our lives much easier than those of our great grandparents were.
There is however a big downside to this abundance. Corporations and Banks have no 'conscience' they are in fact legally obliged to take a course of action that maximises the profit for their owners. The only way for this 'greed' to be restrained is either by legislation (with the corporation equally obliged to try to find loopholes because of its duty to the shareholders) or by the greed of different corporations pulling in different directions. The positive side of the latter is competition that keeps prices down, but only to those consumers who have the power of choice. The darker side of this is a form of open warfare. We see this as all the stupid squabbles over Intellectual Property that corporations waste court time with.
What is more serious is that the self interest in the corporations of keeping things 'the way they are' means that humanity is not getting told the truth that it urgently needs to hear.
The truth is we are running out of time really fast. What I am just skirting over here you can found in detail by Googling for "The crash course".
This video is a very condensed form of the course that Chris gave to the Gold Money Foundation conference:
The simple truth is that we are a world of exponential growth, as our beloved leaders keep saying that growth is what we need to get us out of the current ''temporary difficulties'' with the economy, so that does not sound too bad, does it?
The problem with exponential growth is that even if the rate of growth stays the same the amount of growth is always accelerating. If you are in a speeding car and the brick wall you are heading for is a mile or so away the fact that the driver has his foot hard down on the gas is not that concerning. But how about if that brick wall is just 50 ft away? We are living on a world of finite capacity. Our now 7 billion population is way above what the carrying capacity of the earth would be without our wide scale use of fossil fuel energy.
The bad news is that there is not an infinite amount of this fossil fuel. In a way that is a good thing because we would inevitably make our atmosphere unbreathable if we did just carry on turning it into CO2!
The other bit of bad news is that with a growing population and growing demands for 'the better life' (who can blame us?) our need for energy is growing exponentially too. However as the amount of fossil fuels on the earth is finite the rate of discovery of new reserves has been slowing down for decades now! The ones that are found and go forward to production are progressively more expensive to exploit. The cost of the energy that is needed for the modern world is always rising.
A few years ago you could dismiss this if you wanted a closed mind as all just theory, but signs of the change that is upon us are now so obvious in our economy that only the truly foolish will continue to ignore them.
What of corporations? As they are obliged to run themselves for the profit motive it is hard to see how they can be expected to start taking that foot gently off the gas and help steer the human race if not away from the danger, at least on the optimal course through it.
What is needed is some other way to organise the human race other than the capitalist oligarchy we seem to have at present.
The Internet gives us the chance to get enough people educated to make 'for the good of all' decision making possible. The danger we are facing is just as real as if there was a comet heading on a crash course for Earth, and the urgency is just as great.
The Occupy movement is proposing we try for a fully inclusive global democracy.
The first stage of this is to make sure that the whole world is made to pay attention long enough from the distractions of football & fashon to realise we have a real and urgent problem here. One grave enough that all the long established vested interests that have kept things the way they are need to be questioned and have the light of truth shone on them.
I think you are probably fed up with hearing politicians say this because their sincerity is dubious but "we are all in this together" - unless you know of any Oligarchs that have built themselves a fleet of space ships! The earth has finite resources, that is a fact, not an opinion.
The idea that we all have to come to the hard choices together and take collective responsibility for those choices is not an ideal - but what are the alternatives?
Have some despotic oligarch make the decisions for you (in their, not your, best interests)?
Just share out the world's resources equally? A socialist utopia but doing it literally would never work (if you disagree with me I would be glad to expand my reasons as another post). We need a system that still motivates people to work but does not create 'non human' entities that do not have the well-being or even survival of the human race as part of their aims!
I do not pretend to have the solution to this, as many as possible of the 7 billion of us should talk about it though, you never know what new, better way, someone is going to come up with!
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