Sure, This Is Greed, Plain And Simple...

...But it is also a tragic example of how, in our current mutated, and outdated, economic operating system, if a thing can be commoditized, it will be; and if no one is there to keep watch, corners will tend to be cut. And to add insult to injury, too often does that corner cutting tend to grow until the process in questions breaks of its own extreme exploitation, but the real insult is that we keep going round in this cycle of this shameless disregard for any kind of morality whatsoever.

The thing is, the burden of responsibility, once such cycles are discovered, and understood, falls to the rest of us for letting things continue as they are any longer. We must do something because the political system now, so soaked in Big Money, is incapable of doing anything this important; at least as it pertains to fundamental morality, and social equity. They can't do it for Health Care. They can't do it for critical new infrastructure. They can't do it for the environment. And they can't do it for the reasoned assessment of what ought to be national priorities (in the face of what is becoming permanent world crises mode).

If all of us were involved in all of the things that make a town, or city, or whatever, work, we wouldn't need to be worried about watching over what would otherwise be a purely for profit transaction. A transaction done by someone who seeks, in significant portion, to keep costs low, and profit margins high. Whereas, of course, in our own community we would be doing it because it needed doing (because we found the consensus to make that choice), and we would be relying on one another to do it right; the very people we would be working side by side with, switching task posting every week or two (as each community would figure out for itself), moving across most of the spectrum of what it takes to keep it all working; in effect challenging each other to do what's right for everybody.

Just another statement of a condition that you condone by default if you just sit back and do nothing to bring the debate for an alternative to the forefront of public consciousness.

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Every Day

How much garbage has to be hauled from trash cans to transfer points?

How much acreage has to be either prepped for planting, or tended to after planting has been done?

How much critical machinery has to be serviced, or repaired?

How much food product has to be either hauled to a processing plant as feedstock, or hauled away to distribution points as end product?

How much chemical, metal, or any other material product, has to be hauled to a processing plant as feedstock, or hauled to distribution points as an end product?

How many meals have to be made as either a required institutional, or discretionary, service?

How many people need to have a service rendered as a matter of critical physical well being?

How many people will require a service rendered as a matter of important material need (as referred to by such professions as education, law, accounting, manufacturing, construction, data processing, creating new enterprises etc.)?

Every day all of this has to get done in order to have any community, whether you see a community as a town, a city, a county, or anything larger. That's what it means when you talk about keeping a community going. And that is what the majority of working people in this country are involved in; which is the group I refer to when I say "the rest of us."

As obvious as all this might seem I provide it here as a necessary preamble to making what I feel is an important statement about having a Democracy. Which is to say that, if you have a democracy, the majority has the right to provide themselves with whatever they are willing to support. I fear that this needs repeating in bold type:

If you have a democracy, the majority has the right to provide themselves with whatever they are willing to support.

This statement is of crucial importance now because I firmly believe that we are not getting a good number of things that we would, in fact, be quite willing to support. And the main reason we are not getting them is that the value of what the rest of us do, in keeping things going, isn't appreciated even nearly to the degree that it should be. And why, you might ask is that?

The fault here lies completely with the out of date, and now mutated as well, economic operating system we brought with us on our rise from the ignorant tribalism of our early beginning. A system based completely on the notion of the economics of scarcity; a thing for which, now that technology has advanced so far, is no longer necessary at all. And that is so because, with clean, renewable energy, and the careful application of knowledge, we can certainly provide ourselves with a much greater portion of "what we are willing to support;" especially if creativity can truly break free of the shackles that making knowledge a "proprietary" item has burdened us with in the past.

We can change this. We must change this. The only question left is why you aren't doing more to make that change come about.

 

Livelihoods Can't Be Tied To The Whims Of Capricious Markets

It's bad enough having wages that are seldom enough to truly make ends meet, but to then expect workers to bear the brunt of market instabilities as well is just pouring salt on an already aggravated wound.

How are we to ever have generational stability enough so that succeeding generations can be given the kind of proper culturation that creates purposeful, reasonably well adjusted citizens, if we keep pulling the economic rug out from under people? How much more, of the quite obvious display of the poor choice behavior, so typical of disaffected, directionless misfits, is it going to take before this grievous deficiency is fully appreciated?

Now, more than ever, do we need fully integrated, much more generally capable individuals. Where are they to come from if there is little else but constant messaging to want, and a bewildering array of dazzling things to get buzzed out with, from that manufactured need; so effectively so in fact that real, constructive involvement with keeping our nation strong, and prosperous, becomes ever more problematic?

This arrangement, that our now mutated economic operating system has created, cannot be tolerated much longer; not if we value sanity, as well as prosperity. It has to change, and that will only happen if you get involved to make that change happen. Talk about the need for an alternative to Capitalism everywhere you can, with everyone you can. And get everyone you know to do the same thing. And remember, the clock is ticking.

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Like I've Been Saying...

...And Don't think this is going to get better the longer it goes on.

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Gods Help Us If We Don't Find A Proper Way To Avoid The Thucydides Trap

The quote below from the Politico article (linked below) illustrates why we must openly confront the three biggest (in my opinion) aspects currently affecting the three factors quoted by General McMaster:


1. The current economic competition between nation states.
2. The current, related, competition for resources between nation states.
3. The economics of scarcity, and its increasing toll on people globally. 

These are big not only because of the size of their impact, but also because they are things we can make equally big changes on; if we're finally ready to recognize that this is a pivotal moment in human history; one demanding that we social development down a new path.

That we should also have to do this cooperatively should also go without saying, but I'm a glutton for the seemingly obvious. Which is how I then segue into repeating my contention that getting rid of Capitalism is absolutely required if we are to address the two aspects I listed above. It is also why I remain a staunch supporter of our space program; disorganized, and not nearly as focused, as it may be.

"...In recent months, both Mattis and McMaster have publicly cited Thucydides’ diagnosis of the three factors that drive nations to conflict. “People fight today for the same reasons Thucydides identified 2,500 years ago: fear, honor and interest,” McMaster wrote in a July 2013 New York Times op-ed that argued for bringing historical perspective to military challenges. Mattis also endorsed the universal power of “fear, honor and interest” during his confirmation hearing (prompting Maine Senator Angus King to announce that he had stored the quote in his phone)..."

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Because You Need A Living Wage To Be Able To Afford Being Married

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The Thing Is, We Already Live In A Mixed Reality Environment...

...At it hasn't been doing us much good in the process.

And now that everybody is fracturing, and splintering, into their realities of choice, what's to become of making life bearable in the hard knocks environs of terra firma? More crumbling, chaotic, dissolution it would seem. Oh happy day.

There's still a choice to be made, but the time left to make it is running out.

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