Chris Hedges Has a Point

I recently sent an email to a liberal friend in West Virginia.  I referenced Thomas Jefferson's writings on rebellion and asked whether a stacked judiciary, a shamelessly "bought and paid for" Congress, and a criminal presidency, didn't meet the conditions that Jefferson argued justified revolution.

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure”

"Men have the right to a just government, have natural rights, and have the right to consent to be governed."

I asked her if America had not reached the levels of corruption and tyranny of which Jefferson wrote? If not, how? If so, why are the people not rising up in defence of their cherished Constitution?

The truth can often be ugly. I'm a reader of Chris Hedges although, in the past couple of years, I have sometimes found his views a bit extreme with a resort to hyperbole. This passage from his latest op-ed, however, is on the money:

If what happens in courtrooms across the country to poor people of color is justice, what is happening in the Senate is a trial. If the blood-drenched debacles and endless quagmires in the Middle East are victories in the war on terror, our military is the greatest on earth. If the wholesale government surveillance of the public, the revoking of due process and having the world’s largest prison population are liberty, we are the land of the free. If the president, an inept, vulgar and corrupt con artist, is the leader of the free world, we are a beacon for democracy and our enemies hate us for our values. If Jesus came to make us rich, bless the annihilation of Muslims by our war machine and condemn homosexuality and abortion, we are a Christian nation. If formalizing an apartheid state in Israel is a peace plan, we are an honest international mediator. If a meritocracy means that three American men have more wealth than the bottom 50% of the U.S. population, we are the land of opportunity. If the torture of kidnapped victims in black sites and the ripping of children from their parents’ arms and their detention in fetid, overcrowded warehouses, along with the gunning down of unarmed citizens by militarized police in the streets of our urban communities, are the rule of law, we are an exemplar of human rights.

The retreat into illusion.

The rhetoric we use to describe ourselves is so disconnected from reality that it has induced collective schizophrenia. America, as it is discussed in public forums by politicians, academics and the media, is a fantasy, a Disneyfied world of make-believe. The worse it gets, the more we retreat into illusions. The longer we fail to name and confront our physical and moral decay, the more demagogues who peddle illusions and fantasies become empowered. Those who acknowledge the truth—beginning with the stark fact that we are no longer a democracy—wander like ghosts around the edges of society, reviled as enemies of hope. The mania for hope works as an anesthetic.

What lies ahead.

The embrace of collective self-delusion marks the death spasms of all civilizations. We are in the terminal stage. We no longer know who we are, what we have become or how those on the outside see us. It is easier, in the short term, to retreat inward, to celebrate nonexistent virtues and strengths and wallow in sentimentality and a false optimism. But in the end, this retreat, peddled by the hope industry, guarantees not only despotism but, given the climate emergency, extinction.

This is no time for moralizing or airs of superiority or schadenfreude. The collapse of America's democracy is a contagion. That much is manifest in the spread of illiberal democracy, totalitarianism-lite, and the rise of radical rightwing movements spewing fear, hatred, racism and every other form of bigotry and xenophobia around the world.

The Imperative of Revolt

I've been looking for a way out, an alternative.  I truly have.  Yet I'm becoming resigned to the idea that the future of our grandchildren cannot be entrusted to the existing political structure that currently suffocates Canadian society.

Getting punched in the mouth is devastating whether the fist is in a velvet glove or not.  That's what today's Liberals and New Democrats offer, a velvet glove. Thanks but no thanks.

We're at a point where the imperative of revolutionary change is increasingly obvious.  It's no longer a matter of choice. Twenty or thirty years from now, we won't have the option of a structural reformation of our society, our politics and our economy.

I've written about this for years.  Naomi Klein explores the need to save ourselves from the scourge of free market capitalism while we still can.  Ms. Klein, quite rightly, sees the onset of climate change as bringing us to the boiling point.  The neoliberalism that has come to infect Canda's body politic and that of much of the rest of the world cannot be sustained.

It is with this in mind that I read Chris Hedges' interviews with John Raulston Saul and Sheldon Wolin on smashing the yoke of corporatism that has quietly displaced democracy in our societies.

If, as Saul has written, we have undergone a corporate coup d’état and now live under a species of corporate dictatorship that Wolin calls “inverted totalitarianism,” if the internal mechanisms that once made piecemeal and incremental reform possible remain ineffective, if corporate power retains its chokehold on our economy and governance, including our legislative bodies, judiciary and systems of information, and if these corporate forces are able to use the security and surveillance apparatus and militarized police forces to criminalize dissent, how will change occur and what will it look like?

Wolin ..and Saul ...see democratic rituals and institutions, especially in the United States, as largely a facade for unchecked global corporate power. Wolin and Saul excoriate academics, intellectuals and journalists, charging they have abrogated their calling to expose abuses of power and give voice to social criticism; they instead function as echo chambers for elites, courtiers and corporate systems managers. Neither believes the current economic system is sustainable. And each calls for mass movements willing to carry out repeated acts of civil disobedience to disrupt and delegitimize corporate power.

“If you continue to go down the wrong road, at a certain point something happens,” Saul said during our meeting Wednesday in Toronto, where he lives. “At a certain point when the financial system is wrong it falls apart. And it did. And it will fall apart again.”

“The collapse started in 1973,” Saul continued. “There were a series of sequential collapses afterwards. The fascinating thing is that between 1850 and 1970 we put in place all sorts of mechanisms to stop collapses which we can call liberalism, social democracy orRed Toryism. It was an understanding that we can’t have boom-and-bust cycles. We can’t have poverty-stricken people. We can’t have starvation. The reason today’s collapses are not leading to what happened in the 18th century and the 19th century is because all these safety nets, although under attack, are still in place. But each time we have a collapse we come out of it stripping more of the protection away. At a certain point we will find ourselves back in the pre-protection period. At that point we will get a collapse that will be incredibly dramatic. I have no idea what it will look like. A revolution from the left? A revolution from the right? Is it violence followed by state violence? Is it the collapse of the last meaningful edges of democracy? Is it a sudden decision by a critical mass of people that they are not going to take it anymore?”

This devolution of the economic system has been accompanied by corporations’ seizure of nearly all forms of political and social power. The corporate elite, through a puppet political class and compliant intellectuals, pundits and press, still employs the language of a capitalist democracy. But what has arisen is a new kind of control, inverted totalitarianism, which Wolin brilliantly dissects in his book “Democracy Incorporated.”

Inverted totalitarianism does not replicate past totalitarian structures, such as fascism and communism. It is therefore harder to immediately identify and understand. There is no blustering demagogue. There is no triumphant revolutionary party. There are no ideologically drenched and emotional mass political rallies. The old symbols, the old iconography and the old language of democracy are held up as virtuous. The old systems of governance—electoral politics, an independent judiciary, a free press and the Constitution—appear to be venerated. But, similar to what happened during the late Roman Empire, all the institutions that make democracy possible have been hollowed out and rendered impotent and ineffectual.

The corporate state, Wolin told me at his Oregon home, is “legitimated by elections it controls.” It exploits laws that once protected democracy to extinguish democracy; one example is allowing unlimited corporate campaign contributions in the name of our First Amendment right to free speech and our right to petition the government as citizens. “It perpetuates politics all the time,” Wolin said, “but a politics that is not political.” The endless election cycles, he said, are an example of politics without politics, driven not by substantive issues but manufactured political personalities and opinion polls. There is no national institution in the United States “that can be described as democratic,” he said.

The mechanisms that once allowed the citizen to be a participant in power—from participating in elections to enjoying the rights of dissent and privacy—have been nullified. Money has replaced the vote, Wolin said, and corporations have garnered total power without using the cruder forms of traditional totalitarian control: concentration camps, enforced ideological conformity and the physical suppression of dissent. They will avoid such measures “as long as that dissent remains ineffectual,” he said. “The government does not need to stamp out dissent. The uniformity of imposed public opinion through the corporate media does a very effective job.”

The state has obliterated privacy through mass surveillance, a fundamental precondition for totalitarian rule, and in ways that are patently unconstitutional has stripped citizens of the rights to a living wage, benefits and job security. And it has destroyed institutions, such as labor unions, that once protected workers from corporate abuse.

Wolin goes on to discuss something explored in a recent course I took on warfare in the 21st century, the rise of "illiberal" democracy.  Think of it as a government that retains some vestiges of democracy, such as the vote, but acts independently of the electorate and often not for their benefit.  The individual's rights against the state are weakened, sapped.  The apparatus, taking such forms as the alliance of political and corporate media power, basically shape public opinion as it suits their interests.

“Democracy has been turned upside down,” Wolin said. “It is supposed to be a government for the people, by the people. But it has become an organized form of government dominated by groups that are only vaguely, if at all, responsible or responsive to popular needs and popular demands. At the same time, it retains a patina of democracy. We still have elections. They are relatively free. We have a relatively free media. But what is missing is a crucial, continuous opposition that has a coherent position, that is not just saying no, no, no, that has an alternative and ongoing critique of what is wrong and what needs to be remedied.”

“Capitalism is destructive because it has to eliminate customs, mores, political values, even institutions that present any kind of credible threat to the autonomy of the economy,” Wolin said. “That is where the battle lies. Capitalism wants an autonomous economy. It wants a political order subservient to the needs of the economy. The [capitalist’s] notion of an economy, while broadly based in the sense of a relatively free entrance and property that is relatively widely dispersed, is as elitist as any aristocratic system.”

Wolin and Saul said they expect the state, especially in an age of terminal economic decline, to employ more violent and draconian forms of control to keep restive populations in check. This coercion, they said, will fuel discontent and unrest, which will further increase state repression.

...“They decided that capitalism and the market was about the right to have the cheapest possible goods,” Saul said. “That is what competition meant. This is a lie. No capitalist philosopher ever said that. As you bring the prices down below the capacity to produce them in a middle-class country you commit suicide. As you commit suicide you have to ask, ‘How do we run this place?’ And you have to run it using these other methods—bread and circuses, armies, police and prisons.”

The liberal class—which has shriveled under the corporate onslaught and a Cold War ideology that held up national security as the highest good—once found a home in the Democratic Party, the press, labor unions and universities. It made reform possible. Now, because it is merely decorative, it compounds the political and economic crisis. There is no effective organized opposition to the rise of a neofeudalism dominated a tiny corporate oligarchy that exploits workers and the poor.

...Resistance, Wolin and Saul agreed, will begin locally, with communities organizing to form autonomous groups that practice direct democracy outside the formal power structures, including the two main political parties. These groups will have to address issues such as food security, education, local governance, economic cooperation and consumption. And they will have to sever themselves, as much as possible, from the corporate economy.

“It is extremely important that people are willing to go into the streets,” Saul said. “Democracy has always been about the willingness of people to go into the streets. When the Occupy movement started I was pessimistic. I felt it could only go a certain distance. But the fact that a critical mass of people was willing to go into the streets and stay there, without being organized by a political party or a union, was a real statement. If you look at that, at what is happening in Canada, at the movements in Europe, the hundreds of thousands of people in Spain in the streets, you are seeing for the first time since the 19th century or early 20th century people coming into the streets in large numbers without a real political structure. These movements aren’t going to take power. But they are a sign that power and the respect for power is falling apart. What happens next? It could be dribbled away. But I think there is the possibility of a new generation coming in and saying we won’t accept this. That is how you get change. A new generation comes along and says no, no, no. They build their lives on the basis of that no.”

“You need a professional or elite class devoted to profound change,” Saul said. “If you want to get power you have to be able to hold it. And you have to be able to hold it long enough to change the direction. The neoconservatives understood this. They have always been Bolsheviks. They are the Bolsheviks of the right. Their methodology is the methodology of the Bolsheviks. They took over political parties by internal coups d’état. They worked out, scientifically, what things they needed to do and in what order to change the structures of power. They have done it stage by stage. And we are living the result of that. The liberals sat around writing incomprehensible laws and boring policy papers. They were unwilling to engage in the real fight that was won by a minute group of extremists.”

“You have to understand power to reform things,” Saul said. “If you don’t understand power you get blown away by the guy who does. We are missing people who believe in justice and at the same time understand how tough power and politics are, how to make real choices. And these choices are often quite ugly.”

Chris Hedges Call for Revolt

 Writer, war correspondent, religious scholar, Chris Hedges has become increasingly radicalized over the past dozen or so years although he would argue it's society that has truly changed, particularly through the influence of religious fundamentalism and the capture of political power by the forces of corporatism.  Whatever the balance of changes and forces, he's calling for revolution as the last hope.

Corporations write our legislation. They control our systems of information. They manage the political theater of electoral politics and impose our educational curriculum. They have turned the judiciary into one of their wholly owned subsidiaries. They have decimated labor unions and other independent mass organizations, as well as having bought off the Democratic Party, which once defended the rights of workers. With the evisceration of piecemeal and incremental reform—the primary role of liberal, democratic institutions—we are left defenseless against corporate power.

A handful of corporate oligarchs around the globe have everything—wealth, power and privilege—and the rest of us struggle as part of a vast underclass, increasingly impoverished and ruthlessly repressed. There is one set of laws and regulations for us; there is another set of laws and regulations for a power elite that functions as a global mafia.  

We stand helpless before the corporate onslaught. There is no way to vote against corporate power. Citizens have no way to bring about the prosecution of Wall Street bankers and financiers for fraud, military and intelligence officials for torture and war crimes, or security and surveillance officers for human rights abuses. The Federal Reserve is reduced to printing money for banks and financiers and lending it to them at almost zero percent interest; corporate officers then lend it to us at usurious rates as high as 30 percent. I do not know what to call this system. It is certainly not capitalism. Extortion might be a better word. The fossil fuel industry, meanwhile, relentlessly trashes the ecosystem for profit. The melting of 40 percent of the summer Arctic sea ice is, to corporations, a business opportunity. Companies rush to the Arctic and extract the last vestiges of oil, natural gas, minerals and fish stocks, indifferent to the death pangs of the planet.

...The airy promises of the market economy have, by now, all been exposed as lies. The ability of corporations to migrate overseas has decimated our manufacturing base. It has driven down wages, impoverishing our working class and ravaging our middle class. It has forced huge segments of the population—including those burdened by student loans—into decades of debt peonage. It has also opened the way to massive tax shelters that allow companies such as General Electric to pay no income tax. Corporations employ virtual slave labor in Bangladesh and China, making obscene profits. As corporations suck the last resources from communities and the natural world, they leave behind ...horrific human suffering and dead landscapes. The greater the destruction, the greater the apparatus crushes dissent.

More than 100 million Americans—one-third of the population—live in poverty or a category called “near poverty.” Yet the stories of the poor and the near poor, the hardships they endure, are rarely told by a media that is owned by a handful of corporations—Viacom, General Electric, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., Clear Channel and Disney. The suffering of the underclass, like the crimes of the power elite, has been rendered invisible. 

...It is time to build radical mass movements that defy all formal centers of power and make concessions to none. It is time to employ the harsh language of open rebellion and class warfare. It is time to march to the beat of our own drum. The law historically has been a very imperfect tool for justice, as African-Americans know, but now it is exclusively the handmaiden of our corporate oppressors; now it is a mechanism of injustice. It was our corporate overlords who launched this war. Not us. Revolt will see us branded as criminals. Revolt will push us into the shadows. And yet, if we do not revolt we can no longer use the word “hope.”   

Channeling the Spirit of Posterity, Long Dead

For the five or six years this blog has existed I have strongly lamented the demise of posterity in our societies, our economies and  our politics.   In an era in which any perceived fetter on maximized production and maximized consumption was denounced as heretical, posterity was irrelevant, valueless or worse.

Rejecting posterity has come at an enormous price, not to us but to generations that will follow.   We have taken advantage of everything we could exploit and kicked the consequences down the road wherever possible.   Apparently the Europeans have been little different.

"Interestingly, the sheltered existence [today's economic, intellectual and political elite] led, enjoying prosperity and security, wasn’t of their own making. Merkel and Cameron, like former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder and ex-British PM Tony Blair before them, inherited it from their predecessors – and turned out to have been but an efficient “consumer cooperative”, as Zygmunt Bauman puts it, consuming the fruits of somebody else’s work and basking in the glow of successes that weren’t theirs.

Europe was created and built by a generation for which a tragic past – embodied by Auschwitz – had been a living experience. The European Union’s founding fathers – Konrad Adenauer, Robert Schumann or Alcide De Gasperi – understood that only by working together could they build something lasting and good. European solidarity proved a blessing.

Today’s ruling elites lived in entirely different conditions, enjoying security, peace, and systematic improvement in living standards. This was the effect of building a reasonable welfare state. How is it that after such a spectacular success Europe is experiencing today what is perhaps an equally spectacular fiasco? It’s because of the present elites’ belief that they simply inherited the EU from their predecessors, rather than having it on loan for their children. The mentality and spirit of the people leading Europe today can be summed up thus: “Let’s enjoy life as much as we can because soon the EU will be just a memory”.

What is Europe’s greatest, most burning issue today? We see it in the streets and squares of our cities. “We have the right to vote, but we have no work!” cry the young unemployed. We have a democracy, but no bread or homes. A precariat is emerging in front of our very eyes. What sort of people does it consist of? An apt and curt answer is given by Guy Standing, author of The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class: virtually everyone. At its core are young people.

Disdain for posterity is readily seen.  It can be seen in the increasing gap between rich and poor, in inequality of wealth, income and opportunity.  It can be seen in the weakening of the middle class, the essential engine that generates opportunity for future generations.  It can be seen in the carefully sculpted austerity measures the Right favours and, where it can, imposes.   It can be seen in our utter indifference to environmental degradation of all descriptions.   It can be seen in the obscene debts we amass even as the richest of the rich amass obscene wealth.

We are laying the foundations for unrest that can lead to upheaval, revolt.  If the young are the "New Dangerous Class" they are of our own making.

To the Big Picture, Does the White House Matter?

A substantial majority of Canadians want to see Barack Obama re-elected.  Why?

To be sure, the Republican offerings of late have been unpopular here and pretty much around the world, Israel perhaps excepted.  It could be that Ike was last truly popular conservative president of the United States on the world stage.

Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II - slim pickings at best.  Anyone believe that gang left the world a better place than they found it?  (Hint - if you do, seek help)

The other team put forward Kennedy, Johnson (don't undervalue his civil rights achievements), Carter, Clinton and Obama.  Of course they struck out often enough but, remember, you're comparing them against Team Republican.   Enough said.

The comparison plainly justifies Canadians' preference for Obama over the slash and burn Republican contender but does it really matter?  To my mind, that's a clear "no."

Why doesn't it matter?   Because we're using the wrong metrics, that's why.   We measure one side against the other and that's like choosing one dwarf over another in Olympic high-jumping.   You have to look at the bar first.   Only once you see what they have to clear can you get a real measure of the contenders.

It's not just Democrats versus Republicans.   It's not just what's going on in Washington.  It's a global problem.  It's a Canadian problem.

In the six decades of the post-war period, politics has atrophied and become the preserve of "baby step" technocrats.   They're tweakers at best.   They tinker with tax rates and trade arrangements and they sometimes launch small (or even large) indecisive wars that everyone quickly enough tries to forget.   They're stuck in economic, social and geopolitical models that often pre-date manned flight and are of increasingly marginal utility in a world of 7+ billion human beings en route to 9+ billion.

Liberals used to contend this this sort of technocratic backwardness was an affliction of Conservatives.   Liberals still like to think of themselves as progressives.   They're not.   Don't get smug, Dippers.  You're in the same boat.   You're not progressive if you still believe in a future of economic growth.   You're not progressive if you believe in a petro-economy.   You're not progressive, you're something else.   You're obsolete.

Progressives don't fixate on the dwarfs.   They study the bar and try to figure just how they might possibly clear it.   They know what's at stake if we don't clear that bar and they know that only progressivism can do it.

The bar has never been higher.  It has risen and risen and risen steadily over the past several decades but we didn't notice because, well before then, we stopped bothering to try to jump over it.  We were too busy tinkering, tweaking, and taking the measure of our equally diminutive rivals.   We adopted the baby step as our mode of conveyance.

The bar today represents all the challenges our civilization faces that will determine how mankind and how many of us get through this century.   The Big Three - global warming, overpopulation and the freshwater crisis - have to be met and mastered as best we can.  The dwarfs no longer get to set the agenda for us.   Their agenda can no longer be ours because it remains immersed in 18th century economics, 19th century industrialism and 20th century geopolitics.

Which brings us back to Obama versus Romney, the contest to determine who will be the mightiest dwarf on Earth.   In these presidential elections we delude ourselves that one of the candidates will soon chart a new course for his country, for the world.  It's a preposterous chimera, something last seen, albeit imperfectly, in the 40's.  Democracy has yielded to corporatism and oligarchy.   Of the vaunted three branches of government, at any given time, each seems mainly preoccupied with fettering rather than balancing the other two.

Does it matter whether we have a dysfunctional president Obama or a dysfunctional president Romney beset by an even more dysfunctional, "bought and paid for" Congress and a shamelessly corporatist Supreme Court?   It is a plateau fit solely for dwarfs that will never clear the bar.

The challenges of the 21st century will not be met by political progression because the dwarf beast cannot evolve nearly fast enough for that.  The very nature of these challenges - rapidly growing in size and power, intractable, destructive - defies solution by our outmoded institutions locked in the past.

The last twenty years, the last ten in particular, have revealed that change in this 21st century will not be had from baby-steppers no longer capable of clearing the bar.   If there is any sign of life coming from today's political class it is the sound of shoveling as they dig in to try to preserve their privileged past. 

Soon enough today's youth and the generation that follows them will realize the party apparatus of Republicans and Democrats; Conservatives, Liberals and New Democrats; is tightly integrated in a broken machine that itself has to be swept aside if they're to stand much chance.   And so they will. 

We give them no other choice.  We continue to advance an agenda tailored for dwarfs even as events rapidly overtake us.   Our agenda is to preserve our comforts from the past.   Their agenda, the one we quite wilfully ignore, is to survive into an increasingly unpredictable future.   You cannot reconcile the two.

Our Century of Revolution Seems to Have Arrived

What's going on in the Arab world may just be a taste of what is to come.   Some are predicting that the 21st will be the Century of Revolution.  Man's history is a compendium of wars fought for political, religious and economic aggrandizement but that sort of conflict may be dying out replaced by internal struggles, class-driven insurgency.

In many states, the discontented, disaffected are finding the enemies that matter most are the enemies within.   This is a reality about to dawn on America's working classes, blue and white collar.

America lost sight of the fact that its real enemy, the one that most threatened to undermine American stability and strength, was itself. An Age of Ruin set in beginning with Ronald Reagan that saw the industrial powerhouse transition from a culture of production to a culture of consumption. When Reagan took office, America was the world's largest creditor nation. When he left it had become the world's largest debtor nation. Whereas all of his postwar predecessors, Democrat and Republican alike, had steadily (even during the enormously expensive Vietnam War) whittled down America's debt to GDP ratio, that was all washed away by Reagan, Bush I, Bush II and now by Obama who has inherited the debris of their mental illness.

Corporate America forged the era of globalization which so richly served the oligarchs, the rentier classes, while sucking wealth out of the middle and working classes where, despite productivity leaps, wages stagnated even as the country's manufacturing base, the beating heart of a stable middle class, was shipped offshore. The scourge of inequality, fought back from the days of Roosevelt to Carter, returned with a vengeance.

It's unlikely that marginalized Americans will take to the streets as we are seeing the disaffected do in the Arab world.  That probably won't happen unless their power at the ballot box is somehow usurped.  Yet at some point the inequality that so plagues the United States will, in some guise, lead to political upheaval.  If this is the future that awaits America, what must lie in store for the emerging economic superpowers?   Even India today is finding itself unable to meet the aspirations of the burgeoning ranks of its new graduates.   The same is happening in China.   There simply aren't enough quality (highly paid) jobs to go around.  And there never will be.   Meet the Wall.

We have had centuries to witness nations ascend and decline but the process in the Century of Revolution is markedly different. We've run out of stuff. We've already hit the wall. They can't become us, because there's not enough stuff to make that possible. Sometime in the late 1980's mankind's consumption reached our planet's annual production of renewables - water, trees, fish and so on. We got away with it for decades thanks to sleight of hand, eating into our reserves, and outright conjuring tricks such as the Green Revolution, but the hens always come home to roost.

 So, we're out of good stuff. Now what to do? Well power traditionally translates into access. Those who have power or seize it expect to be first in the queue. But they can't get a power-size share of an already allocated pie without somebody else taking a much smaller than usual slice. The question becomes who gives up how much and why? That's something we'll be struggling with for quite a while and it may cause us to revisit some of our fanciful notions of free-market capitalism - again the Century of Revolution.

When planning is based not on growth but on allocation it shifts the focus from opportunity to inequality. People look for a lot more equality in sacrifice than in prosperity. We can become very egalitarian when we perceive that to be vital to our self-interest. If we aren't to be stampeded off the cliff we will have to pull back and that promises to be a struggle of truly revolutionary dimensions. The forces of the status quo will not go peacefully into the night. We need only look at the extraordinary efforts of the Fossil Fuelers in maintaining their dominance at mankind's considerable expense to understand that corporatism is tenacious and, as needed, ruthless.

An allocation based society is inherently far more communal than most of us have ever experienced. It is an order that confounds free market capitalism, tames it, and dismembers corporatism - not because of some grandiose ideology but of sheer necessity.

I suspect this will, after a lot of costly revolutions, become the new world order, one in which muted aspirations are accommodated by measured equality.  The gap between rich and poor will always exist but it cannot survive at the extremes at which it exists today.