A great article from Countercurrents – how capitalism is destroying our planet:
There are things we can infer from this side of the horizon about what happens on the other side, in the black hole of the capitalist mentality – things that show up outside that tell us something about what happens within it. Things like the concentration camp victim, like the mass graves in Guatemala, the unearthed Mayan corpses left by death squads… they seem to emerge from the black hole and give us a glimpse of what is inside: and, beyond that, sometimes we almost get real glimpses in. We get glimpses of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, of someone’s recollection of headless frogs spewing blood after the psychopathic child, George W. Bush, has lit a firecracker he’s inserted in their mouths and hurled them through the air. We know these things – we glimpse them, those of us who are paying the strictest kind of attention. But, mostly, nothing escapes, or that which seems to escape the pull of the black hole for a moment is immediately sucked back in to the realm of oblivion as if it never happened.
But, as often as not, we can tell what matters to those in the center of civilization’s black gravity – its centers of “power”, by what doesn’t happen out here in the real world – on this edge of the horizon -as much as by what does happen.
Notice. Notice what is taken “seriously” by the denizens of the dark center of “power” – if anything beyond the next quarterly profit and loss statement can be said to be taken seriously at all.
Notice where the $700 billion in “bailout” money is going. The black hole people feared would swallow the Earth when the CERN particle accelerator was launched in Europe didn’t appear there. It appeared thousands of miles away – on Wall Street – and the $700 billion is going into that black hole, never to be seen again.
The bailout finally approved by the US will disappear into the system, into the pockets of the capitalists already filled with the wealth of our planet. Why should yet more of the wealth of the earth be given to these banksters? They maintain the system which enslaves our planet, destroys its life and impoverishes its people. They maintain civilisation. And they want even more of your money to keep maintaining it.
Humanity faces a real crisis – one that threatens not only Wall Street, but all life on Earth. Call it Global Warming, call it Peak Oil, call it running out of water on a global scale, call it the collapse of industrial agriculture. call it fisheries collapsing, call it mass extinction. Call it the potential of planetary death. Call it what is inside the Black Hole made visible, palpable in its meaning. Call it the real event horizon. Call it the Killing horizon. It’s every bit as complex in all of its intersections as the financial “crisis,” but, unlike the financial “crisis,” it’s real.
And what happens?
Nothing. No significant action. At all.
There’s no $700 billion plan to save the Earth – which sustains us all.
When we need everything we have, when we need all hands on deck to change society from the core, instead our masters continue to feed the furnace of civilisation. But this madness cannot last, the fuel needed for the furnace to grow is about to decline and run out, and civilisation will face its toughest test. Our job is to prepare for this time, to survive, adapt and thrive so that we can replace it with something better, a society that not only lives sustainably alongside all life, but enhances and enrichens the planet.
