The Democrats are either very naive and nearsighted or they are willing participants in their own party’s destruction. Perhaps they are a mixture of both. If the Democrats win the election this fall, (personally I think Obama is the odds on favorite), then they are going to be saddled with a plethora of problems. As we reach the breaking point for serious global issues. By not fixing accountability for these long ignored problems on this runaway neocon fascist train, the fallout for ignoring those problems will fall squarely on the leader in charge. You would think that the Democrats would understand this: by not pursuing impeachment and fixing accountability where it belongs, the media will vilify and blame them for all the problems that they will be handed.
Extremely bad times are on the horizon. We are completely addicted to fossil fuels and the time to research and implement alternative solutions has past. We continue to act as though we can and will sustain our current way of life indefinitely, while in truth, we are spending our cache of solar energy collected over a billion or so years in just a few hundred years.
Let’s look at the current situation.
Like it or not, we find ourselves immersed in a resource war for oil. Peak oil occurred in 2005, but only a couple of people are saying it. We are building America’s new military as fast as we can, replacing our old Force XXI army, retrofitted from the cold war, with a new concept: Future Combat Systems. And since we are wrecking the old army faster then expected, we have accelerated the time line for delivery by four years. (Cutting out 4 systems in the process). Gas prices are starting to surge and there are historical indicators that we are headed towards a depression. And finally, defying all normal logic (Illogical that is unless you fail to see the broader picture), in the midst of one of the largest food production years in the history of mankind, a food crisis is already underway.
So what lies ahead?
Do we have a model that will show us what happens when a population outstrips it critical resources. Strangely enough, even though our behavior indicates otherwise, we do have a modern day example. The fate of Easter Island is a sobering reminder of the enormity of the task at hand.
The population grew slowly at first, then more quickly, reaching a peak around the middle of the second millennium A.D. of anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 people. By this time, the Rapanui, as the islanders are known, had developed a complex society of chiefdoms and elaborate stone architecture epitomized by the moai. Beginning around 1600, however, Rapanui civilization began to fall apart, and by the mid-19th century, it had all but disappeared.
…Rapanui culture and society rose and fell with the fortunes of the island’s trees. Studies of pollen and charcoal from extinct plants have shown that, before people first arrived and well into the early centuries after settlement, a subtropical forest blanketed the island. … the Rapanui used trees and their products for almost everything. They ate the fruits of the trees as well as the birds that lived among them. They thatched their houses, which looked like upended boats, with palm fronds. They fashioned bark-cloth clothing. They burned firewood for cooking and for keeping warm on winter nights, which on Easter Island can drop as low as 50°F. They built oceangoing canoes and crafted harpoons to spear dolphins and pelagic fish such as tuna. And they used some combination of log rollers, sleds, and/or levers, along with rope made from tree fibers, to transport and erect the hundreds of moai that once stood around the edges of the island, their brooding faces gazing inland. …
When Captain James Cook visited Easter in 1774, he saw no trees taller than about 10 feet. … By 1872, the number of Rapanui had plummeted to just 111 individuals.
You don’t have to look to far for other examples: The Mayans, the Ancient Egyptians, and the Inca. How bad the chaos gets will totally depend on how we, as a global community, act to mitigate the situation. This is where America needs to take charge and lead the debate on solving these looming issues. But our politicians continue to march like lemmings towards the cliff. It’s as if they are detached from reality. Do the Democrats know they are being setup to be the fall guy for what’s about to come? Americans woke them up to the crimes of Bush and the neocons, but they did not get the full message. We need to wake up America to the full reality of the situation and this is one time where the Democrats are failing to deliver help.
Mitigation and solutions
A) Impeachment is the single best tool available in mitigating this global disaster. The benefits of impeachment could be an entire diary in and of itself, but for my purposes, I will enumerate just a few. First it will fix accountability for the pending economic collapse where it belongs: squarely upon the neocon fascists’ shoulders. Secondly, it will highlight and push into mainstream the serious consequences of the choices we are making and underline the need to debate and resolve these issues before its too late. Lastly, it will permanently remove the current set of usurpers and prevent them from their continual setting up of roadblocks.
B) Finding and implementing alternative energy solutions yesterday. Energy Autonomy is a clear solution that can go forward without political support or intervention.
C) For What It’s Worth, I have compiled a list of what I feel are mandatory milestones.
D) Finally, a little less obvious, but important factor in mitigating our cultural decent into a new millennia is that we must preserve and keep public all the knowledge and technology that we acquired during the petroleum age. History reveals that most often times the knowledge that a culture acquired during their reign, died when that culture died. It can be argued that we owe much of our advances through that of the knowledge acquired by the Ancient Greeks. The preservation and discovery of their study of mathematics and of the known visible universe, paved the way out of the medieval era for Europe. It has been said that knowledge is power. The fascist usurpers would like nothing better then to have a monopoly on the knowledge acquired over the last several centuries.
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What will steeply rising oil prices do to the cost of maintaining a large military machine (gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, lubricating oil, plastics, god knows what) that is pursuing two wars (and who knows how many covert ones)? The empire business will become so expensive that it will simply collapse — it will be too much for any power to take on.
And as we race toward the abyss, technology is rapidly becoming more sophisticated. It is anyone’s guess how this will affect the events of rest of this century.
You mean the media will finally be doing what all thinking progressive blogsters have been doing since early 2007?
And the media will be once again too little too late.
Over the short term, Democrats have to try to limit the damage inflicted by the neocons and shock doctrine disaster capitalists, but whether they’re willing to even try or are capable of it remains to be seen.