The Impending Crisis: Reflection on Collapse and Confessions of an Economic Hitman

so i just finished reading these two books. the first, Collapse, by Jared Diamond, the author Guns, Germs, and Steel deals with the collapse of societies as triggered by their seemingly shortsighted destruction of their environments. this book took me about a month to finish. while this is defiently pretty dense reading, i must admit that mr diamond has a way of making textbooks flow with an essense of a fictional narrative.
the second book i read took me less than two days to finish. this of course is Cofessions of an Economic Hitman, as told by John Perkins, the hitman which the title refers to. this was a quite engaging read especially with my affinity for the conspiricy theory type of story. thats not to say that it is a conspiricy theory, but rather that the truth it reveals makes many conspiricy theories seem like government thinktank jargon. in essnce this book recounts the less than altruistic ways by which the united states has spread its global economic empire since the end of world war II. it makes quite clear the intimate relationship between big business (although i dont think this title really illustrates the nature of the beast, it is more like political entities that dont have any land and the only citizens to whom they owe allegiance are the ever more remote stock holder, who care for nothing other than increased profits. the system itself seems flawed, doesnt it, that the most powerful enteties in the world have no built in mechanism for morality. in a private business the owner presumably cares for how his company conducts business as it is his reputation that stands behind it, but i have never heard of anyone ashamed of how the stocks they owned were making them even more money.) and politicians all throughout the world, corporatocracy as perkins comes to term this seeming conflict of interests.

while i did not read these two books in succession for any particular reason, it seems somewhat providencial that i did. while one book talks about how societies have collapsed shortly after their peaks because the population and level of civilization that they reached was only sustainable by mining the their invironment in such a way that made it impossible for it to renew it self. these collapses were difficult to anticipate because of the seeming success of the society. the other book tells us how the first world has achieved its level of opulence only by exploiting the third world for its labor, land and natural resources. better yet, this was done a precise perception of what it would mean for both parties. every world bank loan that cannot be paid back signs over the rights for transnationals to exploit someone elses environment. if all the environmental damage that the united states requires for us to maintain our lifestyle were commited on our territory, our national forests would be barren and suffering from irreversible soil erosion. our fertile farmlands would be polluted with toxic wastes, and our groundwater would be even more polluted by the runoff of poisenous mines.

we cannot hold on forever either. there are several factors that will give in the next couple decades. all past societies operated in relative isolation compared to our contemporary global community so when one collased in america or the south pacific, there were others that were jsut begining their flourishing. but now there is no where else to go, if the united states collpses it will be because the global community is collapsing, we are irreversibly linked past the critical point with the rest of the world for any collapse throughout the world to affect us all. there is the increasing demand, plus the decreasing supply for oil and other fossil fuels, that will surely be felt before we fill the void with other sources of fuel. we will no longer be able to ship corn from new york to mexico, only to import corn from kansas, and pinapples from hawaii, and avocadoes from chile, etc. and then theirs not only the increasing global population that has been sustained to this point by mining our environment in ways that cannot be sustained. in rwanda, the size of a large farm is 2.4 acres, in the united states the size of a farm thought to support one family is 40 acres. so in rwanda they milk the soil for all its worth, to supply the 1600 daily calories thought to be the threshold of starvation. the soil is not allowed to recuperate so that every year it yields less and less while the population continues to grow, and we are left with the genocides that permeate our modern society. as if the growing population were not enough of a problem, every day more people acheive the "first world quality of life" complete with cars, tvs, meat, and all the rest. so not only are there more people in the world every day, but each person is using more of the precious resources we have. it seems ironic that while all of the global financial institutions, world bank, imf, asian development bank, etc, claim to help countries improve the quality of life of their citizens, to raise them to the standards of the first world, it is really impossible. if china alone reaches first world status, it would DOUBLE the global impact on the earth, DOUBLE, and that without any population growth. the only way for their lifestyle to climb is for ours to decrease. so it seems that the only way for us to maintain our status is for them to maintain theirs, and we go to great lengths to keep it that way. we install dictators throughout the world that remain friendly to us, despite the fact that they terrorize their own people. and when anyone tries to take a stand, se send in the assasins, and if that fails again, then we send in the big guns, the US army, like panama after they took the canal back, or iraq today. and we take iraqs oil money and supposedly rebuild the country, even though the companies that are benefiting from the rebuilding are not only american, but the vice president is the ex CEO (with a healthy severence package im sure) of one of them. this is old news though, no revelations. at least iraq has oil, otherwise they would have to take out a huge load, at the peoples expense so that us companies build infrastructure that benefits 'big business's' interests, be that american, or jsut the local elites, its all the same mafia. and then the country is in eternal debt, and wolfowitz running the world bank had nothing to do with it. i dont fucking know sometimes, how much richer can you really get. but those pesky stock holders demand profits, it is actually illegal for the CEO to do anything that does not maximize the profits for the stock holders. and so we turn every resourse that this planet can give us into an increased share price. see this is what worries me, i think these people think that getting rich will prevent them from starving when shit hits the fan, but in the end they will have hustled themselves the honor of being the last to starve, or maybe theyll be the first crusified when people start getting pissed bacause all the rivers are polluted and the farms have dried up and the forests are polluted. we have to start thinking about the long long term. whats gonna happen to their children, their going to have to face the same world as my children. terrorism is the war of the poor, and war (and economic manipulation) is the terrorism of the rich. you get life in prison for killing one person, but if your company is directly responsible for the displacement and subsequent starvation of thousands of indiginous people for a new hydroelectric dam to power the new oil platform, your get a promotion and fat bonus.


so i dont know if ive covered everything but i look at it this way, we are going to have some serious problems in the near future, ie, before someone born today dies (if not much much sooner). these problems are insurmountable only if we are too stuborn and selfish to really look at our lives in a way that takes into account the lives of our great great grandchildren. i know one thing for sure, the world in 2100 will be NOTHING like it is today. now, what that will look like can range the entire spectrum, from the aftermath of a nuclear war triggered by increasing poverty and desperation, to the flowering of a new era in global civilization, arrising from a willingness to think of ourselves as one people, inexorably linked economically, physically, and most importantly, spiritually.

i think the hardest thing will be the shift in values that are necessary for us to decrease our consumption of the planet. every logging and oil company will have to think not only of their stock holders, but of their responsibility to humanity, the planet, and the universe. our goal in life can no longer be to improve our own lives and those of our at whatever expense, but to operate within a framework that maintains a personal spititual link to the farthest reaches of the planet. individuality must be supplanted by communality, priviledge by humility, material wealth by spiritual satisfaction, and our feeling of masters of the universe must succumb to the reality that we are like a single blood cell serving our the purposes of a larger more beautiful organism. the good news is that i think we will be alot happier this way. i think that subconsiously we know that the way we live in this day and age detracts from the greater life of the planet and the universe. we suffer the psychological distress from the negative energy that permeates us as the destroyers of ourselves and the planet. i was once told that the only thing that makes us truly happy is doing things for other people, so i can only extrapollate that the only things that makes us truly unhappy is doing things that harm other people, the most extreme case being the destruction of the planet and all of humanity. so despite the fact that our material "quality of life" will necessarily decrease, so too will our sense of spiritual hollowness and our lack of greater purpose become extinct in the face of a new global community.

peace and love

anyone read any of those books, what did u think?