2012: Wake Up or Else – We've Got Some Problems

While there are some signs emerging that Americans are indeed waking up, on the whole, we've continued to march toward the end of a steep cliff, either oblivious or indifferent to the historic challenges currently facing mankind. 2012 might not be the end of the world as some folklore suggests, but unless we wake up and start addressing the most serious issues that are staring us in the face, it might well be remembered as the beginning of the end of life as we know it.

 

This column isn't about fear mongering – it's a wake-up call. Plain and simple, there's nothing about the way we're doing things as a society that works, near term or far. We've got about 40-50 years of oil left, even by the most optimistic estimates. Meanwhile, all of those fast fixes we were promised are literally crumbling beneath our feet. Fracking for oil and gas doesn't work! For starters, it uses WAY too much water, which we don't have enough of already, poisons much of the drinkable water that is left, and now there's even evidence that injecting millions of gallons of brine and other crap underground lubes up fault lines and can cause earthquakes – like the eleven that frack-happy Ohio has experienced since last April.

 

Considering that we still want to expand our nuclear ambitions, even after the Fukushima disaster, anything that promotes earthquakes doesn't seem to fit the same energy plan, but that would assume there is some sort of actual plan in any real sense of the word. The plan seems to be to milk the udders dry and ride this baby right into the ground, in a gas-guzzling SUV of course. I keep hearing how the alternative energies just aren't there yet, in voices parroting the industry shills who feed us that line while they fleece us dry, billing us for power plants they “may or may not build at some time in the future” and taking in handouts and subsidies like the welfare queens we so readily vilify whenever they're not wearing expensive suits. No, alternatives like solar and wind can't come close to replacing fossil fuels, but where would they be if we would've gotten started decades ago making the same public investments into their development that we made –and still make –for fossil fuels. It's only going to get harder, the longer we wait. 

 

But even though we're fully aware that 20 percent of the world doesn't even have access to clean drinking water already, we still squander ours like it's in infinite supply. There was already a billion dollar industry created for people dumb enough to pay 500 times what something is worth called bottled water. It disrupts the water supply and contributes to our over-reliance on pumping it from the ground 15 times faster than it can be replenished from rainfall. That apparently wasn't enough. Now we want to make what's under there flammable, while wasting billions of gallons a day of what's up here, shooting it into the ground. I couldn't make this stuff up.

 

Of course the water supply is further taxed by an idiotic agricultural industry, overly reliant on the fossil fuels we're running out of, that is causing the desertification of the world. Yes desertification – the soil is drying out and hardening, which adds to the over-developed layers of concrete to make sure that what water does fall has a hard time finding anywhere to soak in and replenish the water we're over-pumping from wells, instead finding its way to our oceans, where it's a.) lost from the cycle forever and b.) contributes to the already rising sea levels caused by the melting of polar ice caps. Still we divert water from rivers in Colorado into deserts in California to grow Alfalfa in the desert that's then shipped to Asia to feed cattle that are in turn shipped back to the states, as if we're in a contest to come up with ways to foolishly waste limited resources.

 

Don't worry though, they tell us that desalinization will fix the water issue, except that desalinization is a boondoggle (just ask the people of Hillsborough County) that wastes money, and tons of that precious dwindling fossil fuel we talked about, contributing right back to all of those other problems. The irony of how people who don't believe in science always promise that it will fix things when it is convenient, never ceases to entertain me. Newsflash: technology, for the past two centuries, has largely consisted of inventing new ways to spend those fossil fuels more quickly. Your Ipad gets plugged into a socket that relies on 19th century technology – Edison's coal-fired power plant – just like every other toy in the box. That's how we've managed to use, in less than 200 years, about half of all the fossil fuels that our planet took millions of years to create.

 

And those are just the problems that are right down the road. Staring us right in the face is a totally FUBAR financial system that has been raped, pillaged and plundered by the smartest kids in the room, who've long since stopped becoming doctors and lawyers and are out to get theirs before it's too late. The giant house of cards is teetering and every time someone breaks wind we have to brace for its collapse. Banking, in any traditional sense of the word, for the most part, doesn't exist anymore. Today, it's a shell game on a blanket that's laid out on some street corner, complete with false bottoms to make sure the coin isn't under any one of the shells, but instead falls into the abyss where it's multiplied by 10, each one ultimately “guaranteed” by the poor bozo who just lost the rigged bet – the taxpayer.

 

There was a $17 trillion backdoor bailout by the fed! $17 trillion that we know of! The biggest investment banks are holding over a hundred trillion just in derivatives – yet we live and die by the $13 trillion “national debt” and the hope its ceiling will be raised every few months so the world doesn’t end? Average citizens should say goodbye to essential services, while continuing to pay in their “fair share,” but the big boys can get that much money spun from thin air and the world doesn't stop on a dime?

 

Where was the inflation that we were told would drive us into the dark ages with a less than one trillion dollar spending package? It doesn't exist because inflation is a lie in a country that settles its international debts from trade imbalances with its own fiat currency. Inflation is about too much real money chasing too few real assets, driving up prices – not adding zeroes on a computer when there is too much debt attached to too few assets and “relief” is needed. I've long asked what would happen if the Federal Reserve simply wiped the debt without attaching new interest obligations in the process and reset the clock with restraints like the Buffet rule.

 

Thankfully, the “backdoor bailout” provided an answer to what would have happened – nothing. Well, not until the powers that be decided that “something” had to happen and used their bought and paid for media and bought and paid for government to incite the market-changing fear that would set up another round of economic cleansing where even more wealth ended up in the hands of the world's economic elite – just like it has in every so-called “economic disaster” that's ever occurred. It's a zero sum game ladies and gentleman. For every loss there is a gain, and the curve of the financial distribution charts tell us that the same kids have been winning the pot, no matter what happens on the field.

 

Funny thing though – the goose that laid the golden egg is dead. They continue to shake out the mattress money, but the economy is broken and I'm talking a cracked head gasket, not a flat tire. You see, globalization was a quick way to accelerate future business, like a poorly-planned tax incentive. People at the top got richer, in relative financial terms, than anytime since the Gilded Age. But turning all 5 billion people on the planet into consumers doesn't last. If you sell every human a big house, an SUV, a cell phone, a flat screen and a bottle of Dasani, it adds up quick.

 

You start running out of the disappearing precious metals in your gizmos, or room for all of the landfills you need just to house their packaging. Overpopulation wasn't an immediate problem when most of the Earth was third world. But the planet can take a million subsistence farmers much easier than 100,000 American-styled consumers, but the only way to keep building absurdly unrealistic “growth” numbers was to do just that, and it all plugs into the same fuel tank and spews out of the same exhaust pipe folks.

 

It's moronic to think you can have perpetual growth in a world of declining resources without completely changing the value system away from material consumption, but we've attempted to do just that. We talk about getting “back on track” once housing recovers, failing to mention that 60 percent of our waste comes from development, or that until we start giving up the ludicrous, oil-hungry farce of suburban planning and concede that our predicament will demand a return toward higher density urban centers with minimal commuting, surrounded by hamlets of local, sustainable agriculture and buy-local, market economies in which we can once again produce things here that can be afforded by our neighbors at a price that allows us to earn a living, we're doomed to an ugly and uncompromising end.

 

Wake up America – this is the event horizon. I see people in the streets and I see people marching on the Mall, but it's still a drop in the water for what is needed. What's this movement about? Making common sense common again. Get to a local city council or county commission meeting. Follow the issues in publications like the Bradenton Times and hold your representatives' feet to the fire. When you read that the state is about to pass yet another piece of short-sided, intelligence-insulting legislation, call your representative or state Senator and tell them you'll be outside of their office with a sign and a hundred friends letting their constituents know who they sided with and campaigning for the next person that runs against them. Vote in primaries, write letters to the editor and raise a little hell if you have to.

 

Or... do nothing. Watch Dancing with the Stars, play video games, keep up with the Kardashians, buy a big SUV to carry around two people, shop the big boxes, eat the poison-tainted food, drink the toxin-laced water, buy all the cheap things from China that the glossy magazine and phony TV commercials tell us we should want, and when we're fighting each other for scraps of meat like dogs down in the streets, while those who fleeced us are safe behind their guarded walls, we can sit back and ask how the greatest country in the world got turned into a giant toilet. The choice is yours, but the time to choose has arrived. 2012 will be a defining year, but it's up to us to choose the definition.

Dennis Maley is a featured columnist and editor for The Bradenton Times. His column appears every Thursday and Sunday on our site and in our free Weekly Recap and Sunday Edition (click here to subscribe). An archive of Dennis' columns is available here. He can be reached at dennis.maley@thebradentontimes.com. You can also follow Dennis on Facebook and Twitter by clicking the badges below.

Dennis Maley