Everyone who read ten articles on zero hedge should be able to realize is that the global economy won’t be growing any more. Available technology, existing labour force, our political apparatus and our collective sense of justice and entitlements provides us with a given amount of collective global (or western world..) productivity. This productivity has always been sufficiently to also cover “a few percent” of growth, so over the last years most humans in the world grew themselves a nice case of historical bias and now we all seem to take that economic growth for granted, or in many cases “regard it as god-given”.
This is no longer the case. We have attained limits to growth and in many cases we will see shrinkage and (if we are really lucky) the means we have will sustainably keep our world intact, without destroying the environment or biosphere.
Well good luck with that last part.
The Kurzweilites have become the only answer to this crisis of expectations. The radical “accelerating technology” crowd asserts that technology will advance substantially faster than the compound effect of sense of entitlement of the most spartan corporate bastarda worldwide, as well as population growth. Progress fetishists such as Kurzweil (or Hans Rosling) insist “we are right on track” towards some collective human paradise, “aside from a few rounding errors”. Myself I also listen to the likes of Orlov or Stross or Chris Hedges or Chris Martenson or Fresco or Noam Chomsky or ArchDruid, and I am decidedly more cautious apprehensive in my expectations. I simply no longer have any faith in the current geopolitical or geofinancial world order, and I take my marching orders from Max Kaiser. I am convinced this global financial system is in fact an unethical and criminal enterprise, dead set on creating economic growth by predation.
History will judge this a crime against humanity. These people better hope we won’t engineer a form of life extension, or they will have to look forward to centuries of imprisonment.
In other words, the current system is a collective scam dead set on having progress by zero sum. “In order for them to win, other people must lose”… The current system is dead set on shedding what it regards as “dead weight” from the system. And yes I assert such a form of realpolitik is a criminal act not much dissimilar to older forms of predation-based politics, Godwin be damned.
I have a modest counter-proposal. Hearkening back to the old days of popular entertainment I propose to vote the fat, useless bums of the island. They will try and do it to the rest of the world for sure so I propose to do it before they do it. And when I am talking about the spoiled fat kid I am squarely pointing at the United States (and probably Great Britain).
The US has at this stage an extremely fragile economy. There are elements in US governance squarely to blame for the mess we find ourselves in at this stage. There is no escape – the US is dead set on a collapse, and we (the rest of the developed world) need to find ways to mitigate this collapse. I am thinking of a controlled demolition of some sort. If we somehow would be able to collaboratively contrive of some kind of peaceful act of demolition we could do so much for the future of humanity. Regard it as an intervention, or chemotherapy, to save the Earth.
As fortune has it, the US is extremely vulnerable to such an intervention. The vulnerable spot in the US global hegemony is the dollar. So in other words – the best way to kill the shambling behemoth is to target the dollar, end the US dollar as global world reserve currency status and engineer a permanent and irreversible economic collapse in the United States.
I live in Europe and taking out the absurd levels of resource hoarding the US practices (i.e. – taking these gluttons down to a more sane level of over-consumption) would be a welcome breath of fresh air. If we somehow would be able to take US out of the equation (peacefully, non-militarily, non-terrorist) there would be more left for people that still actually work – places like western Europe, India, China. There would suddenly be room for multilateral debate on climate change and resource depletion. There would be peace in the middle east (as Israel would have to deal with its neighbors by means of something like peace treaties). I can see a “somewhat convulsive transition” for a few years as the US were cut down to its fair size, but in the long run I only see upsides.
So, how can we, the civilized people of the world, conduct some kind of “completely fair” surgical strike versus the dollar? I welcome a debate.