To review just a little bit of what we've looked at in this section of the website: Just as the power structures, determined by the representation / tyranny system, decides who enacts and enforces the rule of law / brutality - for wealth structures, the opportunity / patronage system fills a similar function of deciding who is first in line to receive goods and services, and through what channels they'll flow. We've tried to be careful up to now to avoid getting ahead of ourselves by leaving the most important piece of the our puzzle until now - and that is the reward system which is used to determine what is and isn't produced, how much there'll be of it, how much it'll cost, and to what degree social/environmental costs are calculated.

Well, the job that you used to have, they gave it to somebody down in El Salvador. The unions are big business, friend, and they're going out like a dinosaur. They used to grow food in Kansas, now they want to grow it on the moon and eat it raw. I can see the day coming when even your home garden is going to be against the law. Well, it's sundown on the union - and what's made in the U.S.A. Sure was a good idea 'til greed got in the way. ~ Bob Dylan, Union Sundown

Who Needs What?

As exemption from laws is granted to people in higher power positions, exemption from the harsh realities of life are provided as material goods and services for those in high positions of wealth. Overall, opportunity structures wealth systems so we can collectively experience the world in an appropriate and enlightened way. When those at the top of the opportunity pyramid are the most responsible, then (and only then) as an incentive they should they be duly compensated proportionate to the value they create for society. In our discussions so far regarding the philosophy behind vote sizing, we've said an awful lot of plainly obvious and redundant things. To try now to explain why people want to be rewarded by material goods, without sounding patronizing, is going to be tough. In a nutshell: Distributing wealth through a reward system is the main way in which we experience the world - without it life is not very interesting and pretty lonely (yes, there are exceptions which we discuss in the philosophy page). A society which fails to reward its citizens is a society that few want to live in.

Vote sizing is neither against, nor disinterested about people being well rewarded with material goods; it sees the urge to own property, build houses, fill them full of stuff, and help others do the same as a basic human requirement. Living in caves and digging for bulbs is not our destiny.

In order to be effective, vote sizing will need to be both pro-capitalism and pro-reward. At the same time we want now to take a good hard look at whether or not there are better and worse ways to go about doing this. It looks like once again we're faced with the question: If we need to structure the reward system so it achieves our goals, then what's the best way to do so?

How to provide for maximum reward?

Let's first consider equality. Well, historical experiments with systems geared towards providing equal reward, like Marxism and communism, have proven absolutely disastrous. There is something so fundamental about letting the markets do their best to reward people proportionally to their contribution, that when we try to eliminate disparity in the distribution of wealth by imposing an unnatural equality, nothing survives but the black market of influence peddling.

When there's a lot of free stuff just sitting around - even if it's communal property - it doesn't take long for someone to come along to find a way to make it their own.

So if we can't have equality, then we're going to have to plan for some kind of inequality. If you've read the pages on tyranny, brutality, and patronage you'll know that the best kind of inequality exists within a pyramid structure. In the case of reward, goods and services are distributed according to a person's placement on the opportunity ladder; the production of stuff is dictated by those who know best; and it's consumption is distributed to the maximum social benefit... where we all get what we need/want, we're part of the process and we're all basically as satisfied as possible. To get stuff to flow within this framework, we use a variety of institutions and arrangements.

The best way to distribute wealth is through some kind of pyramid structure.

 

Who Gets What?

Without an opportunity pyramid to allow the ascension of hard working, motivated individuals; who's then deciding how our collective wealth is distributed? Well, those cheats who have sneaked their ways to the tops of the ladders by using tyrannical, brutal methods of putting in place and abusing a patronage hourglass. In other words, fat cats who are geared towards complete selfishness. And do you think that those patronage beneficiaries will allow wealth to be distributed fairly; proportional to the value each of us creates? No, if they did that then they'd all have to put themselves in the poor house; which isn't too likely anytime soon.

Instead, they operate a system whereby wealth is distributed disproportionately to their selfish needs. Using everything at their disposal, they get the rest of us to make all kinds of useless goodies to then hand over to them. Not only that, but they demand that we and the environment pay some ultimate sacrifices in order to keep the production lines feeding them. So the consumption of all of the goodies bottleneck with them while the burden of production lands on the backs of the middle and lower classes. And because the greedy people at the top of the hourglass are the only ones who can afford the good stuff, the rest of us are left to make the best use out of junk.

Compounding this is the attempt try to fill the void of dissatisfaction with yet more stuff - almost anything and anyone we can get our hands on. We consume more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, because nothing gives us satisfaction. Without adequate governmental regulations in place, as the greedy people at the top determine the prices, goods, and overall priority of things, the rest of us have little choice but to go along with their (often phony, optimistic; or else sacrificial) appraisal of the situation. This under-valuation applies to the way we look at ourselves too. Yet there's no way we can afford the luxuries that wealthy people can, so we end up pretending that all is well while over-consuming cheap knock-offs that barely last once taken out of the bag.

In a world where scientists, teachers, police officers, firefighters, nurses, etc. can't afford to own their own homes while bankers, stock promoters, and criminals own three; there's a skewed system of compensation at work.

This off-kilter way of distributing wealth no longer looks on paper like a pyramid, but an hourglass. This hourglass effectively keeps the wealthy in an decadent orgy of consumption and dictating production, the poor kept away from the resources and chained to their machines, and the middle class trying desperately just to hold on to what they've got.

Corruption interferes with the proper reward structure to create an hourglass of greed.

What's the true cost of holding up all this needless greedy consumption?  Well, it's anyone's guess - but be sure that our children and their children will be paying a heck of a lot more for the things we enjoy than what we do.  Our degradation of the environment, for example, is an insanely costly by-product of our greed-driven production and consumption - and one that is pretty much never figured in at the cash register.

Consequences

Greed Playbook

It's not necessarily going to be easy for these greedy cheaters to keep us in line funneling everything we hold dear to their doorsteps, so they're going to need a lot of dance steps in order to stay out of the heat of our spotlight and to keep us guessing what's actually going on... a unbearably complex set of keeping records, backroom deals, subtle and not-so-subtle force, salesmanship, confidence games, you name it. So long as it makes us feel stupid and powerless, it works to their advantage. They range from illegal back-alley transactions to legal institutionalized ways that most of us take for granted. Here are a few specific ways that they accomplish this:

[no-glossary]Weighted Money[/no-glossary]

Many people currently in power and in privileged positions decry that they very idea of weighted votes, or weighted power, is not fair; yet few of them raise any alarm at the underlying truth to how their money functions as an inherently weighted commodity - that as wealth is amassed, each individual dollar bill acquires more and more purchasing power. (And unlike a weighted vote, money can be accumulated over time.)

So a convenient route for greed to spread is through this basic tenet of capitalism - that people are allowed to do whatever they want, within reason, with their money; including leveraging it towards an increased purchasing power - and like in the world of business ,where companies with the most purchasing power excel while those without dwindle - those of us also have to live day-to-day get flattened by others who have the ability to buy in bulk, wait for sales, borrow against capital, dictate what and when they'll need to spend their money.

These benefits are reserved for the wealthy because the rest of us don't really have any control over our money. We pay our bills as they come due, buy frill items like TVs, extra clothes, and vacations when we have money left over, fix the car when it's broken (not before) - if we have the cash. We are totally beholden to circumstance. And that kind of unplanned earning and spending drains the pocketbook much more quickly than the planned kind of earning and spending that rich people can afford. We pay more to keep bank accounts (or have our checks cashed), hawk furniture to pay for emergency dental work, drive farther or - gasp - take public transportation to find deals (or even basic necessities), and eat old soggy produce (or fast food) to get by.

Wealthy people, in contrast, get their money every other week (or whenever investment dividends pay out), pay the mortgage, utilities, buy groceries and gas, and frill items like TVs, extra clothes, and vacations, take the Lexus (or teeth) into the shop to make sure it's in peak condition (before it needs repairs, that is) and then they decide what they want to do with what's left over: buy stocks or real estate, invest in a rainy day trust, move their money into foreign currencies, or whatever else might make them even richer. The point is that they have money left over after taking care of the basics and then some - and so they have control of the markets.

This kind of intimate control over our daily lives keeps the rich people rich and the rest of us struggling to keep our heads above water. (This applies to businesses too: wealthy corporations can plan activities like office renovations or expansions for the financially optimal time while small businesses that can barely cover each month don't have that luxury - they replace the machines only when they completely stop working, add in extra cubes when they can't afford an expansion).

In recent history we've seen the extra convenience (read 'necessity to stay ahead') of electronic funds in purchasing all kinds of stuff; adding to the loss of control over their finances for those who deal in cold hard cash. And even though there are banks and investment companies that will work for those of us without boatloads of money, we'll pay more for their services and our piddly investments won't make us millionaires anyway. So it should come as no surprise that instead of opening an IRA or investing in the stock market, we put our cash under the mattress, hand it over to the casino, or buy a big screen TV; activities that won't really make our money work for us like rich people do theirs.

As our survival depends more and more on our immediate worth, we find that investing in status items (often more than we can afford to) is a way to be seen as successful and an around-about way of getting ahead; so Nike shoes, bling and pimped out rides displace real long-term value items like education or a home in a decent neighborhood. Ya' think that Nike and Ford don't understand this when they focus group their advertising campaigns and then lease-o us into obscenely large, dangerous and ugly trucks?

[no-glossary]Inflation[/no-glossary]

Taxation is one way that governments can 'make' money; but it only can do so much before the people get really pissed and find ways around coughing it up for them. Another much simpler and greedy approach to making money is to ...make more of the stuff! It really ain't that hard anymore - just call down to the mint and tell whoever answers the phone to crank them damn printers faster and to back them up by selling government bonds to anyone thinking that the currency will have the same value when they (with lots of interest) are cashed in.

Though it's hard to imagine life without paper money, it hasn't always been the lifeblood of our economic systems; vibrant economies existed long before ours based on all kinds of real, tangible standards. Chocolate, cigarettes, beads, drugs, livestock, dried fish, gems, etc. have been used throughout the ages with varying degrees of effectiveness as currency; but predominantly it's been silver and gold which societies have used to relay the information about who has what purchasing power.

Having currencies based on these real and tangible (and fluctuating) objects means that everyone operated on the same principles and that if someone overextended themselves then the books would show it. This applied to merchants, kings and governments. When someone made a deal to get something from someone else, sooner or later the transaction became based on a common denominator - either gold or silver.

In the last century, however, our governments performed a radical experiment by deciding to not back up their currencies with any tangible material, instead going off of the gold standard by simply printing up however much money they wanted and throwing it at whatever the heck suited their fancy. As a result, our economies have become one giant confidence game (re: 'con') whereby we all must now play by the elite's rules of what's-worth-what. Never before has it been so incredibly easy to just make money from trees. And boy has this newfound money made business good for greed and the other forms of corruption, as governments no longer need to show how or why they're spending our money.

The problem is one that Nero brought to his empire a long time ago when he tampered with the gold content of the Ancient Roman coinage: Even though governments which aren't tied to a real monetary standard can pay for all kinds of things - from development projects to social engineering programs to foreign aid to bailing out bankrupt companies, industries (airline, savings and loan), and whole countries to propping up foreign dictators to wars and conquests - the money that they pump into the market over time floods that market and the money itself becomes degraded in value. Since they're first in line behind the printing presses, the diluting effects never seem to catch up with those people who've already spent that money and converted it into hard assets or investments.  So who's left carrying the burden of their greed? Those of us who find the money trickling down buying less and less of what we need. Essentially, by underwriting all kinds of federal subsidies, the government can sap the consumer's control over the market and instead get them to work harder and harder making poorer quality goods faster and faster. It's called inflation, and it's the reason why your rent goes up, the quality of goods goes down, everything comes from somewhere else (oil is heavily subsidized by this funny money) and we're all working harder than ever. Inflation works just like a hidden tax in this regard - the government simply prints out money to pay off its debt while the rest of us take the hits. By the time the market crashes, the insiders who've pocketed a ton of cash simply pack up and move elsewhere. Who ends up paying for this transfer of wealth? The future generations, as inflation has just pushed everything down a notch.

The wicked Witch of the East represented Eastern industrialists and bankers who controlled the people (the Munchkins); the Scarecrow was the wise but naive Western farmer; the Tin Woodman stood for the dehumanized industrial worker; the Cowardly Lion was William Jennings Bryan, Populist presidential candidate in 1896; the Yellow Brick Road, with all its dangers, was the gold standard; Dorothy's silver slippers (Judy Garland's were ruby red, but Baum originally made them silver) represented the Populists' solution to the nation's economic woes ('the free and unlimited coinage of silver'); Emerald City was Washington, D.C.; the Wizard, 'a little bumbling old man, hiding behind a facade of paper mache and noise, ... able to be everything to everybody,' was any of the Gilded Age presidents. ~ David B. Parker The Rise and Fall of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a Parable on Populism

In the worst-case scenario, those who have bought bonds and are keeping our governments above water take a look at the over-inflated value of our real estate and other markets, and pull out. How will the government then find the money to pay off its creditors / police / armies? Since it'll be really tough to get us to do more, and failing economies cause a flight of capital and a shrinking tax base, then the government simply grinds out more money to pay off it's debts and drives the economy into a new low - a state of hyper-inflation. Think it can't happen? Take a look at post WWII Germany and Austria, 1980's Bolivia, 1990's Asia, 2000's Argentina, and preceding it all the fall of Ancient Rome and the ushering in of about 1,000 years of the dark ages (by which time Nero was long dead).

[no-glossary]Banking/Interest[/no-glossary]

With all these random, out-of-control fluctuations of currencies, it's become easier than ever for banks to pull off their greedy tricks. There was a time during which people thought money should only be used to facilitate the exchange of goods and services with intrinsic (practical) value; in other words, it was illegal to make money off of the use of money. Actually, it was also immoral, as money lending (for interest) is prohibited by the Torah, the Bible, and the Koran.  But in a world run on greed, divorced from the real value of things, money reigns supreme and those who have a monopoly on it get to make up the rules.

By offering to lend us money (if they like us) and charging us a fee to keep it in their vaults, banks accomplish two things: First, they make money from nothing, as we lenders are beholden to pay them back extra (the amount borrowed plus interest) because we are not as rich as they are. Secondly, banks double the amount of money being held because they use the money people deposit (or is given to them by government mints, as we discussed above) to loan to other people, who use the same money (which actually belongs to the person who deposited it in the bank) to buy cars, food, calling cards, and houses. Now when the seller of the calling cards etc. deposits the money, the banks can repeat their trick and keep jacking up their own worth, all the while making more money off of the difference between the lending and the savings rates. It's no wonder that the prices of everything rises, and the banks share of everything does too. Sometimes, banks can just by-pass a lot of the middle ground, swap properties and hard assets amongst a few intermediaries, and work their interest magic that way. Without good representative government, diligent courts, and honest businessmen in charge, it ain't that hard to do.

Again, the control of distribution is taken out of the hands of the people and put into the hands of corrupt, greedy institutions. While we have barely the strength to get by living paycheck to paycheck, it's hard to do much but play along with them and remain forever indebted to those with control.

The name of the game in banking is leverage. It's a system designed to reward the investor class before the working or middle classes - at any cost. Never mind how it can, and has, sank the economy into scalding water on many occasions (each time these banks have had to close their doors to the riff-raff because they overextended themselves by signing off on too many bad loans to their long-gone buddies).

[no-glossary]Market Bubbles[/no-glossary]

With the influx of all this of funny money, compounded money and interest money comes the shift to an investor mentality of making money by trading money, and a burgeoning investor class which can at times span all the way down to the middle-class and even working-class people. The creation and rise of the investor class introduced a new kind of profession: The professional speculator. Be it land, patents, trade secrets, art, collectibles, artifacts or stock; many of the wealthiest and most powerful people nowadays are speculators - people who trade upon nothing more than collective whims and manipulated opinions.

With speculation, value is less and less determined by some intrinsic or objective worth, but rather by other people's opinions of whatever worth something might have - which makes the market more and more vulnerable to manipulation and falsification.

Fed by lousy reporting, shoddy regulation, greed, and little independent auditing, the average investor can be easily led along by unscrupulous brokers. By the time everyone realizes that all they have are empty promises, the bubble pops and the market crashes, many of these slimy brokers are long gone, taking with them whatever they can carry out or transfer to offshore banks. From the Tulip Craze of 1634-37, to the land crash of Mississippi of 1720, the stock market crash of 1929, the savings & loan crisis of the 1980s, the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, the Mexican financial crisis of 1994 and 1995, and current market bubbles in the US and Europe ... Who else gets punished in these burstings? Legitimate companies whose shares are deflated along with the rest.

[no-glossary]Taxes[/no-glossary]

In order to regulate the market and balance the forces of excessive inflation, weighted money, and interest; we are supposed to have the government on our side. Besides overseeing the rule of law and the opportunity pyramids, the government is also supposed to maintain the reward pyramid - by levying taxes on its people in order to make sure that wealth is not concentrated too heavily for some at the expense of others. Everyone who contributes in whatever way they can deserves to be rewarded accordingly.

However, taxes can just as easily become a tool for corruption as for decency. First of all, wealthy people get a leg up on poorer people by being able to pick and choose when they're going to spend money; they also get an equally strong advantage when it comes to paying taxes. For those who can afford it, when it comes to taxes the name of the game is deferment. Suckers, like lower and middle class people, on a fixed salary, registered commission, or payroll, have their taxes automatically deducted from their wages as they come in - again having no control over their financial situation. But wealthy people hold off on this action to balance out their higher income years with lower ones so that they can then finesse their expenses to keep their overall income level down. This tactic is put to use along with their weighed money in order to buy nice things or investments when they get the urge, or when the market is down, and then pay their taxes once their chalets are full. Not only that, but their patience pays off as tax laws change and the winds shift to their advantage.

Just how far can this strategy go? Far enough to open up convenient tax loopholes which can swallow up cars, buildings, jet airplanes, and even whole estates. On paper, most developed countries' income taxation systems are said to be progressive - the more income you have the larger percentage of it you pay to the government - in order to share the burden of running the state fairly.  But in actuality those systems may not be progressive at all.  By the time we calculate all the tax deductions and tax write-offs like company cards, company cars, plane tickets, airplanes themselves, meals, membership to exclusive clubs, apartments, personal assistants, holidays, shower curtains, you name it; there's not much left over to tax. Add in a lot of freewheeling high-powered tax lawyers, accountants, and consultants always on the lookout for ever more tax corner to cut; along with a tax department geared on one hand toward helping the wealthy people file all kinds of nonsense (or looking the other way) while on the other hand clamping down or any poor single mom trying to rent out a basement apartment because the child-support never comes ...and the picture starts to change. Now let's add in all the rich people's and corporation's completely unreported income going (like stock options) into a handful of offshore tax shelters so geographically small that most tax payers couldn't find them on a map (for example, corporations putting so much profit/loss emphasis into their trademarks, patents and endorsement deals so that those 'intellectual property' departments can then be transferred out of country to some offshore tax-shelter mailbox drop) ...and the picture gets clearer still. Top the picture off with all the other massive tax breaks that corporations get municipalities - and countries - to bid against each other for in a race to the bottom, and we have a very different view from what we're told. It's not a pretty one, but it shows us how our current tax system can actually redistribute wealth upwards.

[no-glossary]The Black Market[/no-glossary]

People will do what they need to do to survive, regardless of the government's official policies. Under unbalanced heavy-handed taxation, inflation or interest goods and services end up being bartered, bought and/or sold through a thriving black market (as that's the only place for people to find what they need at a price they can afford). But there's an additional heavy price to pay for this workaround: Even though the black market may offer a place for a person to sell what they produce and buy what they need; the real beneficiaries and wealth makers are those who fix the movement of goods - often professional extortionists like organized mobs, drug cartels, arms dealers, and import/export racketeers.

As the black market grows it undermines the tax base of the government, and puts money in the hands of rouge police, mules, security forces, judges and soldiers. It also blurs the lines between regular goods and services, unmonitored and uncertified contraband versions of them, and real nasty, morally reprehensible things like stolen goods, drugs, weapons, prostitution, endangered animals and illegal arms.

[no-glossary]Bureaucracy[/no-glossary]

All this greed is not self-supporting; greedy people can't just take our tax money, interest money, and their freshly printed diluting money and stuff it all in their pockets. The overall effects of weighted money, unfair taxation, inflation and interest on a population can easily become stifled production, internal hostility, and a shortage of hard currency to work with. Mechanisms are therefore desperately needed to keep the rest of us under wraps - ignorant and passive. What's really needed is to get as many of us as possible involved in the greedy people's addiction to greed. Wealthy people make money spending money; banks make money lending money; wealthy governments take our money or take it from future generations; all while we work to support them all and fill their coffers, but in order to keep the wheels of greed greased there also needs to be mechanisms to keep us in the game. This is where bureaucracy comes into play.

The more complex their corruption, the more checkpoints they need to maintain control. A bureaucracy not only creates checkpoints which help the wealthy protect their assets, but also pulls us on board by giving us just a taste of self-control - for the more we fear its loss, the farther we'll go to protect it. The more bloated this bureaucracy becomes, the more it serves their interests, as every little bit helps reinforce a system geared to pulling up every scrap of wealth it can. How does this bureaucracy survive? Besides the illegal kickbacks we described on the patronage page, it depends on unfair taxation and inflation to fill its coffers. Who benefits from the millions of pages of legalese? Not us. Bureaucracies are overwhelmingly designed to benefit the rich - we just have to pay for them.

Even though someone always finds a way through the ambiguity and loopholes, every time the house of cards begins to teeter they just layer on some new rules to keep it standing. Never mind that the core values are based on corruption and greed; a bloated bureaucracy is built on loopholes and skirting around the core values of what government is supposed to be.

[no-glossary]The Welfare State[/no-glossary]

If a bloated bureaucracy doesn't do the trick to keep the people from revolting, then the tentacles of greed can reach out farther to pull the general population into their grasp. Although welfare plays a very important part in the government's role of making sure that no-one falls through the cracks, it can also be used as a tool to help illegitimate rulers keep power by buying off selected parts of the population and pitting them against the others. By taking advantage of people in a tough spot and giving them not enough resources to get out, wholesale chunks of citizenry can get brought to the rulers bidding - all at the expense of the hard-working lower and middle classes.

In the spirit of concentrating their tax base, greedy leaders pay welfare to those who won't make waves for them, or else to anyone in close geographical proximity to form networks of support.  This kind of welfare also allows for uneven levying of taxes, so that the farther one gets from the capitals (the outlying farming communities) the heavier is their financial burden for keeping it afloat. As people in other non-welfare locales get wind of these handouts they move in, making the poverty, crime, and overcrowding in the cities worse and further starving rural areas. It's a cycle of greed that becomes particularly hard to deny, or reverse. It's also a good way to bleed off any ambitious contenders of power from the countryside.

[no-glossary]The Military State[/no-glossary]

If welfare handouts and providing mobs with pitchforks don't give a greedy leader enough of an edge over resisting disgruntle taxpayers, then the next step is to pump money into the official hammer of greed - and the military state is born. Now the tax collector is accompanied by a team of uniformed thugs to work out the issue of what belongs to whom. Pretty soon, the tax collector may just stay home and build his own loyal squadron of spies to keep everyone in line - and from there direct his troops to venture out whenever there's a bounty to be had. Under duress, the productivity of the population can go way up (such as with slavery) and the violence can distract from the underlying transfer of assets from the people to the state. However, as people are naturally not exactly thrilled about the way that their leaders treat them; this kind of greed breeds more resistance and attracts brutality with it. Also, if some highly motivated armed forces get a taste of the good life, it can be very hard to get them to stand down once the jobs over. For greedy regimes, the good thing about standing armies is that with enough incentive they simply obey orders, and can have a hard time distinguishing between pillaging resources from within the regime's national boundaries to sucking from outside; so it's easy to turn a military state into a colonizing one.

Colonialism by Force

When greedy people can't squeeze enough out of, or have destroyed, their own people's productive ability in order to satiate their greed, they then need to reach beyond their borders for loot. The next extension of the military state is colonialism by force: Permanently settling its army, banks, and bureaucracy onto foreign soils as tax collectors. Under the guise of civilizing / pacifying / converting / democratizing; colonizing is an often-used way for greedy leaders, once they've sucked the last drop of life out of their people, to take their armies and use them to squeeze whatever they can from whomever else they can.

Chaos/War Profiteering

War profiteering gives us a good look at how all the various forms of corruption can come together to enforce the hourglass and benefit a select few at the rest of our expense, and lives - so we're not even going to try all that hard to focus this on any one specific area.

Fear and brutality are very effective tools that greedy leaders use to get the rest of us to open our wallets wide.  Times of trumpeted security threats and national crises literally offer defense departments a blank check on military spending.  Why not? The alternative seems worse than death and anyone who dares disagree can be labeled a coward and a traitor.

The sheer enormity of military bureaucracy makes it easy pickings for private firms to exploit. Sure the guy or gal in the military spending office who reports to some colonel on some base somewhere signs the check - but we're the ones who have to pay for it.  A private company, for example, would never "lose track" of billions of dollars, but the government could - it handles and mishandles many billions of dollars every day.  Through massive layers of deeply covered military bureaucracy (tyranny/brutality/greed) means that all kinds of guns, weaponry, armor, missiles, bombs, tanks, airplanes and ships are often bought by someone with very very very very-very close ties to the companies who manufacture the junk (family, friends, members of the same exclusive clubs, ex-officials, members of secret societies, members of affiliated boards, shareholders, themselves, etc.) thereby combining tyranny, patronage and greed. And the more high-tech and top-secret the project, the less accountability it has and the more likely there will be massive skimming or awarding of lucrative contracts to friends, family, or even themselves. Insiders call it a "self-licking ice cream cone."

All of this bureaucracy and mishandling of resources has the exact opposite effect on the military from what we want: It hinders their ability to protect us.  By allowing all kinds of money to go towards top-heavy pet projects so it can be skimmed and misdirected, the soldiers (or what's left of them) find themselves lacking the resources they need to buy the basic things they need to go to battle with.  Meanwhile, the state itself is weakened as we end up trying to fill those enormous budgetary black holes by taking money from other important government programs. On top of it all, the focus on these large projects results in an over-inflated sense of power and hampers diplomatic relationships with other countries.

Colonialism by Influence

Brutal force has been the way we've colonized each other until very recently; colonialism has evolved in recent years and the whole process has taken a very dark turn. In the last century, the brutality has been replaced by an economic kind of conquest.

Empires used to (and still may) crumble when they shipped their farmers away as soldiers to plunder from foreign shores and send home slaves. As the elite prospered, the soldier's pay wasn't enough to sustain the increased taxes levied to support the effort, greedy land holders moved in, bought out the farm and bought the slaves to work it; sending the children and wives scuttling to the city for handouts. This activity couldn't last forever, and eventually the soldiers returned home in pretty foul moods and set about trashing the very same nation they used to defend.

This method of colonization is no longer in fashion, so we don't see Empires fall in the same way; but thanks to the development of multinational corporations, global trade routes, global trade organizations, currency backing by the US dollar (not gold, see the inflation section above) and the undeniable superiority of some nation's military firepower, the transition has been from colonization by brute force to raw influence. Under colonialism by influence, in place of superior armies, superior information, economic and organizational skills have forced smaller nations to open up their markets only to then have them taken over by foreign investors who have a lot more leverage. (What's lost is a sense of nationhood, unity and loyalty; so we can expect these types of economic empires to also implode over time in ugly ways.)

Unfair Loans/Trade/Aid

Along with unfair aid, whole economies based on important commodities like food can be undermined by an influx of foreign subsidized grain. This imbalance leads to a dependency on hard-to-find foreign goods like energy resources, and helps to hold down the value of the smaller nation's economy and currency. In order to quell the building resentment, larger nations inundate the smaller with their cultural stereotypes, forcing the receiving nation to assimilate and thereby suffocate their own identity by dividing their social and generational connections. It's proven at least as effective for the greedy to just brandish their swords, invoke their lord, and take what they want; but the blowback is that by denying people their own identity and resourcefulness, new belief systems grow which have a fatalistic view.

Greedy societies import far more than they export, consume more than produce. In order to do this they need to shift from actually producing practical, self-sustaining items to dominating the economy by pumping up the value of whatever they can actually provide - like their labor, land, luxury goods and collector items. They also need to heavily influence international trading and undermine their trading partner's ability to compete on equal footing. This can involve setting up multi-national trading associations, subsidizing goods to undermine a trading partner's market, putting tariffs in place to deny access to a trading partner, and offering incentives like tax breaks to foreign investors who need to do something with the inflated money paid for their goods.

Every time I hear the crack of a whip, my blood runs cold. I remember on the slave ship, how they brutalize the very souls. Today they say that we are free, only to be chained in poverty. Good God, I think it's illiteracy. It's only a machine that makes money. Slave driver, the table is turned. Catch a fire, so you can get burned. ~ Bob Marley and the Wailers, Slave Driver

For example, under-valued fossil fuels spurred this imbalance by stretching the range of these financial brokers far and wide - across international borders. Historically, people used to seek refuge from the mafia-like 'nobility'-ruled feudal countryside by banding together in cities and forming trade associations (precluding unions). There they found protection from the extortionate ways that their 'ladies' and 'lords' used in order to squeeze the last drop of productivity out of them. Nowadays, in place of kings and queens we have bankers and bureaucratic tax collectors. Globalization has brought with it the loss of collective action, and little remains to protect us from the insane demand and work-load that foreign bankers, brokers and lenders impose. Our new global 'village', put in place by unfair trade and cheap gas, is exactly that - a remote village (not city) wholly under the control of king and queen money brokers residing far behind their castle walls and international trade agreements and organizations.

Finally, a substantial way to cripple a foreign competitor is to financially support (and even arrange for the ascent of) any really nasty tyrant who might take power. This way, it's a pretty sure thing that the money will not go where it's needed, but will be funneled into offshore bank accounts. This keeps the people down and unable to compete on a level field, it keeps the banks swimming in our currency, and it keeps the greed limited and controlled by a select few. But what about all the people who will suffer under the brutal regime of these tyrants? Well, greedy lenders haven't yet bothered to put them into any of their calculations. In the meantime, the whole country has fallen under foreign control, in the name of world banks and international monetary funds and world trade organizations; whose directors sit thousands of miles away, or else comfortably in five star hotels, and make decisions that generals would only dream about; while guaranteeing a captive work force for at least dozens of years... while always being on the lookout for the next crappy dictator to lend a big fat hand to.

Colonialism by Disdain

It used to be that greed led people to wage war on each other, fight over resources like gold, silver, land, hunting rights, fossil fuels, and slaves. Colonization has until recently been pillaging and looting from ones enemies and taking everything for oneself - but recently everything has taken a dark turn as we've found a far wealthier and more vulnerable source of spoils: our future generations.

In place of colonizing other people and taking from them, we've turned our sights elsewhere and refined the process in a dangerous and ugly way - we are now busy taking what's not ours by colonizing and pillaging resources from those not yet even born - our children our children's children.

Every attempt at colonization needs some kind of justification in order to convince people to participate. It almost always takes the form of alienation and some kind of superiority claim - that the victims are somehow demons - lesser people and in the overall picture less worthy to receive rewards for their work. This time, however, we're stealing from our children and our grandchildren, and their children, so the self-importance will need to really be turned up a notch. What's needed now is for the greedy people to orchestrate a real bombardment of propaganda in order to convince us of our own importance and our own need. This is where the media and academia comes into play - by promoting ideas and people who represent a general disdain and apathy and can put a positive spin on everything regarding the damaged world we'll be leaving behind for future generations.

Some people would have you believe that there are higher powers looking out for us who would not let anything too drastic happen; others will tell you that technology will provide the necessary miracles needed to get us out of our jam - but both these propositions are very risky gambles and only help cover the truth that we've known for hundreds of years: We live in a co-dependent, closed, finite system; surrounded by unimaginably inhospitable space - in which our actions can have dire consequences if not paid attention to. If we don't learn to live within this truth then sooner or later something will have to give. Our options are to 1) Change our behavior and learn to exist by preserving the environment for future generations; 2) Somehow be killed by our host's self-regulating mechanisms; or 3) We kill the whole freaking planet. The latter two differ only in the severity of our final impact - but both spell disaster for us. Even if we continue to take the lazy and stupid way out and pass the buck onto our children and their children; the bills will one day come due.

Between the depletion of fuels and food stocks, destruction of soil and foliage, pollution of the waterways and atmosphere, and a forced convergence of all kinds of incongruent microorganisms and chemical compounds at the molecular level, all kinds of wonderful natural chains are being broken by greed.

Depleting Resources

The natural systems we consider to be resources for our taking (or else waste dumps for the by-products) are actually essential to life as we know it.  Even though they all-too-often fail to show up on financial balance sheets and shareholder reports, or high on governmental policy papers; the sad irony is that as we slowly choke the life out of the environment, we are simultaneously sealing the lids on our own, and our children's, coffins.  These important resources-turned-assets include:

[no-glossary]Water[/no-glossary]

Of all the water on Earth, only about 1% of it is available for drinking. But that doesn't mean that the other 99% (seawater, glaciers, and ice caps) doesn't also serve essential purposes. Wetlands, peat lands, streams, and bogs, for example, filter natural pollutants out of water, making it suitable habitat for aquatic wildlife. Often found in low-lying lush valleys, they also soak up excess rainfall and sediment to prevent downstream flooding ...and work in harmony with underground aquifers to ensure that all bodies of water have a sustainable supply. But human development has drained massive tracts of wetlands for agriculture, residential, commercial, and industrial 'progress' - and our ever-increasing overuse of freshwater is depleting the aquifers at much faster rates than Nature can replenish them.

After wetlands, rivers and lakes also play a part in the distribution and management of fresh water, nutrients, plant and aquatic life, sediment and soil.  But forest clear cutting, road building, dams, irrigation ditches and canals have prevented rivers and lakes from performing these necessary tasks.  This can leech the soil from the slopes of mountains and then over-deposit it in creek and river beds - destroying both forest and fish habitat at the same time. Another serious result is the disappearance of the water leading to drought and famine; by 2025 two of every three people will likely have difficultly accessing water.  Yet another result is flooding, which in the last decade has already affected more than 250 million people worldwide.

Forested wetlands - like river deltas, swamps, salt marshes, and mangrove forests - protect the inland areas from storm surges, and the aquifers from seawater intrusion.  They can also be put to use naturally converting our sewage and other refuse into fish and plant crops.  Yet forested wetlands, too, are continually destroyed to make room for pricy luxury homes with a view (not of the various plant/ animal life already there; but of a cleared beach), high rises, factories, shipyards, roads and shopping malls.

Coral reefs, best known as the underwater paradise for a vast myriad of exquisite marine life, also does a fantastic job of maintaining a delicate chemical balance that allows surrounding life to thrive and serves the rest of us by protecting coastal lands from storms.  Ahhh all so nice - only we've recently managed to destroy already one-third of the world's coral reefs.

Beyond these reefs, a vast underwater world largely unknown to us is nonetheless dying by our greed.  Bottom trawlers, for example, decimate an area of sea mounts and sea floor roughly equivalent to the continental U.S. each year.  Offshore oil rigs and cruise and other ships contribute enthusiastically what they can to the catastrophe through oil spills and chucking what they can overboard.

[no-glossary]Forests/Grasslands/Pastures[/no-glossary]

The attitude toward forests, it seems, is that they are either not worth enough to leave standing (the land could be better used to farm or slums or sprawl) and that they're worth too much to leave standing (revenue from lumber, news / toilet paper, packaging, paneling, Hollywood sets, firewood, log houses, second homes, and other such necessities).  Rarely do we stop to think about their intrinsic worth left standing tall - as they are home to many, many fellow creatures, enchanting to walk though, and part of some very important eco-chains (like air and carbon, which we'll discuss below).

Covering about a third of the earth's land, grasslands have not fared much better than the forests.  Irresponsible crop planting and overgrazing have turned fields once covered with amber waves of grain into barren expanses of depleted dirt, or even worse, sand.

[no-glossary]Air[/no-glossary]

Perhaps the sole remaining resource that the greedy have not found a way to make us pay for, air, is fast becoming something not worth paying much for anyway.  Automobiles, trucks, stoves, coal-burning power plants, factories, smelters, pulp mills, and other dirty activities spew sulfur, nitrogen, and other nasty stuff into the air.  Not only do these compounds choke the air, they also sooner or later fall down as rain, choking our soil and our waterways.

Ozone is really needed far away from us but really not up close.  The irony is that we're destroying the good ozone (the kind that forms in our atmosphere to protect us from the sun's UV rays) while we create the bad ozone (the kind that forms down here by us, starving plants of nitrogen and rendering them less able to metabolize carbon dioxide - the compound that's food for them, poison for us).

Even those people unable to acquire sexy pollution-spewing SUVs suffer the same burning eyes and blackened lungs that a smoggy day in Los Angeles might provoke.  In many poorer nations women (and children) relegated to cook with inefficient, non-fossil fuels like wood often succumb to eye and respiratory infections as well as early death.

[no-glossary]Fuel[/no-glossary]

Although we discovered combustion a pretty long time ago (relatively), human beings still can't seem to do much without it.  The basic guiding principle has remained pretty much the same: burn, baby, burn anything and everything to make energy, which we need for just about everything we do (including finding new energy resources).   And that's why fuel - notably petroleum - is at the heart of many of the world's bloodiest conflicts.

While the present state of things could not honestly be described as rosy, the future looks even bleaker: as we are currently consuming two barrels of oil for every one that's discovered and showing no signs of slowing down, or even maintaining current rates.  But the government won't even come close to calling it a crisis or take action because of greed's influence.  One can only assume, then, that our leaders in government also don't believe that any of us will have children - or else they must think that the history books will somehow omit just how blockheaded they really were.

Breaking Sacred Circles

Some would doubt the shrill of the alarm I sound; they would have you believe that life on earth is as immortal as time itself, and that any impact we humans might have on it will easily be erased by time. What these skeptics fail to realize, or perhaps do but don't care, is that the earth itself lives much like we (and all living things) do - through a series of regulatory subsystems. All living things - including the life-support system we call the environment - are systemic and cyclic ...and there's no such thing as a one-way street for living in this world.

Mother Nature likes to recycle: Her energy, Her food, Her waste and Her water. She does this by setting up cycles in which each chain link strengthens the others. We humans break those chains because we are so thick and self-centered that we take what isn't ours and simply ignore the impact we have on any bigger picture. By perverting the natural chains of causality, we've created our own deformed versions, whereby whatever our insatiable greed desires is channeled straight to us, and then our nasty discharges are recklessly flung as far away as possible. Our one-way streets, whether called 'progress', 'success,' 'winning', 'advancement', 'growth' or 'selfish greedy consumption' all lead us straight to our assured self-destruction. Simply put; the way we treat our environment will find its way back to bite us in the butt.

These natural systems - indeed all of those found within this complex ecosystem we call home, are all linked together by circular chains that allow for the harmonious coexistence of life on earth.  As we have gone about reaping our children's futures to satisfy our greed, we've distorted these chains: the protein chain, the germ chain, the toxin chain, and the carbon chain.

[no-glossary]Protein Chain[/no-glossary]

A natural food chain is circular and self-balancing, but we've broken that loop, put our straw at one end, and are busy slurping up all the protein with zeal.

Within a natural protein loop smaller creatures are food for larger creatures, and they're all food for the earth as they decompose - from dust to dust it's a continuous cycle that is balanced and sustainable. Plants turn sunlight and nutrients in the soil and water into vegetable protein. Animals then feed off the plant protein, dispersing seeds, making way for new plants and returning the nutrients back as fecal matter or as their own corpses. These animals are in turn eaten by larger species and this process is continued up the food / protein chain. At each stage there is a give-and-take from life to death to life again. Very little is wasted and overall everything gets what it needs to survive. Since there's plenty to go around, there's room for humans to have a place at the table too - and the fact is that no one should be starving in our world today.

But the sad reality is that rather than accepting our limited part in it, we have broken the protein chain. Never mind that the grain that fed one of our beef cows could have fed many starving Africans - we don't see ours as a global community. We in developed countries want more for ourselves and we want the best, no matter the cost. Instead of using our resources in the most efficient ways, eating an appropriate mixture of protein, carbohydrates, and mixed fats; we load up on animal fats and protein.

How do we do this? Developing countries service their debt not by competing with our subsidized and imposed grains; but by constantly overworking their soil growing millions of acres of livestock feed, or harvesting millions of tons of fishmeal from the oceans to produce feed that then needs millions of barrels of subsidized fuel to be shipped halfway around the world to feed animals which then need to be transported great distances to be slaughtered and butchered before ending up slapped on our grills.  The problem leads not only to the wholesale destruction of the food chain and depletion of the soil and oceans; it's also energy inefficient and highly polluting. Meanwhile, this kind of irresponsible