"Growth" and the Real Paradigm Shift


The" paradigm" shift, the "new, new thing," Y2K and all that hyperbole smegma the Randian trickle downers were talking about at the turn of the century has finally arrived, thank god. It’s the real thing and it arrived in mid-07 and it will surely mark a dramatic milestone in world economic history, and maybe some transcendent consciousness moment too for all of us here on the little "Blue Dot" ........ all this running around looking for local causes, political partisan blaming, economic symposium and round table pundits posturing on the Sunday talk shows, whoring and wooing for their biased causes, will not stem the inevitability of historic inertia of massive fraud in the financial sector combined with Americans accruing gross deficit spending lifestyles over the last 35 years or so.
This is the Armageddon “White Buffalo” apocalypse now moment.

We're going on 7 billion people in the world now and it took 200,000 yrs. for our species to go from a few million to 1 billion in 1850 and then just 160 years to go from 1 billion to nearly 7 billion today. The paradigm shift that occurred in 07 was that the shit finally hit the fan in the Western Democracies when the ultimate funny money house of cards tumbled down and all the Randian, Reaganomic laffer curve "greed is good" trickle down thinking was finally exposed as a terribly pernicious movement favoring a massive aggregation of wealth and power in the hands of a few oligarchs in the corporatocracy. This corporatocracy is wasting away this democracy while only keeping its designer name. Growth? Are you kidding? Are we all kidding ourselves?

We are at a profound point of turning and the entire world- especially the so called leaders in the first world- need to realize that "growth" now needs to mean something dramatically different than it has in the past. The growth needs to be introspective and intelligent- not just wildly consumptive business myopias. We need to throw the bum oligarchs outta here and we need to do it NOW! If there is any growth it needs to be responsible and globally aware that billions of people now are waiting in the wings to bring their lives out of poverty and will require proportionate increases in basic living needs and concomitant power/energy requirements to meet these needs. Demand for fossil fuels can only go up at increasing rates and the costs will continue to rise as these finite supplies, especially oil, dwindle down.

A new" insight" paradigm needs to replace the old orders based on “national” GDP avaricious and narrow nation/state interest drivers. We need to see in terms of GGP(Gross Global Product) now and If we really "see" this, then we will have to realize that we gluttons in the West need to arrest our wild and wanton consumptive growth so that the rest of the developing world will be able to enhance their basic life support needs. The resource pie is finite and we hoard way more than our share. And through this hoarding, and all the massive power/ energy needs to support it, we are destroying the fragile womb of the earth, its water and atmosphere, and all the life forms that are dying at rates never seen before except during cosmic epochs from asteroid strikes.

This all has to be accomplished while fossil fuels are running out and an international collaborative effort, like the massive effort of the Manhattan Project, needs to find renewable and clean energy sources and appreciable alternatives as the oil/ coal/ industrial complex monopoly winds down. Every other alternative energy source combined -wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, biofuels,etc., contribute slightly more than 10% of our total energy consumption here in the U.S. All these together will never meet our rising demands- even if we reduced consumption by 50%. The new paradigm shift needs to be one of global attitude and not the next growth surge derived from the old economics based on fossil fuels. This is why we have to throw the bums out because the oil/coal corporate industrial axis all depends on this finite and earth damaging system and they only base decisions on the next quarter's profit margins and not 50 year plans.

If we in the West all reduce our per- capita consumption of energy by, say, just 15%, and continue to pursue micro nuclear( local to demand) power plants and tapping and using natural gas for electricity generation, home heating and cooking, and even NG transportation vehicles while working together w/ the Chinese, and Indians – and the rest of the developing world, then maybe we will have a chance and an idea time window to at least pursue a realistic renewable technology like hydrogen cells perhaps and maybe algae bio fuels for an example .
Solar and wind , and especially this ridiculous ethanol big agribusiness caper, will never produce enough energy to meet our rising demands- even if we reduce wasteful consumption by drastic measures and increase these renewables to 20% of total demand over the next generation. All this need to be accomplished before we reach the no return point as far as CO2 levels in the atmosphere over the next 50 years- and because we do not really know what that point is, we should assume it is tomorrow, or better, yesterday. Growth? Hell, the paradigm shift we need now meets the rub of the issue right here with this intoxicated idea of growth- any kind- and at all cost mindset!

We don’t need growth, we need a long introspective and “conservative” plateau where massive amounts of stimulus capital needs to go into R&D, education, and infrastructure rehab. “No child left behond”? Hell, we’ve left an entire education system behind ! We need a massive hike in the tax rate of the super, super rich oligarchs of the corporatocracy and a rewrite of the tax code to incise all the gross loopholes for the super wealthy. We need to do it NOW to save the democracy. Just read a little history. Read a little bit about how FDR betrayed his own class and its interests, but likely saved the country from total implosion to hyper burn laissez faire market forces.

We need Obama to be as bold and aware of the real predicament we are in- as FDR surely was. In terms of the global consequences, we are in maxim global dire straits and not just national dire straits. Growth? Are we serious? These are the jobs that will help in the short run and should be the only growth we consider right now. We need an “arrest” and a recalibration movement, and not a new growth objective that meets all the corporate models of blind irresponsible mass consumer growth. The third world will do all the growing for the rest of us- and deservedly so - and we must help them to do it through as many “green” methods as we can while increasing our own growth in green technologies and not just a wild consumer generated economy based on superfluous ‘stuff”…… all this non-essentia kitsch ….

No, we have reached a critical moment in world history and if we continue to look at this problem as if it's only a cyclical “growth glitch” in western economies, an anomaly from the old status quo economic growth curve, then we fail to “see” the real overarching problem. We are experiencing the down slope in rapid descent of an energy sucking consumer driven “Ponzi -scheme” and until we truly understand at the species level what kind of growth we really need , we will continue to hasten our demise.