Ridiculous? Incredible? Mind-boggling? Flabbergasting? Indecent? There is probably no single word to help convey all that the obese(!) U.S. national debt figures will eventually mean to humans alive now and to several future generations. (Image courtesy news.bbc.co.uk)
The debt has become so high that the counter ran out of digits, did it? So where did it all go? We should surely be able to see where:
In glass fronted sky-high edifices? And among the debris in Afghanistan and Iraq
In over-obese consumers' frames? And in the hollow eyes and malnourished, bloated underbellies of the world's poor children
In vulgar luxury infrastructure? And in dried-up, empty farm lands
In over-stuffed homes? And in laid-bare forests
In gleaming and overflowing supermarkets? And in grotesque landfills and toxic oceans
Entropy - as the word occurred in my mind, I felt that this term filled in where other words fail. In the field of thermodynamics, Entropy is "a measure of the partial loss of the ability of a system to perform work due to the effects of irreversibility", to cite just one of many definitions.
It is likely that implications of the U.S. national debt will be explained as a kind of entropy. Apparently it already is - I'm not surprised at this - See Entropy: A new World view.
Way back in 1980, the authors sought to "analyse the world's economic and social structures by using the second law of thermodynamics, that is, the law of entropy. The authors argue that humanity is wasting resources at an increasing rate, and that will lead to the destruction of our civilization, which has happened before on a smaller scale for past empires. The book promotes the use of sustainable energy sources and slow resource consumption as the solution to delay the inevitable: death by entropy".
While Cheney and Bush laugh all the way to the bank, watching their 11th hour efforts to completely privatize all aspects of life succeed in a big way, the people on your street are losing their homes, their jobs, their schools, their health care.
Naomi Klein, in a lecture drawn from her book "The Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism", http://www.naomiklein.org/main, maintains that this recent plundering of the commons by corporate raiders is not only a transfer of wealth to the elites but also an attempt by the right to insure that the next president does not have the resources necessary to transition the US economy away from exploitative, extractive, and war mongering industries towards a greener sustainable foundation. They will maintain that we cannot afford it due to so called "economic and financial realities" as defined by the very thieving industries that created these harsh realities.
Klein says we've seen it before. President Clinton abandoned his attempts to reform NAFTA towards social justice and fight for his universal health care plans on the advice of treasury secretary Robert Rubin that he accept "economic realities".
Guess what, Robert Rubin is one of Obama's top economic advisors. The fox is not only in the hen house he has set up shop and is raising the chickens for his own personal slaughter.
Written in October 2008