Bernard Weiner: Drifting Toward Catastrophe
[Bernard Weiner, a poet/playwright and Ph.D. in government and international relations, has peeked inside the diaries of everyone from Karl Rove to Osama bin Laden to Dick Cheney to George W. Bush. He has taught at universities in California and Washington, worked as a writer/editor for the San Francisco Chronicle for two decades, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers.]
...This country, humanity, the globe are rushing pell-mell to disaster, mostly by neglecting what needs to be done while we're diddling with the political minutiae. This tendency to avoid the obvious larger questions reminds one of the thrust of Albert Einstein's famous quote: "The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe."...
Every so often, unfettered capitalism nearly collapses into itself. President FDR realized that truth in the Great Depression and saved the capitalist system by introducing major reforms into the mix. Now 70-plus years later, after the unbridled capitalism of the Reagan-Cheney-Bush era, where greed and rapaciousness were encouraged to run amuck, it's clear that once again the system requires major reforms to save it. Obama, who put into power noted deregulators, who helped lead the economy into near-collapse (Summers, Geithner, Bernanke et al.), doesn't appear to have the will or desire to fight this battle other than with rhetoric. And, thus, the economy continues to "drift toward unparalleled catastrophe."...
Imperialism no longer works. Nationalist and religious guerrilla forces can force high-tech imperialist armies into prolonged and massively expensive stalemates. Since the US can't move fast enough in developing energy alternatives, it remains locked into the battle around the globe in other countries for the remaining traditional fuels: coal, oil, gas. Even the negative environmental ramifications of bio-mass energy haven't been thought through. This way of operating is a self-destructive loop, one that winds up involving the US in senseless, outrageously expensive wars around the globe, associated with obtaining and protecting natural resources, where all the high-tech hardware is no real match for native anger and determination (read: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somali, Yemen, Pakistan etc.). But President Obama continues on with many of the same reckless imperialist policies as his predecessors. And "thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe."...
Read entire article at Truthout
...This country, humanity, the globe are rushing pell-mell to disaster, mostly by neglecting what needs to be done while we're diddling with the political minutiae. This tendency to avoid the obvious larger questions reminds one of the thrust of Albert Einstein's famous quote: "The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe."...
Every so often, unfettered capitalism nearly collapses into itself. President FDR realized that truth in the Great Depression and saved the capitalist system by introducing major reforms into the mix. Now 70-plus years later, after the unbridled capitalism of the Reagan-Cheney-Bush era, where greed and rapaciousness were encouraged to run amuck, it's clear that once again the system requires major reforms to save it. Obama, who put into power noted deregulators, who helped lead the economy into near-collapse (Summers, Geithner, Bernanke et al.), doesn't appear to have the will or desire to fight this battle other than with rhetoric. And, thus, the economy continues to "drift toward unparalleled catastrophe."...
Imperialism no longer works. Nationalist and religious guerrilla forces can force high-tech imperialist armies into prolonged and massively expensive stalemates. Since the US can't move fast enough in developing energy alternatives, it remains locked into the battle around the globe in other countries for the remaining traditional fuels: coal, oil, gas. Even the negative environmental ramifications of bio-mass energy haven't been thought through. This way of operating is a self-destructive loop, one that winds up involving the US in senseless, outrageously expensive wars around the globe, associated with obtaining and protecting natural resources, where all the high-tech hardware is no real match for native anger and determination (read: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somali, Yemen, Pakistan etc.). But President Obama continues on with many of the same reckless imperialist policies as his predecessors. And "thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe."...