It's the Stupid Economy.

Continuing to try and make sense out of the economic wreckage, and rebuild an economy that's based on reality instead of puerile fantasies of instant gratification and mechanized domination and elimination of every culture on the planet that's not oil-based, there are certain contradictions that must be confronted and discussed as though we were a nation run by adults with some iota of concern for their children's future that supersedes their immediate desire to purchase their love at the discount store.

Although there are many subjects that come to mind, the three that resonate the most are:

Globalization and the Nation State
US Imperialism and Democracy
Peak Oil Production and Predatory Capitalism

Why these three are tantamount is that each of them is impossible to maintain in tandem, yet that is what we pretend we can do, and that is how those in power maintain their positions. In a country where one of the major "news" outlets can actually call itself Fox News, naming itself after a creature known for its craftiness and duplicity, and calling itself fair and balanced while unabashedly championing every flawed policy of the Republicans, while vowing to do its best to destroy the country rather than allow one policy of the opposition to ever see the light of day, there is no outcry against the impossibility of the coexistence of the three topics enumerated above, because only jingoism and Nationalistic charlatanism holds sway. The very idea of rationally discussing such topics is suspect and deemed unpatriotic because it assumes a possibility that the US may be a less than perfect Nation, and our motives less than purely altruistic.

The most important of this triad of topics is peak oil. Because the direction the country took after it lost its predominance as the world's major oil producer, while maintaining its position as, by far, the world's most voracious oil consumer, have colored every National and International policy the US has pursued ever since. With never a discussion, much less an admission, that the change in this most fundamental of dynamics, in an economy completely enslaved to its addiction to profligate energy consumption and perceived god-given right to destroy anything in it path that blocks it from satisfying this all-consuming thirst, the thought that such a monumental change may have altered our relationship with the rest of the world, is dismissed out of hand. The one event, the WTC bombing, that any reasonable person would have thought would surely bring about some kind of soul-searching, some mature questioning of our role of global destroyer of any economic system on the planet that stands in the way of the all-consuming, resource-stripping juggernaut of Predatory Capitalism, was instead used as a pretext to notch the madness up to an even higher extreme, and any who questioned this stratagem was attacked as unpatriotic and treasonous.

Which is, of course, nonsense. The pursuit of Globalization, militarization, Corporatism and Imperialism are all intricately entwined with the reality of Peak Oil Production...which is , of course, why this reality is kept in the background and never discussed. In one of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes episodes, his perspicacious detective astounds the local yokel investigator by lying in the dirt and extracting an item from the mud, making him look much like a conjuror. When the astonished local asks "but, but, but, how?", the ever-composed Holmes replies: "Because I looked for it."

Having constructed in his mind a sequence of events that must have occurred in order for the facts in the case to have been possible, a piece was missing that was easily recovered once he knew what to look for, and where it was most likely to be found. Similarly, by pretending that Peak oil production is a phenomena in a far off esoteric future, pondered only by wing nuts and America bashers, instead of upon us right now, the power structure can pursue its Imperialistic, Globalized agenda without its own citizens ever looking in the mud for what's quite obviously there for anyone to find who knows what to look for.