Succinct!
Is this a great country or what?
So what do you call a country ruled by the greedy?

Gluttonia?

A CorporaToxity?

Mammonocracy

As i learned it long, long ago, governments (and taxation) began when the people made a contract with a set of bandits for the exclusive rights to be oppressed, and in return, gained safety from other bandits.

i don't know if it's true or not, but it has the ring of truthiness.

Weaseldog, that was more or less the point made, at exhausting length, by Azar Gat in his monumental tome _War in Human Civilization_. But he expressed guarded optimism that modern (mostly) democratic societies had made serious inroads into these eternal verities. Certainly for us (US) 9/11 was a setback, prompting a resurgence of the top-down control imperative. But I'm optimistic that potential checks to this absolutism are emerging here and there, resilient to a growing degree. Globalism helps -- is not Wikileaks a child of globalism?

RM, I undertsand that argument, but I don't think it has much power.

If anything Globalism has been the tool to increase oppression and to drain the world's wealth to benefit the few. The bankers efforts in the USA look exactly like what the same bankers in Argentina did under the auspices of the IMF. And that same evolving pattern began in Africa in the 1970s. As globalization has spread, with it, came the same faceless industrial rape an pillage by the financial sector that other nations have suffered for decades.

Wikileaks has produced nothing tangible as far as I can see, except to demonstrate that our federal powers are immune even to the supposed disinfecting powers of sunlight. Doesn't it provide the same baseless hope that we were supposed to enjoy when we learned about torture in Abu Graib and Guantanamo or the great hope Obama was going to bring? There have been countless crumbs of hope passed down to us over the last decade, and still out world continues to darken.

Globalism if anything is giving others, extreme powers over us by instant remote control. We are being consolidated into a bland sameness. Much like Kuntsler's argument in "The Geography of Nowhere". All places and people are becoming the same. Knowing the same things. Sharing the same knowledge and ignorance. Experiencing the same feelings. Having the same conversations about the same television shows and celebrities and all the while, brainwashed into believing that in all that sameness, we are each unique, special and better than those others that don't share our sameness.

The cure is coming, but it brings it's own horrors. Globalism only exists because we are a high energy society. Without the massive input of BTUs from fossil fuels, our civilization could not exist. We could not feed seven billion people. We could not make energy intensive silicon to produce cell phones and solar panels from. The computer networks would decay and the most advanced technology we could produce would be handcrafted and inefficient, diodes and transistors.

And that's coming. We passed the Peak in Conventional Oil in 2005 and the Peak in All Liquids in 2008. Some say we'll see another peak, but I don't think the trends will go that way.

So we've used up half of the fossil energy store. The easy half. Now the ever increasingly energy intensive half is left. The decay of our civilization and the breakup up globalization is commencing.

All of the crap we see in economics and politics is representative of our battle to overturn the science of thermodynamics through ignorance and wishful thinking. We are wasting resources, waging a battle we are doomed to lose. to borrow a line from the Great Bard. We will not go quietly into that good night.

...to borrow a line from the Great Bard. We will not go quietly into that good night."
I believe the quote was by Irish poet Dylan Thomas not Wm. Shakespeare.

Yeah, Dylan Thomas, the Great Bard!

Hehe, I stand corrected. :)

"Whenever you say Dylan, he thinks you're talkin' about Dylan Thomas.
Whoever he was.
The man ain't got no culture.
But it's alright Ma, everbody must get stoned." - Paul Simon

(I'm pretty sure about that attribution)

Hrmmm, that might be a fun one to work out on the guitar.

I can add that to my repertoire of songs I play that nobody has ever heard of....