PLUTOCRACY: The government of the United States has evolved from an
attempt at republicanism to an increasingly purer form of plutocracy.
This means that the minority class of the very wealthy have both become
our "elected" officials, and the principle contributors to their elections.
Legislation is skewed to the purpose of promoting the accumulation and
protection of the personal wealth of the minority, rather than the
betterment of the lives of the population as a whole.
PARADIGM: The intellectual construct that forms the basis for the actions of
a society. For example, the main paradigm of recent human history has been that the resources of the planet are unlimited, and we as people are
somehow removed from the ecological web of life that sustains existance
on this planet. Just as the paradigm that held the Earth as the center of
the universe became outmoded as astronomy progressed, the current
paradigm of exploitation and exclusion must be shed to accomidate the
reality of our vulnerability.
POPULATION GROWTH: While it is true that the percentage increase in the
human population is dropping little by little every year, the overall number of us is still skyrocketing. Medical and agricultural advances, along with the
availability of abundant and low cost energy in the form of carbon based fuels, have promoted a rapid jump in both birth and survival rates. A close look at the graph below shows that this is certainly not a sustainable trend,
especially when we factor in the disruptions introduced by the warming of
our atmosphere.
PRODUCTIVITY vs WAGES: The graph below is perhaps the simplest explaination of what is wrong with our current economic system. Notice
how, in the early 1970s, wages for the workforce started a decades long
stagnation. On the other hand, our productivity-the amount of product
and service we generate-has continued steadily upward.
That gap you see between the red and yellow lines represents earnings of
enormous amounts of money that has ended up in the hands of a small sliver of the population. Instead of the benefits of our great growth in productivity being shared fairly across the workforce, it has gushed
upwards into the coffers of the plutocrats that effectively run our
country. They get richer, and we get credit cards to buy what we once
could get for cash.
