Consume Consume Consume!

There is a hourglass, filled with diamonds, precious metals and jewels. Each moment, more and more of them fall through the neck of the glass, being deposited into the bottom. This bottom is infinite, never ending, always craving. Gravity is on it's side, fighting effortlessly to capture more and more jewels.

People like you and I are running around recklessly, pickax in hand, searching for more gold and jewels to dump into the hopper. If the sands of our economy stop flowing ... everything will collapse! Or at least that is what they want us to think.

If you didn't get the rather overt analogy, let me explain.

Our current economy is based on the principal of perpetual growth. It wasn't always this way -- there was a time where our GDP was an accurate measure of what we produced. Now, with securities, and other fancy financial products we are measuring how often money moves, not what we are actually creating.

With this notion of continuous growth we give ourselves the ability to leverage our future earnings for current gain. This cycle of debt spending is what what has caused federal, and personal debt to sky rocket. Why wait til tomorrow to buy something with cash when you can buy something today with credit.

In theory this is wonderful, it allows for an increase of commerce which in turn benefits those in the community ; however, in excess it can lead to real problems.

The financial whiz kids of wall street are so "smart" that they have created products to leverage and sell the debt of debt of debt. Debt packages are bundled into financial products (a good) and resold. This can happen time and and time again so $1 worth of goods turns into $100 worth of financial products. We end up tricking ourselves into believing that we are generating wealth when in actuality, the bankers (those charging the transaction fees) are simply skimming cream off the top with transaction.

Why is this a problem? well all of those debts create debt payments, and unfortunately, those payments actually need to be paid. Even though it is COMMON practice for governments to mint, or create, money to pay their debts, there has to be some actual value in the the pot or it will all collapse.
So, this leads us to the over utilization of natural resources.

A really smart man once said "real wealth comes from the harvesting and processing of natural resources". This quite true. If you like at earth as a bank account we can make withdrawals in the form of lumber, or fish or fossil fuels. Each of these withdrawals is then processed to add value and then then sold on the open market.

Now, if we have an ever increasing amount of debt, we also have an ever increasing amount of debt payments. In order to accommodate this increased obligation (aka the bankers fees) we have to harvest more and more resources (this doesn't even factor in the increased demand population growth). Unfortunately, even though financial products can be extrapolated ad infinity, physical resources can not.

This leads us to the modern problem. Ever increasing demands on our resources are met with ever decreasing resources pools... the math doesn't work out.

Think about the way this is represented in our lives. Planned obsolescence with technology "forces" us to buy new products. Even if are cell phones aren't bricked through software updates the marketing campaigns that over whelm our brain waves are enough to get people to stampede over each other for a new "high-phone". This is planned. This is intentional. Corporations NEED us to continue consuming that they can continue to create profits. They don't care about the environment, nor the individuals who are oppressed and often killed due to the direct and indirect implications of their actions. Profit to the share holder being the ONLY focus they will not stop until we WAKE UP or the earth is bled dry.

It's our choice, and responsibility, to create the future that we want to live in. If we do not take action (in this case, maybe the best action is inaction) we will surely find ourselves in a dystopic future where corporations, through the guise of government, control our total existence while they "milk" us for our last drops of vitality. We've all seen The Matrix ... let's not go there.

The solution is rather simple ... just buy less. No need for new clothes all the time, go thrift. That old phone you have still works, maybe your friends will judge you but then you should ask "are they really my friends". We the people need to start standing up for ourselves, for the earth. Saying no thank you to new phones every 6 months, no thank you to excessive debt spending on things that we don't want or need and a big NO to Big Corporate and their extortion of the world. Vote in your elections, sure, but every day you should be voting with your dollar, or yen or peso or euro. This is our real power. This is our real wealth. This is how we make our stand.