When I was an adjunct English instructor I discussed the trial of Galileo in all my classes, whether creative writing, survey of literature or basic college composition. I consider this incident a key entry into understanding the role of intellectual thought and inquiry within human society. Few isolated events from Western history offer a better lens for examining the role that official institutional “experts” play in suppressing, and even persecuting, the truth, even after it has long since become overwhelmingly self-evident.

The result of Galileo’s trial was that the Catholic Church forced him, under penalty of torture and death, to recant his body of scientific work: his own irrefutable evidence that the earth was not at the center of the universe, but that it in fact rotated around the sun, instead of the other way around, as had been the accepted scientific view since the time of Aristotle. The event is traditionally understood as a case of religion persecuting science, as medieval superstition lashing out at the coming age of scientific enlightenment. The post-script is that science won; the moral that the rational inquiry of the enlightened always overturns superstition in the end. This is an accurate assessment, but woefully incomplete.

A fuller interpretation of Galileo’s trial must focus on a deeper appreciation for how “official” truth meets contradictory evidence with a stone wall of resistance, and of how “official” experts in a given field will comfortably live with an almost unlimited amount of intellectual inconsistency, in order to avoid admitting that they are, in fact, just plain wrong, and that they have built their prestigious and lucrative careers entirely around being wrong. Galileo’s story should not be limited to the role of an historical anecdote about how the enlightenment struggled to emerge from the dark ages, persecuted but ultimately triumphant. No, the trial of Galileo is more properly understood as a living metaphor for the institutional resistance that the truth is likely to meet in any age, including our own.

Nowhere in the Bible does it even state that the earth is at the center of the universe, with the sun and everything else rotating around it. The sole bit of scripture used to prosecute Galileo was Joshua 10, which relates Israel’s battle to defend the city of Gibeon against the Amarites, in which Joshua prayed for God to halt the trajectory of the sun in the sky, extending daylight long enough for Israel to vanquish her foes. But even if this miraculous story is accepted as completely true, it does not require anyone to accept that the sun is actually rotating around the earth.

The idea that the sun, and everything else, rotated around the earth was established by the Greek pagan Aristotle. Aristotle, the greatest scientific and philosophical thinker of his time, did not rely on religious superstition or dogma to reach his conclusion. Nor did he simply say “Well, it sure looks like the sun is rotating around the earth because it rises in the east and sets in the west each day.” Aristotle and his contemporaries were more than sophisticated enough to entertain the idea that this might simply be an illusion based upon our own fixed position on the earth’s surface.

No, Aristotle concluded that the earth must be the fixed center of the universe due to the fact that he could not observe stellar parallax in the night sky.  Parallax is a displacement or alteration in the apparent position of an object viewed along two different lines. Nearby objects have a larger parallax than more distant objects when observed from different positions. The easiest way to understand how this phenomena works is to close your left eye, hold your arm out in front of you with your forefinger and thumb forming a circle, and then line up some object across the room so that it appears to be inside of the circle. Then open your left eye and close your right eye—the object will appear to have “moved” from outside of the circle. Because the circle you have made with your thumb and finger is so much closer than the object across the room, when your perspective shifts from right eye to left, the position of the circle appears much more significantly altered. Aristotle reasoned that if the earth was in fact moving through the universe, our continually shifting perspective would mean that the constellations in the night sky should continually be shifting in relation to each other, on a nightly basis. This in fact does not happen, due to the immense size of the universe and the tremendous distance between us and the stars. Aristotle’s sole pre-conceived assumption was that the universe simply could not be that big; even for modern science, the incredible vastness of the universe is difficult to grasp in anything but abstract, mathematical terms. In concluding that the earth was at the center of the universe, Aristotle relied mostly on logic and observation.

And for the next 15 centuries or so, everybody simply assumed that Aristotle was right. All astronomical work was conducted under the iron-clad assumption that the earth was at the center of everything. Over time, as the data accumulated through observation, this began to create problems. The other planets, for instance, displayed the puzzling phenomena of “retrograde motion”—periodically, as the earth lapped one of the outer planets as they orbited the sun, the outer planet would appear to suddenly shift and begin traveling for a period of time in the opposite direction. The same thing would happen to Mercury and Venus as they passed us in their own orbit. Other heavenly bodies which rotated around the sun, such as various asteroids, would also display “retrograde motion.” Sky charts became increasingly cluttered pieces of work, as astronomers were continually forced to draw in the counter, retrograde movements. Retrograde motion baffled most astronomers—as scientifically inclined thinkers, they found it counter-intuitive that some heavenly bodies should suddenly just decide to start flying off in the opposite direction for a little while, only to shift back in the original direction after a month or two. But they operated under a world view—the entire universe rotated around the earth; all observed facts were by necessity interpreted and twisted to accommodate this world view.

By the time of Galileo’s trial, Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium was over 60 years old, and the theory that the earth in fact rotated around the sun was well known to educated Europeans, including the Catholic Church hierarchy.  But Copernicus, though a radical thinker, had been a cautious propagandizer. Although many of his contemporaries were familiar with his work and even gave lectures based upon it (some of them attended by the Pope himself), he waited until his death bed to publish his seminal work, dedicating it to Pope Paul III.  For over half a century the heliocentric theory, though never officially accepted, was tolerated by the Church and debated among scholars.

The Galileo invented the telescope and discovered five of Jupiter’s moons, which clearly orbited it—the first hard, empirical proof that not everything in the heavens orbited the earth. Moreover, whereas the heliocentric theory had always been tolerated as a theory debated among experts, Galileo made it his project to popularize the theory, not just to other scholars, but to the growing class of literate merchants and artisans. He often eschewed writing in Latin, the language of the experts, in favor of common Italian, which could be read by the masses. In addition to being the most brilliant scientist of his time, he was also a vicious satirist, and went out of his way to pick fights in print with the entire Jesuit faculty of the Collegio Romano. Whereas Copernicus had humbly dedicated his work to the Pope, Galileo famously wrote a fictional dialogue in which the earth-centered and sun-centered theories were debated; he named the simpleton arguing on behalf of the earth-centered theory after the Pope.

Galileo, though officially charged with heresy, was in reality convicted for his relentless mockery of the experts, for tirelessly demonstrating that they were group of professionalized idiots. Although the Catholic Church was the official organ of Galileo’s persecution, his true persecutors were not so much authoritarian religious fanatics but rather the early 17^th century equivalent of tenured faculty—professors of cosmology, mathematics and natural philosophy at the era’s various colleges, which happened, by historical coincidence, to be Church-run schools. Their motivation was to protect the Aristotelian world view, thereby making it possible for them to continue teaching science classes based on that word view, preventing their conversion from experts into artifacts.

Nothing in Galileo’s scientific work contradicted the “word of God” as presented in the Bible.  But everything in his actions demonstrated total contempt for the self-appointed representatives of God in the Catholic Church, who attempted to double as scientific experts. This was the era of the Protestant Reformation; the Church had spent most of the past century fighting wars and being thrown out of various parts of Europe. Inquisitions had become standard as the Church watched their once hegemonic power ebb away. Now Galileo promised to throw them out of their own universities. It was too much to endure, and he was made to pay a price.

The philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn coined the term “paradigm shift” to describe events such as the scientific communities’ ultimate abandonment of the Aristotelian model in favor of the Copernican. Kuhn posited the idea of “normal science,” in which working scientists gathered all evidence and interpreted it within the framework of an accepted paradigm—the rather silly concept of retrograde motion, for example, was the best possible scientific explanation within the paradigm of an earth centered universe. A paradigm shift occurs when enough scientists begin to find or recognize too many errors or inconsistencies within the paradigm. Galileo’s discovery of the moons orbiting Jupiter was a fatal bit of data for the Aristotelian paradigm. It proved that not everything orbited the earth. The logical idea to posit in response to that realization was: So maybe nothing does. And if the earth in fact orbits the sun…well, then these bizarre retrograde movements of the other planets suddenly make a lot more sense, too.

Writers and critics from nearly every field have borrowed Kuhn’s concept of the paradigm—much to his chagrin. No doubt some pop culture moron somewhere has used the term in an attempt to sound intellectual while blabbing on about some such trivial nonsense as the emergence of Lady Gaga or the influence of reality television. Kuhn intended for the term to have a special relevance to science, claiming that “A paradigm is what members of a scientific community, and they alone, share.” Once a paradigm shift is complete, a credible scientist can no longer posit, for instance, that ether carries light, or that the earth is in fact only six thousand years old. Kuhn maintained that “a student in the humanities has constantly before him a number of competing and incommensurable solutions…that he must ultimately examine for himself.” Certain of these competing theories may become more or less fashionable or accepted, but none can be established as ultimately, and solely, legitimate—in other words, as paradigmatic—in the way that a particular scientific theory does.

But I would argue that from the perspective of political power and social control, certain ideas or assumptions that govern society do achieve a status that, for all practical purposes, is every bit as entrenched and unquestioned as a dominant scientific paradigm. Just as scientific careers hinge on the continued viability of the dominant scientific paradigms, careers in politics, the media and education are inextricably wound together with the continued acceptance of certain cultural beliefs which are regarded as unquestionable.

Just as the Catholic ruling elite of the 16th and 17^th centuries maintained a firm allegiance to the Aristotelian world view, even as it became increasingly unworkable, even transparently false, the ruling elite of the early 21^st century persist in clinging to their own increasingly unworkable, transparently false world view—the corporate/capitalist world view. But whereas the threat posed by the Aristotelian world view was merely continued acceptance of ignorance, the threat posed by the corporate world view is far more dangerous: the continued and accelerating destruction of the planet’s ecosystems, along with the continued and accelerating state of perpetual, planetary wide warfare. Our future existence as a species will depend upon our ability to shed this destructive world view in favor of a more enlightened one.

The corporate/capitalist world view is based upon one unassailable assumption: that economic growth and development is the supreme good and must be pursued relentlessly, else the world itself shall screech to a grinding halt. The only viable method for meeting human needs that is allowed to exist under this world view is as a by product of this growth. It is deemed literally sinful to collectively and democratically look at the world and say: “Well, this is what we have for available resources and these are the human needs that must be met, so let’s decide the best way to go about this.” No, under the capitalist world view, morality is defined by rigging an economic system (the mythological “free” market) to facilitate the relentless accumulation of the overwhelming majority of the available resources into the hands of a very miniscule few. From there, the rest of us will allegedly prosper through collecting up the crumbs which they allow to drop from their hands. This, under the capitalist world view, is deemed “efficiency”—the ultimate moral good.

Some people within this system do manage to accumulate a substantial pile of crumbs for themselves, and so such people are inclined to live their entire lives never questioning the world view they have been given; indeed, they will view it as sacrosanct. To question it is literally to be a Godless infidel. If confronted with the fact there are never enough crumbs trickling down for everybody, that perhaps not everybody has been fortunate enough to find themselves in a position where the crumbs even trickle down at all, they will quite likely become defensive and angry. They have worked very hard to gather up their own pile of crumbs and feel that they should be able to sit atop it and enjoy it in piece. If they are a “liberal” they will perhaps agree that some mechanism needs to be in place to gather up a pittance of crumbs from those who have a lot of crumbs, in order to make sure nearly everybody at least has enough to sustain themselves. If they are a “conservative” they will most likely believe that anyone who can’t manage to scrounge their own allotment of crumbs needs to go hungry. But as long as the crumb-less class has remained relatively small, a wretched underclass, most of the rest of society, “liberal” or “conservative” have seemed quite pleased with our capitalist world view, our system for allowing the chosen elite to accumulate unfathomable wealth and then dribble some excess down on the masses below.

But this sacred accumulation of wealth by the corporate elite can only be possible so long as there is relentless economic expansion and growth. So here we have the fundamental dogma of the capitalist world view: unchecked growth is the ultimate, truly even the only, good. You can see this clearly in the reverence with which the official economic experts of today hold the Gross Domestic Product, or GDP. The GDP is treated at all times as the ultimate arbiter, the accurate measure for the health of any society. But the GDP only measures the total goods and services being consumed within a society—that’s it. It says nothing about how those goods and services are distributed, about how many people are going hungry, how many are homeless, how many are without necessary medical care. It tells only how much wealth has been made available for the corporate elite to snatch up. A natural disaster which kills some thousands of people and destroys the homes and livelihoods of some tens of thousand more will actually be good for the GDP.

But since the corporate/capitalist world view truly is an all-powerful paradigm, we do find ourselves existing within a system where this relentless growth truly is needed in order for a surplus of crumbs to accumulate and begin trickling down to all of us below. For this reason, we have all become cheerleaders of growth—whether “liberal” or “conservative” we have demanded that our elected officials push for “pro-growth” policies. For over half a century, we have demanded a continual war economy, in order to keep growth going in the defense industry. The unavoidable consequence of this has been a proliferation of weapons around the planet, and the violence which must follow. An unstable planet and hot wars, as over the last generation young Americans have died fighting on three different continents. A few economic elites in the defense industry and on Wall Street have gotten very rich off from this misery. The rest of us might not like it so much, but ultimately, we know it must be tolerated, so that the crumbs will keep trickling down to us. Just consider what happens when even one military base or weapons plant anywhere in the country is deemed unnecessary and targeted for closure. The entire community rallies against this closure, even the most “liberal” elected officials go into full-press lobbying mode to keep it open, to keep growth alive in the war economy.

To be sure, there are people in our country fearful and deluded enough to believe that it really is necessary for the U.S. to spend many times what the rest of the world spends on war-making; but not enough to keep bloated war budgets churning out year after year. That requires the full effort of the entire American political structure, all of whose members think entirely within the capitalist world view, in which relentlessly pursuing growth is tantamount to inhaling your next breath of oxygen.

Actually, scratch that last statement. Within the capitalist world view, relentless economic growth is actually considered more important than inhaling your next breath of oxygen—or, at any rate, more important than your future breaths. Locked within the grip of the capitalist world view, our nation long ago determined that preserving air quality was an expendable goal when weighed alongside of continual growth. Environmental devastation is considered entirely acceptable under the corporate world view; it is the unavoidable by product of economic growth, and so it is a fact that must necessarily be endured.

Under the capitalist world view, political debates between “liberals” and “conservatives” about environmental destruction ultimately break down to arguments about how much pollution can be moderated without intruding upon the economic elites’ ability to accumulate more and more wealth. The final policies are written based upon what the economic elite tell us they will tolerate—how much they are willing to temper their environmentally destructive practices while still allowing enough crumbs to trickle down to the clutching fingers of the desperate masses below. In coal country they have demanded that entire mountains be blown from the face of the earth, and the watersheds fouled forever by toxic sludge. The people there accepted it, in exchange for the opportunity to risk being buried alive gathering Massey Energy’s coal; under the corporate world view, it was the best deal they could hope to get, the only way they could gather their few crumbs. The same energy industry and Wall Street elites want to force a similar deal onto the people living in my own area of central New York State, in order to collect the pockets of natural gas buried deep below in the Marcellus Shale. And we have all become painfully aware of the devastating gamble they have forced upon us with off-shore drilling; a gamble they say we must continue to accept, even as the losses in the Gulf of Mexico continue to mount, with no end in sight.

Environmental devastation and artificially generated human misery have always been existential facts of life lived within the capitalist world view; the great propagandizers of this world view have continually shrugged them off with trite Utopianism: “Sure, pursuing growth so far has meant polluting the air and water and eventually even shipping all the decent working and middle class jobs to poorer economies. But that is necessary in order to keep growth churning, in order to push profits higher and higher for the economic elite, and when they eventually accumulate enough wealth, it will really finally trickle back down to the rest of us, crumbs from the heavens. Oh, and the magic Free Market will solve all the environmental problems in time, as well—just as soon as some genius figures out the best way to get rich from doing it.”

In the meanwhile, though, the environmental devastation and human misery really do exist, the equivalent of those puzzling retrograde orbits which confounded astronomers who lived under the Aristotelian world view. The experts of the capitalist world view have devised a similarly facile manner to account for the undeniable problems their system creates: these things are apparently easily and even magically dismissed simply by terming them “externalities.” For instance, if the poorly regulated power plants of the Midwest have destroyed the air quality all the way back to the east coast, creating a generational asthma epidemic for the children of the Northeast—well, a naïve person who did not understand the realities of our capitalist world view might think the solution would be to better regulate those power plants to lower their pollution (or pursue cleaner energies, or even, heresy of heresies, lower the over all energy used by the society). But this just isn’t possible, for it would mean cutting into the profitability of those power plants, thereby limiting growth, the ultimate sin in our world.

No, the real solution is to label the air pollution, the children suffering from asthma, the melting ice caps, all of it, as “externalities.” Under the capitalist world view, the only things that are real and important are the profits on the energy corporation’s annual report. The children suffering from asthma, those troublesome little externalities, are best employed within the capitalist world view by providing another growth opportunity for the pharmaceutical corporations, who will sell them asthma medicine…so long as their parents have insurance or can afford to pay cash.

A dominant paradigm or world view will remain entrenched for as long as it can possibly be made to function—too many people throughout society are far too invested in it, professionally and emotionally, to ever let it simply crumble in the face of overwhelming evidence that it doesn’t actually work. Many people have understood, for a very long time, how flawed the capitalist world view is, and so protecting it has long since developed as an industry in itself. It is propped up and defended bitterly in words, violently in deeds. In the corporate media, the capitalist world view has the greatest propaganda machine ever devised, shilling for it relentlessly, around the clock. Throughout its history, it has forced its way into societies around the world, at the barrel of a gun. When its official experts hold their G20 or WTO or other trade meetings attempting to plot our collective futures behind our backs, they use full police state force to keep any dissenting opinions far, far away.

Still, like any other faulty paradigm, the capitalist world view cannot avoid the gravity of reality forever. It is ultimately a failure for the planet and humanity, and this truth cannot be avoided indefinitely. The environmental devastation it has so long ignored as an externality of little consequence has become mortifyingly self-evident. There is good reason to fear that within the century, significant parts of this planet will be rendered uninhabitable. The resulting societal crash will make pie-in-sky visions of endless economic growth and unlimited wealth an obscene historical footnote, the final ravings of a pathologically insane culture.

That this process is already well underway should be obvious. The cheap, easy to find fossil fuel that the orgy of expansion has always depended upon no longer exists. The remaining sources are now increasingly hard and dangerous to reach, with future disasters such as we are seeing in the Gulf of Mexico rendered inevitable if we persist in clinging to the now transparently dysfunctional paradigm of the capitalist world view.

Moreover, the dismal state of the world economy is obvious proof that the days of utopian dreams of global trade and ever expanding growth is a thing of the past. The economic collapse of October 2008 is now over a year and a half in the rearview mirror, and for real working people, a true recovery has yet to materialize; it will not materialize under the capitalist world view.

Further “structural readjustment” and a future that closely resembles life in any other dysfunctional third world nation are the only logical outcomes that await the United States under this current paradigm. The productive capacity of our economy was hollowed out and shipped away during the “boom years” of the Clinton 90’s, courtesy of NAFTA and other pro-trade polices cheer led by the likes of Thomas Friedman, The New York Times and the entire rest of the mainstream corporate media. All that remains now is debt. For much of the illegitimate Bush administration, that debt was used to provide expanded growth for the Wall Street elite, as it became a commodity for speculation. The corporate elite pumped up one great last trading bubble through reckless trading practices that were transparently unsustainable; when it inevitably collapsed, the bought and paid for corporate government of the United States bailed out the very banksters who caused the problem. So entrenched was the corporate worldview, the capitalist paradigm, that this was viewed as the only possible remedy: We had to restore the elite’s ability to continue accumulating massive wealth, before we could even hope to see any crumbs start trickling down to the humble masses on Main Street. Fuck sending bread directly into the communities that are desperate for it—under the capitalist world view, the option of such a policy does not even exist.

And naturally the economy has remained stagnant, though Wall Street has its periodic rallies, and the “big brains” in the bankster racket are back to collecting bonuses large enough to feed entire towns full of laid off workers. But as the “jobless recovery” (the most obscene bit of jargon every devised?) continues to chug forward, the promised shower of crumbs for the little people has yet to materialize. Instead, massive budget cuts are in the offing; as the nation experiences the most brutal long term jobless rates it has seen since the depression, our corporate-owned politicians are currently looking to cut even the pittance of unemployment benefits that keep millions of our neighbors off from the streets. Education and all other public services face drastic cuts—only the war budget, so profitable for the corporate elite, seems safe from the chopping block.

These massive cuts are what the economic experts of the capitalist paradigm call “austerities,” and they are foisted on a nation in order to provide “confidence” to the elites in the “investor class.” The elite investor class needs to feel confident about their potential for accumulating massive profits, and nothing makes them more confident than seeing that a nation’s political leaders are willing to starve their own people, if necessary, in order to guarantee “growth” for the economic elite. Under the capitalist world view, there is a superstitious belief that starving the masses in order to pump riches up to the corporate elite is the key to prosperity; eventually, as the elite grow their wealth enough, they will begin to allow the magical trickle of crumbs to begin again.

Naturally, along with these cuts to services and public works, come cuts in every other aspect of a functioning, democratic government. This includes cuts to the regulatory agencies that might be able to reign in the reckless and polluting fossil fuel industries. This includes an abandonment of any effort to develop sustainable, non-polluting energy sources. Under the capitalist world view, the future is dark, but clear to see: poverty and “austerity” for the many, on a planet that is increasingly uninhabitable.

The great question before humanity at this moment: How much longer will we continue to accept the capitalist paradigm, this vile world view that sentences the majority of us, and the future generations of this planet, to a path of relentless misery? No easy, painless alternative exists—either way, an honest assessment of reality must admit that a time of struggle awaits us. Environmental collapse of some sort is almost certainly unavoidable at this point, and we are woefully prepared to respond. Indeed, the dire conditions we face are at least subconsciously realized by almost every thinking adult, and the results so far have been a kind of mass paralysis. We are seeing a great upswing in collective escapism, as if by closing our eyes long enough, we will finally be able to open them back up in a world where the capitalist worldview has once more been redeemed, where the comforting trickle of crumbs is showering down again, with no end in sight. We are sleep walkers mere steps from the edge of a steep and deadly cliff.

But the option still remains to meet the problems of the future with eyes open, unencumbered by a failed world view. This will mean a mass rejection of the way of life we have grown accustomed to; though the conditions of reality will likely take that way of life away soon enough, anyway, and already have for many of our friends and neighbors. More importantly, it will require a rejection of our old ways of thinking. We will have to accept that virtually anything we hear or see on any cable or network television program is a message that has been formed from the perspective of the failed capitalist world view. We will need to understand that any national politician, of either party, is nothing more than a paid representative of the failed capitalist world view. We need to accept that our institutions and media have all been created to uphold and strengthen the failed capitalist world view, this paradigm that no longer works.

“Modern man protects himself from seeing his own split state by a system of compartments. Certain areas of outer life and his own behavior are kept, as it were, in separate drawers and are never confronted with one another.”

“If, for a moment, we regard mankind as one individual, we see that the human race is like a person carried away by unconscious powers; and the human race also likes to keep certain problems tucked away in separate drawers. But this is why we should give a great deal of consideration to what we are doing, for mankind is now threatened by self-created and deadly dangers that are growing beyond our control. Our world is, so to speak, dissociated like a neurotic…”

“A sense of a wider meaning to ones own existence is what raises a man above merely getting and spending.”

–from Man and his Symbols, Carl G. Jung

There can be no hope for mankind without a renewed and updated spirituality. It is unfashionable to say this among the hard-bitten intellectuals of the modern world, but I myself can see no other alternative. Human civilization is confronted with the preconditions of apocalyptic collapse—environmental devastation unfolding on a widespread and unpredictable scale. To regard the nightmare occurring in the Gulf of Mexico as a kind of temporary and unique tragedy to be endured and then moved on from is to adopt a dangerous and idiotic position of denial; it is to persist in living in the childish world of illusion. This new age we are living in requires that human beings view reality at its starkest, most naked and anxiety-provoking, something our recent generations of corporate media addicts have been loathe to do. But beyond then, we must   engage the material world through a lens of spiritual commitment, and strive to find our rightful place within that world. We must take up the hero’s journey to discover and create a unified meaning in daily existence, one which will put our horribly damaged planet, and our own horribly damaged human psyches, on a path of healing.

The long term effects on the ecosystem of BP’s leak in the Gulf will very possibly alter the trajectory of all life on this planet, and there will be other disasters like it in the future. Indeed, there is one just like it occurring in Nigeria at the present moment, courtesy of Shell Oil—it simply isn’t reported in America, because, frankly, Americans really don’t give a shit about what happens to Africans, and the American media corporations are not going to waste valuable programming time telling us about it, particularly when it might make a mighty oil company look bad. Hell, they’ve minimized coverage of our own domestic disaster in the Gulf, as far as they possibly can. And for all Obama’s posturing about placing a “moratorium on off-shore drilling,” the dangerous practice continues: BP is still operating its Atlantis well, a mere 150 miles off the coast of New Orleans. On the day I am writing this, Secretary of the Interior Salazar made a point in publicly announcing that this ban is “only a pause, not a stop.” Our leaders are unequivocal: the reckless, destructive exploitation of the planet will continue. They are still keen to wager our collective future for the massive private profits and cheap political convenience of the oil-based economy.

Meanwhile, the energy corporations continue to bomb the mountains of West Virginia into oblivion, destroying the drinking water of entire communities, in the pursuit of “clean coal.” They are pushing hard to extend domestic drilling for natural gas, presenting this, too, as a “clean fuel.” This “clean fuel” exists in tiny pockets in such geographic locations as the Marcellus Shale formations that spread across almost all of southern New York State. In order to gather the gas from these tiny, discreet pockets, they must employ a drilling practice known as “hydrofracking”—each hydrofracked well produces between one and 4.5 million gallons of extremely toxic waste water. The energy corporations’ plan for disposing of this extremely toxic waste water is to truck it across very poorly maintained rural roads and dump it all in open air holding tanks. The watersheds of some of the most densely populated areas on the east coast, i.e. New York City, would be directly risked. Within the past week of my writing, there have been gas well explosions in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Texas.

In the background behind all of this is a renewed push for more nuclear power plants. Even many nominal “environmentalists” have begun to bang the drums for big nuke. Their thinking is that at least the use of nuclear power does not pump ever greater quantities of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere, so that its widespread adoption might slow down the advance of global-warming and climate change. But while nuclear power plants might not produce hydrocarbon emissions, they do produce other toxic pollutants which might threaten our continued existence. Over the years, cancer-causing tritium leaks have been detected at 26 domestic nuclear power plants. Nobody has ever come up with any sort of plan for how to safely dispose of the waste from nuclear power plants, which can remain lethal for millenniums. The best our most brilliant minds have come up with is to bury it deep in the ground, where it will remain safely shielded from life, so long as an unexpected earthquake does not occur; a nice strategy, so long as we ignore the fact that the natural history of the planet is the history of unexpected earthquakes. The great terror when it comes to nuclear power plants is the potential for a full reactor melt-down, such as occurred at the Chernobyl plant in the Northern Ukraine, in 1986. The long-term consequences of the Chernobyl disaster have occurred across several countries, covering a widespread portion of northeastern Europe, and will continue to be felt well into the distant future. But we are assured by the corporate media that such catastrophes could never occur at an American plant, for they are safely constructed and well regulated. This, of course, is more or less exactly what they were telling us only a few months ago about off-shore oil drilling.

Nearly every member of our contemporary society has made a Faustian pact with reality, in exchange for the gift of seemingly cheap and convenient energy. In order to heat our homes, to illuminate our dark nights, to keep ourselves spectacularly entertained and to transport ourselves across fantastic distances at dizzying speeds, we have been willing to accept the steady, relentless contamination and destruction of the very ecosystem on which we must depend for our continued existence. We have pushed our way into a corner where environmental catastrophe has now become an unavoidable fact of daily existence. We have ceded vast quantities of wealth and nearly total political control to the corporations responsible for providing this energy, and we are seemingly helpless to stop them as they grow increasingly reckless in their pursuit of more cheap, convenient energy. And we cannot begin to imagine what we can do about any of this.

We bemoan it and cringe in horror at it all, but then we place it in one compartment, and turn about to open the separate compartments where we store the facts and pressing conditions of our daily lives—our legitimate need to earn our daily bread and maintain adequate shelter, but beyond that, our yearning for a lifestyle of casual opulence; our discontented hunger for mindless consumption, for cheap baubles and trinkets and easily absorbed, thoughtless electronic entertainments. This is the grand illusion we exist within mentally—the American Hologram, a technological utopia, in which we never have to confront the viciously destructive and unsustainable environmental reality that props it all up, and which teeters now, closer and closer to final collapse. And no amount of intellectual argument will ever truly break through this compartmentalized, illusionary worldview, stirring us to act decisively before it is too late. For this entire compartmentalized worldview is itself the product of modern intellectual thought, our inheritance from the enlightenment. No, only a deeply felt and transformative spiritual awakening can save our sorry asses now.

The difficult question to answer is this: What might this spirituality look like? Not programmatic, not dogmatic, and not authoritarian. The popular intellectual view is that modern science during the enlightenment liberated the human mind from the rigid shackles of traditional religion and superstition. In many ways this was a gift—there was a great deal in the medieval religious worldview that needed to be thrown away. The persistence of that religious worldview is a great tragedy of modern life, and a substantial part of what compromises our ability to move on and make progress on the terrible problems we now face, whether we are talking about the medieval worldview of Islamic fundamentalists in Saudi Arabia, or the medieval worldview of the Christian fundamentalists in these United States. But the persistence of these fossilized ways of looking at the world is a dialectic reaction to the vigorous shunning by the modern scientific worldview of any form of sincere or meaningful spirituality. The dominant worldview of modern life is one of mechanistic soullessness. The most uneducated react to this heartless affront by clinging fiercely to simplistic dogma.

Furthermore, because the scientific worldview is one of compartmentalization, and because it deliberately separates out all spiritual concerns or questions from the more important and valuable nuts and bolts of the empirical sciences, it abandons what has traditionally been among the primary concerns of human consciousness. Questions about spirituality and higher meaning are condescendingly pushed away into a darkened corner. And within those shadows, all manner of ancient bigotry, pathological religiosity and harmful delusion continue to thrive, in place of a more enlightened and useful spiritual development. The majority of modern citizens know that the simplistic dogmas of the fundamentalists are not really tenable; yet they, too, feel lost and despairing in the mechanistic universe we have inherited from the enlightenment era. At certain moments of human existence, nearly everybody hungers for an awareness of higher meaning and purpose. A society which separates out these concerns and places them far away from the realm where its best and brightest thinking occurs leaves its members extremely vulnerable to all manner of unhealthy obsessions and manipulations.

The great gifts and achievements of the enlightenment, the scientific advancements that have built our world of daily miracles, have made efficiency the supreme goal and good, at the expense of any sort of sustainable worldview. The end result of the scientific revolution of the enlightenment was to compartmentalize human consciousness; at the level of society, this manifests in the phenomena of specialization—certain problems of daily living become the exclusive province of a particular kind of specialist. A specialist is a person who allows him or herself to become entirely absorbed in a career. A specialist’s entire consciousness and worldview becomes submerged by the facts and demands of a particular specialty, to the point where any awareness whatsoever of the rest of the world remains locked out of the compartment.

Now in a world of ever greater knowledge accumulation, some specialization is obviously unavoidable and to be greatly desired. We will need all the specialists and experts we can muster in the years ahead, as we struggle to react to environmental catastrophe and collapsing infrastructure. But the specialist of the future must be a man or woman who operates with a sense of higher purpose and meaning, who sees him or herself not as a mere technician toiling within a discreet compartment of the machine, but instead as an engaged element of a unified reality.

The capitalist philosophy arose out of the enlightenment; if it was the child of Adam Smith, it was certainly the grandson of Isaac Newton and a direct descendent of Descartes. Capitalism was the inevitable result of the mechanistic view of reality taking hold of human consciousness: that the Universe itself was simply a machine, and all that existed within it merely pieces of that machine. As the cataloguer’s perception of life took hold, the fundamental unity of creation was broken down into so many separate cogs. The vibrant and living earth that had long been home to our race and to every other living thing became instead a cold, lifeless mechanism to be manipulated for profit. Ancestral and sacred lands became “natural resources”—no longer to be caringly maintained by thoughtful stewardship, but rather to be exploited, through ruthless, money-grubbing management. It took no great leap to extend this view towards humanity itself—to come to view the human individual as but simply one more soulless resource to be managed and manipulated in the grand pursuit of profit.

Over three centuries of existing within this dominant consciousness has damned near bred any shred of divinity right out of us. As much as we like to think of ourselves as dynamic, self-creating subjects in the all-absorbing, ongoing drama of our epic life adventure, the mundane truth of daily life is that we mostly resemble all the non-sentient objects with which we share this plane of reality—we give every appearance of being just as firmly governed by Newton’s First Law of Motion as any soccer ball kicked across an open field: Objects in motion will tend to stay in motion. Objects at rest will tend to stay at rest. Once propelled by the momentum of a good solid kick, we will fly, bounce and roll over that expanse of green, until the initial burst of energy has played out and the friction of gravity overcomes us, bringing us to halt in a spot where, in accordance to inertia, we will steadfastly remain until such time as the next kick comes along.

Oh, I have surely over-simplified. We are, after all, psychologically complex beings, and the forces that play upon us are more varied and dynamic than those that propel a soccer ball forward and finally bring it to halt. Still, all those complicated, emotionally and psychologically nuanced forces that influence and direct our decision making process, both on a day to day basis and over the course of years, can still be pretty easily lined up on either side of the dichotomy: either the kick forward or else friction’s drag to rest.

Each morning the steel-toed boot of necessity kicks us out of our pleasant early morning slumber, propelling us forward into the morning routine: the chatter of the radio DJ and the news from somewhere else; a hastily prepared and consumed first meal of the day; a few brief seconds of eye contact with that near-stranger in the mirror as we brush our teeth and splash cold water onto our faces. Habitually, many of us will gulp coffee, caffeine now a necessary infusion to make our flight forward into the day smoother and less painful.

Perhaps, if we are what are known as “morning people,” or if we have had the proper training or inspiration over the years, this morning routine for us will have taken on something of the tranquil aspect of the ritual. We will wake early enough so that we do not have to rush. We will have time to properly chew, swallow and appreciate our morning oatmeal. Perhaps we will spend some time on our porch or in the garden, examining the progress of the day lilies and the salvia plant, listening to the sunrise birdsong, observing the world coming to life around us. Ah, but we are still only that kicked soccer ball, set in motion by force, bouncing out across the world.

And out into the world we will go, to work. If we are particularly unfortunate, the day will be nothing more than a series of kicks sending us flying first in one direction, then in another and another and another; a dizzying back and forth between supervisors, customers, clients. Even those lucky enough to work with relative autonomy and very little if any supervision still are compelled by that primary kick of financial necessity, if nothing else. Boom, boom, boom, all day long we feel that kick, and bounce and fly forward through time and space, our body and our being a battlefield for the competing forces of momentum and friction, for movement and rest. How can it be any wonder that so many of us simply collapse on the couch each night—with the day’s final kick finally worn off, the friction of gravity now drags us to rest. And it will take one hell of a kick to get us to move again now. For most of us, only the next day’s hard boot of financial necessity will have any chance at all to budge us forward.

To be certain, we are more aware than that soccer ball of the forces kicking us forward: mortgage or rent; groceries and utility payments; health insurance, car loans and all the other assorted bills of modern living; the cable television and high speed internet, to keep us entertained during our evening down-time of inertia; perhaps a 401k, so we can live the dream years from now, when we finally reach the golden age of retirement, when we can begin to come to rest for good. We are aware of the forces which propel us, in that we have the mindless soccer ball beat. But how accurate would it be to say that we truly reflect upon those forces, that we truly consider the manner in which they have structured our daily reality? I would submit that at a fundamental level, most of us, most of the time, are operating with no more sense of awareness than that feckless soccer ball. The kick comes and we react.

Now let us ask: what would a soccer ball do if a particularly forceful kick were to send it in the direction of a sheer-faced, five hundred foot high cliff? Why, it would simply bounce, bounce, bounce along, over the edge and into the deep chasm below. And suppose that soccer ball were kicked onto a train track, and brought to rest by inertia in the path of an oncoming locomotive? Well naturally enough it would just sit tight, waiting patiently to be crushed flat and torn to shreds.

Now suppose we were sitting in the bleachers of the largest cosmic soccer field in the Universe, incredibly vast and immense, with 300 million soccer balls all lined up and waiting to be kicked. At one end of the field, instead of a goal, there is a great fire pit. A small army of soccer players on the field begins to methodically kick the soccer balls about, and away they fly, bouncing around the great field and careening into one another. Eventually one of them, then another and another and another, make their way down the field and bounce or fly into the fire pit waiting on the other end. From our position high above in the stands, it soon becomes clear to us that the small army of soccer players is systematically kicking each and every ball toward that ultimate end—destruction in the fire pit. But of course the other soccer balls still on the field do nothing to save themselves from this promised fate. They merely bounce and fly about where they are, then come to rest and wait to be kicked forward again. Even as they cross the midfield and approach near enough to the fire to feel the terrible heat, they simply continue to bounce along toward destruction.  They merely react to every kick, then react to the force of inertia, dragging them to rest, then react again to the next kick, flying away in whichever direction it sends them.

Perhaps you get the point: The forces that kick us forward through life in this dimension have been shepherding us toward destruction, surely and steadily, for a very long time now. For years the evidence has been stark, that the capitalist-industrialist system we live within is unsustainable and inhumane. The British Petroleum oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico has only been the most recent and horrific example of this—the undeniable evidence that has arrived on our doorway, the bit of news we cannot entirely ignore.

Still for those of us not living directly in the path of destruction, it remains unclear whether or not this tragedy will be enough to overcome the inertia of our daily lives. Mass expressions of outrage aside, we still appear to be bouncing idly along, or else sitting and waiting, wherever gravity has dragged us to rest. In this we continue to fulfill the role that destiny seems to have assigned us: to be the last living fuel burned down by the consumer culture, the cogs that keep the tottering machine of late industrial-capitalism creaking along towards its final and spectacular collapse. We wait and we react, even as the chasm approaches, or even as the train bears down upon us, or even as the terrible flames draw near.

The inertia that weighs us down, limiting our ability to even conceptualize any sort of true and fundamental change for this doomed reality we have inherited and continue to create is intense and powerful. The daily kicks we absorb require immediate reactions, all of which serve to reinforce the status quo of inertia. The car must be fed gasoline so that we can reach our job and earn the money we desperately need to live. Our homes must be heated, which in almost all cases in today’s reality requires fossil fuels. In our modern corporate empire, very few of us know of any way to feed ourselves that does not require us to financially support the environmentally destructive and vicious practices of the industrial agricultural system. And when it comes to our precious bits of free time, even then very few of us know how to entertain ourselves or occupy our brains without the further inputs of large amounts of fossil fuel powered energy.

Intellectually, most of us understand that the world cannot go on like this indefinitely, not without slipping into further collapse and decay, not without incurring ever greater environmental destruction. As we continue to burn through fossil fuel at a staggering rate, the sources still left in the ground become increasingly difficult and dangerous to reach. Disasters such as BP’s recent leak in the Gulf of Mexico are inevitable in this reality we continue to embrace and help recreate at every step of our daily lives. Intellectually, we know this. But the forces of daily living press hard upon us at every second, continually propelling us to make choices in defiance of what we know. The inertia created by the generations of our mechanistic-capitalist consciousness makes it extremely difficult for us to even conceptualize or imagine how we might avoid the inevitable disaster we are proceeding towards like so many wind-up toys.

Within this capitalist consciousness we are locked into, the solutions that most readily appear are pathetically inadequate. A new generation of advertizing presents us the illusion of “green consumption”—that we can continue to maintain our capitalist system and still somehow stave off environmental destruction through making morally superior consumer choices; never mind that these more “environmentally friendly” products are often transparently phony, and even more often priced at a level that can never gain traction and substantial market shares within our floundering economy. Facile thinkers such as Thomas Friedman bang the drum for an alternative energy utopia, in typical baby-boomer style invoking the heroic memory of the Apollo moon landing, insisting that our entire capitalist structure could be easily enough converted to “sustainable” energy sources; never mind that any serious researchers of sustainable energy (as opposed to entrepreneurs fishing for start-up capital) uniformly believe that the voracious energy appetite created by a century of cheap fossil fuels can never be fed by “sustainable” sources. The professional non-profit crowd that lobbies in Washington insists that we need only greater safety regulations; never mind that the fossil fuel energy long ago bought the entire Federal Government, from the executive branch, to the regulatory agencies, to all the Federal judges who might someday review their violations—which is, of course, the logical thing for them to do within the capitalist system.

The fundamental problem that must be overcome is the capitalist system itself, that product of the cold and inhuman mechanistic worldview. This is much easier said than done; much easier to state than to conceptualize, let alone implement. In the lived, real-time experience of second to second decision making, we continue to react as the moment requires, continue to reinforce the web of inertia that keeps us in motion as a part of this spiraling death machine of society. Breaking away from this cannot be easy, will require a species-wide shift in consciousness. One way or another, a miracle must occur. We must become like some magic soccer ball who can see the booted foot coming and dodge out of the way, then send itself off into the sky in the opposite direction, flying free and clear.

This has been the epoch of miracles in daily life. With the mere flick of a tiny plastic switch, even the smallest child can send the cursed and ancient dark to flight. Warm rooms are to be taken for granted by all but the most destitute and miserable. The world itself has shrunk down to a manageable scale—the humble tradesman can travel over mountain ranges and across valleys to reach his work before the sun has a chance to rise. The faceless legions who fill our office parks and cubicle farms shrug their collective shoulders at covering 50 or even 100 miles round trip in a day, making the country estate a rather common place luxury. Every day thousands of travelers wake up on one side of the world and go to bed on another, and do not think twice about it, unless to complain about some very minor inconvenience or delay they encountered along the way.

Convenience itself has become the grand illusion, the maya shakti, of our age, obscuring our collective ability to see and engage with reality on any truly significant level. Food and warm shelter, the most concrete concerns that have engaged the human mind (indeed, the minds of all living beings) throughout our tenure on this planet, have been rendered abstract and secondary. We get food by driving to a great big store and exchanging little pieces of paper for it; or, more likely, exchanging information contained on a plastic card. We get the heat we need to stay alive during the cold winter nights by turning a dial on a wall in our home. All of this convenience liberates us to focus our attentions on more important matters: primarily earning more pieces of little paper, or getting more of the necessary information installed back onto our plastic cards.

Convenience and miracle, the birthright of even the more modest citizens of this Empire, denied only to the most wretched few. And all of it bought with oil, the stored sunlight of long ago days, a million years or more; the blood of the dinosaurs and other ancient life forms, turned thick and black and stored deep down under the earth. And if the Empire must send armies to murder distant populations in order to keep that sweet, sweet oil and convenience coming, we will perhaps shudder a moment, tssk-tssk to ourselves, but ultimately we will move on and continue our lives of convenience. If the side effect of that convenience is to clog the very air we breathe, we will simply choke on our luxury and move on.

And I would of course have to be a crank to find fault with any of this, and a hypocritical one at that, as I ruminate the pre-dawn hours away on my laptop computer, contemplatively sipping coffee, that exotic and luxurious product of an entirely different climate and region of the world. And occasionally I will pause to check for news headlines from all over the planet. Me, an anonymous nobody—but oh, in this age of wonders and miracles, far more well informed and up-to-date than the Italian princes who waited 24 long years for Marco Polo to return.

As citizens of the Empire of Convenience we all make concessions, both moral and intellectual. There are things we just don’t think about, that we push far away to the back of our brains; the true cost of convenience is a debt too great to seriously think about, even at moments when it would seem unavoidable to behold. Why, if the pursuit of that oil might cause a catastrophic tear in the floor of the ocean, creating a gusher of death that explodes up and spreads out of control relentlessly killing every living things for hundreds of miles, with no end in sight…well, as loyal citizens of this Empire of Convenience, we will simply turn our heads and move on. We might, perhaps, find a scapegoat to absorb the terror and outrage we feel at our deadly convenience. But ultimately we will just move on. Or so we imagine.

The truth is, nobody knows how bad the current oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico will get. British Petroleum’s initial estimates of 5000 barrels a day seeping out from the ocean floor were quickly shown to be woefully low, by a factor of about 20. Independent analysis by people like Steve Wereley, an engineering professor at Purdue University, have used the what little available video footage there is, and some fairly basic geometry, to determine that the amount is much closer to between 70,000-90,000 barrels a day, perhaps even more. Keep in mind, it is very difficult for independent engineers like Werely to formulate completely accurate analysis, due to the very poor quality of video and photographs released by BP—Werely has stated that he believes BP has released only the poorest quality footage that it has. It could be even worse. Still, based on what has been made available, BP has been forced to admit that, indeed, their initial estimates were ridiculously low.

Only a completely credulous imbecile could possibly believe that British Petroleum ever believed the 5000 barrels a day number. They were obviously low-balling and obviously knew very well that they were low-balling. It seems rather amazing that they thought they could get away with this…but maybe it really shouldn’t seem so amazing. They have, after all, been handed complete control over clean up operations, and given total authority over the spill site. When independent researchers have attempted to get close to the catastrophe, the foreign-owned corporation British Petroleum has kept them at bay, deploying the Coast Guard, a branch of the United States military, as if it were BP’s own private security firm.

More amazing has been the degree to which BP has been able to control any and all information about this catastrophe, from the initial blown rig, to the rate of oil leakage, to the potential toxic hazards faced by the initial workers on the rig and the clean up workers. What we are talking about is the greatest environmental crime to occur in this generation and the Federal Government has seen fit to let the primary suspect: 1. Conduct the clean up and investigation 2. Close off the crime scene to any independent observers 3. Maintain complete control over any information about that crime scene.

British Petroleum maintains that they are sharing information with “relevant parties.” The Federal Government—the same one that can easily subpoena our payroll stubs, our investment records, our internet search history, or any other so-called private information of ours that it might take an interest in, would have us believe that when it comes to dealing with British Petroleum, they are in a position of having to beg and cajole for information. The private citizens of this so-called Democratic Republic—whether they are merely concerned onlookers from around the nation, or the very natives of the Gulf states who are in the process of having their future health and livelihoods destroyed, or even the fishermen and other clean up workers currently getting sick from the toxic sludge, will all simply have to wait patiently for whatever scraps and crumbs of information eventually trickle down.

As recently as May 21, BP’s Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward had the unmitigated arrogance and gall to announce that “everything we see so far suggests that the overall environmental impact will be modest.” Over the weekend that followed this stunningly vicious PR lie, the oil washed up on the Louisiana shoreline, pushing 12 miles deep into the marshes, overwhelming two different Brown Pelican rookeries. Apparently when you are the visionary leader of a 21^st century high-tech oil corporation, the destruction of the breeding grounds of a species only recently removed from the endangered species list is a “modest impact.” But, of course, the fate of the Brown Pelican really is only a very small part of the story. A May 22 Associated Press story reported that marine scientists in the region have concluded that cleaning up the Louisiana wetlands will very likely prove impossible. Generations of people living on the Louisiana coastline will watch and wait, across decades, as Tony Hayward’s “modest” environmental destruction plays out. Entire species of marine animals and fauna will never be seen on this planet again.

By the time the oil washed up in the Louisiana marshes, it had been destroying marine life for over a month. BP has been unable to contain the leak and there is no reason to believe that they will be able to contain it any time soon. On Sunday, May 23, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar began to indicate that the cozy relationship between the Federal Government and British Petroleum may be reaching the end, threatening to “push them out of the way” and take charge of the leak if they were unable to stop it soon. The problem with this bit of posturing is that, according to Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, the Federal Government doesn’t actually have the technological ability to stop the oil leak. Only the big oil corporations like BP know how to do that (except that they apparently don’t)—that was why they were left in charge in the first place.

That’s right: The Federal Government, even as they have authorized off-shore oil drilling, (even as Obama had his pen dipped in ink and ready to authorize MORE off-shore drilling) has never bothered to come up with a plan for safely containing any accidents that might result from this very chancy practice. They have left that to the industry itself to worry about, assuming, as they always seem to do, that the industry would somehow do the responsible thing, even though they never in fact do. And so once again, we are harvesting the bitter fruits of our Federal Government’s 30 year history of eviscerating regulations for the short term benefit of the multinational corporations and the economic elite who own them. Only this time, instead of destroying the paper economy, they are destroying massive sections of ocean, the very cradle of life. How much it will destroy, we really still cannot begin to guess. Satellite photos show that the leak has now reached the loop current, which will bring it into the Florida Keys, the Carribean Sea, and up the east coast of the Atlantic ocean…and beyond to who knows where. With no end in sight for the oil leaking out of the ground, it is impossible to predict what the eventual destruction will be. It sure as hell won’t be “modest,” though.

Meanwhile, outrage and anger are the order of the day—for within this Empire of Convenience, no comforts are ever so cheap and easy to come by as anger and outrage. The Obama administration, all set only six weeks ago to authorize increased drilling off the coastline, despite the now obvious lack of proper safety precautions, has now begun to express their anger and outrage with BP’s pathetic efforts. Ken Salazar has become particularly vociferous of late in his criticism of BP…the very same Ken Salazar who appointed former BP executive, Sylvia Baca, for the post of deputy assistant secretary for land and minerals management. Meanwhile, the Federal government has not even shut down BP’s other deep water oil rig, the Atlantis, which continues to drill a mere hundred miles further off shore.

And then we have Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, the man who would be 2012 standard bearer for the Republican Party. The very same Republican Party that has led this relentless 30 year march to strip all industry regulation and to kill attempts for alternative energy in the crib, which ensured we would get to arrive at such a catastrophe some day. The very same Republican Party that passionately supported Dick Cheney when he was holding his secret meetings with oil company executives, the very meetings which led to such loopholes in democracy as the one that allows BP to avoid telling the Louisiana fishermen who are now working to clean up this mess exactly what kind of environmental hazards they are facing.

And so, too, among the citizen’s of this Empire, does anger and outrage swell. For many of us it is an intoxicating jolt, a heady refresher from our normal sleep-walking existence. On the street, over the internet and at the office water coolers, talk turns to boycotting British Petroleum. Well why not? I, for one, will never buy gas at a BP station again. Let the motherfuckers go bankrupt. And somebody, please, kidnap Tony Hayward and drown him in a barrel of crude oil; may he choke to death in exactly the same manner that his callous arrogance has condemned countless living beings in the Gulf. Oh, let the outrage and anger flow, righteous and pure. As the great philosopher St. Augustine noted, Anger is indeed one of Hope’s two lovely daughters. But we cannot forget that the other daughter is Courage. And all our anger and outrage will be so much sound and fury signifying nothing, if we cannot find the courage to view this as the final wake up call to change the way we live every part of our daily lives, the way we structure every aspect of our economy and society.

That necessary courage will not come from any of our elected political leaders—of that we can be sure. They offer only the false promise of continuing this phony Empire of Convenience. That is perhaps the greatest danger of all that we face right now, that we might abandon Courage and send our fair Anger out alone into the world, as we continue to cling to the illusions promised by this Empire of Convenience. Without her sister Courage to chaperone her, Anger is destined to go morally stray, to become nothing but a slatternly whore, cheaply available for the use of any two-bit demagogue or cause. Because Convenience is the biggest pimp of them all.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave addresses the limited understanding and acceptance of reality that marks most human experience. As in much of Plato’s work, the main character and spokesman for his ideas is his former teacher, the heroically martyred, Athenian philosopher Socrates. In this Dialogue, Socrates explains to Plato’s brother Glaucon that human beings are like the people trapped in a dark, underground cave, chained in place forever. Unable to ever move away from their spot in the cave, they naturally assume that the cave alone exists. Meanwhile, a fire burns behind them and from time to time other people carry various statues across the cave, in front of the fire, casting shadows upon the walls before the chained prisoners. The prisoners of the cave believe these shadows are real beings of some sort, and they tell their fellow prisoners stories about the nature of these beings that move about before them. They form various, fiercely held opinions about these shadows and argue vehemently with each other when their opinions conflict.

Eventually one prisoner manages to slip from his chains. He slowly climbs up from the cave and out to the surface above. At first when he climbs out of the cave and encounters the open sky, the brightness of the sun overwhelms him. His eyes recoil in sharp pain and he is blinded. But gradually his eyes adjust and he begins to take in true reality and soon enough he feels moved to go back for his comrades, to liberate them so that they, too, can know the truth. He climbs back down into the cave, into the chamber where his friends and family remain imprisoned. He excitedly tells them about how fixed and limited their perspective has been. He reveals the true nature of the shadow beings they have been obsessing over. He describes the potentially bright and glorious new world they can ascend to if they chose. The prisoners in the cave respond by hurling abuse at him. They call him a liar. They tell him to shut up.

As Socrates explains it, that one escaped prisoner is the philosopher. He realizes that reality as presented to him and agreed upon by those around him is a farce. He struggles to free himself from his chains, to climb up from his prison to the open and limitless sky above. He suffers the pain that first accompanies true insight and enlightenment. And then he returns below to offer liberation to the others. As Socrates knew only too well, they will curse him for this. Indeed, in the case of Socrates himself, as an old philosophy professor of mine liked to quip, they will “invite him to drink Hemlock.”

When addressing the catastrophic problems facing our contemporary society, writer Joe Bageant has hit upon something close to Plato’s cave metaphor with his own concept of the “Hologram.” The Hologram is that great, blanketing presence of pop culture trivia and mindless consumption, which keeps Americans plugged in and giggling, fat, secure and amused while our financial experts busily recreate the economic disparity of the Robber Baron era and our system of voting is converted into a computerized sham with no traceable paper trail. It is a multi-billion dollar a year industry to keep the public entertained, distracted and misinformed; strategically educated and herded into a prison of the mind that is every bit as fixed and limited as the shackled cave of Plato’s allegory. Attempts to convince average Americans to unplug from the Hologram, to give up their hours a day of televised entertainment and to spend more time thinking about the actions of their government or the environmental and social impact of their own consumer choices, are generally met with the same scorn that greets Socrates’ philosopher upon returning to the Cave.

But where Plato’s Cave is merely allegory, Bageant’s Hologram is an essentially realistic description of the world in which most of us in the United States still live. And while one can assume that the prisoners in the Cave would remain chained against reality forever without the philosopher’s interference, there is a very real possibility that for many currently locked into the Hologram, reality itself will be the liberating force that pulls the plug. Already the Hologram has begun to short out and go dark in places, as the cheap oil and easy credit fueled American orgy of consumption begins to wind down and crash. The reality and truth that waits outside of the Hologram, in as much as it can be glimpsed at all, naturally enough appears harsh and overwhelming to eyes conditioned to accept the Holograms dim and tawdry illusions. Yet for those willing to embrace it, reality offers opportunity far grander than the Hologram’s placating shadow world. An authentic life away from the Hologram offers the chance for consciousness development and true spiritual evolution, after these lost decades in which the easy consumption and instant gratification of the Empire’s Hologram have infantilized and tragically stunted the human soul.

But as the famous cliché notes “illusions dies hard.” The echo chamber within the Hologram—the “official voices” of society—are exactly like the bickering prisoners in the Cave. They might argue passionately about the nature of the flickering shadows on the wall, but they have no patience for impudent philosophers who try to reveal the entire game for the charade that it is. And so long their own corner of the Cave remains warm and well lit, they will steadfastly deny that anything too drastic is occurring anywhere else. “Be patient,” they will assure those at the far end of the cave, suddenly panicking and in the dark. “Be patient. Things will return to normal soon enough. And by all means, do not listen to the conspiracy theorists who claim that all the lights down here are set to go out.”

Of course, there have been philosophers crying out for years that the American Hologram was fundamentally built on illusions—illusions, and an imperial grab of the rest of the world’s resources. The United States, accounting for slightly less than 5% of the world’s population, consumes somewhat more than 25% of the resources. A generation ago or more, any honest assessment of reality would have recognized this as untenable. However, honest assessments are rarely if ever heard within the Hologram. Instead, maintaining the Hologram’s illusions has required an entire class of professional liars—men and women who would have been known in Plato’s time as sophists. Socrates viewed the sophists as his greatest enemies, describing them as men who could use their expertise with language to “make the weaker argument defeat the stronger.” Then, as now, they were worked on behalf of the powerful and rich.

For years now the Hologram’s sophists have sold a vision of a future world transformed by the glories of global capitalism. Never mind that Americans consume so much more than everybody else right now; eventually the magic of unfettered free trade and unrestrained corporatism will raise the standard of living for the rest of the world and bring it up to the American level. All through the Clinton 90’s, when the American manufacturing capacity was being systematically taken apart and shipped off to wherever the workers were poorest and most desperate, the “big brains” who cheerlead for global capitalism, the Thomas Friedmans of the world, assured us that the end result would be a grand Utopia of cheap fast food and recreational shopping for all. Somehow, through earning slave wages for sewing plush toys for Disney or hoodies for the Gap, the poor third world sweatshop workers would achieve something like middle-class American prosperity: Eight billion plus global citizens, all consuming like good Americans, all plugged into the great corporate Hologram through their I-pods, their X-boxes and their plasma television sets, and all singing together like in a Coca-Cola commercial.

How this could ever be environmentally sustainable was not a topic the capitalist “brainiacs” were ever willing to honestly address—in their calculations, an additional five Earths’ worth of resources was assumed. Technology would somehow make it magically appear, in complete defiance of the Second Law of Thermal Dynamics. This sounds farcical, but it was, and remains, essential economic dogma within the Hologram. Capitalism is a great devouring monster, all mouth and no eyes, and since it depends upon ever-increasing levels of consumption, increased consumption must be relentlessly pursued, and damn the consequences. “Gross Domestic Product” is regarded as the most critical of all economic indicators, though all GDP really represents is the total amount of resources consumed within an economy—from a capitalist perspective, a natural disaster is a great financial windfall, because it requires so much consumption to re-build afterwards.

Indeed, one need pay only passing attention to the publications specifically aimed at the “investor class” to understand that the climate-change created environmental catastrophe already underway is viewed with giddy anticipation by our capitalist overlords. Within the framework of their worldview, it will all just be another golden opportunity to keep consumption ramped up and the flow of capital moving upward, where it belongs. For the potentially billions of souls who will be left dispossessed and destitute…well, they need merely wait patiently for the few crumbs of capital that will inevitably dribble back down to them…perhaps not soon enough to provide food and shelter for children who are starving and dying in the elements…but still, “all in good time.”

And what is to become of the American worker, once all the jobs have been shipped away? “Not to worry,” the sophists of capitalism smugly assured us for years. They have steadfastly asserted that being freed from the obligation of producing actual commodities is the greatest thing that has ever happened to the American worker. “Americans just don’t want to make shoes!” they insisted, as if all the American shoe factories shut down over the past 20-30 years were closed due to a lack of workers. While the poorest people in the world took over the manufacturing of almost all commodities sold in America, the Americans themselves would be freed up to pursue bigger and better things. For awhile, the “internet” was somehow, magically, going to be that bigger and better thing. Through working “online” and creating a “web-based business” Joe Lunch Pail and his wife Donna were somehow going to achieve financial abundance, presumably by selling some sort of vaguely defined “product” or “service” to other internet entrepaneurs. Perhaps they would even be able to “market” their business to the emerging middle class of former third world economies, now miraculously surging with prosperity from 49 cents an hour sweatshop jobs.

Then, after the dot-com crash, a new idea was put forth. Struggling American workers were now encouraged to join up with the “ownership society.” The phrase became a kind of “abracadabra” bandied about by the sophists in the media, as if to generate magical protection against the credit frenzy that was simultaneously driving the market to historical highs while meanwhile leveraging the national economy to the max. Without anymore good jobs, or the prospect for anymore good jobs, the America worker was now going to achieve long term economic prosperity and stability through taking on staggering levels of debt and using it to “own” things. Debt accumulation became as patriotic as wearing a flag lapel. For the first time in human history, a population was told that the very best way they could support their nation’s war effort was by increasing their own consumption. For a few brief years during the past decade, it actually became an article of popular economic faith that housing and real estate prices had somehow been scientifically proven to never drop in price. As long as one could borrow enough money to “own” real estate, one could count on a steady rise in his fortune.

The crash of October 2008 gave the lie to all that. A year and a half later, the nation muddles along, trying to make sense of it all. Optimism is still the official position of capitalism’s sophists—nearly every day they announce some new statistic meant to prove that the “recovery” is at hand. Fewer and fewer of the prisoners in the Cave are buying it. As the global capitalist system staggers and lurches,  as catastrophic weather continues to reshape the face of the planet and as supplies of natural resources continue to dwindle, the Hologram flickers and burns out inside of individual homes and within entire communities across the country. The class of the dispossessed grows larger every day.

And so the real job for the contemporary philosopher may, in fact, be somewhat different than what Socrates might have envisioned—rather than helping our fellow citizens unplug, we must instead help them adjust and make sense out of what they are being disconnected from. Just as the overwhelming majority of American citizens have been conditioned to acquire all of their daily calories within the corporate hologram, they have learned to acquire all of their ideas there, as well. Just as they would not begin to know how to feed themselves outside of the Hologram, they have no clue of how to think outside of it, either. As the challenging future rises up in the road ahead to greet us, we must boldly learn to do both, and fast.

The complex, interconnected global economy that most of humanity now depends upon for its basic sustenance was long ago designed to entirely depend upon fossil fuels that are now quickly running dry. The life support systems of the planet itself are now compromised, facing possible collapse. We are hurling now into a future that any reasonable person must view as potentially catastrophic. The economic elites know this very well, better than we do, for it was their own plotting and greed that has brought this reality about. And so as we stand now on a kind of precipice of history, they are quick to raise the stakes, quick and unblinking, confident that our own vague awareness of impending doom will paralyze us, push us to go docile and once again fold.

The “Golden Age” has only ever existed as some ancient myth, intruding on our human consciousness from we know not where, a persistent whisper of what we once were and a promise for what we could become. For all of recorded human history we have been ruled by a Dominator Consciousness. Indeed, recorded history is a byproduct of the Dominator Consciousness. The warlords and chieftains who rose up to take power needed clerks to categorize and record all that they had conquered, to better facilitate control in the present and to boast of their prowess before the generations to come.

And so human civilization arose, always in the shape of the Pyramid: A great mass of struggling workers squeezed together across the entire base of the structure, ruled over by a small elite group at the top, with directly below them a slightly larger managerial class—the engineers and accountants; the technicians and the priesthood; and the writers of propaganda, who create stories to tell the rulers how great they are, and to tell the masses how fortunate it is that we live in this greatest of all possible worlds. In more recent times, a charade known as “voting” has been enacted to allow the workers along the base to feel as if they play some role in controlling society. But those at the top of the Pyramid continue to define the state of reality, and have made sure that this charade of voting will never threaten the Pyramid’s structural integrity.

We have always been told that before recorded history, before the advent of civilization, human life was scarcely worth living: Nasty, brutish and short. It is important to keep in mind that the “experts” who have told this story have always come from the class of professional intellectuals, cozily ensconced rather high up in the Pyramid, comfortable and well invested with an interest of keeping the whole structure firm.

But that rumor of a lost Golden Age has always been stubbornly persistent, again and again bubbling up in the collective consciousness and asserting itself in various manifestations. In recent decades, Primitivism Philosophers such as John Zerzan have interpreted the archeological records to show that for tens of thousands of years, hunter-gatherer bands of human beings existed in a kind of anarchist utopia, with mutual aid and cooperation the governing principles. The Dominator Consciousness and civilization itself are only relatively recent and regrettable aberrations, tied to the rise of agriculture.

Another persistently popular theory to arise out of the social upheaval and transformation of the 1960’s and 70’s received it’s most well known articulation in When God Was a Woman by Merlin Stone. According to Stone’s research, early humanity worshipped a benevolent Goddess and existed in matriarchal paradise, which was finally overrun and supplanted by the fiercely patriarchal Indo-European tribes who developed into Western civilization as we have come to know it.

Naturally enough, anarchist and feminist theories such as these are routinely dismissed as absurd by the official experts in the field—i.e., those tenured information managers of the academic world, living in comfort and ease well up within the Pyramid’s top half. I am not qualified to do battle against such well armed foes, and that is not my intention here. But I do think it is interesting to give some thought to the social structures of our closest primate relatives, the Bonobos, with whom we share over 96% of the same DNA.

Bonobo society revolves around sexual play and affectionately rendered mutual grooming sessions. When conflict arises between individuals, it is almost inevitably defused by some act of pleasure-causing physical exchange. The life of the Bonobo more or less consists of sharing food and sex, a casual and never-ceasing orgy. Bonobos are matriarchal, as well, with a kind of benign lesbian mafia at the top of their social structure. Everybody eats, everybody fucks, but if a young male bonobo, for example, tries to force himself onto a partner, the band’s close-knit sisterhood will quickly gang up on the transgressing young buck and administer a solid thrashing. It is unusual for even this degree of conflict to arise, though. Most bonobo males seem more than content to enjoy the rare paradise they have been given on this planet.

The rulers of civilization have worked very hard to promulgate the idea that without submission to the authority of civilization, human beings would quickly descend into a vicious state of lawless self-interest. But the idea that early humanity could have existed in a fierce state of snarling dog-eat-dog competition seems rather unlikely. As a species we could not have survived the ice age without a tremendous innate capacity for mutual aid and cooperation. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is almost certainly among humanity’s hard-wired, biological imperatives.

Kindness, compassion, love—these are spiritual qualities which emanate out of from the human soul, permeating the cellular structure of the individual body and longing for expression. It has been one of the great historical propaganda tricks of the ruling elite to make it seem as if morality instead enters human beings from some place outside of them, through an acceptance of submission to the forces above. The ruling elite have built their pyramid so as to crush these vital qualities out of humanity, in order to sell them weak, synthetic substitutes instead.

Throughout the history of the Dominator Consciousness, throughout the long history of life inside civilization’s Pyramid, a more enlightened and compassionate consciousness has persisted, a small flickering candle protected by what is innate and best within us. At times this higher consciousness has flared up and become glowing and bright within certain individuals, quickly spreading out to those around them, at times even growing bright enough to be seen from the top of the pyramid. That human beings might sincerely discover their own divine light and then recognize that same light in those around them is the only true threat that exists for those who perch atop the Pyramid. From their positions high above they vigilantly keep watch against any sudden flickering light in the darkness, ready to douse it out if necessary, by violent force.

But the light within us is persistent, its hunger to shine strong. There is no way to extinguish it everywhere by force. And so the ruling elite have their employees working directly beneath them, spinning propaganda. The Priest class insists that the individual human is a dark beast, and that the light he hungers for can only be handed down from above, as a reward for total obedience. And in this more recent age of scientific materialism, an even more demoralizing story has steadily been handed down from above—that there is actually no light at all, anywhere, that the entire world is mechanistic and dark. ,

The propaganda of the elite has kept the Pyramid standing and humanity enslaved, for century after century, across the last several millennia. The result has been a steady and accelerating assault upon the living planet, exploding misery for all living things. The Pyramid itself begins to crack; by any reasonable analysis, it appears ready to collapse. From the base of the Pyramid, the candle lights begin to flicker and shine, brighter everyday. In this age that we live in, a desperate race is underway, the future of humanity hangs in the balance. Will enough of us recognize and understand the true nature of the divine light, before it is too late? Will the evolutionary leap in consciousness occur? Will reality be re-imagined and transformed?

Whether humanity enjoyed a great Golden Age in its distant past is a debate for scholars. But it must be the work of all concerned people to bring a new Golden Age about, for if we fail at this, the darkness may very well swallow us all, and before very long, before we even know it has happened.

While not many conspiracy theorists go as far as Icke does with his Reptilian claims, the “ancient elite bloodlines” theme has long been a staple of the field. Any cursory research done online will find countless hits claiming that all 44 U.S. Presidents have had royal lineage. This sounds too fantastic to be true, but the source generally cited is Burke’s Peerage, a genealogical research organization which touts itself as “The definitive guide to the genealogical history of the major royal, aristocratic and historical families of the United Kingdom, Ireland and the United States of America.”

In the two most recent presidential elections, it was very widely reported that John Kerry and George W. Bush were in fact cousins, and that Barak Obama was a cousin of both Bush and Cheney. In the mainstream media these revelations were treated simply as insignificant human interest stories—“Gee-whiz, isn’t it a small world after all? We’ll be right back with a recap of weather after this message about erectile dysfunction from our corporate sponsors!”

The underground network of conspiracy researchers was hardly so sanguine. The giggly, aw-shucks, whada-ya know revelations about the family connections between the candidates in the past two presidential elections have been pointed to as proof that the conspiracies are now nearly complete. With their plan for totalitarian enslavement now nearly brought to fruition, the elite brazenly flaunt what they have kept secret for these past 200 years.

By all accounts, this has been a long developing conspiracy—in some cases, it is traced back through the royal houses of Europe to Charlemagne and beyond that into Rome, Egypt, perhaps even mythological Atlantis, or off the planet entirely. Nations and Empires have risen and fallen, centers of power transferring across the globe, with somehow the same interconnected families and organizations remaining in power behind the scenes—in conflict with each other at times, to be sure, but ultimately always conspiring together to keep the masses down. They are often said to practice secret occult rites, sorcery and black magic; the maintenance of such a complex and long term conspiracy would indeed seem to require some element of supernatural assistance.

Elite and secretive organizations like the annual Bohemian Grove gathering and the Skull and Bones fraternity at Yale are often referenced in this literature. These groups do have some rather bizarre practices. The intensely secretive Skull and Bones group meets in the basement of a windowless building known as “the tomb,” surrounded by human bones and other macabre decorations, many reputably stolen from graveyards. Each year 15 seniors are “tapped” to join, chosen from the most powerful families in the country, with a strong preference given to sons and grandsons of other members. As part of their initiation rituals they are expected to give a full confession of their sexual history, in front of a coffin. They pledge to assist and promote each other throughout their lives, pursuing power and glory for the good old Skull and Bones. At any given time, there are approximately 600 living “bones men,” infiltrating the highest ranks of governments and business. The group gained special attention during the 2004 election, when both the Democrat and Republican nominees for president were members of the society. Throughout the campaign, both George W. Bush and John Kerry were steadfast in their refusal to answer any questions at all about their Skull and Bones association.

The annual Bohemian Grove gathering is held for three weeks each July in Monte Rio, California, on a 2700 acre campground owned by the all-male San Francisco Bohemian Club. This event is attended by the most powerful figures from government, the defense industry, finance and banking, big oil and coal, politics, media and entertainment. Many U.S. Presidents have attended—Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton have all attended, and both Bushes are club members. Between 1500 and 2000 members and guests attend each year and are quartered throughout the grounds at various camp sites.

In 2000, the tireless radio broadcaster, filmmaker and conspiracy researcher Alex Jones managed to sneak into Bohemian Grove and surreptitiously record something called the Cremation of Care ceremony. In the grainy footage he produced, the ceremony mostly resembles a rather poorly acted and bizarrely written community theater production, with a ridiculously generous budget. The ceremony features a head priest surrounded by attendant priests of lower ranking, a boatman from the underworld, a disembodied demon’s voice and a tremendous bonfire on which a human sacrifice is symbolically (well, one would assume it is only symbolically) burned alive. In his video Jones provides a rather thoroughly researched textual analysis of the ceremony, describing it as a “Luciferian rite of the Canaanite-Babylonian mystery cults mixed with ancient Druidic sacrifice.” Jones maintains that, although many of the invited guests watching may be totally clueless as to the true significance of the ceremony, the Bohemian Club members are themselves orchestrating a sincere occult rite, designed to reify and strengthen their control over the rest of the human population.

Watching Jones’ video, part of me was tempted merely to chuckle at the low brow hokum of the ceremony. Actor/writer Harvey Shearer, a one-time guest at the Grove, actually produced a satire of the gathering called “The Teddy Bear’s Picnic.” On the other hand, I consider myself a poet above all else, in the true and ancient sense, and so I have become aware over the years that invocation ceremonies can indeed be entirely legitimate and potentially powerful. As a ceremony, The Bohemian Grove cremation sketch seems campy and amateurish—like something from an Alice Cooper or Marilyn Manson concert, except far less aesthetically stylish and skillful. But it is not unusual in magical practice to use deliberate clowning and bumbling as a kind of obfuscation. And at any rate, it is indeed a bizarre way for the most powerful men on the planet, the captains of industry and shapers of world policy, to spend their summer vacations.

The Council on Foreign Affairs is another organization repeatedly listed as a core group comprising the secret “Illuminati” power structure that controls the world. On a surface level, this group is not very secretive—it is a chartered non-profit organization, maintains a website with extensive biographical information about its members, publishes a journal called Foreign Policy and regularly presents speakers to the public at its Park Avenue headquarters in New York City. The Council steadfastly presents itself as a non-partisan group of prominent decision-makers, all coming together to work for the greater good of humanity, dedicated to shaping American foreign policy in a positive direction.

But this organization, established by the Rockefellers in 1921, has a history of more secretive activity among the inner-circle. In 1939 the Council established a top secret War and Peace Studies group, funded entirely by the Rockefeller Foundation and presided over by Alan Dulles, head of the OSS, future head of the CIA, and the man who would devote a great deal of energy to shepherding Nazi scientists safely out of Germany and onto American soil after the war. This study group, operating in private from even the other members of the Council itself, provided the eventual architecture for the Cold War—the policy of “containment,” of the Soviet Union, which was used for decades as a pretense for overthrowing Democratically elected governments in poor countries which prioritized the needs of their population over the greed of the financial elite, replacing them with brutal dictators only too happy to open their national economies to economic exploitation from global corporations.

Since the end of the Second World War, the Council’s membership has included virtually every important political figure from both parties: Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Clinton and both Bushes. Over a dozen former Secretaries of State, including: Dean Rusk, Cyrus Vance, John Foster Dulles, Henry Kissinger, Warren Christopher, George Shultz, Lawrence Eagleburger, Madeline Albright, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Hillary Clinton. National Security Advisors and Secretaries of Defense have almost inevitably been Council Members.

The current Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is a member. Former Chairmen of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan and Paul Volker are members.  The current head of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, is a member, along with such past World Bank Directors as James D. Wolfensohn and Paul Wolfowitz. Wolfowitz also served as Under Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush and was among the primary architects of and propagandists for the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. In fact, almost all of the movers and shakers behind that blood-splattered farce belong to the Council on Foreign Relations. Dick Cheney is a former director.

At one level, the Council on Foreign Relations can be viewed as simply one more racket set up for the purpose of selling access to the nation’s most powerful political figures. While membership is open only to U.S. Citizens, whether native or naturalized, Corporate Membership is much more cosmopolitan, and the CEO’s of any global corporation willing to pony up 50 grand for a “President’s Circle” Membership can enjoy the privilege of attending small, intimate dinners and receptions with senior American officials and visiting world leaders. It would appear as if the entire international banking and finance industry belongs to the Council on Foreign Relations: Goldman-Sachs; Bank of America; Barclays Capital; Morgan Stanley; JP Morgan, Chase, & Co.; Japan Bank for International Cooperation; Banca d’Italia; Rothschild North America—these are only a few of the financial interests who belong to the Council. Not surprisingly, the Oil and Fossil Fuel industry is well represented at the Council. Also not surprising is the membership of KBR, perhaps the single largest war-profiteering corporation on the planet.

A similar group to the Council on Foreign Relations, with overlapping membership, is the Bilderberg Group, an annual gathering of between 100-150 of the most powerful and well connected figures in politics, industry and the media from the United States and Western Europe. They meet under heavy security at various European resorts, where they hold meetings about world affairs. No press is allowed to attend and participants must agree to refrain from speaking publically about any of the events or discussions that occur during the conference.

In May of 2009, members of the new Obama administration traveled to the exclusive Five-Star Astir Palace hotel, on the Aegean Sea in Greece, to provide private briefings for the Bilderberg attendees.  As reported by Politico, on a tip from an anonymous meeting attendee, top Obama diplomats James Steinberg and Richard Holbrooke detailed the administration’s policies for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Paul Volcker, chairman of President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, gave a presentation, as well. Perhaps most incredibly, Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the top-secret National Security Agency, also participated in the conference.

The anonymous source for the Politico story was dismissive of any conspiratorial element being attached to such proceedings. He is quoted by Politico as saying that the meetings are “one of the least well-kept secrets in the world” and “don’t have any decision-making authority,” adding that Bilderberg is “a useful group of people who are well-connected and thoughtful who put on these meetings and usually invite a few people from the [U.S.] administration to come so they understand what the administration is doing.” When reading such high-minded rhetoric, please remember that this individual was speaking anonymously, that he wanted his identity kept secret, because Bilderberg wants EVERYTHING about their little gatherings kept secret, from who attended to what was discussed. The Politico story further reported that Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, who until recently sat on the committee that picked invitees, refused a request for comment about how invitees are selected.

A true democracy, a government “of, for and by the people” cannot really exist without transparency. Without transparency, it is merely a charade, actors on a stage performing routines pre-determined and choreographed behind the curtain, away from the audience’s eyes. Perhaps in some cases of IMMINENT threat to national security, some temporary secrecy might be justified. But in the day-in, day-out workings of the government, secrecy cannot be tolerated.  We the people must be in a position to know exactly what our government is doing—what policy decisions they are discussing, and with whom these policies are being discussed. If we do not have that, we do not have a democracy.

And it seems obvious to me that we simply do not have that. Our government is infiltrated, and has been for years, by people who belong to exclusive, top-secret organizations. They have conversations and make deals within these organizations which directly impact their roles as officers of the government, and yet they smugly refuse to talk about it. It has been going on for so long, and so openly, that most Americans, if they can even be troubled to pay attention at all, merely shrug and mumble something about how “it’s all just well-intentioned information gathering…just the big shots at the top of the Pyramid getting together to talk about how they can do what’s best for the world and the future.” To protest that there is anything nefarious about these secretive meetings and exclusive organizations is to throw your lot in with the paranoids, the “black helicopter” crowd, David Icke and his reptiles.

But you really do not have to concern yourself with reptilian-humanoid hybrids, complex bloodlines or top secret Satanic rites to understand that conspiracies are going on, that the mechanisms of governance have been taken over by the small cabal of financial and corporate elite. Most of what they do is really completely in the open.

They bribe elected officials, openly under the guise of “campaign contributions” and somewhat more discreetly through providing access to golden business and investment opportunities—often as not, opportunities that depend upon favorable political decisions. A very high number of Congressional Representatives and Senators go directly from the Legislature to fantastically lucrative careers as corporate lobbyists. Louisiana Republican Congressman Billy Tauzin was the key player behind passing the “Medicare D” legislation. This was a bill that was almost entirely written by pharmaceutical industry lobbyists. It has resulted in hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars being channeled directly into pharmaceutical corporation profits. Two years later Tauzin retired from Congress and was immediately hired as the CEO of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, PhRMA, the primary trade and lobbying group for the pharmaceutical industry.

One of the first things Barak Obama did as president in 2009 was hold a series of secret meetings with Billy Tauzin to discuss healthcare reform. This was after promising throughout his campaign that he would hold all healthcare reform discussions on CSPAN. During these meetings, Obama agreed to not to institute a policy of having the Federal Government negotiate for prescription drug prices, as the Veterans Administration does and as the governments of every other democratic country on the planet do. This backroom deal to protect corporate profits was evidently the “change” we could believe in.

The man Obama originally tapped to be his point-person for healthcare reform and his Secretary of Health and Human Services was former Democratic Senator from South Dakota, Tom Daschle. Daschle had taken the kinds of liberties with his Federal income tax that would land a normal citizen in prison and it was enough to force his withdrawal from consideration for the Cabinet. This was portrayed by the Democratic-friendly hairdos in the corporate media as a great loss to the American people, due to Daschle’s unique qualifications and expertise in the area of healthcare. Daschle had spent the past few years, following the electoral loss of his Senate seat in 2004, working as a lobbyist for Alston and Bird, an extremely high profile D.C. lobbying firm which earns about 60% of its annual revenue from representing various corporations form the health care industry.

The high drama of partisan conflicts between the two political parties is almost entirely a charade, a choreographed kabuki dance designed to rile up the masses. As the philosopher-comedian Bill Hicks once observed, one group of people say “I think the puppet on the left represents my views” and another group says “I think the puppet on the right is more to my liking” and meanwhile nobody notices that “the same guy is holding both puppets.” The two political parties gnash their teeth and beat their breasts and yank at their hair. They throw red meat to their loyal followers and drum them up into an almost continual apoplectic rage against the other side. And then the leaders from both parties secretly meet with the global economic elite at Bilderberg Group, at the Council on Foreign Relations, at Bohemian Grove gatherings or in any of D.C.’s high priced steak houses, and that is where the policies which will shape the world and reality as we know it are decided.

My own attitude towards the more extreme end of the conspiracy theories is skeptical open-mindedness, the same attitude from which I approach virtually any religious, spiritual, occult or paranormal claims. That the global elite are a distinct bloodline carrying reptilian DNA seems fairly unlikely to me; but still, quite a bit more likely than the idea that the Universe was created in six days or that the earth is only about 6000 years old.

I am actually fairly open to the idea that the members of the global elite practice black magic and Satanic rites. Groups like the Council on Foreign Relations and Bilderberg have for decades been the vehicles for forcing the poor and weak nations of the world to let their own people go hungry while their wealth and natural resources are gobbled up by the mavens of international finance. Their policies have created a world in which the richest 1% of people owns 40% of the planet’s wealth, while 30 thousand children die each day from preventable diseases related to malnutrition and inadequate sanitation. They are evil motherfuckers, of that there is no doubt. It would not shock me to learn that when these people get together they pass around a chalice filled with the blood of innocent babies. At the very least, that is exactly what they are doing symbolically, in a much truer and more immediate sense than any good Catholic is symbolically drinking the blood of Christ.

By using the term “black magic” I do not mean to imply that the economic elites who control our economy and political process do so by means of occult ritual, séance and the summoning of supernatural demons. Then again, as a radical agnostic, I am also unwilling to completely discount such a possibility. I have had no contact with this class of people during this lifetime; hence I know nothing at all about their personal habits, about what they might be doing in their palatial estates and guarded compounds of luxury.  I do know that the richest 1% of people own 40% of the Earth’s resources, while over 2 billion people struggle to exist on less than 2 dollars a day, while over 30 thousand children around the world die each day from preventable diseases caused by malnutrition or inadequate sanitation. And that richest 1% is very happy about this situation. They want even more and are pursuing it aggressively, and this certainly indicates a breathtaking and transcendent level of pure evilness. So I cannot readily and easily dismiss the possibility that some sort of left-handed sorcery is occurring, at least no more readily than I can completely dismiss the sincere testimonies that I have heard from various decent and caring Christian people who I have known.

I am certain of one thing, it must surely have taken a great effort, supernatural or not, to lock up the overwhelming majority of the American people so tightly inside of the current reality tunnel that we inhabit. The daily consciousness of most of us is dominated by petty resentment, fear based decision making, trivial preoccupations and studied indifference to the daunting challenges that collectively confront us at this historical moment. Almost nothing in the way of rational discourse is allowed to penetrate this reality tunnel, and to the extent that any serious conversation about our current problems manages to insert itself at all into public consciousness, it is quickly swallowed up or drowned out by the competing chatter of the corporate media’s never-ending circus of spectacle.

And most of us seem only too happy to have the serious conversations blocked out. This is actually quite understandable, since within the reality tunnel we are currently stuck inside of, there is really nothing we can do about any of these problems anyway. The economic elite openly bribe our elected officials. They openly rig our economy to transfer an ever greater share of the world’s resources into their own hands. When their smoke and mirrors system of voodoo economics inevitably crashes, they simply have their bi-partisan employees in the United States government write legislation which hands them hundreds of billions more borrowed tax dollars. This is the way things work inside of our current reality tunnel and almost every voice we hear within that tunnel assures us that it can be no other way—no matter who we the people vote for and put into office, they will have no choice but to obey those economic elites and give them what they want.

Like the gods of primitive societies, they go mostly unseen, but must always be placated. The alternative would be catastrophic, we are assured by the voices inside of the reality tunnel, to the degree that they even bother to justify it at all. Mostly they don’t bother to justify it, though. Why should they? It’s reality, it’s simply what is. And it is so insulting and depressing that perhaps it is no wonder that so many of us would rather be titillated by the sexual excesses of a celebrity golfer, the details or a pop star’s death, or the degrading charades played out by various  “reality” show contestants.

Indeed, in a recent online essay, clinical psychologist Bruce E. Levine posits that Americans have become so thoroughly paralyzed within our current reality tunnel of infantile helplessness that pointing out the desperate nature of our current situation merely makes them grasp onto trivia and distraction all the more desperately, as a means of psychic self defense. “Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not “set them free” but instead further demoralize them?” he asked on Alternet.org. He further wondered: “Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further?”

We have a situation where the once proud citizens of the first representational democracy of the modern world have become thoroughly disenfranchised from the workings of their own government. And to point this out to them only makes that disenfranchisement more solidly entrenched.  I am willing to call that Black Magic. I certainly cannot think of a more accurate term.

To see this Black Magic at work, one need only consider the health care debates which dominated much of 2009. It is a peer-reviewed, documented fact that somewhere in excess of 45 thousand people in the United States die each year as a direct result of not having health care. That works out to 123 people every day. The number is simply too big to ignore, even in this land of relentless media distraction and trivia. It intruded upon the reality tunnel and could not be ignored. Reforming the health care system was a primary issue in the 2008 Presidential Election, even as at a moment of historic economic crisis, while two wars raged on.

In a nation of free people, within a reality tunnel where morality and a sense of civil ethics ruled public discourse, the entire discussion on how to reform health care would have begun with one primary question: “How do we make sure that everyone in this country has access to the health care they need?” After all, the purpose of the government in a representational democracy is to protect and promote the public good. Please note that this is not the same thing as saying that its purpose is to “take care of everyone” in some kind of nanny state. But it is the proper job of the government to maintain the adequate infrastructure necessary for maintaining a civil, democratic society. Without proper roads, you cannot have this. Without fire departments and basic emergency response, you cannot have this. And without a system that allows all workers and citizens to receive necessary medical care when they need it, without the threat of financial ruin, you cannot have this.

But that primary question—“How do we make sure everybody will have access to necessary health care?”—was never asked. As a nation, we just don’t live inside of that reality tunnel. And in the reality tunnel that we do live inside, the purpose of government is not to protect and promote the public good; it is, instead, to protect and promote the interests of the economic elite. Every single voice we hear within this reality tunnel, whether it is a politician from either party, a hair-do in the corporate media, or even our neighbors at the coffee shop, speaks with one underlying assumption—that the purpose of the government is to protect and promote the interests of the economic elite. Nothing can ever occur if the economic elite do not approve of it. Even millions of people who do not like this state of affairs persist in treating it as an entrenched, untouchable fact; as the state of reality, the way things are.

The only fiscally responsible way to provide medical coverage to everybody in a society is to institute some form of a single payer health care system and to also negotiate prices with the pharmaceutical corporations. This is what they do in every other democratic nation on the planet, and they spend about half as much per person as we do and they have much better statistical results for their citizens. But, of course, the economic elites who control the private health care and pharmaceutical industries would lose a lot of profits if such a system was instituted. And they will be damned if they will see that happen. And thus was the discussion of “health care reform” begun: The enthusiastically elected man of the people, President Barak Obama, started the discussion by “taking single payer” off the table. He met, in secret, with representatives from the pharmaceutical industry and agreed to remove the negotiation of drug prices from any possible reform, in exchange for a “promise” of a paltry 20 billion dollars in future savings.

Obama actually admitted “if we were starting from scratch,” single payer would be the best system. The fact that this comment has slipped by virtually uncommented upon is glaring proof of just how manipulated our reality has become. We have a private health care system that pushes nearly 50 million people out the door because they are “unprofitable” and this leads directly to 45 thousand of them dying every year. That is 15 times the number of people who dies on September 11, 2001. But the underlying assumption to Obama’s statement is that it is somehow critically important to our society that we maintain this incredibly dysfunctional system, even though it kills 45 thousand people every year. You would think that 45 thousand people a year dying would be more than sufficient reason to “start from scratch.” But not in this reality tunnel.

Occasionally the need to maintain the current private health insurance system has been defended on the grounds that “a lot of people work in that industry.” But this is nonsense. I am from Maine—one of many states that was economically devastated by the North American Free Trade Agreement. I taught College Writing to displaced workers at the University of Maine satellite campuses in the late 1990’s. If the economic elite desire a particular policy, it will pass, regardless of what it does to “the workers.” And H.R. 676, the single payer health care bill in the Congress, was written with far more concern for helping and retraining displaced workers than NAFTA was.

Another popular obstacle to health care reform cited during that past year were the “town hall” patriots, foaming at the mouth against “socialism.” These people represented a viewpoint that was overwhelmingly rejected during the last election, but within our reality tunnel this past year, their shrill, uninformed blathering was echoed and elevated to the status of representing the pulse of the people. In truth, their numbers were paltry compared to the size of the anti-war protests of 2003. But in 2003 the economic elite were determined to extend their perpetual war into Iraq, and so within our reality tunnel the massive protests which shut down cities across the United States were merely dismissed as representing the opinion of a small lunatic fringe.

But the real truth was more or less always in the open. Again and again the voices within the reality tunnel spoke about the “powerful forces” that oppose any really meaningful healthcare reform. It was calmly and matter-of-factly taken for granted that these “powerful forces” simply had to be placated, and ultimately given their way. Forget about government of, for and by the people. We live in a world of “powerful forces”—rich people, high above us, pulling the strings. This is their reality and we are just living in it.

That so many Americans can accept this, and still somehow even maintain their emotional belief in the United States as the “home of the Free,” is most certainly a magic trick of some kind, a mass hypnosis to be sure.

In the end a health care bill was passed—one that will make the health insurance industry richer than ever, that will make us all their paying customers, whether we like it or not. It will not even go into effect until 2014—by which time another 180,000 Americans will have died from lack of care. The debate on all this was a long, drawn out farce, centering on the estimated cost of approximately 800 billion dollars over the next decade—about the same as the yearly defense and supplemental war budgets that pass each year as a matter of course, despite the fact that a large majority of this nation does not even want to be at war.

But then, we all know that what the majority wants is irrelevant. And we have also reached a point where rational argument and fact based discourse are irrelevant, quaint. Our entire consciousness has been trapped within this reality tunnel by the economic elites. Perhaps they achieved this through pure material manipulations, without any sort of occult black magic. Just the same, any good witches, yogis, energy workers, holy men or magi, now is most surely the time for you to join the fight.

The Marcellus Shale Formation is an immense unit of marine sedimentary rock that spreads over most of northwestern Pennsylvania and across New York State from the far southwest corner in Chautauqua County to the Catskill Mountains, where the great New York City drinking water reservoirs are located. Throughout this massive, ancient geological formation is a tremendous amount of natural gas—all within close proximity to New York City and the rest of the energy hungry eastern seaboard. The energy corporations have been eying it for years, quietly buying up drilling rights throughout the region.

Now, as public pressure builds to curb CO2 emissions, the fossil fuel industry has begun to push natural gas as the “clean energy alternative.” In reality, the extraction of natural gas from the Marcellus Shale of upstate New York promises to be an environmental disaster. It would permanently mar the landscape of a region that depends heavily upon agriculture and tourism. It would create an untenable burden for the public roads and other infrastructure of small, rural communities across New York’s Southern tier. And it threatens to contaminate the clean drinking water of the entire southern half of the state, including New York City itself.

To fully appreciate the danger one must first understand how the energy corporations plan to extract this natural gas. Traditional natural gas and oil drilling has involved sinking a vertical well to access a large pool of gas or oil. The unique geological nature of the Marcellus Shale makes this traditional method impossible—within the Marcellus, the natural gas is spread out in tiny pockets and bubbles, far too small to be profitably tapped by a traditional well. Instead the natural gas companies have devised a method they call “hydrofracking.”

In hydrofracking, a hole is drilled straight down into the earth, then horizontally out into the shale. This hole is then violently flooded with between 2 and 9 million gallons of water mixed with sand and toxic chemicals, in order to fracture and corrode the shale and release the small pockets of natural gas. Essentially, a giant underground slurry is created, full of water, sand, pulverized shale, industrial chemicals, the newly released natural gas and also radioactive heavy metals and hydrocarbons, which the water picks up in the process of “fracking” open the well. About half of this slurry remains underground. The other half is brought back to the surface, where the natural gas is separated out from it.

What is left is between one and four and half million gallons of toxic waste, which must be somehow disposed of. Often it is pumped back into a dry well. The current regulations proposed by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation allow for it to be stored in open pits, provided they are fenced and posted with warning signs. How, say, migrating birds or other wildlife are supposed to read these signs has not been addressed by the DEC.

Most of the recent advances in hydrofracking have been made by Halliburton, and are protected as “proprietary trade secrets.” This means it is impossible to even know exactly what chemicals are being pumped down into the ground and then pulled back out and trucked away for disposal. Halliburton describes the fracking fluid as “like soap and oil.” Samples from fluid pits in Colorado have revealed more than 200 different chemicals, over 95% of which are carcinogens. But not even the local emergency workers who would be called upon to respond to an accident involving this toxic waste are not allowed to know what is in it. During the Bush/Cheney years, the energy corporations were granted exemptions to the Emergency Planning and Right to Know Acts, along with the Clean Air and Water Acts.

The New York State DEC, and the gas companies themselves, have been astonishingly blasé about the potential for a trucking accident involving this waste; given the pure volume of trucks that will be hauling this stuff, it is almost certain that some will crash. A single 2 million gallon well would require 183 tanker truck loads to haul the waste water away. Each well can be fracked up to ten times and they are proposing thousands of potential wells. The roads in the Catskill and Southern Tier regions of New York are rural roads, not particularly well maintained, steep and windy. With thousands of new tractor trailer trips over them, they will deteriorate quickly. Every winter several milk trucks jack knife on these roads. Spilt milk is nothing to cry over. A spilt load of hydrofracking waste would kill wild life and permanently contaminate rivers, streams and the watershed for miles around.

The carbon footprint associated with hydrofracking far offsets any potential benefits derived from burning the relatively cleaner natural gas. In addition to the potentially millions of new tractor trailer trips, diesel generators and drill rigs will run 24 hours a day. Flaring wells produce tremendous amounts of volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxide, which combine with sunlight to produce ozone. In high density drilling areas in Colorado and Wyoming, rural communities now have higher ozone levels than Los Angeles.

Time is may be running out to prevent this environmental nightmare. Through the end of December, the New York State DEC is taking comments on their draft proposal for regulating hydrofracking. But the DEC’s own spill reports, as documented by Ithaca Geologist Walter Hang on his website toxicstargeting.com, already show that existing regulations have failed to potentially protect the public. Hang has drafted a letter to New York Governor David Patterson, requesting that he immediately withdraw the DEC’s draft supplemental GEIS and start over with a new document. You do not even need to be a New York State resident to sign the letter. Concerned people can also visit shaleshock.org, to learn more about hydrofracking and about the citizen movement rising up to oppose this environmentally destructive practice.

Panel: Jeff Cohen, Moderator; Congressman Eric Massa; Donna Smith of California Nurses Association; Political Strategist Steve Cobble; PNHP Member and working Physician Emily Queenan, Held in Dryden Theater of the George Eastman House Museum

A crowd of perhaps 200-250 people turned out. I did not get a head county. It was a very well organized event by the Genesee Valley Progressive Democrats, with a good supplemental packet ready for all attending. Jeff Cohen started off by reminding everyone that the recent House Health Care bill was not only written for the private health insurance industry, but was actually written by them. He pointed out that Max Baucus’ Chief Counsel for health care legislation is former Well Point V.P. of Public Policy Liz Fowler. He pointed out that Democrat Senator Evan Bayh’s wife sits on the Well Point Board. Given this kind of influence on our legislative process, Cohen wondered if “Democracy was still functional.” In regard to the House Health Care Bill he said it “started going wrong when liberal net roots groups started with a robust public option as their chief demand” instead of single payer. He then introduced New York 29^th Congressional District Representative Eric Massa, stating that Massa was the most courageous freshman Congressman since 1846, when Illinois Freshman Congressman Abraham Lincoln opposed the Mexican War. After a week of being unfairly chastised by self described Progressive Democrat Party hacks, Congressman Massa was greeted with the standing ovation he deserves.

Massa stated that he spent 14 hours on the House floor on November 7, watching as the drive grew to “pass anything.” He said he knew back when Obama took single payer off from the table, the fight was going to be to get a bill that would do the most good for the most people. He said: “This bill does tremendous good for a few health insurance industry CEOs.” He stated that the bill: “Intensifies what is wrong with the health care system—it strengthens the role of private insurance and heightens the role of employers in providing health care.” He noted that the bill contains “astronomical” cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, in order to put funds into the private insurers. He also noted that we are about to spend twice as much money in Afganistan in the next year as we are debating spending on health care over the next ten (for those who do not know, Massa, a retired Naval Commander, has also taken a lead role in opposing “Obama’s war” in the Congress).

Following Massa, Donna Smith of the California Nurses Association spoke. Fans of Michael Moore might remember her from Sicko. She is one of the most articulate bloggers on the web on behalf of single payer. She stated that she is still optimistic about the movement, based on her activism on the ground. She said she has been to 43 states now, and that “people get it.” She said we just have to keep building the pressure on the Congress to force them to follow along. She stated that this bill is terrible—said it was like “giving a cancer victim an aspirin.” She said it won’t guarantee people get the care they need and won’t guarantee that people don’t end up bankrupt from medical bills, so it is a failure. She made some very smart observations about how disingenuous so much of the debate is, how they tell you “You’ll be able to keep what you have” but that “14,000 Americans a day lose their jobs, and they can’t keep what they’ve got.” She pointed out that almost no American workers actually have any meaningful say over “what they’ve got” for health care. Their employers negotiate the policies, their health insurance companies negotiate rates and establish which doctors “are in the network.” She pointed out that keeping health care tied to employment by definition hurts women most, because as a group women are statistically employed at lower wages, at lower hours. She pointed out that a woman whose husband dies doesn’t get to “keep what she has.” She also spoke about the age-rated provisions in the house bill, which will allow insurance companies to charge up to 5 times as much based on age—totally destroying the concept of “affordability.” She concluded her introductory remarks by stating that activists need to support Bernie Sander’s S703 bill, the Senate version of single payer, and must keep educating: “We’re not done.”

Next up was political strategist Steve Cobble. He frankly gave the Democrats credit for being stupid where I would call them corrupt. He pointed out that voters are not “conservative” on heath care—that it is the beltway pundits and media types who are conservative on health care. He said that the Democrats should have made the Republicans vote against “Medicare for All” not a confusing “public option” contained in a 1900 page bill. He said “people know what Medicare is and they like it.”

Following Cobble was PNHP member Emily Queenan. She talked anecdotally about how private insurance undermines the entire system. She said that “everyday the heath insurance industry invades the space where I am trying to heal my patients.” She put a lot of emphasis on the fact that making people buy insurance won’t in any meaningful way guarantee them care, based on her experience working with underinsured patients—most people will be underinsured with the plans that they will be forced to buy.

The rest of the time was spent on audience questions. The first question was the obligatory “But don’t we have to start somewhere?” Massa stated that he would be happy to support a health care bill that did not go all the way towards establishing single payer, but only if it were a “step in the right direction” that would actually improve the health care situation for working and middle class Americans. He pointed out that this bill will cut 500 Billion from Medicare, which will force people in the future to buy supplemental plans from private insurers, when more and more doctors start refusing to take Medicare because of the lowered reimbursement rates—one more way in which the bill will benefit the insurance industry while hurting regular people. Donna Smith pointed out that while the bill expands eligibility for Medicaid, it cuts Medicaid funding, which will end up being a huge burden on already strapped counties and states. She also observed that by forcing so many more people to become customers of the health insurance industry, and by giving them so much more money from citizens and tax payers, we are ultimately strengthening the people who are causing all the problems. Cobble repeated Rahm Emanuels cynical comment that “the only non-negotiable part of the bill is whether it passes” as a sign of how little some in the Democrat party actually care about passing reform that will actually help people.

In response to another question on what the Medicaid/Medicare cuts will look like, Massa repeated a story about how Obama came to see him shortly after he had become a Congressman and told him “You will not raise taxes on people earning less than $250,000 a year!” But this bill will very likely force property taxes up on Americans across the country, regardless of their income, due to the expanded eligibility for Medicaid and corresponding cut in funding.

Donna Smith raised the issue of the much vaunted “pre-existing condition reform.” She pointed out what many have been saying—that forcing people to buy private insurance and forcing private insurers to sell it to people with pre-existing conditions is really a meaningless reform because the insurance industries will still be able to deny treatments.

Somebody wanted to know why the bill will take 4-5 years to phase in. Massa stated that “no living person can intelligently answer that question.” Somebody wanted to know why the AARP would support a bill that cuts funding for Medicare. Smith pointed out that the AARP has a strong relationship with United Healthcare and that they sell seniors supplemental insurance policies—so they will make a lot of money off from the Medicare cuts.

There was a question about Torte Reform. Massa pointed out that states with medical malpractice caps have seen no reduction in medical malpractice premiums. He stated that malpractice lawsuits mostly drive up rates due to the amount of defensive medicine they cause—excessive tests that probably might not be needed. He advocated for national standards of care, which would establish a framework to measure malpractice against. Dr. Queenan stated that financing for doctors must be altered so that doctors can spend enough time with patients so that they can actually determine what might be going on without having to rely on a battery of extensive tests.

The panel concluded with a discussion of what activists can do in the weeks ahead. Cobble said that we need to be calling the Senate to make sure Bernie Sanders can get his single payer for the states amendment into the Senate bill. He said to defend Massa and Kucinich on the blogs against the so-called progressives who think “anything is better than nothing.” He said in New York we need to seriously talk about passing it on the state level and inject it into the Governor’s race. Smith said to contact Schumer and Gillibrand and demand they support the Sanders amendment. She said get on the blogs and keep talking up single payer in local communities. She said we need to make single payer a “centrist issue.”

Massa strongly urged people to write letters for single payer to newspapers throughout the state and in his district (newslink.org will give you the homepage for most newspapers in New York State, and the rest of the country, too). He said the letters to the editors really have a strong impact on shaping public opinion. He really emphasized the fact that so-called progressives really haven’t been as vocal and public in supporting single-payer as the right-wing has been in shouting down “socialism.”

Massa finished his remarks with a very chilling story about a vocal right-winger in his district, who routinely calls his office and attacks him and his staff. He said the man called after the health care vote to congratulate him on being independent in his vote on the bill. He then started to tell the staffer in Massa’s office about how his daughter had recently been diagnosed with cancer, and does not have any insurance. “But I still don’t want Massa to vote for socialized medicine,” he said. The staffer asked “You mean that even though your daughter is sick and shut out of the system, you don’t want the system reformed?” The man replied that he would rather have his daughter “die an American than live as a socialist.”