A Cancerous Anarchy

cancer - potentially unlimited growth
anarchy - absence of order - without govornment

The most powerful social structures on Earth are international corporations backed by the most powerful govornments on the planet. Their goals and objectives are as old as man himself, yet never before has there been so extensive and unstoppable power and influence in the world thanks to the physical size of the world's population and the explosion of technology. With assets that exceed the gross national products of most nations, they virtually control the world's laws, or at the very least sidestep them. There is no international body to govern these giants.

Slick, blood and grease covered floors, flashing razor sharp knives, saws and giant meat grinders of the slaughter house, dust and gas filled air of the mines, fatally toxic and highly combustible chemicals of the refineries, the radiation of the nuclear power and weapons industries - these are only a few examples of the multitude of conditions under which people risk their lives, health, and the well being of their families for the sake of owners, executives, managers, stockholders, and customers of gargantuan, faceless, inhuman corporations. Protected by the laws, police, and military forces of governments effectively bought and controlled, the captains, stockholders, and stewards of these corporations have, apparently, nothing to lose and every immoral, material luxury to gain, all at the expense of their laborers and consumers blood, sweat, and tears. not only are our individual lives, but the health of the whole planet has been compromised and in many cases damaged, at least to the extent of several human generations to come.
International corporations possess a positive potential, yet as of the present time, they are like a malignant cancer spreading thoughout the body of mankind. Through their colossal advertising budgets and their experts of unethical enticement, hypnotism, and illusion this cancer has engulfed the brain stem of our global society and is taking over the brain as a whole - the human brain - the common mind we all share - the thoughts and images which determine our behavior, individual and collective. Our government, our educational system, and our academic research are all controlled by or at least steered toward the goal of big business - the perpetuation of profit and expansion of the organization.
Of course for every harmful situation these monsters create, there are acions that would redeem and correct - if they would just consider what is right for the people and planet rather than just what will profit and expand. The technology for controlling pollution is available yet not fully developed and implemented because it does not produce immediate, tangible profit. The technology for harnessing the absolutely unlimited energy of the only nuclear reactor, god given, this solar system needs - the sun - is a hair's breadth away, and will remain so until the energy corporations figure out how to put a meter between you and the sun.
And who foots the bills for these international, immoral madhouses to live, grow, thrive, and destroy? You and i, the little guys are the vast majority who produce, pay for and cosume the marginally useful, often times hazardous to your health, sanity, and environment goods and services pushed at us with images of healthy, young, beautiful, financially fit, laughing, singing, dancing, smoking, drinking people in opulent surroundings on television, billboards, magazines, and movies.
Our circulatory system, the economy, is so clogged by these cancers we find survival to be at best meaningless and oftentimes a nightmare when we find so little of reality matches the false images that are set up to be our standard of living. We produce with our life's blood the labor that actually feeds the corporation. But little or nothing comes back. The circulation is cut off. We are losing our blood and getting duller and weaker by the minute, unaware of what health is, much less acquiring a cure for our disease. All the while we are dependent upon the greedy destructors of our planet.
In the united states, 10% of the people own 73% of all wealth. Yet the laborers in the u.s. live like kings compared compared to nearly everyone in the third world, where tens of thousands of children die each day of malnutrition, disease, poverty, neglect, and war. The annual income of the poorest two and a half billion people on the planet equals the combined wealth of the world's richest 225 people. 20% of the global population recieves approximately 80% of the world's income, while 80% of the people share the other 20% of the wealth. The poor folks in the rich countries are taxed to provide the rich folks in the poor countries "foreign aid for economic and technological development" so that the international corporations can fatten their bellies at the expense of the labor and resources of undeveloped nations where medicine, food and consumer products banned in the u.s. are dumped indiscriminately on unsuspecting citizens.What is it? Divine Right, Manifest Destiny, or Eminent Domain? You tell me, cause I wanna Know.

With the population exploding at the rate it is, too many people may be the single greatest threat we face. The world population has more than tripled since the turn of the century. With over 7 billion people on Earth now, some who study population growth estimate that number may double by the turn of the century. Yet it is not the number of people who place stress on the planet so much as the behavior in which they indulge. A baby born in Kenya will not grow up to drive cars, use air conditioners and refrigerators or eat grain fed beef. It will not grow up wasting non-renewable resources nor using huge amounts of energy. The activities in which they partake will not contribute to undermining the life support capabilities of the planet. We in the united states and the life styles we teach our children are, in fact, directly responsible for the greatest part of the destruction of the world. One rich person in the u.s., by investing in corrupt coporations, destroys more rain forest than a poor person trying to survive in the forest itself.
It's not that there is a lack of wealth, but that it's not being distributed equitably. The technology and resources are available to provide more than enough life support for every being on the planet, but they are not being exploited to their greatest potential. If they were, present intelligence indicates the world population would stabilize. The dominant structures of power - the great religous organizations, the national governments, ant the international corporations will not bring about the radical changes the present crisis demands because doing so would imply their demise.
The sad fact is that they are capable and willing to fight to the death - survive at any cost.

The Global War Machine

Ten percent of the planet's economy is in the production and service of war. Vast amounts of money, billions of dollars every day, gathered through taxes and spent as defense contracts, fuels the war machine and feeds the capitalist economy which weds big business and government whose offspring are over a hundred million strong, globally.
They are soldiers, police, and every type of weapons maker - laborer, scientist, engineer, and doctor making every kind of weapon, from clubs and shields, mace and armor, to computers, satellites, and intercontinental ballistic missiles armed with nclear warheads or chemically or biologically lethal agents.
It takes over a hundred million people, globally, to keep the machine up and runnin - part of the sum of people swelling the ranks of the paranoid and alienated who bring new meaning to what was once considered "normal", "rational", and "respectable". It may or may not be twisted logic that has brought the world to the point where security means the ability to annihilate the whole of human civilization in half an hour - but one thing is for sure - it's accepted by all but a very few.
In an insane world, insanity becomes the norm.

structures of power
forming and transforming
outwardly
joining
the fearful and greedy
the clever and cruel
the stupid and brutish
overcoming
the industrious and meek
the lovers of family and community
the open, honest, innocent, and true
dividing humanity
nationally, religously, politically, economically
growing
larger, more complicated, impersonal, and inhumane
ever more far reaching
unwieldy, entrenched
powerful beyond control
fragmented, unwhole
creating
enmity and hatred
and their own opposition

whether they be
men on horseback with spears
against men on foot with clubs
or vast armies led by
khans, alexanders, napoleons, or hitlers
or protestant against catholic in Ireland
or jew agains Palestinian in Isreal
or christian against muslim in Beirut
or shiite against sunni in Saudi Arabia
or hindu against muslim in India
or black against afrikaaner in South Africa
or Iraqi vs Kurd or Iran vs Iraq
or Lebanon vs Israel or Vietnam vs Cambodia
or serb vs croat or terrorist vs innocent
or white against black in america
or crip vs blood or rich vs poor
or liberal vs conservative or labor vs management
or believers vs non-believers or us against them

Structures of power are creating a magnitude of violence we, the people, cannot endure.

power
authority, control, influence, strength
structure
something arranged in a definite pattern of organization

The structure of power is an essential facet of evolution. It makes matter. Atoms bond, form molecules which bond in their turn and form compunds. That's stability. Power structures are a natural tool of evolution. A collective action is taken to ensure the continuation of life.
A cell, complete in itself, joins other cells to form a more complex organism, more capable of thriving in its environment than the cell is by itself. The more complex organisms band together in increasing complexity in order to survive, expand, grow, explore and reproduce until life evolves into man.
Human structures of power originate as a natural outcome of human survival. Man lives in groups. The animal instinct causes division according to perceived differences between groups and competition for resources. What binds individuals to act as a whole - kin, community, tradition, belief, climate, culture, etc., is exactly what divides a particular power structure from all others. As long as their is division there is conflict.
A structure of power is not just a collection of folks bonded by certain characteristics, but a specific form of organization in which each individual has a particular role. Life assigns us, each person, our role according to the place and time of our birth, our ancestors genes, our parents, our environment, our cultures. We learn to play our part at an early age and our whole life is spent maintaining our structures inwardly, as our program or belief system and outwardly as our society. Whether we grow from girl scout into politician or school yard bully into policeman or video game champ into white collar criminal or confused kid into laborer, we are all doing our part to maintain the present global social order.
We drive tremendous emotional security in knowing our roles well and diligently playing our part because our programming works automatically, like machine. We don't have to face the unknown, or take reponsibility for our thought, feelings, and behavior.
The more coherent the structure is, the greater the forces that act on the individual. The more sharply defined the position is, the less freedom exists. Although, from time to time, certain individuals may change position, high or low, within the structure, the positions always remain the same. Only the faces change.
A structure of power has a life of its own that functions strictly beyond the capacity of any one particular person. Many individuals may die, but the structure of power just keeps rollin along, from generation to generation. The structure of power becomes more important than living people, prejudicial ideas and tyrannical leadership thrives. If an individual's or group's existence impedes or merely does not enhance a greater power, then the lesser power must be ingored absorbed, or destroyed - through political oppression, corporate acuisition, the "criminal justice system", or war.
Meanwhile our knowledge and power steadily increases, allowing our animal instincts and human emotion to be an ever increasing force in the world. This force dominates the natural environment and governs our planetary society and determines every aspect of human relationship.
When we see that all humanity shares a common bond more powerful than any belief, location, nation, or religion - more significant than any tradition or family name - when we see we share a common mind, the human brain, we will create a structure of power, a one world super structure, in which power is diffused through a network rather than administered by a bureaucracy.

Ruthless Selfishness Revisited

it's out on the frontier
where evolution makes it's breaks
where small segments of the population
-stressed beyond the normal limits of survival-
will gradually die off
or
suddenly transform

should the transformation be
sufficiently radical
the minority may, in turn, transform the whole

after a hundred thousand years of tribal existence in essential equilibrium
the past ten thousand years has spawned and evolved human organizations
that have grown and spread over the whole planet
in quantum leaps and exponential proportions

while what was once common to all
-Earth-
became property
that has changed hands
through violence
from one empire to another

until now
in less than one century
the ruler
a mutant
the united states of america
with a stranglehold on the vast majority
doesn't realize
it's about to be grabbed by the balls

yeah
wars and slavery
rape, pillage, and plunder
that's the fuel of the fire
that ignited civilization
through the spark of culture
that's now burning up the world

While the tribes gathered, cooperated, worshipped the goddess, and cultivated the lands in the river valleys, the nomads were roaming the steppes on horses. At the edge of existence, they worshipped the gods of the mountains, of thunder and lightining. Where the farmers worshipped the goddess, the giver of life, the ability to cultivate and grow, the pastoralists worshipped the gods, the takers of life, the willingness to destroy and plunder. Peaceful, abundant coexistence characterized life in the garden of Eden. The slaughter of human beings and the pillageing of their property and the subjugation of the living - slavery - the glorification of the power and use of the sword epitomized the people on the periphery.
The tillers of the soil were egalitarian, There was compassion and care for the whole community. The nomads were concerned with the strict hierarchy, the strongest and most ruthless dominating all. As the nomads explored their power through death and destruction, inciting fear far and wide, their influence intruded into a core of a highly sophisticated humanity, thousands of years old, that lived in harmony with the whole amidst material abundance.
The power of the war gods was unmatched. The farmers had no natural inclination or skill or tools to deal with the marauders the only way they could have been dealt with successfully. There was nothing to stop the intruders from confiscating the land and the wealth and enslaving the people and creating the social order in which we now live.
Like a hot virus that moves in, takes over, and destroys its host, the marauding hordes were able to do a lot with a little. And that little is called fear. It now controls our whole world. The ability to conquer and control is the most highly valued skill of our planetary society. Lying, scheming politicians, corporate executives, investors, gangs, and crooked cops rule our streets and our world.
But come to find out - the world can't be controlled. The greater the ability to control, the greater the potential for catastrophic changes to occur. The more pressure the greater the risk of explosion.

the establishment of human civilization
thousands of years ago
was the establishment of the social structure
in which we now live

thought has created great structures of power
every type of
nation, army, industry
international corporation and religous organization
-and the rich and powerful who finance and operate them-
and every type of alliance and rift
where always a few at the top exist
experiencing immense power and pleasure
ease, comfort, and fantastic physical security
and are supported by the many at the bottom
existing in degraded deprivation and pain
as receivers of the so called generosity
dispensed by those in power

That's thought's job - to seek ruthlessly to survive. But why, twenty five years after thought has attained the knowledge necessary to supply every human being on the planet with the maximum physical security possible, do we still live in the squirming conglomeration of an anarchic hierarchy of ruthlessly competing power structures?