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The surest path to the destruction of our current economic system turns out to be really very simple: raise the cost of energy sky high. Remember, our ENTIRE economy is based on cheap energy. Everything that is "America" today, depends upon it.
Every small business, every minimum wage employee, every single parent working multiple jobs, every person working "dead end" jobs for thankless wages - all of us - depend UTTERLY - on cheap energy for our economic survival.
Say you live in a rural community like I do. You share a town with a few hundred other souls, and there aren't many jobs available because there aren't that many jobs to begin with. So you must look outside your small town to maybe a bigger town, 20, or 30, or 50 miles away.
Enter the new economic reality. If you drive a car with average gas mileage (lets say 25 mpg), and you have to drive 30 miles one way to your average paying job (or if you're in a big city and spend 3 hours a day in traffic, its the same thing) you are going to have to give up about an hour's pay each day just to get back and forth to your job. And as gas prices increase, and heating oil increases, and natural gas increases, and electricity costs increase, and even the price of an oil change increases - its going to add up in a very short time. Work, will soon be an expense, rather than a source of income. In other words, there will come a time, starting with the lower paying jobs in our wonderful economy, that people will begin to suffer from diminishing returns, which will quickly put an end to their ability to work such a job for "standard" wages.
In a city, you can likely switch to public transportation, and be all right - for a while. But if you live in a rural area without any kind of public transportation infrastructure - well, you're just plain fucked.
While the news is filled with the fate of brokers, banks, and corporations, the real drama is just starting to play out all over America. How it will end, or where it will take us, is anyone's guess.
Dark days, are coming. The economic system that we all work for, slave for, sacrifice for, and worry so much about, is imploding.
For the "average" American (God, how I hate that term) it is going to be a dark, difficult time, when uncertainty rains upon us and threatens to consume our nation. We're all pretty used to our fast food, our plethora of vehicles to instant gratification, our consumables - in other words, we're all comfortably accustomed to our (dare I say) hedonistic American way of life. And in the short term, that lifestyle, is going to have to drastically change to meet the growing economic reality of our lives.
But for the elite, their days may well end up being even darker than ours. For, no matter how you parse it, the system which is now failing - the system we are all forced to participate in - is 100% theirs. They took the promise of America and made it solely about them, about elitism, about privilege, and 'us' vs. 'them', about wealth, and decadence, excess, and selfish short sightedness.
And their greed is finally destroying the very system they depend on to even simply be, "elite." They are, ultimately, nothing more than destroyers; traitors to the ideals of America, and to their fellow man.
I'll leave you with a quote from one of my favorite authors: "Every generation gets the magic they deserve." Think on that, during the coming meltdown...
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