When the riots begin

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The trouble with preaching to pigs is that they will never get it. How much the rich in any society consume is never likely to be a major factor because there is only so much any one person can guzzle. Now by my definition, consumption is a direct activity whereas moving money around is not. Both require a subject or agent but consumption actually utilizes tangible resources whereas transferring money from one bank account to another is simply notional. I know, I know, it is a difficult concept to grasp because most people just do not understand what money really is.

People get angry when told that Western societies are over consuming because any adjustment will mean that some people are going to experience steep declines in their standard of living. America is today going through just such an adjustment and it is painful. There is a lot of citizen journalism chronicling the very apparent rise of homelessness and neighborhoods that have sunk into not so genteel poverty. It would not have been so bad if the American government had sought to manage the decline as opposed to pretending that if they held it together and stayed positive, everything will turn out okay. Well everything is not okay.

maybe we need to cut our production. i mean we can't just create and consume until the whole planet is gone can we?

There are a lot of poor people in the world who would like to consume more. Think basic healthcare, literacy and having enough to eat so that you do not fall asleep in the day from hunger. All these things are taken for granted in the rich world but are not always available in poorer countries. Consumption in itself will not drive our planet to extinction as there are rich deposits of basic materials and our biosphere is naturally self regenerating. It is when people consume too much and thus deprive others of needed goods and services that many problems arise. But people then ask: why should a poor Indian farmer get to own a cell phone when he does not produce enough to make the trade with phone manufacturers and service providers reasonable? Indeed this is the exact same question I ask myself when I look at how Americans gobble down with such gusto all the things they buy with borrowed money. Why should anyone send goods and provide services to America when all Americans do is give them increasingly worthless IOUs in exchange?

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/wor ... e2056715/#

Honesty about the Greek debt crisis is harder to come by in America. The Canadians can be candid I suspect because they know that with abundant natural resources and strict rules on lending and borrowing, Canada is unlikely to ever be compared with Greece. Even American pundits cannot help but draw parallels between America and Greece these days.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/ju ... nt-clashes

More violence in Greece.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhV9Lxw-MYM

You have to watch the AlJazeera piece where 3 Greeks tell the world that Greece is not to blame. How do you not get angry when people say that tax evasion is not a problem.

Apparently, what will start the riots is losing Game 7 of the Stanley Cup playoffs...

As for resources, there are plenty of resources. The problem is, our "leaders" are too shortsighted, cowardly, or just plain stupid to get the frak off this planet and go after those resources on the Moon, in the asteroids, in the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, on Mars, being emitted daily from the Sun...

There are plenty of people in America who live a hand to mouth existence and often it is the economically disadvantaged who have had to make all the adjustments to help correct the national imbalances. A middle-class family that loses both incomes is an example of how America’s current account deficit is getting closed at the expense of personal dignity and well-being. It is precisely this unfair distribution of pain that has led to violent riots in Greece. Will we see the same horrifying out pour of rage in America? I suspect that we will except it will be far worse than anything the world has seen because unlike the Greeks or Egyptians, Americans have guns.