- The bottom line is profit. Profit and the lust for it
is capitalism's event horizon. Like the boundary of a black hole
which is roughly what the term "event horizon" means in the theory
of general relativity, any energy, information or meaning that passes the
threshold of a consciousness driven by profit disappears into the super-gravitational
field of the black hole itself never to be seen or heard of again.
-
- Nothing can be seen once it enters this realm, and nothing,
having entered, ever escapes. No light, no sign, no dawn of understanding
can re-emerge. Anything, any light, any object, any thought, any meaning,
purpose, or any human feeling is swallowed and for all practical purposes,
obliterated there.
-
- No communication can transpire between inside and outside.
-
- The event horizon of profit-consciousness functions as
an inviolate barrier between what appear to be mutually exclusive worlds.
Those of us on this side of the event horizon can only guess, but never
really know, what happens on the other side. What we know of what is inside
the black hole of the capitalist consciousness can only be inferred from
what seems to happen at its horizon. We are left to assume that what happens
there is annihilation, or its equivalent. It seems that the only thing
that can enter that realm is money- life stripped of all meaning except
a numerical designation, like a concentration camp inmate with a serial
number tattooed on her forearm.
-
- There are things we can infer from this side of the horizon
about what happens on the other side, in the black hole of the capitalist
mentality - things that show up outside that tell us something about what
happens within it. Things like the concentration camp victim, like the
mass graves in Guatemala, the unearthed Mayan corpses left by death squads
they seem to emerge from the black hole and give us a glimpse of what is
inside: and, beyond that, sometimes we almost get real glimpses in. We
get glimpses of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, of someone's recollection of headless
frogs spewing blood after the psychopathic child, George W. Bush, has lit
a firecracker he's inserted in their mouths and hurled them through the
air. We know these things we glimpse them, those of us who are paying
the strictest kind of attention. But, mostly, nothing escapes, or that
which seems to escape the pull of the black hole for a moment is immediately
sucked back in to the realm of oblivion as if it never happened.
-
- But, as often as not, we can tell what matters to those
in the center of civilization's black gravity its centers of "power",
by what doesn't happen out here in the real world - on this edge of the
horizon -as much as by what does happen.
-
- Notice. Notice what is taken "seriously" by
the denizens of the dark center of "power" if anything
beyond the next quarterly profit and loss statement can be said to be taken
seriously at all.
-
- Notice where the $700 billion in "bailout"
money is going. The black hole people feared would swallow the Earth when
the CERN particle accelerator was launched in Europe didn't appear there.
It appeared thousands of miles away on Wall Street - and the $700
billion is going into that black hole, never to be seen again.
-
- It's going to fix problems that have no real existence,
that are tied to values that have no real existence. Down the rabbit hole,
the black hole, into the land of illusion, the land of swindles, the land
of lies, of the selling of the negation of values, of mirrors upon mirrors,
into the unreal land of black magic, where it will impact nothing but the
"faith" of capitalist financiers and wizards in their ability
to live on - and to sustain themselves with - lies and illusion in a system
that is fundamentally not sustainable. They call this psychic trick- this
denial - "faith" in the markets, liquidity and credit (and to
give credit, of course, means nothing but to put faith or belief in something
or someone) even as the credit markets are drying up. They are drying
up because no one who is sane can any longer believe the lie. The whole
thing is incredible, unbelievable. Such faith is nothing more or less than
faith in a lie. The whole thing is based on what Ayn Rand the late
high priestess of capitalism, cruelty, arrogance, free markets and the
"virtue" of selfishness, called, ironically enough, given the
context, the "blank out."
-
- All it takes is one stroll down Wall Street to get that
Wall Street is "America's" temple district
-
- The sense of being on "holy" ground is palpable
- and all it takes is one glance to get that none of the financial wizards
really knows what's going on they know not what they have wrought, they
know not whom they have robbed; they have invented a house of lies so complex
that they themselves can no longer follow the plot or the floor plan. What
we know and what they know, and what Bush knows and Obama and McCain
- what they all know- is that the $700 billion is going to cover the lie,
is going to keep their asses out of prison, is going to prevent revolt
against their system, which profits at the expense of all of us. It's not
going to so-called "Main Street," and - even if it did - who's
on Main Street, if not merely the junior, local and regional versions of
the players on Wall Street the ones getting their hands dirty
the ones that exploit us face to face, rather than from the remote heights
of the now-obliterated World Trade Center?
-
- Yes, who's on Wall Street, who's on Main Street, who's
on ghetto streets and barrio streets, and who, after all is on Skid Row,
or on a dirt street in a third world village, living on $2 a day - $2,
not $700 billion not even $200 billion, not even $200 or a twenty
dollar bill. 2 dollars. A day. Or less.
-
- Of course, outside the black hole, outside the house
of mirrors, it's plain to see. All profit comes at someone else's expense.
They have robbed the poor blind that's why they are poor. They have
gutted the Earth of its soil, plant life, energy, forests and water tables:
we are left with deserts and a $700 billion black hole. That's why the
Earth is dying. They profit, as the traditional Hopi elders told us, at
the expense of all life. That's where the limos, and the mansions (whether
its one mansion like Obama's or 13 of them like McCain's) come from: at
the expense of all life. That's what happens.
-
- Now, notice what doesn't happen.
-
- Humanity faces a real crisis - one that threatens not
only Wall Street, but all life on Earth. Call it Global Warming, call it
Peak Oil, call it running out of water on a global scale, call it the collapse
of industrial agriculture. call it fisheries collapsing, call it mass extinction.
Call it the potential of planetary death. Call it what is inside the Black
Hole made visible, palpable in its meaning. Call it the real event horizon.
Call it the Killing horizon. It's every bit as complex in all of its intersections
as the financial "crisis," but, unlike the financial "crisis,"
it's real.
-
- And what happens?
-
- Nothing. No significant action. At all.
-
- There's no $700 billion plan to save the Earth - which
sustains us all.
-
- The only thing that has ever mattered to the rulers of
this empire and of every other empire- is profit, and profit, we
will recall, always comes at someone's expense ours, the indigenous
peoples in every corner of the planet whose lands and lives have been usurped,
-
- at the expense of the enslaved, from Babylon to the USA,
at the expense of Polar Bears, Wolves, Buffalo, Dolphins, Bears and
now even the Chimpanzee faces extinction, along with Whales, and as much
as 50% of all living species before this century and this system
- is finished with them. Profit. At the expense. Of all life.
-
- The capitalists can't look at the meaning of it. They
can't bear to see the meaning and impact of their lives and how they live
them. Blank out. They don't know and can't know, any more than George W.
Bush can really afford to know what was happening when he stuck firecrackers
in frog's mouths and sent them sailing through the air with the fuse sparkling
(that, after all, is why he drinks not to know.) Maybe he imagined
as a boy that the frogs were B24 bombers in WW2, and that when the firecracker
exploded, it was flak hitting the nose of the plane, right where the navigator
sat, and that the blood was the navigator's blood. Maybe he couldn't bring
himself to look at the shattered skulls, the exposed spines, the blood,
and know what he had done. Or maybe he looked, and delighted in what he
saw. We'll never know. It's lost in the black hole. Maybe the financial
wizards think of derivatives and scam mortgages like Bush thought of frogs.
The thrill, the drama of making a kill, of scamming, lying, getting over
on others less powerful the nobodies - the frog people - like you
and me, the frog people who live on Elm Street, on ghetto and barrio streets,
on Skid Row, on dirt streets, and along trails in the Amazon jungle and
paths in the high Andes of Bolivia. I say probably so that the financiers
see us just that way.
-
- But, maybe we'll never know. It seems to have disappeared
in the black hole of denied memory, impossibility and lies, just as Bush's
childhood memories lay hidden in the dense black hole of unresolved alcoholism.
But we know this; for them, regular people - and animals, forests, polar
bears, wolves and glaciers are invisible. We're on the other side
of their event horizon, and they don't care what happens to us. They are
pulling us all inexorably into the gravity well from which no light escapes.
They call the collapse of their house of financial lies a "crisis."
In the U.S., people like the Republican vice presidential candidate call
the Killing horizon the potential of planetary death - a "hoax."
-
- But, on a planetary scale, as everything unravels and
is thrown into increasingly radical imbalance, people are starting to understand
that what we see is what we get. And they are starting to see what has
remained hidden in the realms of dark gravity and power. The event horizon,
the Killing horizon, is drawing ever nearer.
-
- And people are starting to decide for themselves what
constitutes a hoax and what is, in fact, an actual crisis. We are deciding
what and who needs and deserves a rescue a "bailing out"
It's not the wizards and merchants of death; it's the frogs, lizards,
plants, forests, beavers, bears, and human children.
-
- You decide who and what nurtures us all and who and what
destroys us. You decide. Is it saner to hug a tree, a cold stone building
on Wall Street, or a stock certificate? Look at it. You decide. Everything
that matters to you depends on the nature of your decision.
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- http://countercurrents.org/santos041008.htm
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