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From where I sit, we are now officially a third world country and our addiction to fossil fuel is going to bring about the end of the American Empire. All empires collapse. Our empire is built upon a foundation of cheap oil. America has gotten quite far on cheap oil. Cheap oil has deluded us into thinking we are the wealthiest nation on the earth, yet we blindly ignore the nasty problems of poverty, hunger, and irrational consumerism that destroys our environment. Watching one of the poorest cities in America being chastised for not heeding the mandatory evacuation is sickening. Everyone of us assumes that these people should have just filled up their nonexistant cars with cheap gas and hightailed it out of the one place that many of them have never left in their entire lives.
Sadly, Katrina is nothing compared to what is coming. We live on a steady diet of fossil fuels. Our agriculture is swimming in the stuff. We've stripped the soil of its capacity to grow anything and to compensate, we pump barrels and barrels of petroleum based fertilizers back in, creating a vicious cycle. Our oceans are dead zones from all the nitrates running of our mono culture pastures. Within the next decade or so, we will begin to lose the capacity to feed the 6.5 billion people that occupy this planet. I'm not a Malthusian, but you can't argue with basic mathematics. The energy we put into producing food is greater than what we pull out. Plain and simple, we are killing ourselves with abundance and the day of reckoning is drawing near.
Politically, I've always been a libertarian socialist. Despite the nonsense of the Rand and Rothbard cultists, I'm not going to let a bunch of oxymoronic anarcho-capitalists tarnish the word libertarian. Liberty is more than just being able to smoke marijuana and watch porno. The obscenity of so called capitalist libertarians has tarnished the very meaning of the word liberty. Liberty cannot exist until every man and woman has a living wage, nutritious food to eat, quality healthcare, and an environment that isn't choking in sewage and toxins. We can no longer turn these matters over to the wealthy political class and expect them to protect our liberties. Revolution cannot occur by proxy. No, we're going to have to get our hands dirty.
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