Is the world too big to fail?

[CHIMO]

The democracy uprising in the Arab world has been a spectacular display of courage, dedication, and commitment by popular forces - coinciding, fortuitously, with a remarkable uprising of tens of thousands in support of working people and democracy in Madison, Wisconsin, and other US cities. If the trajectories of revolt in Cairo and Madison intersected, however, they were headed in opposite directions: in Cairo toward gaining elementary rights denied by the dictatorship, in Madison towards defending rights that had been won in long and hard struggles and are now under severe attack.

Each is a microcosm of tendencies in global society, following varied courses. There are sure to be far-reaching consequences of what is taking place both in the decaying industrial heartland of the richest and most powerful country in human history, and in what President Dwight Eisenhower called "the most strategically important area in the world" - "a stupendous source of strategic power" and "probably the richest economic prize in the world in the field of foreign investment," in the words of the State Department in the 1940s, a prize that the US intended to keep for itself and its allies in the unfolding New World Order of that day.

Despite all the changes since, there is every reason to suppose that today's policy-makers basically adhere to the judgment of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's influential advisor A.A. Berle that control of the incomparable energy reserves of the Middle East would yield "substantial control of the world." And correspondingly, that loss of control would threaten the project of global dominance that was clearly articulated during World War II, and that has been sustained in the face of major changes in world order since that day.

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/09/201192514364490977.html

[Jackpine Radical]

1. And that, children, plus discoveries of reare-earth minerals in Afghanistan,

is why we remain at war today. It has nothing to do with terrorism. It has only to do with our addiction to a substance which at once drives our economic machine and poisons our biosphere.

[jwirr]

2. Sooner or later we will run out of resources to fight over. In fact we

will probably use them up fighting wars over them. We should be using them to help to build the post-fossil fuel era.

[Kennah]

3. I doubt it. We can always fight over water.

[jwirr]

5. And I suppose food. Sorry state we have gotten this world into.

[Kennah]

7. There is perhaps good news

Einstein said, "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

Perhaps the world is so broken we won't even be able to fight WWIII with unimaginable weapons, and we'll just have to make do with sticks and stones.

[saras]

4. NOTHING is too big to fail because bigness doesn't protect against failure

Ask the dinosaurs about "too big to fail". Or the British Empire. Or the Roman Empire. Or Ozymandias.

[Kurmudgeon]

6. It's the haves vs the have-nots. It'll be like this to the end unless mankind ever wises up.