I was driving to pick up Mom, so we could visit her 94 year old third husband. Wes was recovering at Mercy Hospital from an operation to remove a tiny bit of bone that was pinching a nerve.

Lucky man, Wes. I won't make it to 94. Our health care, our food, climate change, peak oil, our environment - already faltering. It's systemic. We cannot maintain our civilization because our footprint is too big.

But first I had to stop by Paris Farmer's Union on Auburn Street. I needed a seedling heater mat and I wanted to look through the seed for new discoveries. And I'd waited too long and Fedco, Johnny's and Cook's Garden were out of Fish Pepper, Everlasting Chard and Gilfeather Turnip [1] for the 2008. Had to find those.

Some guy in a flannel shirt and beat baseball cap was standing next to me at the counter wigging out over the price increase for chicken feed.

"Be happy," I said, butting into his business, "that you are not in England, where they have no pasta [2]. Or in Boston, where the price of bread flour has tripled [3]. Or where grains and hops [4] to make beer cannot be found."

"No more bread and circus," I said.

The self-styled Mrs. Robinson - Sara Robinson of Orcinus [5] - has written a piece on the upcoming revolution. Preposterous, a revolution in the US. Violent or not.

Robinson makes seven fairly conventional points in her essay. Read it [6].

1) Modern revolutions occur when economic advances turn into sharp reverse.

We called it the "j-curve of revolution" when we studied it at MIT, course 21.05: the point where the economy - the o'ikonomi`a - turns from good to bad. The housing crisis and peak oil are only the start of the downturn; government will be unable to meet its obligations. Half the states in the union have more serious budget crises than Maine.

2) Robinson writes of the broken social compact between the classes.

Check. Plantation Maine is For Sale: the atlantic salmon, the eels, the Androscoggin and Presumpscot, the forest. Our commonwealth. Even we natives. David Sirota writes [7] "This Washington [or Augusta] system exists, ironically, to preserve a well-coordinated class war being waged by an economic class very aware of itself - a class war by the wealthy against the rest of us." Or as Jay Hansen of dieoff.org puts it "a mass, communal robbery of another social group's life-support resources. [8]"

3) We are "deserted intellectuals", Robinson writes of the GenX and Baby Boomers, "a class that is always at extremely high risk for fomenting revolution whenever it appears in history.

The policies guiding change will not come from the working-three-jobs-isn't-it-a-great-country Gen X or disgruntled Boomers, but from those who - as the NYPD terrorism report notes - don't have regular jobs, pensions or mortgages and who have already given up on Business-As-Usual. From those of us living small, from those of us making common cause with the polar bears, from those of us with backyard chickens. We will be labelled terrorists.

4) Robinson echos the standard progressive line about the incompetence of the Bush administration.

As if the Iraq war would be better under competent management. As if torture can be handled competently and humanely. As if our votes would matter if only they were counted. But as Naomi Klein argues in "Shock Doctrine [9]", there is nothing incompetent about those operating the predatory, kleptocratic state [10]. New Orleans was no mistake, Iraq was no mistake, 9/11 was no mistake. Nor is the bankrupting of this country a mistake: the deliberate intent - the publically expressed intent - is to "drown the government in the bathtub." "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." - Grover Norquist, 2004 [11]

5) Robinson points out that revolution is necessary when the ruling elite sticks its head up its ass [24].

I've been arguing that virtually every solution the piranha class puts forward makes things worse. The faster we run this engine of consumption we call our modern economy, the deeper into the mud we sink. We've used up the good stuff - a third of the planet's resources in the past thirty years alone - and we're hitting the wall. It's systemic.

6) "America is now heading into the biggest financial contraction since the Great Depression," Robinson writes. She calls it "fiscal irresponsibility", and goes on to note that "conservatives [have] systematically dismantled the economic foundations of the entire country.

I don't understand why that is irresponsible. There is a well-planned and carefully executed plan dating back at least as far as the Powell Manifesto. It is deliberate policy. Those who carry it out are entirely responsible. It is not the hidden hand of the market or any value-free action. John Stuart Mill - the broad thinking political economist of the Industrial age wrote "Except on matters of mere detail, there are perhaps no practical questions, even among those which approach nearest to the character of purely economical questions, which admit of being decided on economical premises alone." [p94, Rostow, "Theorists of Economic Growth", quoting Mill.]

The current recession is not only the bill coming due for 28 years of Republican fiscal malfeasance, the oncoming depression is the end of the road for rising tide, neoliberal economics. The resources aren't there.

7) "The government no longer exercises force in a way that people find fair or consistent," Robinson writes.

In this country, the Rule of Law has been usurped by the rule of man. Authoritarianism [12]. The telecoms and private military get their own Congressional get-out-of-jail-free passes while the government - at all levels - goes out of its way to supress the most fundamental human right, freedom of speech.

The clerk behind the counter at Farmer's Union started reciting the month-by-month increases in the price of chicken feed. The customer pushed his hat back. His jaw was falling open.

So I kicked him. Hard. In the teeth.

"Biofuels," I said, loudly enough for everyone in the store to hear. I wanted to disturb everyone [14].

"Oh shit," he said. "It's happening."

He knew!

It will be violent. It already is violent. The piranha business class is destroying life itself on this planet. What better example than Plum Creek's proposed development, except perhaps a Virgin Airways jet flying on biofuel from a new third runway [15] at Heathrow. Humankind shares less than half an acre of arable land per person on the planet. So that I, rich white American, can eat and drive with a footprint darkening thousands of acres, how many poor colored humans and other living beings must perish? All the cropland on the planet cannot make biofuel to replace the petroleum we use. How many people will starve [16] so Virgin Airways jets can fly on biofuel [17]? How many "miles per life" does that jet get?

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the revolution won't be violent. Maybe it's the counter-revolution - the preemptive strike against the pending revolution - that will be violent. Maybe the counter-revolutionaries will follow Machiavelli's dictum - updated by Milton Friedman and the Chicago School economists [18] - strike hard, strike arbitrarily, strike mercilessly, above all strike first. Maybe then the Prince will be gracious.

After 9/11 everything changed. Just so in Chile on Sep 11, 1973, when Kissinger and the US overthrew Allende before he could implement desired social reforms. In their US backed counter-revolution, Pinochet's thugs threw the community activists, intellectuals, students and labor organizers out of the planes and helicopters into the rivers - a technique pioneered by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. The thugs would cut open their victims' bellies first, so the bodies would sink long enough for the piranhas to eat most of the flesh. Beyond recognition. Which is how the business-class counter-revolutionaries in South America came to be called "piranhas". P is for piranha.

As Robinson wrote me in some correspondance about her article: "Policies need champions to sell them at court. When suitable champions can't be found, or court isn't buying, you get strikes, mob violence, and eventually revolution."

The court isn't buying. Immortal corporations get more rights than people - rights the corporations gained under the 14th Amendment [23]. But human beings in Guantanamo have no rights because they are not people [19]. Draft rules implemented without public input can't be challenged. Immortals like Exxon and Monsanto, Sappi and Florida Power and Light rule.

The piranhas expect it to be violent. They are preparing. They are transforming our entire society into a prison-in-place. The NYPD Report on Radicalization, Jane Harmon's [D - Demofascist] Homegrown Terrorism Bill.

I wonder how in a different time and place, serving a different prince or ruler and fighting a different race, religion and country the likes of Jane Harmon and Michael Chertoff, Tom Allen and John Baldacci, Scondras [20] and Collins, and Generals Powell and Libby would have performed. Authoritarians obey. They expect obedience. Obedience trumps law. Authoritarians will employ any means [21] to impose order and authority.

I left the man at the counter. He wasn't moving.

Mom and I spent a little time with Wes at Mercy Hospital. He's a lucky man.

References

[1] http://www.slowfoodusa.org/ark/ark_list.html

[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/nov/03/food.climatechange/print

[3] http://countingsheep.typepad.com/amuse_bouche/2008/02/flour-shortage.html

[4] http://www.samueladams.com/promotions/HopSharing/Default.aspx

[5] http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/

[6] http://alternet.org/module/printversion/77498

[7] http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/thoughts_about_iowa_after_vacation

[8] http://dieoff.org/page185.htm

[9] pick good vid from youtube or dn FIX ME!!!

[10] http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2006/05/predator_state.html

[11] http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oid=9326

[12] http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/

[13] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hhm0NHhCBg

[14] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/feb/19/climatechange.carbonemissions/print

[15] http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/02/19/an-exchange-of-souls/

[16] http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3662/308268

[17] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7261214.stm

[18] http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/printer_090807A.shtml

[19] http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=ca1e2e07dcc6ff291c8edde6d4bd1890

[20] http://www.mainecommonwealth.com/asdfasdf FIX ME!!!

[21] http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=172244&ac=PHnws

[22] http://www.thedemocraticstrategist.org/ac/2006/09/authoritarianism_and_the_ameri.php

[23] http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/index.php/Equal_protection

[24] http://www.energybulletin.net/41231.html