Things Aren’t Going Well

   Things are quickly deteriorating around the world despite the main stream media’s contention that the major concern facing our country is the future of a horny New York congressman’s tenure in a governmental body that over the last 20 years have performed acts against us more corrupt and heinous than a few pictures of Weiner’s underpants.

   What started as a neatly packaged uprising in North Africa amongst people marketed to us as radical Muslims, but are really just people on the same planet as you and I who happen to pray to a different god, has now jumped north across the Mediterranean Sea to countries with people who have a lot more in common with us in appearance and lifestyle.

   People in Greece have taken to the streets to oppose vast austerity measures the Greek government needs to implement in order to satisfy their debt to the European Central Bank, the European equivalent to our privately owned Federal Reserve Bank. The people there are angry at the prospect of their government’s having to pay back, at interest, money irresponsibly loaned to it to inflate their economy and lifestyles beyond their natural means. The movement is being billed to us here as a simple uprising. Locally, in Greek newspapers, blogs, twitter feeds and on the streets it is being discussed among the people as a revolution ever as strong as what we witnessed in Egypt.

   The collapse of the European Union doesn’t stop in Greece. Just yesterday, the Irish government, in response to people demonstrating there, rebuked the European Central Bank’s demand that instead of default they accept loans to prop up their banks and insure their investor’s large monetary position in them. The troubles in Spain and Portugal continue as well. In Germany and France, the countries that have been propping them all up, people have begun to protest any additional monetary assistance for the “PIIGS.” With the continuing unrest, which will only grow when this spring’s worldwide drought starts to interrupt food supply and energy shortages there continue to crimp growth, the disintegration of the European Union is now less theory and more realistic outcome.

   Across the globe in China, even with the information barriers set up to keep internal affairs under wraps, news is starting to trickle out from Reuters and other international news agencies that huge protests and “serious rioting” is beginning to break out in large Chinese metropolitan areas. People involved in these protests aren’t holding placards; they’re bombing government buildings and fighting police. China supplies all our plastic pumpkins. Get yours now before supplies run out.

   Japan’s troubles continue unabated. Three reactors at the Fukushima plant are still in a state of meltdown. Even in the most civil society on earth, people there have protested the continued use of nuclear power, resulting in the shutdown of not only Fukushima but other nuclear reactors in the country. Enough power capacity has been permanently lost to stifle, if not stop, production of most products that support everything technology-based in the world. Simply put, I wouldn’t expect to see an IPad 3 anytime soon, if ever.

   Here at home, we’re told everything is fine. Sure, there are some problems, but people in government are working on it and certainly will have them fixed and the country back on the road to prosperity in no time. But are we still believing the same government that brought us to Iraq to extinguish WMDs; Told us the bailouts would jump start things for us when they simply preserved the wealth of others; Insisted in the early 2000’s that the best investment a family could make was in real estate because values would could go nowhere but up; Implied that we would return to due process for our enemies by closing military detention camps, ending torture, and bringing supposed combatants to trial in an open court of law?

   I’m not.

   We would be in the same predicament as the rest of the world right now if it wasn’t for the wars we manufactured under false pretenses but under the reality that we needed to send our men and women in to Iraq, Afghanistan and now Libya for oil to fuel our economy. We would be in a hole deeper than all the “PIIGS” combined if it weren’t for the private bank that issues our currency propping up markets and raiding our treasury to throw money at the big banks. How long is the rest of the world, equally starved of energy and suffering financial turmoil, going to allow us to continue to wreck sovereignty in the name of the American way of life? How long are other countries going to allow us to “take it all” for ourselves killing whoever and destroying whatever lay in our path?

   Tensions are building everywhere, and the civil unrest that is spreading around the globe will find it’s way here when the people of the world, including the American people, take a stand against the corrupt federal government. We’ve all allowed it to go on too long and now it’s beyond repair.

   It’s time to prepare for that reality.

(Jeffrey S. Spofford is the circulation manager for The Portland Daily Sun. His column appears Fridays.)