The Common Man’s Response to Globalization Which Seeks to Destroy Him…

 “Food is Love. I believe there is no better food supply chain management system than one which starts in the back garden and ends a few meters away on the table” – Tom Dennen.

“Preppers” take that as a given.

It’s all about numbers, starting with the number of people exploding into the vast spaces of the planet and then confining themselves to cities rather than McLuhan’s “Global Villages”

One of the functions of ‘think tanks’ and some Universities, is the examination of alternatives to taken-for-granted paradigms that guide businesses ‘in the real world’, a ‘consulting’ function that evolved after the Industrial Revolution.

In the 1700s, if you made 20 000 pairs of shoes in a year, you were guaranteed to make more shoes in the next year because there were more people.

Project that into the fifties and sixties when the west’s birth population began to level out while the Third World population continued to expand.

A lot of shoe companies competing for the same number of western ‘consumers’, the smart ones moving into Eastern markets.

It is assumed here that the ‘growth’ that drives the profit motive today originated with increasing numbers of people each year back then.

But when the consumer base leveled out, the demand for bottom-line ‘growth’ did not, investors put on pressure and by the early eighties, after years of time-and-motion studies and streamlining ‘efficiency’ implementations, “flattening management” became part of the necessary decentralization, even a short-lived corporate ‘fashion’ when computers began generating productivity data 24/7 – beating by miles the quarterly reports of middle managers.

It was best described by a Unilever CE: “There used to be seventeen people between me and the lowest factory sweeper in Hong Kong; now there are three”. In the later eighties, some ten million middle managers were discarded by corporate America who may be the glue holding SMMEs together today – they were not ‘preppers’ but people suddenly thrown out on the street who responded as humans do, with creativity, ingenuity and courage.

 This was followed through the nineties by a savage period of ‘mergers and acquisitions’; hostile takeovers that ended with the current, but still evolving, network  of ‘global corporations’ and their efforts at ‘Globalization’.

But the stockholders still needed to see the bottom line move upward every year, demanding “profit growth” without the original engine, and continued pressure on management and the educational system:

Decentralization in global consumer-oriented corporate structures, for instance, was an early innovative response in the now rapidly changing world of corporate management and the introduction of Independent ‘Profit Centers’ within global financial management hierarchies originated at Harvard, while Supply Chain Management was the brain child of a Canadian university.

EARLY DAYS

My involvement with business innovation began with a postgraduate course at Harvard in 1968. We explored the awesome implications in the future of the ‘Accelerating Rate of Change’ in every aspect of the human condition based on the growing number of eople born each year from the beginning of the ‘population explosion’, which would later includeSouth American NAFTA casualties immigrating to the US and influenced all numbers – from scientific journals published to patents applied for, films made, increases in overall production and consumption of… everything.

The differentially expanding Internet (Gutenberg) Revolution curve is rapidly approaching an ‘infinity’… of change; the ‘info overload’ syndrome across the board in every field.

At the time, the study was aimed at learning how to create tools that could be used to build model solutions to problems related to rapidly changing environments in global commerce up to and including the business of war that had reached the point at which, in Viet Nam, the number of veterans’ suicides exceeded the number of battle fatalities, indicating a failure of ideologies propping up the US military-oriented economic expansion, (the Politics of Economics vs “Thou Shalt Not Kill”) but not of any faith in profits by its practitioners and from thence another moral hazard emerged which remains with us.

But those tools were and still are elusive as the course suggested a much more chaotic view of the future, “if everything is in a naturally and rapidly accelerating rate of change, everything will eventually ‘peak’ or reach its own “availability saturation” point. But how soon and what happens then?“

Three Horsemen of the Modern Apocalypse – Nuclear Annihilation, Overpopulation and Environmental Destruction were just being seen over the horizon.

The Fourth Horseman was the proximity of that horizon and the accellerating speed of our approach to it.

Again, the course implied that there would come a point where change itself would be so rapid that the rate of change would approach infinity in every field of man’s endeavor – at least in terms of the human capability of embracing it as individuals or as groups now known as ‘Corporations’. 
The irony then – and a conclusion drawn  - was that all those saturation points looked like they would be reached at the same time in the very near future – today, almost fifty years later, in  the so-called End Times, when other, larger cosmic changes are about to reach a peak, particularly the possibility of a Polar Shift – all which brought one man to declare that this period of human existence is “The End of History”, although for other reasons… but it’s a great phrase.

Certain saturation points were already being pinpointed by various other universities and think tanks – after all, everything comes to an end eventually and finite resources run out, even though the earth is a closed ecosystem and its components can be rearranged forever, unless they are hoarded or chemically locked up.

These were described as ’peak’ resource points – peak oil, for instance or peak anything that we totally rely on – phosphates, coal, molybdenum or access to water (which is finite, but accumulating and ‘hoarded’ at the poles by geophysics) – each peak beyond which we go into the second half of a so-called ‘finite’ resource at a highly accelerated reduction in the amounts available.

No tools have been created to deal with that.

The ‘second half’ runs out many times faster than the ‘first half’, but long before that the system collapses: Imagine a severed human femoral artery. Blood spurts out very quickly at first, but long before even the first half of it is gone – about 15% or so – it ‘peaks’ out and the system shuts down – imagine the world suddenly being required to run on only 85% of its current energy consumption…

One answer lies hidden in full view: foods are sustainable recombinants of energy in a ‘closed’ ecosystem, using the photosynthetic conversion of energy replenished by the sun and so not finite.

This scenario is finite and will soon ‘peak’:

There are two major powers on the planet today, the Anglo-US (NATO) bloc ‘Shock and Awe’ expansion against China’s BRICS moves – possibly quicker, certainly with less physical damage – with trade and aid, a ‘soft’ but double-edged sword.

 The panic is in the west’s accurate observation that the world’s economic clout is shifting east in spite of its ultra-sophisticated weaponry (the west having failed to understand or ignored the fact that Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s message was that Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was final and ended any argument for sustainable ‘conventional’ military conflict except for ‘war profiteering’).

Politics today is vying for single global governance, economics has been reduced to a quest for a universal, probably still debt-based, fiat currency under that governance and a monopolistic control over the exploitation, mechanization, automation and hoarding of resources – diamonds are a good example of monopolistic economic control by hoarding.

Again, on the one side “conventional warfare” (without nuclear weapons) and the other, “Trade and Aid”.

The total indifference to conventional warfare’s damage in terms of human economic ‘collateral’ is simply the system’s established refusal to consider any real distribution of material, intellectual or moral wealth. Both sides are supported by identical Monotheistic, ideologies that continue to be used in divide-and-rule strategies by the “Masters of War” on the one side (all of whom have read Sun Tzu) and the Masters of Trade on the other (who have a nuclear arsenal) with Monotheistic, Abrahamic Islam in the middle geologically separating the two for the moment, the ‘tripping point’ being Iran.

But control over an infinity of change may be infinitely difficult when the only tools we have left are muscles and minds.

So we must step aside from this ‘Think Global Clash of Civilizations” and think more along the lines of its corollary,  ‘Act Local’ – much more productive in that thinking local could avoid some of the temporary downsides of any central system achieving either control over everything left after a major conflict or rapid climate change, or destroying enough to establish control over what’s left in the event of a large socio-economic or climatic disruption.

Any of which is more than possible today.

“Localize your economy” is another wonderfully succinct phrase pregnant with opportunity and the most likely answer to globalization (and “the end of history”) for it could be the beginning of a history of cooperation and sharing, something quite new to many of us…

LOCALIZATION

Briefly, in the present economic paradigm a nation’s Debt-to-GDP ratio indicates the proximity to the edge of its ‘fiscal cliff’ over which lies total bankruptcy and default,. This quite obviously needs to be addressed at local service delivery levels before that happens because there will come a point at which almost all GDP revenues will be used for ‘debt servicing’ rather than the maintenance of basic infrastructure.

At that point lights and water, roads and bridges start to crumble; food and other products dependent on distribution systems must start down the pot-holed road to eventual collapse, which is where ‘local economics’ not only works but beats submission to any ideology – farmers for instance have been repairing their own rural road systems for years, neither for God nor Country but Survival.

Most western nations (including the US since the second quarter of last year) are well over the 100% Debt-to-GDP point and their banker governments have been both blatantly robbing the public purse and ‘borrowing’ expensive fiat money in a futile but profitable – for them – effort to push the edge of the cliff further into an impossible future.

There are myriad historical examples of  small communities  not just surviving but living day-to-day in real prosperity during past ideological conflicts and even tyrannical rule – the pre-Industrial Revolution Commons and the original Commons-based American Colonies are probably the best examples of resource management in terms of production exceeding demand, particularly of food, which should be our highest priority.

It goes without saying that if Maslow’s Hierarchy remains the simplest outline of steps to any human fulfillment, then the satisfaction of bodily needs – air, water and food, clothing and shelter – must necessarily be in place and fully secure before further ascent up the ladder to any attempt at spiritual inter-connectivity can even be considered.

This is why religious ‘prophets’ and ‘messengers’ insist that people grow their own food, for “he who controls the granaries, controls the people”, a phrase not bandied about by the present diverse ‘ruling elites’ who have those keys nicely locked away in places like Bayer and Monsanto.

There are very few socio-political structures existing on this planet today that include an even distribution of any form of wealth along with fairness and honesty in their dealings but there are plenty of working models in the past to draw from including former Eastern governments, the Roman Empire before it succumbed to the same usurious credit/debt-based banking system that destroyed, Richard II’s England and later the Commons and is destroying our financial systems today – with stock market manipulation recently thrown in and the final insult:  a ‘Deposit Charge” for lending the banks your money!

North Dakota is the only solvent state in the United States. Most recently Iceland and some African and South American states today are solvent because they control their own central banks and issue their own currencies.

With a political will based on just a modicum of awareness about our potential situation relative to the global financial collapse going on, there are more than enough resources in hand everywhere to create powerful, independent and prosperous communities.

Grow your own food… and Live – Tom Dennen