Greetings from the country that has shored up your main banks over the last ten years. If you are British, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese or Italian; we have been forced to bail your financial institutions out when they got burned by collapsing property bubbles in three different countries which occurred at the unfortunate moment when the world's financial and real estate system also fell into crisis and your investment houses needed to scoot their hot money around the planet before contagion got to their inflated valuations.
Ireland's crime: Bad timing; we and Greece were left with no chairs when the music stopped.
To add insult to injury this process of coring out our national assets, which we paid for - not Europe - was called in the media and among the mainstream economic group thinkers as the 'Irish Bailout'. Such a title would be laughable if it wasn't so tragic - to date over 3,500 suicides have been linked directly to the austerity agenda pushed by the Christian Democratic Union of Germany and in the European Parliament. In particular, the former Ministers for Finance Wolfgang Shauble in Germany and Michael Noonan in Ireland pressed ahead with an agenda that placed not only the odious debt but the moral burden of recrimination upon a blameless people to shore up their bets. These are lives we won't be getting back nor will they ever be acknowledged by those in charge of Projekt Europe. Nobody voted for Projekt Europe - this is the hostile takeover of our continental democracies.
It is against this background and in criticism of neoliberalism, a value system that reduces people into commodities and elevates property rights over human rights, that I write this essay about how we climb out this wreckage, dust ourselves off, and continue to progress despite the hooks and snares of an industry that consistently indulges in cocaine-fuelled hubris and then crashes. It is clear that there will never be a rapprochement between those who have been ground into dust by this system and its neoliberal champions; far too much pain and grief has been inflicted by the strong upon the weak.
I am Irish and I know all about a sense of oppression and unchallenged injustice - it's what I grew up with during the time of Northern Ireland's ironically dubbed 'troubles'. I am not inclined to write ballads and laments about the last decade; I do solutions.
There is no point in hoping for trust let alone co-operation between the satellite countries who have been sacrificed to shore up Germany's economic ambitions with a currency that is still structurally brittle and Europe's current ruling bureaucracy; for that's what it is; a ruling bureaucracy also known as a coercive bureaucracy. The European Commission has made it abundantly clear that the last ten years of pain and austerity imposed upon Europe's smaller nations is not an anomaly but a policy that will continue for an unspecified period of time.
Brexit did not happen in a vacuum; no amount of propaganda or spin on the side of a bus caused a clear majority of British people (particularly people in the anti-Tory north) to vote to leave a system they recognised only too well. This system was precisely the same system the 19th Century British Empire imposed upon its subject nations.
As the song goes: Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.
Therefore this essay outlines the options for Ireland and other 'little loser' nations of Europe to move beyond the reach of the banks, the energy giants, and the polluters. When the game is rigged, as this European single economy game is palpably rigged, you don't continue to gamble; you leave the table. Ireland doesn't have the option of leaving the table without throwing herself upon the mercy of a former dominator or seeking to form alliances not imagined for a millennium.
Here's how we can do both and more. Here's why we shall continue to be European yet standing outside of the influence of the EU's bureaucracy as well as the ambitions of mittel European banks and investors. Here's how we simply reject all powers over our sovereignty and yet, maintain excellent trading relations with the entire world.
Too good to be true? Think about where Europe has been and what we have come through in our living memory. There are no binding rules that compels us to sacrifice our citizens to a hierarchy or regime. Membership of the EU is purely voluntary despite the patter and propaganda of career bureaucrats. Should the Irish people decide that our economic interests lie beyond the crumbs off an Alpine court so be it and 'auf wiedersehen'. Ireland, has options that Britain never could have. Britain has the financial services industry and plenty of manufacturing, engineering and high tech to fall back on but Britain is a nation of tens of millions. Britain's post European strategy cannot suit Ireland. However Ireland's scale, expertise, developing infrastructure and population as well as our ease with other nations offers us a different strategy entirely. We don't need to leave so that we can engage in free-trade with superpowers; we can do something far more radical.
We are going to reinvent civilisation from the ground up to the stars above us. In doing so, Ireland will be the hub for a population of up to 100 million northern Europeans who have far greater ambitions than competing with Asian countries for diminishing employment investment. We are going to kickstart a real space age, an energy age based upon fusion energy, and an age of plenty thanks to natural abundance and planned sustainability as opposed to synthetic scarcity.
How could Ireland in its present depressed, dispossessed state even contemplate such an adventure?
Let's look into history for an answer.
In 1588, England faced obliteration at the hands of the Spanish Empire, then the greatest power in the world thanks to their colonial properties in the Americas. This obliteration wasn't simply the loss of their monarch or even their religion but the English had to consider their culture, their emerging Renaissance literary and music scene, even their language to be forfeit should the Spanish armada prevail. In this instance England looked a lot like it does today - isolated against most of the force of Europe under the Catholic banner with only some emerging Protestant nations offering some succour. This is before a Federalised Germany; most of the Netherlands was still subject to Spain, the Danes and Swedes were still unfocused as nations and the surrounding kingdoms France, Scotland and Ireland were active and devout belligerents against the House of Tudor.
It looked like 'Game Over' for England.
But the English prevailed and the Spanish lost not just ships but also the mantle of being unbeatable. The success of England encouraged them not only to reinvest in their navy but to explore beyond Europe's borders. Within as short a time as one year, Elizabeth I had given a royal commission to merchants from London to sail to the Indian ocean. In 1591, three years after the armada, three ships made the first voyage with the hope of cutting out the middlemen who littered the Italian dominated silk road entirely. This audacious mercantile gamble ended up lasting over two and a half centuries capturing colonies and realms as far afield as India, Burma (now Myanmar) and the Antipodes. Within twenty years of the armada, England had allied with Scotland under James I and established a permanent colony on North America's East Coast. The British Empire had begun. This empire prevailed for over three hundred years where it ruled over just short of a quarter of the world's total population and controlled just under a quarter of Earth's landmass.
The point? England went from a middling country of no great importance to the largest, most successful empire of the last five hundred years not just through courageous battle but also through audacious ambition.
Now is not the time for laments and ballads, now is the time for audacity.
Debt - the yoke that a financial industry has placed upon humanity is beginning to chafe. The secret to remaining in business long term is to maintain at least the image of providing more than you charge. Now that banks and markets all over the world, not just in Ireland, have been caught costing more than they are worth - it's time to rethink how we live. We are seeing alternative investment models emerge from the ashes of the credit crunch; crowdfunding, cryptocurrencies, valorisation agreements, token or local currencies, even barter and recycling are becoming the done thing again.
Why make the change now? Why not just adopt a 'wait and see' approach?
On the whole, capitalism isn't such a bad system as long as one remembers that it is a system and not a religion. Where capitalism and investment goes wrong is when this simple fact gets forgotten. Such periods were once upon a time considered aberrations, moments of collective idiocy that were to be defenced against. Bubbles happen when investors compete with one another in a buying fever that bears no relation to analysis or logic but the type of feeding frenzy that sharks are known for. They put such pressure on the supply of a particular asset or commodity that its price ceases to represent a realistic reflection of its real world value. Once the bubble bursts, usually with the first investor to refuse an inflated price, a crash follows with the same tide of investors now desperately seeking to sell their devalued interests.
Bubbles and crashes used to be once in a lifetime phenomena. The gap between Tulip Fever of the 1630s to the South Sea Bubble in 1711 was practically the life expectancy of a man of the period, three score and ten years. By the 19th Century with improved professionalism and information technology the period between crashes fell to roughly twenty years; this is progress. In the early 20th Century the period between crashes stretched back to thirty years again thanks to the intervention of two world wars and the sacrifice of tens of millions of lives. However, once peace broke out so did our stock market jitters more frequently than before from the Florida housing crash to the great depression in the 1920s to the austere 50's, then the collapse of oil prices in the 1976, followed by Black Monday 1987, the collapse of the Asian tiger economies in 1997, quickly followed by the Dotcom crash in 2000 - 2002 to the housing crash of 2007, the oil price collapse of 2014 where China lost a third of its stock market's value overnight, and we are currently looking at the bitcoin bubble expand - due to pop in 2019 if we follow the timescale of the 21st Century.
Do you see the pattern? Bubbles and crashes now happen every FIVE years. Is this actually accidental or is this part of the scam? Finance has lost all credibility. If you hold shares for an industry you do not professionally understand then expect to be fleeced. They never, ever learn because they never, ever last. Five years is the cut off point where employees in a corporation either move off to pastures new or are made redundant as new management teams change the game. Finance has no longevity and thus cannot have wisdom.
As I stated in my open letters nearly seven years ago: If you absolutely deny a junkie his or her drug they will wail and suffer but ultimately, they will recover from their addiction. The financial world don't have a drug to replace debt so nations and entire civilisations are opting for recovery over their continued misery. This was always going to happen.
If you were to pitch a system of wealth management to today's investors; a system that relied on the confidence of jittery, ever twisting, over complicated markets for commodities and socialised debt you would probably end up starving to death or sent to a secure psychiatric facility. FIAT is flawed. There can be no future beyond our current permanent resource war state coming out from FIAT and materialism.
This is going to happen extremely quickly and it starts with us cutting out our addiction to debt.
What awaits us goes far greater than the free-trade nirvana so beloved of Tories and Neoliberals; we have the opportunity to profoundly change how we think about life and living on Earth. Living in a post financial world is the first step that leads directly to an amazing goal that I and many other people around the world have been inspired by.
So let's look at the options beyond finance, credit and debt that can be used as iterative steps towards our audacious goal. Remember that whatever system or solution we pick must lead directly to that goal or we are off on a winding road that can end up as a technological or social cul de sac. I am a fan of science fiction and thus I have seen my fair share of dystopian settings and flawed paradises turned into evil empires. What distinguishes what we do today from the founders of those fictional failures is this exercise in disciplined planning and anticipation.
Never lose sight of the goal, no matter how shiny and distracting the new option may be.
The option to make a positive investment, a grand gesture, a monumental national endeavour died with the retreat from NASA at the ending of the Space Shuttle missions. The Russian Federation is still in the space race, obviously they understood it to be a marathon not a sprint; and China is making all the right noises to imply that they want to be a leader in this field too. Both China and the Russian Federation are enticed by the promise of mining possibilities on the moon and along the asteroid belt, which may or may not be worth the effort.
What is worth the effort is a goal of an entire Goldilocks zone stuffed full of habitats, teeming with life, with the range of nation options capable of representing every single person living on Earth today. Just think of that for a moment. We will be many degrees of trillions strong so a few billion nations is not even far fetched, it's nearly inevitable. Politically, socially, psychologically, physically, technologically, spiritually, intellectually we will be as different from how we are today as modern people are different from Homo Erectus. We will be a completely different species; many, many different species.
We have the potential to realistically consider living beyond Earth's atmosphere, not in a mechanised pressurised tin-can space station but an open and living habitat in space, effectively growing our territory beyond our home world and fully occupying the 'Goldilocks zone' of sufficiently temperate space in our own star system; filling our territory between Venus and Mars with Earth in the centre not with incorporated space junk but with a natural air atmosphere filled with avian and insect life, living seas leaping with fish and coral, fertile and beautiful land draped in flora supporting as diverse and plentiful fauna as we can save from the third mass extinction of our world - all supported and maintained by an innovative alliance between human sentience and artificial intelligence. We go from polluting our habitat to expanding our habitat a trillion-fold.
Now that's a future worth striving for, not just for Ireland but for everyone.
The secret to getting there is quite simple and we have known how to do that since we first built the pyramids - yes, we built the pyramids, not aliens. First we need to have a very clear and detailed image of how we wish to live within our Goldilocks zone. We need to interrogate this vision with the attention to detail of of an obsessive at the same time as conjuring as grand a scale as we dare with the majesty of a visionary. What technologies do we need to develop? What resources do we need to deploy? What time-scale are we looking at? How much space should we assign each living being. How might we encourage our natural world to thrive in space. What protections from space bound threats like radiation and meteorites need we develop? We are aiming to become a Kardashev 1 civilisation - Literally a civilisation as comfortable in space as we are on land.
Even if we are limited to our immediate Goldilocks zone, that offers us many trillions of square miles of available space and potential. Once we have fully fleshed out the vision we can then track back to our own world and time, mapping each iterative step required to make this future real. This is easy to do and many of us do this every day; a writer must flesh out characters and settings to ensure their work feels realistic, if they are writing a mystery or a thriller they must know how the mystery ends and how their protagonist solves the riddle or survives the jeopardy. Most narratives that have a beginning, middle and end structure are written backwards. That's how easy it is to move beyond a world of proxy wars, ecocide, dead zones in the seas, toxins in the air and in the soil - we simply decide on life and reject all agendas which would hold us back, including profiteering.
Why would anyone even bother trying to rule the world when there is an abundance of richer territory just beyond Earth's gravity well? The first nations to seriously pursue this goal will benefit beyond our current imaginations. Ireland is one such nation; a country familiar and comfortable with development and adaptation, familiar with the technology industry, possessing tectonically stable land, relatively stable government, well developed but also poised to innovate infrastructure, located on an island at the end of a gulf stream that provides temperate climate and abundant water. If you're planning to build and develop many worlds worth of territory orbiting this planet - Ireland has few rivals when it comes to being an excellent fit for the foundation base for the 21st Century's space industry. If you want to grow life then starting on a fertile rock in an ocean is a great choice, more so than a rain forest or even a wide open plain because life has to be resilient and adaptable on an island.
So here's the future history of humanity taken as a snapshot from a couple of brief centuries into our future in which we have just completed our latest ring world around the sun to compliment our orbital habitats around the three main anchor worlds of Venus, Mars and Earth: RING WORLD NEWS 2351
In this future time, borders are illegal barriers to human rights and that nation states are founded around philosophical and ideological concepts as opposed to racial or territorial heritage. Physical and life giving resources are abundant thanks to the careful development of new flora, fauna and atmospheres on seed habitats which are then shipped in totality to the ring world. The linear cities built on Earth's and Mars' surfaces inform how each habitat module connects to one another linking together like beads on a necklace on the ring world.
VEN/TER ring world will wrap like a helix around Venus to Earth like a massive infinity symbol. A second ring world TER/MAR which wraps around Earth and Mars, built nearly a century earlier, is undergoing massive renovation so that the ring's connectors are perfectly compatible and the dwellings can traverse even more open space like an ancient train set with the anticipated Summer zone of VEN/TER filling many denizens with excitement and trepidation in equal parts.
The colonisation of Venus' upper atmosphere is progressing apace with more and more interest in relocating to the hot world now the process of decanting sulphur and carbon from the storm systems is gathering pace. Meteorologists estimate the tipping point where Venus' atmosphere can be breathable is fast approaching, probably within a decade or two. Outside of large scale Omni State developments like VEN/TER and TER/MAR a swarm of private O'Neill habitats and Nation Disc connectors is forming around the formerly isolated planet of Venus. Get in fast to secure the best views seems to be the advice from the experts.
During their formative education many denizens of the ring world read about the New Dark Age from the late 20th to mid 21st Centuries whereupon humanity nearly poisoned themselves into oblivion, living in daily fear of warfare, poverty, famine and pandemic diseases while struggling to earn sufficient tokens to remain under shelter in a world where machines and AI depleted their opportunity to earn. It is little wonder that the much feared third, yes, Third World War was only averted by the fall of the primitive and cruel Fin-tech Empire and the emancipation of the people into an Energy Age with the discovery of low cost fusion energy and anti-gravity plates capable of lifting many tonnes of material into space effortlessly.
Such a miserable existence couldn't be thought of as living and yet it was the case a mere three hundred years ago. Of course the move to digitise all knowledge of the age in the early 2000's didn't take into account the very real possibility of massive solar flare activity wiping out all records in one hyper burst that forced mankind to move into space in the mid 21st Century so that such solar activity never took them by surprise again. So it has been pretty much guess work for nearly everything that happened in the 21st Century.
Historians have recently discovered that block chain, the technology so useful in encoding full personality backups, was once used as a means to develop a monetary token known as a Bitcoin. Opinion is divided whether this brief period of Bitcoin resulted in a distinct culture or had any influence on the development of the current energy economy. At the same time a group of nations called UBI appear to have emerged after a great calamity in which entire estates were over run by zombies. One wonders whether Bitcoin was simply devoured by the UBI forces or fell prey to the zombie banks. Many historians point to the fact that crypto-login tech is still used three hundred and fifty years later and thus must signify some kind of religious significance with 'Nerds' being a kind of priest caste and 'Coders' and 'Miners' being equivalent to manual labour. Some even posit the theory that 'Hackers' were some version of barbarian or rampaging horde although they appear to have been highly admired within the kingdom known only as Anonymous.
What unifies the experts is the observation that the decision to change from token-based material economics to open-ended energy economics was the moment that mankind was able to expand from the confines of an insecure, shrinking world to our present robust solar swarm which could even survive the loss of our star itself.
But for that lone audacious decision, we may never have made it at all. It's as if this was always meant to be and was always going to happen. So here we are, floating in our tin cans with no idea who Major Tom really was - a war hero maybe?
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