I walked up to the shops yesterday to see the frenzy of bargain hunting: Woolworths, a staple of the British High Street for decades was opening its doors, in some stores, for the last time; the rest, hanging on by the thread being dangled in front of thousands of store workers by the administrators who are trying to claw back the absurd debts owed in leiu of millions of plastic toys, DVDs and electrical knick-knacks that should have been sold to so many more people.

This is the same week that three behemoths of the motoring world — GM, Ford and Chrysler — waited, with overwrung caps in their tight fists, as Washington voted on whether to give them another $14 billion dollars on top of the trillions they have already taken in tax breaks, grants, environmental loopholes and trade protection. They might have to cut the workers’ wages but, hell! The CEOs still have their yachts, and the ball keeps rolling.

“Jobs!” we say, “We must preserve jobs. We must preserve the economy!”

And, for now, the governments of the world, are still marching to the beat of the corporate drum. This is the same corporate drum that keeps time as the chainsaws rip into the Amazon and the Canadian Taiga; as the derricks bob up and down, sucking liquid carbon from the sea beds; as the icebreakers search out minerals while fresh polar water flows into the brackish ocean; as the earth movers tear holes into the land to feed the furnaces producing electricity to power the factories that produce the goods that define us as consumers…civilized consumers.

I read an article by Nobel Prize Winning Economist, Paul Krugman about the causes and the “cure” for the economic crash that’s coming. He wrote:

For the first time in two generations, failures on the demand side of the economy — insufficient private spending to make use of the available productive capacity — have become the clear and present limitation on prosperity for a large part of the world. What we need right now is a rescue operation. Policy-makers around the world need to do two things: get credit flowing again and prop up spending.

The words of a man whose vision of the world needs to be saved; whose vision of the world is singular — we must keep buying things, we must keep spending, we must provide the means so that people can have whatever they want, whenever they want. He demands this because he is an economist who sees only one good in the world: growth at any cost.

He doesn’t even consider the most important question: why?

But no one in the establishment will ask that question, because there is no answer; no rational answer that a sane person would consider worthy of our time on this planet. As long as we never ask “why?” the economists, the politicians, the CEOs of this rapacious culture, will carry on doing their thing — telling us they know what is best for us, the people that no longer ask questions…