Words to Live By...

. Money is a rigged game -- you cannot win by trying to buy security. Oh, you can have the illusion of it, but the price is your soul. The entire world architecture of money, beyond basic sustenance, is horribly corrupted -- especially since the advent of the "virtual world economy," a paper and digital racket that sucks away the people's hard earned wealth before they ever see it.

read the rest HERE
No disagreement at all on Joe Bageant's take on our corporate Looter-tacracy... but


... what Joe misses... not all that subtle a distinction, is that 'hope' is open to a more capacious definition. Not that definitions in themselves matter. But the several ideas and realities they point to, do.

The most artificial, least grounded and most vulnerable to exploitation, is the notion of "hope" as a wager on some future outcome, a future, of course... which no one can lay claim to: hence: hope  = delusion.

But 'hope' need not be grounded in abstract propositions about the future. These are always secondary. There is, as Camus understood it... while denying the word... an experiential dimension grounded in the capacity to act, even without that abstract, false assurance of future outcomes.

Who retains the capacity to act, exemplifies hope.

No matter the odds. No matter the FACT that all is lost. Hope is not about the future. It's about the present.

We die. There is no "hope" to erase this fact.

We may well exterminate our own species... and much of the rest of life on our planet. I'm not at all hopeful on that account. And no matter... the sun will encompass the inner planets and all we do and have done will be lost. So from the start... the "hope" thing pinged to futurity is a fantasy of denial.

But that's not what counts. Not for now. What matters... is our capacity to act, and to act in a way that if we should look back upon  what we have done (would that we could) what would we see? What would we think? How would we judge our actions?