War budgets booming, drills and nukes reviving, health insurers hooting, agro-biz bloating, privacy invasions through the roof – any progressives or patriots out there not ulcerating yet?

Give Obama credit, the man has been a great civics teacher. Millions of us now understand a lot more about American government than we did just two years ago. Skin color doesn’t matter. Nor does cool and IQ. Neither do promises, party labels or soaring oratory. Governance as we now see is largely about golden strings and the corporate hands that pull them in our body politic today.

Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse. -Sophocles

Things have, in fact, moved way beyond string pulling to full-blown systems engineering. The reign of big corporate bodies has delivered us a health system that profits from our ills, a security system that thrives on our fears and a defense system that prospers from our peril – not to mention a financial system that fattens off our debts and dwindling solvency. In front of our unfocused eyes, the Big Bodies have redesigned America so completely that all rational social incentives have been suicidally inverted. Indeed, the nation’s entire economy could be easily devastated yet again by a single, sudden outbreak of health or nerve or peace.

This leads some of us to believe that the central conflict of our century, the final showdown for social justice and ecological redress will not be between left and right, North and South or even rich and poor. It’s a contest between the rampant Big Bodies on the planet and a world of human scale, a fight for planetary dominion between our biped species with its quaint holistic values and vast corporate organisms obsessed with cancerous growth.