Oil is all the news now, of course. And all the world doing nothing about it. The price has reached levels that are apparently causing distress to the extent of actual bodily harm and even death in parts of the world.

Those are the places where the increase in the price of oil has caused an increase in the price of food, specifically: rice, to where people can't afford to feed themselves any more. People are starving to death. Well, they always were, weren't they? But now more so.

So the British Prime Minister makes what everyone seems to think is a ludicrous proposition: that the Arabs who've profited to the tune of trillions of dollars from this price rise should invest some of that money in alternative energy sources in Britain. Help the Brits become freer of dependency on oil.

Faint hope.

But he's getting around the truth. Oil is a global commodity. Oil is global resource. Oil is a global necessity. I mean: it belongs to the globe. It doesn't belong to the Arabs beneath whose ground it happens to be. Or shouldn't.

Radical notion. Not new. Just radical. Today. Radical in today's world.

Ironically. Because it is the nature of today's world that makes the proposition all the more true, all the more urgent.

Today we can see plainly just how intertwined we all are. Bad banking practices in America cause us all to suffer. Bad trading practices (possibly) on the oil exchange cause us all to suffer. Bad environmental practices in China cause us all to suffer.

What one of us does today affects all the rest of us.

We could contemplate going to war with China, once, or hating them, or blockading them, or shunning them, from political, ideological dislike of their regime. Today they are the engine driving our growth. On the other side of the coin they could once ignore and hate and shun us, lock themselves off from the world. Today they see that trading with the rest of the world is the way for them to make progress and they're engaging in the process wholeheartedly, thoroughly, enthusiastically.

We could contemplate dropping atom bombs once, before we realised that the radiation contamination would inevitably affect ourselves, sooner or later... pyrrhic victory.

Now the world demonstrates to us vividly that we are one. One people in one world. Inextricably.

Global warming, they say, is now irreversible to some degree - i.e. there are some inevitable consequences at this stage, the temperature will continue to rise to a certain point before there's any hope of reversing it, glaciers will continue to melt before it can be reversed, climate changes will be permanent for some years, etc....

And this affects us all. Some more than others. Some nations completely lose their land - small Pacific nations like Kiribas are going to be completely flooded.

It is obvious today that we need each other.
It is obvious today that we affect each other.
It is obvious today that the same threats threaten us all.
It is obvious today that we've only got one world, one atmosphere, one supply of this or that or the other.
It is obvious that we inevitably share consequences.
And it is obvious that we should share wealth, resources, solutions.
We must help each other.

Traditional ways are now seen as nonsense.

Traditionally the whole central thing for human beings was for power blocs to form aggregations of people around them and contest for resources and riches with other power blocs. Be they Kings and Queens in monarchies, or dictators, tyrants, whatever... They all pursued the same goal: achieve comfort and privilege for themselves by imposing their will on the people around them and using those same people to subjugate even more people... on and on.

And it was possible to build an island of privilege for yourself and your cronies.

And your 'people' your subjects, even shared to some extent in that privilege. Not as much as yourself, of course and never to the extent of being considered 'equals', but to some extent.

Inequality worked. It worked well. Find some riches, take them. Find some prey, kill them, prey on them, use them. Enjoy your privilege. Build strong defences, be safe from attack, either mount regular forays beyond your borders and increase your wealth regularly or try to maintain the status quo and keep your own privileged position amongst your own subjects and turn your back on the rest of the world.

That was the paradigm for human social organisation. That's all that's ever been happening.

And now for the first time it doesn't work.

You can't be an island. That's why. You can't even achieve real privilege without being part of it all. Communication, knowledge, is too ubiquitious. You can no longer be satisfied and feel privileged as the richest family amongst this collection of poor peasants in this rundown backward country. Because you are all too aware of the other privileged families in the world and the level of privilege that they enjoy when they inhabit developed, progressive, rich nations. Show yourself in their company and they look down upon you because they know your origins. You simply don't have the wealth, the privilege, they have. You know that. And you can't get it without involvement in the rest of the world.

You can't even get the toys of the world without involvement in the world. The world today has these toys that are 'essential' and which you can't manufacture for yourself behind the walls of your castle in your backward oppressed rundown country. Motor cars, planes, electronics, playgrounds, the whole bit.

And nor can those on top of the heap any longer get satisfaction in their lofty isolation, because it cannot be supported, because the odors and the problems from the bottom of the heap reach them. Because the stench and disorder of an overcrowded world affect them. And because you inevitably need the rest of the world to support your privileged position.

You can't dance around the tennis court without your feet being clad in shoes made by poor peasants. You can't switch on a computer or a radio without using the work of poor peasants. Today you can hardly clothe yourself without being clothed by the work of poor Chinese peasants.

America needs China and its peasants, and India and its peasants, and so on....

We are one and that fact is becoming glaringly obvious. And we must share in the interests of health and safety.

Capitalism is a childish game lacking an morality. It says that in the perfect free market all problems will be overcome and that's an obvious nonsense. An obvious nonsense pointed up by that tenet of the stock market from economics 101: "A rational investor will seek to maximise profit".

Yes, a rational capitalist is as rational as a machine programmed to maximis profit, to gather wealth as quickly as possible.

And that 'rationality' is as irrational as you can get. Because taken to its limit final collection of all wealth stops the game. Not that it could ever be achieved. It is the wealth outside the investor's control that allows the game to continue so's the investor can collect wealth.

It is, simply, Monopoly, the board game. And as everyone knows that game cannot continue for long without a redistribution of wealth.

The world is beginning to see how this truth applies globally. Never hard to see, never a secret, it now begins to get borne in on everyone that the game cannot continue without redistribution of wealth from time to time.

Which rational capitalism makes no provision for.

Because capitalism is about money and it says that look after the money and the people will get looked after as an inevitable consequence. Simplistically: because there's always someone will provide (at a price) for any conceivable need. An obvious nonsense. No one will provide for the poor because there's no profit to be made from it. And the system is designed to make more and more poor. The system is designed to allow for the accumulation of wealth in fewer and fewer hands. And that's, no surprise, exactly what it does.


And now is the time when we can see that this one world, this one people, is playing this game of Monopoly and it is not a good enough game for the people, the nations, the world, to play.

We need something better. We need something human, more human than this. We all do. Rich and poor alike. Because the rich man will find if the game stops his riches turn to nothing.