Written by Bob Maschi   

“This installment plan—it’s a curse on the working man!” is my favorite quote from the classic leftie film; Salt of the Earth (1954, a must-see).

The comment was meant to show a character’s frustration at not having wages sufficient enough to buy a particular item, instead, needing to take out a loan in order to afford it. This way of engaging in Capitalism traps working people. Once you’ve committed to making a monthly payment, having a job and putting up with your boss’/master’s work demands and mood swings becomes far less of a choice and much more a necessity. Missing payments will not only jeopardize your ownership of the item you bought, but will mess up your credit and deny you future purchases—which, of course, you’ll need because your wages never seem to keep up with the items advertised for your consumption.

This dreaded ‘installment plan,’ always a part of Capitalism’s foundation, has become much more popular among the corporate elite in the last couple decades. The new business model is to get all of us, and much of what we buy, on a form of this installment plan through monthly payments. Having a guaranteed customer base and consistent monthly income must look good to investors and the whole concept might make some sense for homes and cars and other major purchases. But an increasing amount of goods and services now rely on the installment loan.

Buy a one-cup coffee maker and soon after you can expect some business to contact you about their automatic-mailing monthly sampler pack. Home got termites? Sign up for the pest control company’s ongoing service. If you watch films, join the club with monthly fees to get reduced rental rates. Can’t afford to buy rooftop solar panels? No worry. You can have them installed and then pay a monthly fee based on usage—just like you would for a utility company!

Want to sell something online through one of the big sites? It’s best if you sign on to the monthly plan or you won’t get good placement or prices. Want higher education? Young people who take out student loans should be prepared to pay the equivalent of a mortgage for a couple decades after they graduate.
If you’re over 50, you’ve probably realized by now that no one actually tries to cure any diseases anymore. No, no, no! Where’s the profit in that? The profit comes from developing a once-a-day pill that you take forever to keep the disease in check.

But, really, what does this have to do with Armageddon?

Today, our planet faces its greatest threat since the last mass extinction event 66 million years ago. Two years ago, an earthquake, followed by a tsunami, overloaded the (obviously) insufficient safety systems at the Fukushima nuclear power plants in Japan. Since then, our media has kept people more interested in celebrity side-boob shots and the amazing ability of royalty to breed (or inbreed, more likely), than in this ongoing and increasingly volatile crisis. For more information on this see my previous article; Fukushima Nuclear Disaster—We are all ‘On the Beach’ at http://readersupportednews.org/pm-section/212-212/18947-fukushima-nuclear-disaster-we-are-all-on-the-beach

In brief, the nuclear power plant continues to melt down, aiming for a major event and a radioactive release that the world has never before experienced. Already the crisis is bleeding radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean and the best estimates suggest that this will go on for… wait… here it comes… tens of thousands of years. The radioactivity has already reached America and is currently polluting some of our food supply. Today, only a fool would eat untested fish from the Pacific.

If this crisis is not brought under control, it will most probably, eventually, kill off the Pacific and thereby completely disrupt what is left of the global ecosystem. Most likely, it will lead to Japan becoming a third world nation populated by the sick and dying. As much of the radiation crosses the Pacific and rains on Canada and the United States, we can expect that those two nations will rapidly encounter a sickened population that neither is equipped to deal with.

And now for the good news.

The Japanese government and TEPCO (the corporation that owns the Fukushima plant) have devised a plan to limit the amount of radioactive water that is released into the Pacific Ocean. They intend to freeze the deep soil between the plant and the ocean in hopes that this ice wall will contain the disaster. This technology has been used in the past for major construction projects—but only as a temporary fix. Not as a long term solution.

And this is where I tie this all back to the installment plan.

This ice wall will this, require a vast amount of energy to maintain. Some suggest that another nuclear power plant will need to be built just to keep it intact. For two years TEPCO has farted around with this crisis and spent more resources on containing the news feed than on containing the radiation and now their solution, coincidentally, will insure that this corporation makes continual and major profits for decades ahead.

The ice wall is not a cure. It’s an ongoing treatment that we will all pay for through monthly installments. The message to us is clear. The planet will not be protected unless profit can be made from doing so.

(End of the first installment of an ongoing series—kidding!)