This is an excerpt from as essay on ZNet by Michael Albert. It puts the current unprecedented threat to our world into its proper perspective, and it is intended to bring us all into the streets at noon this saturday.

Despite the magnitude of the indignities and deaths, it always seemed certain that the crimes of the men in grey flannel suits were just intensified business as usual. All the grim and grievous circumstances of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s never seemed to me poised to transcend existing social relations. There was no new more ugly regime threatening the world.

But I have to say that today it does seem that plans now being pursued in the suites, in the Congress, and in the White House, are not merely an intensification of business as usual.

The anti-corporate globalization movement, promising a new but much more humane world "regime", has (with good reason) seriously scared the masters of the universe. But 9/11 has given them confidence and hubris.

Capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and corporate globalization are vile enough, but every so often -- and of course the mid century Nazis were a prime example -- something even worse tries to emerge out of still deeper layers of hell, and occasionally it does. And such a scourge of evil seems perhaps to be seeking entry into our world now, all the way from the seventh circle, or further.