It should come as no surprise that the inevitable is unfolding. Commercialization of our commodities continues to proliferate, from clothes manufacturers’ ploys to hook us into a particular brand, to grocers pushing for a particular food that is loaded with the latest look-there’s-absolutely-no-fat-in-this-product displays as we hurry through aisles in order to get dinner on the table, to entertainment venues (sporting, music, the arts) vying for the golden buck that lines our pockets. While I haven’t listed everything that is marketable, there also is the battle of the telecommunications world, with relay companies springing up left and right, hoping to retain us as exclusive users to boost their ratings and revenue, let’s not forget about the only two juggernaut competitors in the satellite radio business, XM and Sirius:

They announced plans (on the 19th) of merging both companies into one, with one CEO becoming executive officer and the other a chairman (the Karmazin/Parsons entity). To me, it is the cataclysmic sign of the apocalypse–where is enough enough? When does the infinite search for top dollar finally recede? When the Martians have invaded, and all that is left are our eight-legged creatures to wonder at what happened to those funny-looking two-pronged humanoids that always chased them around with a can of combustive chemicals, does the buck finally come to a restive halt then?

Back on track–is there nothing that cannot be compressed, packaged, and sold? Forget the space around us; real estate and commercial developers are gunning that down as we speak…ditto for cyberspace, vast juggernauts (Google) are rising from the dust and sending sentinels out to seize, market, control and advertise. Water? The commodity we have the most supply of–just take a look at any map–somewhere, a corporate soul is tucked away in a dark, dank state-of-the-art laboratory, hatching a plan that will be the “future of tomorrow!” and figuring out how they can turn abundance into a marketable commodity (aquatic real estate’s starting to sell like hot potatoes). It should not figure that satellite and our radio waves would fall into the same black hole.

While some may laud the XMSIRIUS merger as the next messianic coming, this blogger is not so convinced. The FCC will also investigate, to ensure that a monopoly is averted (probably so that it can continue taxing TWO entities rather than losing money and taxing only ONE); after the dust settles, the point still remains:

Where does the line start getting crossed? Are we expected to end up chucking our mores and ethics for the next fastest line in the rat race? I can see the coming boom of ethics marketing: we pay for people to tell us what we should do in certain situations (Note: Listen to your gut feeling! It almost never fails you!).

The XMSIRIUS merger may help both companies utilize their resources, Howard Stern, Oprah Winfrey, professional sports, music, and so forth, to provide subscribers with more options. Although, as the good Doctor Faustus pondered the Devil’s deal, what is the catch? Will prices rise, forcing us to debate whether we should give up this addictive convenience, when maybe we should never have bought into it in the first place?

Will the pooling of collective energies result in a greater return on investment, generating excess dollars that will be poured back into the community to provide leadership, support, homes, a bolstering of our economy and eventually a chip away from the largest deficit known in history (trillions of dollars and counting)?

Or will the not-yet-born dollars just go right back into the already-fat coffers of the richest, leaving the peons to toil away while they lavish themselves with million-dollar birthday parties?

In a parallel universe, the fat-cats would turn into Robin Hoods and send the Pied Piper off into the sunset with all the stumbling and bumbling corporate officers in tow, to the impending doom of being cast into limbo for eternity.