http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2/2011_a_brave_new_dystopia_20101227/
2011: A Brave New Dystopia
The two greatest visions of a future dystopia were George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” The debate, between those who watched our descent towards corporate totalitarianism, was who was right. Would we be, as Orwell wrote, dominated by a repressive surveillance and security state that used crude and violent forms of control? Or would we be, as Huxley envisioned, entranced by entertainment and spectacle, captivated by technology and seduced by profligate consumption to embrace our own oppression? It turns out Orwell and Huxley were both right. Huxley saw the first stage of our enslavement. Orwell saw the second.
We have been gradually disempowered by a corporate state that, as Huxley foresaw, seduced and manipulated us through sensual gratification, cheap mass-produced goods, boundless credit, political theater and amusement. While we were entertained, the regulations that once kept predatory corporate power in check were dismantled, the laws that once protected us were rewritten and we were impoverished. Now that credit is drying up, good jobs for the working class are gone forever and mass-produced goods are unaffordable, we find ourselves transported from “Brave New World” to “1984.” The state, crippled by massive deficits, endless war and corporate malfeasance, is sliding toward bankruptcy. It is time for Big Brother to take over from Huxley’s feelies, the orgy-porgy and the centrifugal bumble-puppy. We are moving from a society where we are skillfully manipulated by lies and illusions to one where we are overtly controlled. Orwell warned of a world where books were banned. Huxley warned of a world where no one wanted to read books. Orwell warned of a state of permanent war and fear. Huxley warned of a culture diverted by mindless pleasure. Orwell warned of a state where every conversation and thought was monitored and dissent was brutally punished. Huxley warned of a state where a population, preoccupied by trivia and gossip, no longer cared about truth or information. Orwell saw us frightened into submission. Huxley saw us seduced into submission. But Huxley, we are discovering, was merely the prelude to Orwell. Huxley understood the process by which we would be complicit in our own enslavement. Orwell understood the enslavement. Now that the corporate coup is over, we stand naked and defenseless. We are beginning to understand, as Karl Marx knew, that unfettered and unregulated capitalism is a brutal and revolutionary force that exploits human beings and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse.
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake,” Orwell wrote in “1984.” “We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”
The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin uses the term “inverted totalitarianism” in his book “Democracy Incorporated” to describe our political system. It is a term that would make sense to Huxley. In inverted totalitarianism, the sophisticated technologies of corporate control, intimidation and mass manipulation, which far surpass those employed by previous totalitarian states, are effectively masked by the glitter, noise and abundance of a consumer society. Political participation and civil liberties are gradually surrendered. The corporation state, hiding behind the smokescreen of the public relations industry, the entertainment industry and the tawdry materialism of a consumer society, devours us from the inside out. It owes no allegiance to us or the nation. It feasts upon our carcass. The corporate state does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader. It is defined by the anonymity and facelessness of the corporation. Corporations, who hire attractive spokespeople like Barack Obama, control the uses of science, technology, education and mass communication. They control the messages in movies and television. And, as in “Brave New World,” they use these tools of communication to bolster tyranny. Our systems of mass communication, as Wolin writes, “block out, eliminate whatever might introduce qualification, ambiguity, or dialogue, anything that might weaken or complicate the holistic force of their creation, to its total impression.”
The result is a monochromatic system of information. Celebrity courtiers, masquerading as journalists, experts and specialists, identify our problems and patiently explain the parameters. All those who argue outside the imposed parameters are dismissed as irrelevant cranks, extremists or members of a radical left. Prescient social critics, from Ralph Nader to Noam Chomsky, are banished. Acceptable opinions have a range of A to B. The culture, under the tutelage of these corporate courtiers, becomes, as Huxley noted, a world of cheerful conformity, as well as an endless and finally fatal optimism. We busy ourselves buying products that promise to change our lives, make us more beautiful, confident or successful as we are steadily stripped of rights, money and influence. All messages we receive through these systems of communication, whether on the nightly news or talk shows like “Oprah,” promise a brighter, happier tomorrow. And this, as Wolin points out, is “the same ideology that invites corporate executives to exaggerate profits and conceal losses, but always with a sunny face.” We have been entranced, as Wolin writes, by “continuous technological advances” that “encourage elaborate fantasies of individual prowess, eternal youthfulness, beauty through surgery, actions measured in nanoseconds: a dream-laden culture of ever-expanding control and possibility, whose denizens are prone to fantasies because the vast majority have imagination but little scientific knowledge.”
Our manufacturing base has been dismantled. Speculators and swindlers have looted the U.S. Treasury and stolen billions from small shareholders who had set aside money for retirement or college. Civil liberties, including habeas corpus and protection from warrantless wiretapping, have been taken away. Basic services, including public education and health care, have been handed over to the corporations to exploit for profit. The few who raise voices of dissent, who refuse to engage in the corporate happy talk, are derided by the corporate establishment as freaks. Attitudes and temperament have been cleverly engineered by the corporate state, as with Huxley’s pliant characters in “Brave New World.” The book’s protagonist, Bernard Marx, turns in frustration to his girlfriend Lenina:
“Don’t you wish you were free, Lenina?” he asks.“I don’t know that you mean. I am free, free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody’s happy nowadays.”He laughed, “Yes, ‘Everybody’s happy nowadays.’ We have been giving the children that at five. But wouldn’t you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else’s way.”“I don’t know what you mean,” she repeated.
The façade is crumbling. And as more and more people realize that they have been used and robbed, we will move swiftly from Huxley’s “Brave New World” to Orwell’s “1984.” The public, at some point, will have to face some very unpleasant truths. The good-paying jobs are not coming back. The largest deficits in human history mean that we are trapped in a debt peonage system that will be used by the corporate state to eradicate the last vestiges of social protection for citizens, including Social Security. The state has devolved from a capitalist democracy to neo-feudalism. And when these truths become apparent, anger will replace the corporate-imposed cheerful conformity. The bleakness of our post-industrial pockets, where some 40 million Americans live in a state of poverty and tens of millions in a category called “near poverty,” coupled with the lack of credit to save families from foreclosures, bank repossessions and bankruptcy from medical bills, means that inverted totalitarianism will no longer work.
We increasingly live in Orwell’s Oceania, not Huxley’s The World State. Osama bin Laden plays the role assumed by Emmanuel Goldstein in “1984.” Goldstein, in the novel, is the public face of terror. His evil machinations and clandestine acts of violence dominate the nightly news. Goldstein’s image appears each day on Oceania’s television screens as part of the nation’s “Two Minutes of Hate” daily ritual. And without the intervention of the state, Goldstein, like bin Laden, will kill you. All excesses are justified in the titanic fight against evil personified.
The psychological torture of Pvt. Bradley Manning—who has now been imprisoned for seven months without being convicted of any crime—mirrors the breaking of the dissident Winston Smith at the end of “1984.” Manning is being held as a “maximum custody detainee” in the brig at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Virginia. He spends 23 of every 24 hours alone. He is denied exercise. He cannot have a pillow or sheets for his bed. Army doctors have been plying him with antidepressants. The cruder forms of torture of the Gestapo have been replaced with refined Orwellian techniques, largely developed by government psychologists, to turn dissidents like Manning into vegetables. We break souls as well as bodies. It is more effective. Now we can all be taken to Orwell’s dreaded Room 101 to become compliant and harmless. These “special administrative measures” are regularly imposed on our dissidents, including Syed Fahad Hashmi, who was imprisoned under similar conditions for three years before going to trial. The techniques have psychologically maimed thousands of detainees in our black sites around the globe. They are the staple form of control in our maximum security prisons where the corporate state makes war on our most politically astute underclass—African-Americans. It all presages the shift from Huxley to Orwell.
“Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling,” Winston Smith’s torturer tells him in “1984.” “Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”
The noose is tightening. The era of amusement is being replaced by the era of repression. Tens of millions of citizens have had their e-mails and phone records turned over to the government. We are the most monitored and spied-on citizenry in human history. Many of us have our daily routine caught on dozens of security cameras. Our proclivities and habits are recorded on the Internet. Our profiles are electronically generated. Our bodies are patted down at airports and filmed by scanners. And public service announcements, car inspection stickers, and public transportation posters constantly urge us to report suspicious activity. The enemy is everywhere.
Those who do not comply with the dictates of the war on terror, a war which, as Orwell noted, is endless, are brutally silenced. The draconian security measures used to cripple protests at the G-20 gatherings in Pittsburgh and Toronto were wildly disproportionate for the level of street activity. But they sent a clear message—DO NOT TRY THIS. The FBI’s targeting of antiwar and Palestinian activists, which in late September saw agents raid homes in Minneapolis and Chicago, is a harbinger of what is to come for all who dare defy the state’s official Newspeak. The agents—our Thought Police—seized phones, computers, documents and other personal belongings. Subpoenas to appear before a grand jury have since been served on 26 people. The subpoenas cite federal law prohibiting “providing material support or resources to designated foreign terrorist organizations.” Terror, even for those who have nothing to do with terror, becomes the blunt instrument used by Big Brother to protect us from ourselves.
“Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating?” Orwell wrote. “It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself.”
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
SC104-7
http://www.fcnp.com/commentary/national/7980-the-peak-oil-crisis-the-future-of-government.html
The peak oil crisis: the future of government
In case you missed it, a couple of weeks back the International Energy Agency in Paris got around to disclosing that the all-time peak of global conventional oil production occurred back in 2006. Despite that fact that this declaration was tantamount to announcing the end of the 250-year-old industrial age, few in the mainstream media noted the event and it was left to obscure corners of cyber space to ponder the meaning of it all.
It is also worth noting that oil is back in the vicinity of $90 a barrel and even Wall Street economists, who are paid to be eternally optimistic, are starting to talk about oil going for$110-120 a barrel in the next year or so.
In the meantime, the talking heads, pundits and even hard-headed reporters chatter on about the slow but persistent economic recovery that is supposed to be taking place. As the effects of last year's near-trillion dollar stimulus start to be felt, every statistical twitch upward is hailed as proof that normalcy will soon return. Realists, however, call this twitching "bottom-bouncing" and are convinced that far worse is yet to come.
As we all know by now, a new crowd has descended on Washington vowing to make everything right again by cutting taxes, reducing the size and the role of some parts of the government. Above all the folks are committed to getting government regulation off our backs so that free enterprise, the entrepreneurial spirit, merchant capitalism, or what have you can flourish as it did in the past.
What all those calling for reduced government fail to grasp, however, is that 200 years of cheap abundant fossil fuel energy has transformed this country into something completely different. Take food as an example, 200 years ago, some 90+ percent of us were involved in its raising or otherwise procuring food -- or we would simply not eat. Now, thanks to cheap fossil fuels, less than 3 percent of us are engaged in agricultural endeavors and I suspect only a fraction of our "farmers" still have all the requisite skills to feed themselves and their families in the style to which they have become accustomed. Take away the diesel for the tractors and farming is going to become mighty different. Has anyone yoked an ox lately?
In short, 200 years of abundant energy have allowed us to build an extremely complex civilization based on dozens of interrelated systems without which we can no longer live - at least not in the style to which we have become accustomed. Food production and distribution, water, sewage, solid waste removal, communications, healthcare, transportation, public safety, education --- the list of systems vital-to-life and general wellbeing goes on and on.
Those who believe that ten years from now we will be able to get along with much reduced government have little appreciation of how modern civilization works or how bad things are going to get as fossil fuel energy fades from our lives. The notion is absurd that we are in the midst of a routine downturn in the business cycle which can be cured by Keynesian stimulus favored by the Democrats or tax cuts favored by the Republicans.
While no one can foretell the future in detail, every now and again a window opens that allows a general outline of coming events to emerge. For example, in the years leading up to the Second World War one did not have to be clairvoyant to appreciate that a great disaster was about to befall.
Although few recognize how precarious the situation is, we are trapped in a very complex civilization that is rapidly losing the sources of energy and numerous other raw materials that built and maintained it. In America today we have millions un- and under-employed and that is certain to grow into the tens of millions before the decade is out as our politicians horse-trade tax cuts for billionaires in return for extensions of unemployment benefits. The good news is that this phase of the great transition from the industrial age to that which will follow cannot last much longer for events are moving too fast.
Whether one likes it or not, the size and complexity of the coming transition will be so great and unprecedented and there will be so much at stake that only governments will have the authority and power to cope with the multitude of problems that are about to emerge. Be it heresy in some as yet unknowing circles; all this is going to require a massive transfer of resources from private hands to public ones. Take something as simple as jobs. If anyone thinks the employment situation is difficult, wait a few years until the very high priced motor fuels makes discretionary car travel unaffordable. Millions upon millions of jobs in the retail, travel, hospitality, recreational, and dozens of other industries will be lost.
The current efforts by various levels of government to stimulate job creation or save people from home foreclosures will prove to be ridiculously inadequate. A completely new paradigm of what we do to sustain life is going to have to emerge or things will become far worse than most of us have ever known. Modern civilization simply cannot stand a situation in which a substantial share of its people is destitute. The potential for social disorder is too great.
If current trends continue, somewhere in the next five years a critical mass of us will realize that new foundations for civilization, and new ways of life must be found and implemented if we are going to survive with a modicum of comfort, economic, and political stability. Until then there will be many false prophets calling for a return to a civilization which is no longer possible.
The peak oil crisis: the future of government
In case you missed it, a couple of weeks back the International Energy Agency in Paris got around to disclosing that the all-time peak of global conventional oil production occurred back in 2006. Despite that fact that this declaration was tantamount to announcing the end of the 250-year-old industrial age, few in the mainstream media noted the event and it was left to obscure corners of cyber space to ponder the meaning of it all.
It is also worth noting that oil is back in the vicinity of $90 a barrel and even Wall Street economists, who are paid to be eternally optimistic, are starting to talk about oil going for$110-120 a barrel in the next year or so.
In the meantime, the talking heads, pundits and even hard-headed reporters chatter on about the slow but persistent economic recovery that is supposed to be taking place. As the effects of last year's near-trillion dollar stimulus start to be felt, every statistical twitch upward is hailed as proof that normalcy will soon return. Realists, however, call this twitching "bottom-bouncing" and are convinced that far worse is yet to come.
As we all know by now, a new crowd has descended on Washington vowing to make everything right again by cutting taxes, reducing the size and the role of some parts of the government. Above all the folks are committed to getting government regulation off our backs so that free enterprise, the entrepreneurial spirit, merchant capitalism, or what have you can flourish as it did in the past.
What all those calling for reduced government fail to grasp, however, is that 200 years of cheap abundant fossil fuel energy has transformed this country into something completely different. Take food as an example, 200 years ago, some 90+ percent of us were involved in its raising or otherwise procuring food -- or we would simply not eat. Now, thanks to cheap fossil fuels, less than 3 percent of us are engaged in agricultural endeavors and I suspect only a fraction of our "farmers" still have all the requisite skills to feed themselves and their families in the style to which they have become accustomed. Take away the diesel for the tractors and farming is going to become mighty different. Has anyone yoked an ox lately?
In short, 200 years of abundant energy have allowed us to build an extremely complex civilization based on dozens of interrelated systems without which we can no longer live - at least not in the style to which we have become accustomed. Food production and distribution, water, sewage, solid waste removal, communications, healthcare, transportation, public safety, education --- the list of systems vital-to-life and general wellbeing goes on and on.
Those who believe that ten years from now we will be able to get along with much reduced government have little appreciation of how modern civilization works or how bad things are going to get as fossil fuel energy fades from our lives. The notion is absurd that we are in the midst of a routine downturn in the business cycle which can be cured by Keynesian stimulus favored by the Democrats or tax cuts favored by the Republicans.
While no one can foretell the future in detail, every now and again a window opens that allows a general outline of coming events to emerge. For example, in the years leading up to the Second World War one did not have to be clairvoyant to appreciate that a great disaster was about to befall.
Although few recognize how precarious the situation is, we are trapped in a very complex civilization that is rapidly losing the sources of energy and numerous other raw materials that built and maintained it. In America today we have millions un- and under-employed and that is certain to grow into the tens of millions before the decade is out as our politicians horse-trade tax cuts for billionaires in return for extensions of unemployment benefits. The good news is that this phase of the great transition from the industrial age to that which will follow cannot last much longer for events are moving too fast.
Whether one likes it or not, the size and complexity of the coming transition will be so great and unprecedented and there will be so much at stake that only governments will have the authority and power to cope with the multitude of problems that are about to emerge. Be it heresy in some as yet unknowing circles; all this is going to require a massive transfer of resources from private hands to public ones. Take something as simple as jobs. If anyone thinks the employment situation is difficult, wait a few years until the very high priced motor fuels makes discretionary car travel unaffordable. Millions upon millions of jobs in the retail, travel, hospitality, recreational, and dozens of other industries will be lost.
The current efforts by various levels of government to stimulate job creation or save people from home foreclosures will prove to be ridiculously inadequate. A completely new paradigm of what we do to sustain life is going to have to emerge or things will become far worse than most of us have ever known. Modern civilization simply cannot stand a situation in which a substantial share of its people is destitute. The potential for social disorder is too great.
If current trends continue, somewhere in the next five years a critical mass of us will realize that new foundations for civilization, and new ways of life must be found and implemented if we are going to survive with a modicum of comfort, economic, and political stability. Until then there will be many false prophets calling for a return to a civilization which is no longer possible.
Saturday, November 27, 2010
SC104-6
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010/11/no-time-for-lullabies.html
No Time for Lullabies
At this point we’ve covered the core techniques of backyard food gardening, one of the three basic ingredients in the bubbling cauldron of green wizardry. Those core techniques are far from the only things that can usefully be added to the pot, of course, but I don’t propose to go into the other options in any detail.
First, and to my mind the most crucial, is the need for dissensus. It’s impossible to know in advance what particular set of tools and skills will be the one best suited to squeak past the mess taking shape around us – and by this I mean to include both the short-term mess defined by the implosion of America’s debt economy and its overseas equivalents, and the long-term and even more daunting mess defined by the head-on collision between a civilization and technostructure predicated on limitless expansion and the hard limits of a finite planet. Green wizardry, as I’ve already discussed here, is only one option, and even within green wizardry there needs to be plenty of room for different paths, new inventions, local traditions, and a good helping of outright eccentricity.
Those of my readers who took me up on last week’s challenge and sat down with a copy of Darwin’s The Origin of Species and a tall beverage of choice already have some sense of the importance of variation in evolution; that’s what provides the raw material that gets sorted out by natural selection. There’s no shortage of natural selection piling up for us in the not too distant future, that’s for sure, but it’s up to us to provide the variation. That’s part of what’s behind my recommendation that aspiring green wizards haunt used book stores and go digging for obscure pieces of information, and it’s also part of the reason why I’ve focused almost monomaniacally on a very specific version of backyard food gardening – the version that evolved in the 1970s energy crises – when there are many other options out there. The logic here is straightforward: a pretty fair fraction of green wizards who didn’t grow up during that decade are bound to get irritated by the deliberately annoying Seventies-centric approach, and that irritation will send them looking for other options.
Another important reason, though, was brought home to me by a book that arrived on my doorstep not too long ago. I’m not going to name the author, the publisher, or even the subject matter, because it could have been any of a hundred books; these days they’re as interchangeable, as forgettable, and as inescapable as American politicians at election time. I’m not sure why it was mailed to me, as it came unannounced; I have to assume that since I blog about the crisis of industrial society, and this book claims to offer a solution to that crisis, the author or the publisher’s marketing department decided that I probably ought to know about it.
You already know the kind of book I’m discussing. It begins with several chapters of potted history that combines an overheated version of the mess we’re in – slanted, naturally, toward those aspects of the mess that the proposed solution is supposed to solve – and an equally colorful account of the prehistory of the solution that traces it back to an exotic and currently fashionable source. It goes on to talk about the proposed solution with the kind of overhyped enthusiasm and rose-tinted assumptions more often associated with the press releases of small tech startups that will be bankrupt within the year. It spares a brief chapter or two to mention criticisms directed at the proposed solution in order to dismiss them out of hand, and then finishes up with a vision of the glorious Utopian future that awaits once the Party’s latest five year plan – er, excuse me, once the proposed solution gets the universal acceptance and ample funding the author hopes to attract.
What isn’t in books of this kind is as important, and as worth mentioning, as what is in them. You won’t find any substantive discussion of the limits of the proposed solution – what dimensions of the crisis of industrial civilization it can’t solve, which bioregions or human societies can’t use it effectively, what resource requirements, environmental effect, or economic factors place constraints on its use, and so on. You won’t find any substantive discussion of the downside of the proposed solution – what burdens it will place on already stressed resource supplies, ecosystems, or economies. Equally, you won’t find meaningful comparisons between the proposed solution and other ways of accomplishing the same thing. Since there are always limits, costs, and alternatives, and a reasoned approach to any kind of decision needs to take these three things into account, their exclusion from such books is not exactly a minor point.
Still, there’s another factor left out in the sort of book I’m discussing: there’s nothing the reader is supposed to do in response. Until recently, if you picked up a book that took some current crisis, painted it in the most apocalyptic terms available, then trotted out some solution dolled up in glowing colors for your approbation, you could safely bet any sum you like to name that the final chapters would try to sell the reader on a product to buy, a service to pay for, a movement to join, or something similar. That sort of snake oil sales pitch is as old as the hills of Iowa and twice as corny, but at least it’s relatively straightforward.
The books I have in mind are anything but straightforward. Like the sales pitches just mentioned, they work overtime making whatever crisis concerns their authors look as dire as possible, and gild their proposed solutions with a glitter of infallibility as glorious as anything a carnival pitchman ever claimed for Doctor Fox’s Genuine Arkansas Snake Oil, but they’re not written to sell. It finally occurred to me, while reading the example mentioned earlier in this essay, what their actual purpose is: they’re written to soothe.
This sort of lullaby literature is very popular just now. Shorter pieces humming the same tunes can be found all through what passes for news media in America these days. The New York Times is particularly fond of such things; my adopted kid sister Sharon Astyk neatly eviscerated one example from that source in a recent blog post, but it’s a safe bet that neither the author nor the intended audience of the piece will notice. They are paying attention to something else.
Especially but not only in America, an awareness is spreading through the crawlspaces of society that the current round of troubles might not just be a speedbump on the road to the shiny future our society’s myths promise us. The sense that something has truly, deeply, desperately gone wrong, right down at the core of the world we’ve created for ourselves, has made itself the background to most of the collective conversations that define our culture. The popularity of soothing narratives about the future just now is, if anything, a marker for just how pervasive that background has become; it’s only when fears are inescapable that efforts at mass reassurance find a market.
Still, there’s another dimension to all this, and it bears directly on the Green Wizards project. One of the things that makes our predicament so difficult for so many people to face just now, and especially for so many Americans, is that every available option for the future includes the certainty of massive impoverishment. The five per cent of us who live in the United States have gotten used to living on a quarter of the world’s energy supply and around a third of its raw materials and industrial products. Even if the world wasn’t facing the rapid depletion of its readily accessible fossil fuel reserves, the equally rapid depletion of many other nonrenewable resources essential to the economy, a global climate tipping toward critical instabilities, a dizzying array of local, regional, and global ecological shifts, and the inevitable feedback loops and synergistic effects these changes are going to cause – and of course the world is facing all these things, and will be facing more of them with every passing year – even if these things weren’t happening, the arrangements that provide Americans with so huge a share of the world’s resources are not going to last much longer.
Those arrangements were the product of a particular set of historical conditions. A century ago, those conditions didn’t exist; back then, it was Britain that received a disproportionate share of the world’s wealth, as the beneficiary of an imperial system that directly ruled a quarter of the world’s land surface and also dominated the world’s oceans and, by that fact, most of its international trade. America in those days was a rising power, to be sure, but wasn’t even close to the world’s biggest economy; it had to shelter its industries from the impact of the British colossus by exactly the sort of trade barriers the Chinese are using against us today. (Yes, British economists criticized the US in much the same terms our economists now use to denounce the Chinese; we didn’t listen and neither will they.)
It didn’t take a hundred years for the British empire to be replaced by ours, and it won’t take a hundred years for ours to be replaced by someone else’s. Since we can’t rely on the unusual historical circumstances that allowed Britain to maintain a few shreds of its imperial dignity and some of its privileged economic standing – they were basically able to rent their island out to the American military as an unusually large aircraft carrier conveniently anchored right off the shores of Europe; we don’t have that geopolitical advantage – the aftermath of the American empire is almost certain to be much more like the aftermath of most other empires: economic collapse, massive political dislocations, and a long period of turmoil and contraction until the bottom is reached and recovery can finally start to take shape. The global empire that preceded Britain’s, the Spanish Empire, may provide a more accurate model: that empire imploded in the early nineteenth century in the wake of Britain’s rise to global power, and it wasn’t until the late twentieth century that Spain finally managed to pull itself out of the long nightmare of impoverishment and political chaos that followed.
Again, this is what we would be able to expect if the global economy was entirely based on sustainable resources and the global ecology wasn’t redefining itself in the face of a couple of centuries of fossil fuel-powered abuse. Factor in the impact of energy and resource depletion, climate change, and environmental instability, and the very high likelihood of an increasingly desperate and violent scramble for remaining resources on the way down, and the effects of the end of American empire are likely to be more drastic than anything we’ve seen in the western world since the fall of Rome.
I suspect most Americans these days know this, or at least sense it. These days, when I give a talk on the future to an audience outside the peak oil community, I can begin it like this – “Remember all those scientists a few decades back who warned that if we didn’t make some drastic changes in the very near future, we’d be in deep trouble in the early twenty-first century? Well, guess what.” – and far more often than not, nobody argues. Some of them, at least to judge by the comments and questions I field, are already beginning to try to fit their minds around a future in which nearly all of us are desperately poor by today’s standards; many more are hoping that the worst of it will miss them somehow, or that they’ll be lucky enough to die before it hits – I’ve had people, not all of them elderly, express this latter hope to me in so many words.
Even among those who insist that it won’t happen – those who claim that the center of the Earth really is full of limitless oceans of oil, or that holding hands in a circle and singing “Kum Ba Ya” is a viable strategy for an age of imperial decline and global overshoot, or that the Rapture or the Singularity or 2012 or some other deus ex machina will annihilate history and save them from the future – I have to question how many people actually believe what they claim to believe. I know far too many people who insist the world will end in 2012, for example, who are still putting money into their retirement accounts, and it’s been an open secret for the last decade that the vast majority of people who like to imagine living in a lifeboat ecovillage have not been willing to lift a finger or spend a dime to bring such a project into being.
I’d like to suggest that this is because daydreams about nonexistent lifeboat ecovillages and planet-ending catastrophes two years from now that weren’t actually predicted by the ancient Mayans at all share a common purpose, one that’s also shared by abiotic oil, fusion power, and a dime store’s worth of other lullabies disguised as solutions. Their purpose is to give people something more pleasant to think about than the future that’s breathing down our necks. Yes, planet-ending catastrophes are more pleasant to think about than a couple of centuries of ragged decline, impoverishment, and population loss; if we all get blown to kingdom come in one vast fireball, at least it’s over quickly, and you can probably get some consolation in the few seconds before you’re vaporized by reminding yourself that, after all, it wasn’t your fault.
The irony here, and it’s a rich one, is that potentially workable projects can be turned into lullabies just as effectively as the most dubious daydream. I’m not exactly a fan of the lifeboat ecovillage concept, but it’s always possible that one or more of the handful of voluntary communities that have adopted this role might turn out to have had the right idea all along; it’s the ones that haven’t been built, will never be built, and function primarily as lullaby fodder that are guaranteed to be useless. Equally, some of the other approaches that have become the focus of soothing pronouncements that the solution has been found might actually do some good – and in some cases, quite a bit of good – if they’re treated as projects needing immediate hard work by anyone who wants to see them happen, rather than as props for the fantasy that somebody else is going to do everything that’s necessary.
Green wizardry is vulnerable to exactly the same process. That’s one reason why I don’t intend to present a nice neat all-encompassing plan for saving the world in these essays, or the book for which they form the very rough initial draft. Green wizardry can’t save the world, if by “saving the world” is meant finding some way to allow Americans to keep on living some semblance of a lifestyle that requires a third of the world’s economic activity to support it; but it won’t even accomplish those modest but useful tasks that it could potentially do if it gets treated primarily as raw material for lullabies.
We don’t have time for lullabies. With the United States government openly covering its debts by printing money, food and commodity prices spiking, the number of permanently unemployed people soaring across the industrial world, and China cutting deals with its other major trading partners to price goods and handle exchanges in yuan and local currencies rather than dollars, we face a high risk of serious discontinuities in the relatively near future. That’s why I hope to goad those people already involved in the Green Wizards project to get going; it may be winter here in the northern hemisphere, but that’s a good time to plan those garden beds, order seeds, keep the compost going, and put some tools on the list of holiday presents.
Next week’s post will push the envelope a bit further by talking about the value of some bits of the old appropriate tech toolkit that have been consigned to the fringes. In the meantime, I’d encourage any of my readers who might have been using these posts as lullaby fodder to think again. If you’re going to be desperately poor by today’s standards, and you are, you might as well learn how to handle that with a certain amount of skill, and maybe even a bit of grace. Knowing how to grow some of your own food, keep your home comfortable with minimal energy inputs, and do the other things green wizards can do will help with that; listening to lullabies won’t.
No Time for Lullabies
At this point we’ve covered the core techniques of backyard food gardening, one of the three basic ingredients in the bubbling cauldron of green wizardry. Those core techniques are far from the only things that can usefully be added to the pot, of course, but I don’t propose to go into the other options in any detail.
First, and to my mind the most crucial, is the need for dissensus. It’s impossible to know in advance what particular set of tools and skills will be the one best suited to squeak past the mess taking shape around us – and by this I mean to include both the short-term mess defined by the implosion of America’s debt economy and its overseas equivalents, and the long-term and even more daunting mess defined by the head-on collision between a civilization and technostructure predicated on limitless expansion and the hard limits of a finite planet. Green wizardry, as I’ve already discussed here, is only one option, and even within green wizardry there needs to be plenty of room for different paths, new inventions, local traditions, and a good helping of outright eccentricity.
Those of my readers who took me up on last week’s challenge and sat down with a copy of Darwin’s The Origin of Species and a tall beverage of choice already have some sense of the importance of variation in evolution; that’s what provides the raw material that gets sorted out by natural selection. There’s no shortage of natural selection piling up for us in the not too distant future, that’s for sure, but it’s up to us to provide the variation. That’s part of what’s behind my recommendation that aspiring green wizards haunt used book stores and go digging for obscure pieces of information, and it’s also part of the reason why I’ve focused almost monomaniacally on a very specific version of backyard food gardening – the version that evolved in the 1970s energy crises – when there are many other options out there. The logic here is straightforward: a pretty fair fraction of green wizards who didn’t grow up during that decade are bound to get irritated by the deliberately annoying Seventies-centric approach, and that irritation will send them looking for other options.
Another important reason, though, was brought home to me by a book that arrived on my doorstep not too long ago. I’m not going to name the author, the publisher, or even the subject matter, because it could have been any of a hundred books; these days they’re as interchangeable, as forgettable, and as inescapable as American politicians at election time. I’m not sure why it was mailed to me, as it came unannounced; I have to assume that since I blog about the crisis of industrial society, and this book claims to offer a solution to that crisis, the author or the publisher’s marketing department decided that I probably ought to know about it.
You already know the kind of book I’m discussing. It begins with several chapters of potted history that combines an overheated version of the mess we’re in – slanted, naturally, toward those aspects of the mess that the proposed solution is supposed to solve – and an equally colorful account of the prehistory of the solution that traces it back to an exotic and currently fashionable source. It goes on to talk about the proposed solution with the kind of overhyped enthusiasm and rose-tinted assumptions more often associated with the press releases of small tech startups that will be bankrupt within the year. It spares a brief chapter or two to mention criticisms directed at the proposed solution in order to dismiss them out of hand, and then finishes up with a vision of the glorious Utopian future that awaits once the Party’s latest five year plan – er, excuse me, once the proposed solution gets the universal acceptance and ample funding the author hopes to attract.
What isn’t in books of this kind is as important, and as worth mentioning, as what is in them. You won’t find any substantive discussion of the limits of the proposed solution – what dimensions of the crisis of industrial civilization it can’t solve, which bioregions or human societies can’t use it effectively, what resource requirements, environmental effect, or economic factors place constraints on its use, and so on. You won’t find any substantive discussion of the downside of the proposed solution – what burdens it will place on already stressed resource supplies, ecosystems, or economies. Equally, you won’t find meaningful comparisons between the proposed solution and other ways of accomplishing the same thing. Since there are always limits, costs, and alternatives, and a reasoned approach to any kind of decision needs to take these three things into account, their exclusion from such books is not exactly a minor point.
Still, there’s another factor left out in the sort of book I’m discussing: there’s nothing the reader is supposed to do in response. Until recently, if you picked up a book that took some current crisis, painted it in the most apocalyptic terms available, then trotted out some solution dolled up in glowing colors for your approbation, you could safely bet any sum you like to name that the final chapters would try to sell the reader on a product to buy, a service to pay for, a movement to join, or something similar. That sort of snake oil sales pitch is as old as the hills of Iowa and twice as corny, but at least it’s relatively straightforward.
The books I have in mind are anything but straightforward. Like the sales pitches just mentioned, they work overtime making whatever crisis concerns their authors look as dire as possible, and gild their proposed solutions with a glitter of infallibility as glorious as anything a carnival pitchman ever claimed for Doctor Fox’s Genuine Arkansas Snake Oil, but they’re not written to sell. It finally occurred to me, while reading the example mentioned earlier in this essay, what their actual purpose is: they’re written to soothe.
This sort of lullaby literature is very popular just now. Shorter pieces humming the same tunes can be found all through what passes for news media in America these days. The New York Times is particularly fond of such things; my adopted kid sister Sharon Astyk neatly eviscerated one example from that source in a recent blog post, but it’s a safe bet that neither the author nor the intended audience of the piece will notice. They are paying attention to something else.
Especially but not only in America, an awareness is spreading through the crawlspaces of society that the current round of troubles might not just be a speedbump on the road to the shiny future our society’s myths promise us. The sense that something has truly, deeply, desperately gone wrong, right down at the core of the world we’ve created for ourselves, has made itself the background to most of the collective conversations that define our culture. The popularity of soothing narratives about the future just now is, if anything, a marker for just how pervasive that background has become; it’s only when fears are inescapable that efforts at mass reassurance find a market.
Still, there’s another dimension to all this, and it bears directly on the Green Wizards project. One of the things that makes our predicament so difficult for so many people to face just now, and especially for so many Americans, is that every available option for the future includes the certainty of massive impoverishment. The five per cent of us who live in the United States have gotten used to living on a quarter of the world’s energy supply and around a third of its raw materials and industrial products. Even if the world wasn’t facing the rapid depletion of its readily accessible fossil fuel reserves, the equally rapid depletion of many other nonrenewable resources essential to the economy, a global climate tipping toward critical instabilities, a dizzying array of local, regional, and global ecological shifts, and the inevitable feedback loops and synergistic effects these changes are going to cause – and of course the world is facing all these things, and will be facing more of them with every passing year – even if these things weren’t happening, the arrangements that provide Americans with so huge a share of the world’s resources are not going to last much longer.
Those arrangements were the product of a particular set of historical conditions. A century ago, those conditions didn’t exist; back then, it was Britain that received a disproportionate share of the world’s wealth, as the beneficiary of an imperial system that directly ruled a quarter of the world’s land surface and also dominated the world’s oceans and, by that fact, most of its international trade. America in those days was a rising power, to be sure, but wasn’t even close to the world’s biggest economy; it had to shelter its industries from the impact of the British colossus by exactly the sort of trade barriers the Chinese are using against us today. (Yes, British economists criticized the US in much the same terms our economists now use to denounce the Chinese; we didn’t listen and neither will they.)
It didn’t take a hundred years for the British empire to be replaced by ours, and it won’t take a hundred years for ours to be replaced by someone else’s. Since we can’t rely on the unusual historical circumstances that allowed Britain to maintain a few shreds of its imperial dignity and some of its privileged economic standing – they were basically able to rent their island out to the American military as an unusually large aircraft carrier conveniently anchored right off the shores of Europe; we don’t have that geopolitical advantage – the aftermath of the American empire is almost certain to be much more like the aftermath of most other empires: economic collapse, massive political dislocations, and a long period of turmoil and contraction until the bottom is reached and recovery can finally start to take shape. The global empire that preceded Britain’s, the Spanish Empire, may provide a more accurate model: that empire imploded in the early nineteenth century in the wake of Britain’s rise to global power, and it wasn’t until the late twentieth century that Spain finally managed to pull itself out of the long nightmare of impoverishment and political chaos that followed.
Again, this is what we would be able to expect if the global economy was entirely based on sustainable resources and the global ecology wasn’t redefining itself in the face of a couple of centuries of fossil fuel-powered abuse. Factor in the impact of energy and resource depletion, climate change, and environmental instability, and the very high likelihood of an increasingly desperate and violent scramble for remaining resources on the way down, and the effects of the end of American empire are likely to be more drastic than anything we’ve seen in the western world since the fall of Rome.
I suspect most Americans these days know this, or at least sense it. These days, when I give a talk on the future to an audience outside the peak oil community, I can begin it like this – “Remember all those scientists a few decades back who warned that if we didn’t make some drastic changes in the very near future, we’d be in deep trouble in the early twenty-first century? Well, guess what.” – and far more often than not, nobody argues. Some of them, at least to judge by the comments and questions I field, are already beginning to try to fit their minds around a future in which nearly all of us are desperately poor by today’s standards; many more are hoping that the worst of it will miss them somehow, or that they’ll be lucky enough to die before it hits – I’ve had people, not all of them elderly, express this latter hope to me in so many words.
Even among those who insist that it won’t happen – those who claim that the center of the Earth really is full of limitless oceans of oil, or that holding hands in a circle and singing “Kum Ba Ya” is a viable strategy for an age of imperial decline and global overshoot, or that the Rapture or the Singularity or 2012 or some other deus ex machina will annihilate history and save them from the future – I have to question how many people actually believe what they claim to believe. I know far too many people who insist the world will end in 2012, for example, who are still putting money into their retirement accounts, and it’s been an open secret for the last decade that the vast majority of people who like to imagine living in a lifeboat ecovillage have not been willing to lift a finger or spend a dime to bring such a project into being.
I’d like to suggest that this is because daydreams about nonexistent lifeboat ecovillages and planet-ending catastrophes two years from now that weren’t actually predicted by the ancient Mayans at all share a common purpose, one that’s also shared by abiotic oil, fusion power, and a dime store’s worth of other lullabies disguised as solutions. Their purpose is to give people something more pleasant to think about than the future that’s breathing down our necks. Yes, planet-ending catastrophes are more pleasant to think about than a couple of centuries of ragged decline, impoverishment, and population loss; if we all get blown to kingdom come in one vast fireball, at least it’s over quickly, and you can probably get some consolation in the few seconds before you’re vaporized by reminding yourself that, after all, it wasn’t your fault.
The irony here, and it’s a rich one, is that potentially workable projects can be turned into lullabies just as effectively as the most dubious daydream. I’m not exactly a fan of the lifeboat ecovillage concept, but it’s always possible that one or more of the handful of voluntary communities that have adopted this role might turn out to have had the right idea all along; it’s the ones that haven’t been built, will never be built, and function primarily as lullaby fodder that are guaranteed to be useless. Equally, some of the other approaches that have become the focus of soothing pronouncements that the solution has been found might actually do some good – and in some cases, quite a bit of good – if they’re treated as projects needing immediate hard work by anyone who wants to see them happen, rather than as props for the fantasy that somebody else is going to do everything that’s necessary.
Green wizardry is vulnerable to exactly the same process. That’s one reason why I don’t intend to present a nice neat all-encompassing plan for saving the world in these essays, or the book for which they form the very rough initial draft. Green wizardry can’t save the world, if by “saving the world” is meant finding some way to allow Americans to keep on living some semblance of a lifestyle that requires a third of the world’s economic activity to support it; but it won’t even accomplish those modest but useful tasks that it could potentially do if it gets treated primarily as raw material for lullabies.
We don’t have time for lullabies. With the United States government openly covering its debts by printing money, food and commodity prices spiking, the number of permanently unemployed people soaring across the industrial world, and China cutting deals with its other major trading partners to price goods and handle exchanges in yuan and local currencies rather than dollars, we face a high risk of serious discontinuities in the relatively near future. That’s why I hope to goad those people already involved in the Green Wizards project to get going; it may be winter here in the northern hemisphere, but that’s a good time to plan those garden beds, order seeds, keep the compost going, and put some tools on the list of holiday presents.
Next week’s post will push the envelope a bit further by talking about the value of some bits of the old appropriate tech toolkit that have been consigned to the fringes. In the meantime, I’d encourage any of my readers who might have been using these posts as lullaby fodder to think again. If you’re going to be desperately poor by today’s standards, and you are, you might as well learn how to handle that with a certain amount of skill, and maybe even a bit of grace. Knowing how to grow some of your own food, keep your home comfortable with minimal energy inputs, and do the other things green wizards can do will help with that; listening to lullabies won’t.
SC104-5
http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/economy-set-starve/48474#part-ii
It's Official: The Economy Is Set To Starve
Part I: It's the End of the Oil As We Know It...
If you have already read Part I of this report, please click here to go directly to Part II.
Once a year, the International Energy Agency (IEA) releases its World Energy Outlook (WEO), and it's our tradition here at ChrisMartenson.com to review it. A lot of articles have already been written on the WEO 2010 report, and I don't wish to tread an already well-worn path, but the subject is just too important to leave relegate to a single week of attention.
Because some people will only read the first two paragraphs, let me get a couple of conclusions out right up front. You need to pay close attention to Peak Oil, and you need to begin adjusting, because it has already happened. The first conclusion is mine; the second belongs to the IEA.
Okay, it's not quite as simple as that; there are a few complexities involved that require us to dig a bit deeper and to be sure our terms and definitions are clear so that we are talking about the same things.
But if we can simply distinguish between two types of "oil" (you'll see why that term is in quotes in a second), the story becomes much easier to follow.
"Conventional oil" is the cheap and easy stuff. A well is drilled, pipe is inserted and oil comes up out of the ground that can be shipped directly to a refinery. Whether the oil is "sour" or "sweet" doesn't matter; it's still conventional oil.
"Unconventional oil" refers to things like tar sands, ultra-deep-water oil, coal-to-liquids, oil shale, and natural gas liquids. In other words, oil that is much more difficult and expensive to produce.
The IEA has been producing annual reviews of the world energy situation for a long time and has not mentioned the term "Peak Oil" (as far as I know) until this year's report. And not only did they mention it, they said that as far as conventional oil goes, it's in the rear view mirror:
Crude oil output reaches an undulating plateau of around 68-69 mb/d by 2020, but never regains its all-time peak of 70 mb/d reached in 2006, while production of natural gas liquids (NGL) and unconventional oil grows quickly.
WEO 2010 - Executive Summary
I might quibble that the all-time peak remains 2005 in the US Energy Information Agency data set, but the main point here is that the IEA has not only used the words "Peak Oil" (finally!) but they've done so in the past tense, at least with regard to conventional oil.
The IEA now sees all forms of oil, conventional and unconventional, hitting a high of 99 million barrels per day (mbd) by 2035 (including 3 mbd of 'refinery gains'). Of course, we may wish to take even this tepid estimate of growth in oil supplies with a grain of salt, because in every annual report, like clockwork, the IEA has been ratcheting down its estimate of how much oil we'll have in the future:
.......First, pay close attention to the legend for the chart. Starting at the bottom, note that crude oil from "currently producing fields" (dark blue) is already in sharp decline and is expected to decline from a high of 70 mbd in 2006 to ~15 mbd in 2035; a loss of 55 mbd over 25 years, or 2.2 mbd per year. The next band up (gray) is crude oil from "fields yet to be developed," which we largely know about but have not yet really started producing significantly.
My only comment here is that these fields cannot overcome the expected rate of loss in the dark blue band below them. All of the conventional oil that we know about is now past peak. In order to keep conventional oil flat, we have to move up to the third band (light blue), which goes by the spine tingling name "fields yet to be found" - which will apparently be delivering a very hefty 22 mbd by 2035. In other words, the IEA is projecting that in 25 years, more oil will be flowing from "fields yet to be found" than from all the fields ever found and put into production by the year 2010.
Colin Campbell, one of the earliest analysts of peak oil who has decades of oil field experience, is on record as saying that the "fields yet to be developed" category, originally introduced to the world as unidentified Unconventional in 1998, is a "coded message for shortage" and was, off the record, confirmed as such by the IEA. That coded message is getting easier and clearer to receive by the day.
But back to the main story line. Even if the final assessment of future oil production isn't notched down even one more tick, we have all the information we need to spot an enormous problem in the global story of growth. Assuming that we stick with the 99 mbd by 2035 estimate going forward, this represents a growth rate in oil of only around one-half of one percent (0.5%) per year between now and then.
This means that over the next 25 years, the global economy will have to make do with less than half the rate of growth in oil that it enjoyed over the prior 25 years. How will the economy grow with less oil available? What will happen to the valuations of financial assets that explicitly assume that prior rates of growth stretch endlessly into the future?
To cut to the chase, the admission by the IEA that we will not be achieving past levels of energy growth should be the most gigantic red flag in history, at least to those who might care that their money or other paper-based forms of wealth be worth something in the future. What if that future growth does not emerge? What happens when the collateral for a loan goes sour? The IEA report indicates an enormous set of risks for an over-leveraged world reliant on constant growth.
The bottom lines are these:
The IEA now admits that conventional crude oil peaked in 2006. Permanently. Any gains from here are due to contributions from unconventional oil and natural gas-to-liquids.
Under no scenario envisioned will future growth in fossil fuel supplies be equal prior rates of growth.
Energy from here on out is going to be (much) more expensive.
I cannot state this strongly enough: The WEO 2010 report is an official admission that Peak Oil is not only real, but it's already here.
Part II: Scouring the Globe for Fuel
"Tomorrow’s [economic] expansion was collateral for today’s debt."
~ Colin Campbell
The implications from this report are too important to preserve just for the enrolled members who support this site's mission, people, and goals. We're going to open up most of this report to the general public because we feel it's the right thing to do. For those unfamiliar with my work, the job I do most frequently is a combination of information scout (I connect dots) and analyst (I dig deep).
Okay, let's head deeper into the World Energy Outlook (WEO) 2010 report. Here's my quick summary of the report.
By 2035:
Between 2008 and 2035, total energy demand grows by 36%, or 1.2% per year; far less than the 2% rate of growth seen over the prior 27 years. (Note: This comes from the "New Policies Scenario," which is the middle scenario of three in the report. We'll discuss this one throughout.)
Renewables will be contributing very little to the overall energy landscape, just 14% of the total, and this includes hydro.
93% of all the demand increase comes from non OECD countries (mainly China and India).
Oil remains the dominant fuel (although diminishing in total percentage).
The global economy will grow by an average of 3.2% per annum.
It's time to cut demand for oil by raising prices (they recommend ending energy subsidies for fossil fuels as the mechanism).
Conventional oil has peaked, and this is a permanent condition. All oil gains from here forwards will come from non-conventional sources and gas and coal-to-liquids programs.
There are enormous implications to that series of bullet points, if one stops to think about them in total. One glaring difficulty in all of this is that the IEA notes that China and India are going to consume nearly every drop of any potential future increases in oil production. Yet overall production is only going to grow by a meager 0.5% per year.
So how does the IEA suppose that oil growth can slow down to a paltry 0.5%/year, see China and India increase their consumption massively, and still have everything balance out? We all know that China and India (et al.) have been growing their oil consumption by massive percentages in the recent past, and there's some evidence that we can expect more of that behavior in the years to come.
In fact, this was what India's Premier told the world on November 1, 2010:
Premier Manmohan Singh told India's energy firms on Monday to scour the globe for fuel supplies as he warned the country's demand for fossil fuels was set to soar 40 percent over the next decade.
The country of more than 1.1 billion people already imports nearly 80 percent of its crude oil to fuel an economy that is expected to grow 8.5 percent this year and at least nine percent next year.
(Source)
So, yes, it's pretty much expected that China and India, et al., will be increasing their consumption by rates much (much) higher than 0.5%, which means, logically, that some other countries will have to consume at negative rates in order for the equation to balance.
And this is exactly what the IEA has modeled and proposed:
......I want to draw your attention to the green circles that I placed on there. Yes, you are reading that right. To balance everything out, the IEA has modeled the OECD as actually decreasing its consumption of coal and oil by significant amounts (that's what a negative 'incremental demand' requires: a decrease in current consumption). The difference is made up from a mix of renewables, biomass, nuclear, and natural gas.
Never has such a thing happened in the entire industrial history of the OECD. Never. There are no models or examples to follow here. No guidance is offered to suggest how such a monumental feat will be accomplished, beyond tossing a few more bucks at renewables, as if money alone could correct for vast differences in energy quantity and quality.
To suggest that the next 25 years for the OECD will be characterized by a significant reduction in the use of the two primary industrial fuels is an astonishing claim, and so it deserves to be carefully examined. But, speaking bluntly, this is not going to happen.
Any suggestion that the OECD is going to reduce its use of coal for electricity and oil for liquid fuels has to be accompanied by evidence of massive programs of investment towards energy transitioning that, truth be told, have to have been started a decade or more before the arrival of Peak Oil. Hinting that it might possibly be a good idea to move these renewable dreams to the drawing board after the advent of Peak Oil is akin to playing tunes on a sinking ship; at best, you are providing a captivating diversion.
Regardless, no such programs operating at appropriate scale are even remotely in sight.
A point that I try to make clear in my upcoming book (due out in March 2011 from Wiley) is that such an energy transition would be evident by such things as the trillions of dollars being dedicated to it, by eminent domain actions to secure new land for natural gas pipelines, and by vehicles that could run on electricity or natural gas being churned out by the millions. While we can debate whether we might get there someday, there can be no doubt that we are not there today.
So if one is a card-carrying member of the mainstream media, what does one do with such a major event as the WEO 2010 report? In the case of the New York Times, the answer is to run a completely schizophrenic pair of articles, but bury the supportive one deep in the "blogs" section while placing the one that completely ignores the WEO 2010 report prominently in the business section.
The first of these two articles, separated by only a day and centering firmly on the IEA report, is titled "Is ‘Peak Oil’ Behind Us?" to which the article correctly answers "Yes":
Is ‘Peak Oil’ Behind Us?
Peak oil is not just here — it’s behind us already
That’s the conclusion of the International Energy Agency, the Paris-based organization that provides energy analysis to 28 industrialized nations. According to a projection in the agency’s latest annual report, released last week, production of conventional crude oil — the black liquid stuff that rigs pump out of the ground — probably topped out for good in 2006, at about 70 million barrels a day. Production from currently producing oil fields will drop sharply in coming decades, the report suggests.
That's pretty accurate. You'd think that such a stunning admission by the preeminent body responsible for preparing such reports for the OECD would have sparked a fury of investigation and maybe even self-investigation by the New York Times, which through the years has pooh-poohed the entire idea of Peak Oil rather religiously. But that didn't happen.
The second article is entitled "There Will Be Fuel" and is chock full of comforting anecdotes and quotes from oil industry executives:
There Will Be Fuel
Just as it seemed that the world was running on fumes, giant oil fields were discovered off the coasts of Brazil and Africa, and Canadian oil sands projects expanded so fast, they now provide North America with more oil than Saudi Arabia. In addition, the United States has increased domestic oil production for the first time in a generation.
“The estimates for how much oil there is in the world continue to increase,” said William M. Colton, Exxon Mobil’s vice president for corporate strategic planning. “There’s enough oil to supply the world’s needs as far as anyone can see.”
Somebody get that man a pair of glasses (!)
Seriously, any country or corporation that cannot foresee the end of cheap and abundant oil is being run by dangerous people. To suggest that even the most optimistic assessment of oil, which has it peaking in 2030, is too far away to begin planning for today is just silly. Really, now...responsible planners considering major capital projects with multi-decade life spans (which can be 30 years or more for many things) should just ignore energy? That's the message here? Goodness, gracious.
In fact, there are so many problems with "There Will Be Fuel" that I hardly know where to turn to next. I suppose we could note that the article quoted "100 years of natural gas" left in the US without mentioning the all-important phrase "at current rates of consumption." To those who are familiar with exponential processes, and who know that energy consumption has been increasing exponentially for decades, such an oversight is an enormous red flag. It betrays either ignorance or deception on somebody's part (perhaps the editor?), and neither are acceptable at this stage of the energy debate. Once we increase consumption at reasonable and prior rates, that 100 years can rapidly shrink to mere decades in a hurry.
What's the difference between "100 years of gas" and "maybe a couple of decades"? Night and day.
Next, we might note that the article goes out of its way to make the case that "estimates for how much oil there is in the world continue to increase," while somehow avoiding the essential point that it's not the amounts that matter, but the rates at which the oil can be coaxed to flow out of the ground. Peak Oil is, has been, and always will be about flow rates, not amounts.
For example, if the very center of the earth were entirely filled with oil, but we could only get to it through a single, very thin tube (limiting how fast we could pull the oil out), it wouldn't really matter how much was there - a hundred trillion barrels could be there - because how much we could do with it would be limited by the rate of extraction. Exponential economic growth requires increases in fuel consumption. It always has and it always will, until and unless a brand new model of economics is developed.
Again, the lack of awareness of this basic concept of the difference between rates and amounts leaves the New York Times piece very much in doubt.
I could go on, but it's not all that helpful to once again catch the New York Times playing fast and loose with the facts in order to advance an agenda; for now, let's just observe that Peak Oil refers to a condition where the rate of extraction cannot be increased. If it were about amounts, then I suppose we would call it "Peak Reserves," but it's not, and for a reason: We care about the flow rates.
It is on this matter of flow rates that the IEA report was especially jarring and succinct: Peak Oil has happened.
At this point, it may be good to remind ourselves that last year an IEA whistleblower said that the organization had willfully underplayed looming shortages due to political pressures from the US.
Please read the following very carefully; it represents very important context for what we are about to discuss next. (I'm quoting at length because it's all essential):
The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying.
The senior official claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves.
The allegations raise serious questions about the accuracy of the organisation's latest World Energy Outlook on oil demand and supply to be published tomorrow – which is used by the British and many other governments to help guide their wider energy and climate change policies.
Now the "peak oil" theory is gaining support at the heart of the global energy establishment. "The IEA in 2005 was predicting oil supplies could rise as high as 120m barrels a day by 2030 although it was forced to reduce this gradually to 116m and then 105m last year," said the IEA source, who was unwilling to be identified for fear of reprisals inside the industry. "The 120m figure always was nonsense but even today's number is much higher than can be justified and the IEA knows this.
"Many inside the organisation believe that maintaining oil supplies at even 90m to 95m barrels a day would be impossible but there are fears that panic could spread on the financial markets if the figures were brought down further. And the Americans fear the end of oil supremacy because it would threaten their power over access to oil resources," he added.
A second senior IEA source, who has now left but was also unwilling to give his name, said a key rule at the organisation was that it was "imperative not to anger the Americans" but the fact was that there was not as much oil in the world as had been admitted. "We have [already] entered the 'peak oil' zone. I think that the situation is really bad," he added.
(Source)
The idea expressed above is simple enough: The oil data has been fudged to the upside by the IEA. Pressure has allegedly been applied upon the IEA to paint a rosier picture than a strict interpretation of the data would warrant. To speculate, the reason why is that there are a host of interlocking vested interests in the financial but especially political spheres that would find the public recognition of Peak Oil to be disruptive and therefore unwelcome.
This is just another example of Fuzzy Numbers, but the consequences of fibbing to ourselves about oil are far more dire than when we lie about employment. If it weren't so serious, it would be just another somewhat regrettable obfuscation of reality created to serve narrow and temporal political purposes.
Note: There is a well-recorded history, going back at least 13 years, of the IEA being fully aware of Peak Oil but bowing to political pressure to soften the message. Read paragraphs 4 & 5 of this piece by Colin Campbell for some more essential background.
Conclusion
Here's where we are:
The IEA has known about looming Peak Oil issues for more than a decade and is only now explicitly recognizing the idea in their public documents.
People inside and outside of the IEA say that the organization has downplayed both the timing and potential severity of Peak Oil.
Peak Conventional Oil has already happened.
Any possible growth in future oil that the IEA can envision -- and we might suspect that even this is fudged to the upside and will retreat in subsequent reports -- is going to be almost entirely eaten up by China and India.
What this means is very, very simple. There will be an energy crisis in the near future that will make anything we've experienced so far seem like a pleasant memory.
The very best personal investments you can make at this stage will involve increasing your energy resilience. Make your house require less heating and cooling, use the sun wherever and whenever possible, and increase your personal storage of the fuels you use (if and when possible).
The potential knock-on effects of less energy to the complex system known as our economy are unpredictable in their exact details and timing, but are thoroughly knowable via their broad, topographical outlines. The economy will become simpler and less ordered.
It's Official: The Economy Is Set To Starve
Part I: It's the End of the Oil As We Know It...
If you have already read Part I of this report, please click here to go directly to Part II.
Once a year, the International Energy Agency (IEA) releases its World Energy Outlook (WEO), and it's our tradition here at ChrisMartenson.com to review it. A lot of articles have already been written on the WEO 2010 report, and I don't wish to tread an already well-worn path, but the subject is just too important to leave relegate to a single week of attention.
Because some people will only read the first two paragraphs, let me get a couple of conclusions out right up front. You need to pay close attention to Peak Oil, and you need to begin adjusting, because it has already happened. The first conclusion is mine; the second belongs to the IEA.
Okay, it's not quite as simple as that; there are a few complexities involved that require us to dig a bit deeper and to be sure our terms and definitions are clear so that we are talking about the same things.
But if we can simply distinguish between two types of "oil" (you'll see why that term is in quotes in a second), the story becomes much easier to follow.
"Conventional oil" is the cheap and easy stuff. A well is drilled, pipe is inserted and oil comes up out of the ground that can be shipped directly to a refinery. Whether the oil is "sour" or "sweet" doesn't matter; it's still conventional oil.
"Unconventional oil" refers to things like tar sands, ultra-deep-water oil, coal-to-liquids, oil shale, and natural gas liquids. In other words, oil that is much more difficult and expensive to produce.
The IEA has been producing annual reviews of the world energy situation for a long time and has not mentioned the term "Peak Oil" (as far as I know) until this year's report. And not only did they mention it, they said that as far as conventional oil goes, it's in the rear view mirror:
Crude oil output reaches an undulating plateau of around 68-69 mb/d by 2020, but never regains its all-time peak of 70 mb/d reached in 2006, while production of natural gas liquids (NGL) and unconventional oil grows quickly.
WEO 2010 - Executive Summary
I might quibble that the all-time peak remains 2005 in the US Energy Information Agency data set, but the main point here is that the IEA has not only used the words "Peak Oil" (finally!) but they've done so in the past tense, at least with regard to conventional oil.
The IEA now sees all forms of oil, conventional and unconventional, hitting a high of 99 million barrels per day (mbd) by 2035 (including 3 mbd of 'refinery gains'). Of course, we may wish to take even this tepid estimate of growth in oil supplies with a grain of salt, because in every annual report, like clockwork, the IEA has been ratcheting down its estimate of how much oil we'll have in the future:
.......First, pay close attention to the legend for the chart. Starting at the bottom, note that crude oil from "currently producing fields" (dark blue) is already in sharp decline and is expected to decline from a high of 70 mbd in 2006 to ~15 mbd in 2035; a loss of 55 mbd over 25 years, or 2.2 mbd per year. The next band up (gray) is crude oil from "fields yet to be developed," which we largely know about but have not yet really started producing significantly.
My only comment here is that these fields cannot overcome the expected rate of loss in the dark blue band below them. All of the conventional oil that we know about is now past peak. In order to keep conventional oil flat, we have to move up to the third band (light blue), which goes by the spine tingling name "fields yet to be found" - which will apparently be delivering a very hefty 22 mbd by 2035. In other words, the IEA is projecting that in 25 years, more oil will be flowing from "fields yet to be found" than from all the fields ever found and put into production by the year 2010.
Colin Campbell, one of the earliest analysts of peak oil who has decades of oil field experience, is on record as saying that the "fields yet to be developed" category, originally introduced to the world as unidentified Unconventional in 1998, is a "coded message for shortage" and was, off the record, confirmed as such by the IEA. That coded message is getting easier and clearer to receive by the day.
But back to the main story line. Even if the final assessment of future oil production isn't notched down even one more tick, we have all the information we need to spot an enormous problem in the global story of growth. Assuming that we stick with the 99 mbd by 2035 estimate going forward, this represents a growth rate in oil of only around one-half of one percent (0.5%) per year between now and then.
This means that over the next 25 years, the global economy will have to make do with less than half the rate of growth in oil that it enjoyed over the prior 25 years. How will the economy grow with less oil available? What will happen to the valuations of financial assets that explicitly assume that prior rates of growth stretch endlessly into the future?
To cut to the chase, the admission by the IEA that we will not be achieving past levels of energy growth should be the most gigantic red flag in history, at least to those who might care that their money or other paper-based forms of wealth be worth something in the future. What if that future growth does not emerge? What happens when the collateral for a loan goes sour? The IEA report indicates an enormous set of risks for an over-leveraged world reliant on constant growth.
The bottom lines are these:
The IEA now admits that conventional crude oil peaked in 2006. Permanently. Any gains from here are due to contributions from unconventional oil and natural gas-to-liquids.
Under no scenario envisioned will future growth in fossil fuel supplies be equal prior rates of growth.
Energy from here on out is going to be (much) more expensive.
I cannot state this strongly enough: The WEO 2010 report is an official admission that Peak Oil is not only real, but it's already here.
Part II: Scouring the Globe for Fuel
"Tomorrow’s [economic] expansion was collateral for today’s debt."
~ Colin Campbell
The implications from this report are too important to preserve just for the enrolled members who support this site's mission, people, and goals. We're going to open up most of this report to the general public because we feel it's the right thing to do. For those unfamiliar with my work, the job I do most frequently is a combination of information scout (I connect dots) and analyst (I dig deep).
Okay, let's head deeper into the World Energy Outlook (WEO) 2010 report. Here's my quick summary of the report.
By 2035:
Between 2008 and 2035, total energy demand grows by 36%, or 1.2% per year; far less than the 2% rate of growth seen over the prior 27 years. (Note: This comes from the "New Policies Scenario," which is the middle scenario of three in the report. We'll discuss this one throughout.)
Renewables will be contributing very little to the overall energy landscape, just 14% of the total, and this includes hydro.
93% of all the demand increase comes from non OECD countries (mainly China and India).
Oil remains the dominant fuel (although diminishing in total percentage).
The global economy will grow by an average of 3.2% per annum.
It's time to cut demand for oil by raising prices (they recommend ending energy subsidies for fossil fuels as the mechanism).
Conventional oil has peaked, and this is a permanent condition. All oil gains from here forwards will come from non-conventional sources and gas and coal-to-liquids programs.
There are enormous implications to that series of bullet points, if one stops to think about them in total. One glaring difficulty in all of this is that the IEA notes that China and India are going to consume nearly every drop of any potential future increases in oil production. Yet overall production is only going to grow by a meager 0.5% per year.
So how does the IEA suppose that oil growth can slow down to a paltry 0.5%/year, see China and India increase their consumption massively, and still have everything balance out? We all know that China and India (et al.) have been growing their oil consumption by massive percentages in the recent past, and there's some evidence that we can expect more of that behavior in the years to come.
In fact, this was what India's Premier told the world on November 1, 2010:
Premier Manmohan Singh told India's energy firms on Monday to scour the globe for fuel supplies as he warned the country's demand for fossil fuels was set to soar 40 percent over the next decade.
The country of more than 1.1 billion people already imports nearly 80 percent of its crude oil to fuel an economy that is expected to grow 8.5 percent this year and at least nine percent next year.
(Source)
So, yes, it's pretty much expected that China and India, et al., will be increasing their consumption by rates much (much) higher than 0.5%, which means, logically, that some other countries will have to consume at negative rates in order for the equation to balance.
And this is exactly what the IEA has modeled and proposed:
......I want to draw your attention to the green circles that I placed on there. Yes, you are reading that right. To balance everything out, the IEA has modeled the OECD as actually decreasing its consumption of coal and oil by significant amounts (that's what a negative 'incremental demand' requires: a decrease in current consumption). The difference is made up from a mix of renewables, biomass, nuclear, and natural gas.
Never has such a thing happened in the entire industrial history of the OECD. Never. There are no models or examples to follow here. No guidance is offered to suggest how such a monumental feat will be accomplished, beyond tossing a few more bucks at renewables, as if money alone could correct for vast differences in energy quantity and quality.
To suggest that the next 25 years for the OECD will be characterized by a significant reduction in the use of the two primary industrial fuels is an astonishing claim, and so it deserves to be carefully examined. But, speaking bluntly, this is not going to happen.
Any suggestion that the OECD is going to reduce its use of coal for electricity and oil for liquid fuels has to be accompanied by evidence of massive programs of investment towards energy transitioning that, truth be told, have to have been started a decade or more before the arrival of Peak Oil. Hinting that it might possibly be a good idea to move these renewable dreams to the drawing board after the advent of Peak Oil is akin to playing tunes on a sinking ship; at best, you are providing a captivating diversion.
Regardless, no such programs operating at appropriate scale are even remotely in sight.
A point that I try to make clear in my upcoming book (due out in March 2011 from Wiley) is that such an energy transition would be evident by such things as the trillions of dollars being dedicated to it, by eminent domain actions to secure new land for natural gas pipelines, and by vehicles that could run on electricity or natural gas being churned out by the millions. While we can debate whether we might get there someday, there can be no doubt that we are not there today.
So if one is a card-carrying member of the mainstream media, what does one do with such a major event as the WEO 2010 report? In the case of the New York Times, the answer is to run a completely schizophrenic pair of articles, but bury the supportive one deep in the "blogs" section while placing the one that completely ignores the WEO 2010 report prominently in the business section.
The first of these two articles, separated by only a day and centering firmly on the IEA report, is titled "Is ‘Peak Oil’ Behind Us?" to which the article correctly answers "Yes":
Is ‘Peak Oil’ Behind Us?
Peak oil is not just here — it’s behind us already
That’s the conclusion of the International Energy Agency, the Paris-based organization that provides energy analysis to 28 industrialized nations. According to a projection in the agency’s latest annual report, released last week, production of conventional crude oil — the black liquid stuff that rigs pump out of the ground — probably topped out for good in 2006, at about 70 million barrels a day. Production from currently producing oil fields will drop sharply in coming decades, the report suggests.
That's pretty accurate. You'd think that such a stunning admission by the preeminent body responsible for preparing such reports for the OECD would have sparked a fury of investigation and maybe even self-investigation by the New York Times, which through the years has pooh-poohed the entire idea of Peak Oil rather religiously. But that didn't happen.
The second article is entitled "There Will Be Fuel" and is chock full of comforting anecdotes and quotes from oil industry executives:
There Will Be Fuel
Just as it seemed that the world was running on fumes, giant oil fields were discovered off the coasts of Brazil and Africa, and Canadian oil sands projects expanded so fast, they now provide North America with more oil than Saudi Arabia. In addition, the United States has increased domestic oil production for the first time in a generation.
“The estimates for how much oil there is in the world continue to increase,” said William M. Colton, Exxon Mobil’s vice president for corporate strategic planning. “There’s enough oil to supply the world’s needs as far as anyone can see.”
Somebody get that man a pair of glasses (!)
Seriously, any country or corporation that cannot foresee the end of cheap and abundant oil is being run by dangerous people. To suggest that even the most optimistic assessment of oil, which has it peaking in 2030, is too far away to begin planning for today is just silly. Really, now...responsible planners considering major capital projects with multi-decade life spans (which can be 30 years or more for many things) should just ignore energy? That's the message here? Goodness, gracious.
In fact, there are so many problems with "There Will Be Fuel" that I hardly know where to turn to next. I suppose we could note that the article quoted "100 years of natural gas" left in the US without mentioning the all-important phrase "at current rates of consumption." To those who are familiar with exponential processes, and who know that energy consumption has been increasing exponentially for decades, such an oversight is an enormous red flag. It betrays either ignorance or deception on somebody's part (perhaps the editor?), and neither are acceptable at this stage of the energy debate. Once we increase consumption at reasonable and prior rates, that 100 years can rapidly shrink to mere decades in a hurry.
What's the difference between "100 years of gas" and "maybe a couple of decades"? Night and day.
Next, we might note that the article goes out of its way to make the case that "estimates for how much oil there is in the world continue to increase," while somehow avoiding the essential point that it's not the amounts that matter, but the rates at which the oil can be coaxed to flow out of the ground. Peak Oil is, has been, and always will be about flow rates, not amounts.
For example, if the very center of the earth were entirely filled with oil, but we could only get to it through a single, very thin tube (limiting how fast we could pull the oil out), it wouldn't really matter how much was there - a hundred trillion barrels could be there - because how much we could do with it would be limited by the rate of extraction. Exponential economic growth requires increases in fuel consumption. It always has and it always will, until and unless a brand new model of economics is developed.
Again, the lack of awareness of this basic concept of the difference between rates and amounts leaves the New York Times piece very much in doubt.
I could go on, but it's not all that helpful to once again catch the New York Times playing fast and loose with the facts in order to advance an agenda; for now, let's just observe that Peak Oil refers to a condition where the rate of extraction cannot be increased. If it were about amounts, then I suppose we would call it "Peak Reserves," but it's not, and for a reason: We care about the flow rates.
It is on this matter of flow rates that the IEA report was especially jarring and succinct: Peak Oil has happened.
At this point, it may be good to remind ourselves that last year an IEA whistleblower said that the organization had willfully underplayed looming shortages due to political pressures from the US.
Please read the following very carefully; it represents very important context for what we are about to discuss next. (I'm quoting at length because it's all essential):
The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying.
The senior official claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves.
The allegations raise serious questions about the accuracy of the organisation's latest World Energy Outlook on oil demand and supply to be published tomorrow – which is used by the British and many other governments to help guide their wider energy and climate change policies.
Now the "peak oil" theory is gaining support at the heart of the global energy establishment. "The IEA in 2005 was predicting oil supplies could rise as high as 120m barrels a day by 2030 although it was forced to reduce this gradually to 116m and then 105m last year," said the IEA source, who was unwilling to be identified for fear of reprisals inside the industry. "The 120m figure always was nonsense but even today's number is much higher than can be justified and the IEA knows this.
"Many inside the organisation believe that maintaining oil supplies at even 90m to 95m barrels a day would be impossible but there are fears that panic could spread on the financial markets if the figures were brought down further. And the Americans fear the end of oil supremacy because it would threaten their power over access to oil resources," he added.
A second senior IEA source, who has now left but was also unwilling to give his name, said a key rule at the organisation was that it was "imperative not to anger the Americans" but the fact was that there was not as much oil in the world as had been admitted. "We have [already] entered the 'peak oil' zone. I think that the situation is really bad," he added.
(Source)
The idea expressed above is simple enough: The oil data has been fudged to the upside by the IEA. Pressure has allegedly been applied upon the IEA to paint a rosier picture than a strict interpretation of the data would warrant. To speculate, the reason why is that there are a host of interlocking vested interests in the financial but especially political spheres that would find the public recognition of Peak Oil to be disruptive and therefore unwelcome.
This is just another example of Fuzzy Numbers, but the consequences of fibbing to ourselves about oil are far more dire than when we lie about employment. If it weren't so serious, it would be just another somewhat regrettable obfuscation of reality created to serve narrow and temporal political purposes.
Note: There is a well-recorded history, going back at least 13 years, of the IEA being fully aware of Peak Oil but bowing to political pressure to soften the message. Read paragraphs 4 & 5 of this piece by Colin Campbell for some more essential background.
Conclusion
Here's where we are:
The IEA has known about looming Peak Oil issues for more than a decade and is only now explicitly recognizing the idea in their public documents.
People inside and outside of the IEA say that the organization has downplayed both the timing and potential severity of Peak Oil.
Peak Conventional Oil has already happened.
Any possible growth in future oil that the IEA can envision -- and we might suspect that even this is fudged to the upside and will retreat in subsequent reports -- is going to be almost entirely eaten up by China and India.
What this means is very, very simple. There will be an energy crisis in the near future that will make anything we've experienced so far seem like a pleasant memory.
The very best personal investments you can make at this stage will involve increasing your energy resilience. Make your house require less heating and cooling, use the sun wherever and whenever possible, and increase your personal storage of the fuels you use (if and when possible).
The potential knock-on effects of less energy to the complex system known as our economy are unpredictable in their exact details and timing, but are thoroughly knowable via their broad, topographical outlines. The economy will become simpler and less ordered.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
SC104-4
http://www.alternet.org/story/28584/
NO THANKS TO THANKSGIVING
One indication of moral progress in the United States would be the replacement of Thanksgiving Day and its self-indulgent family feasting with a National Day of Atonement accompanied by a self-reflective collective fasting.
In fact, indigenous people have offered such a model; since 1970 they have marked the fourth Thursday of November as a Day of Mourning in a spiritual/political ceremony on Coles Hill overlooking Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, one of the early sites of the European invasion of the Americas.
Not only is the thought of such a change in this white-supremacist holiday impossible to imagine, but the very mention of the idea sends most Americans into apoplectic fits -- which speaks volumes about our historical hypocrisy and its relation to the contemporary politics of empire in the United States.
That the world's great powers achieved "greatness" through criminal brutality on a grand scale is not news, of course. That those same societies are reluctant to highlight this history of barbarism also is predictable.
But in the United States, this reluctance to acknowledge our original sin -- the genocide of indigenous people -- is of special importance today. It's now routine -- even among conservative commentators -- to describe the United States as an empire, so long as everyone understands we are an inherently benevolent one. Because all our history contradicts that claim, history must be twisted and tortured to serve the purposes of the powerful.
One vehicle for taming history is various patriotic holidays, with Thanksgiving at the heart of U.S. myth-building. From an early age, we Americans hear a story about the hearty Pilgrims, whose search for freedom took them from England to Massachusetts. There, aided by the friendly Wampanoag Indians, they survived in a new and harsh environment, leading to a harvest feast in 1621 following the Pilgrims first winter.
Some aspects of the conventional story are true enough. But it's also true that by 1637 Massachusetts Gov. John Winthrop was proclaiming a thanksgiving for the successful massacre of hundreds of Pequot Indian men, women and children, part of the long and bloody process of opening up additional land to the English invaders. The pattern would repeat itself across the continent until between 95 and 99 percent of American Indians had been exterminated and the rest were left to assimilate into white society or die off on reservations, out of the view of polite society.
Simply put: Thanksgiving is the day when the dominant white culture (and, sadly, most of the rest of the non-white but non-indigenous population) celebrates the beginning of a genocide that was, in fact, blessed by the men we hold up as our heroic founding fathers.
The first president, George Washington, in 1783 said he preferred buying Indians' land rather than driving them off it because that was like driving "wild beasts" from the forest. He compared Indians to wolves, "both being beasts of prey, tho' they differ in shape."
Thomas Jefferson -- president #3 and author of the Declaration of Independence, which refers to Indians as the "merciless Indian Savages" -- was known to romanticize Indians and their culture, but that didn't stop him in 1807 from writing to his secretary of war that in a coming conflict with certain tribes, "[W]e shall destroy all of them."
As the genocide was winding down in the early 20th century, Theodore Roosevelt (president #26) defended the expansion of whites across the continent as an inevitable process "due solely to the power of the mighty civilized races which have not lost the fighting instinct, and which by their expansion are gradually bringing peace into the red wastes where the barbarian peoples of the world hold sway."
Roosevelt also once said, "I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth."
How does a country deal with the fact that some of its most revered historical figures had certain moral values and political views virtually identical to Nazis? Here's how "respectable" politicians, pundits, and professors play the game: When invoking a grand and glorious aspect of our past, then history is all-important. We are told how crucial it is for people to know history, and there is much hand wringing about the younger generations' lack of knowledge about, and respect for, that history.
In the United States, we hear constantly about the deep wisdom of the founding fathers, the adventurous spirit of the early explorers, the gritty determination of those who "settled" the country -- and about how crucial it is for children to learn these things.
But when one brings into historical discussions any facts and interpretations that contest the celebratory story and make people uncomfortable -- such as the genocide of indigenous people as the foundational act in the creation of the United States -- suddenly the value of history drops precipitously and one is asked, "Why do you insist on dwelling on the past?"This is the mark of a well-disciplined intellectual class -- one that can extol the importance of knowing history for contemporary citizenship and, at the same time, argue that we shouldn't spend too much time thinking about history.
This off-and-on engagement with history isn't of mere academic interest; as the dominant imperial power of the moment, U.S. elites have a clear stake in the contemporary propaganda value of that history. Obscuring bitter truths about historical crimes helps perpetuate the fantasy of American benevolence, which makes it easier to sell contemporary imperial adventures -- such as the invasion and occupation of Iraq -- as another benevolent action.
Any attempt to complicate this story guarantees hostility from mainstream culture. After raising the barbarism of America's much-revered founding fathers in a lecture, I was once accused of trying to "humble our proud nation" and "undermine young people's faith in our country."
Yes, of course -- that is exactly what I would hope to achieve. We should practice the virtue of humility and avoid the excessive pride that can, when combined with great power, lead to great abuses of power.
History does matter, which is why people in power put so much energy into controlling it. The United States is hardly the only society that has created such mythology. While some historians in Great Britain continue to talk about the benefits that the empire brought to India, political movements in India want to make the mythology of Hindutva into historical fact.
Abuses of history go on in the former empire and the former colony. History can be one of the many ways we create and impose hierarchy, or it can be part of a process of liberation. The truth won't set us free, but the telling of truth at least opens the possibility of freedom.
As Americans sit down on Thanksgiving Day to gorge themselves on the bounty of empire, many will worry about the expansive effects of overeating on their waistlines. We would be better to think about the constricting effects of the day's mythology on our minds.
NO THANKS TO THANKSGIVING
One indication of moral progress in the United States would be the replacement of Thanksgiving Day and its self-indulgent family feasting with a National Day of Atonement accompanied by a self-reflective collective fasting.
In fact, indigenous people have offered such a model; since 1970 they have marked the fourth Thursday of November as a Day of Mourning in a spiritual/political ceremony on Coles Hill overlooking Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, one of the early sites of the European invasion of the Americas.
Not only is the thought of such a change in this white-supremacist holiday impossible to imagine, but the very mention of the idea sends most Americans into apoplectic fits -- which speaks volumes about our historical hypocrisy and its relation to the contemporary politics of empire in the United States.
That the world's great powers achieved "greatness" through criminal brutality on a grand scale is not news, of course. That those same societies are reluctant to highlight this history of barbarism also is predictable.
But in the United States, this reluctance to acknowledge our original sin -- the genocide of indigenous people -- is of special importance today. It's now routine -- even among conservative commentators -- to describe the United States as an empire, so long as everyone understands we are an inherently benevolent one. Because all our history contradicts that claim, history must be twisted and tortured to serve the purposes of the powerful.
One vehicle for taming history is various patriotic holidays, with Thanksgiving at the heart of U.S. myth-building. From an early age, we Americans hear a story about the hearty Pilgrims, whose search for freedom took them from England to Massachusetts. There, aided by the friendly Wampanoag Indians, they survived in a new and harsh environment, leading to a harvest feast in 1621 following the Pilgrims first winter.
Some aspects of the conventional story are true enough. But it's also true that by 1637 Massachusetts Gov. John Winthrop was proclaiming a thanksgiving for the successful massacre of hundreds of Pequot Indian men, women and children, part of the long and bloody process of opening up additional land to the English invaders. The pattern would repeat itself across the continent until between 95 and 99 percent of American Indians had been exterminated and the rest were left to assimilate into white society or die off on reservations, out of the view of polite society.
Simply put: Thanksgiving is the day when the dominant white culture (and, sadly, most of the rest of the non-white but non-indigenous population) celebrates the beginning of a genocide that was, in fact, blessed by the men we hold up as our heroic founding fathers.
The first president, George Washington, in 1783 said he preferred buying Indians' land rather than driving them off it because that was like driving "wild beasts" from the forest. He compared Indians to wolves, "both being beasts of prey, tho' they differ in shape."
Thomas Jefferson -- president #3 and author of the Declaration of Independence, which refers to Indians as the "merciless Indian Savages" -- was known to romanticize Indians and their culture, but that didn't stop him in 1807 from writing to his secretary of war that in a coming conflict with certain tribes, "[W]e shall destroy all of them."
As the genocide was winding down in the early 20th century, Theodore Roosevelt (president #26) defended the expansion of whites across the continent as an inevitable process "due solely to the power of the mighty civilized races which have not lost the fighting instinct, and which by their expansion are gradually bringing peace into the red wastes where the barbarian peoples of the world hold sway."
Roosevelt also once said, "I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth."
How does a country deal with the fact that some of its most revered historical figures had certain moral values and political views virtually identical to Nazis? Here's how "respectable" politicians, pundits, and professors play the game: When invoking a grand and glorious aspect of our past, then history is all-important. We are told how crucial it is for people to know history, and there is much hand wringing about the younger generations' lack of knowledge about, and respect for, that history.
In the United States, we hear constantly about the deep wisdom of the founding fathers, the adventurous spirit of the early explorers, the gritty determination of those who "settled" the country -- and about how crucial it is for children to learn these things.
But when one brings into historical discussions any facts and interpretations that contest the celebratory story and make people uncomfortable -- such as the genocide of indigenous people as the foundational act in the creation of the United States -- suddenly the value of history drops precipitously and one is asked, "Why do you insist on dwelling on the past?"This is the mark of a well-disciplined intellectual class -- one that can extol the importance of knowing history for contemporary citizenship and, at the same time, argue that we shouldn't spend too much time thinking about history.
This off-and-on engagement with history isn't of mere academic interest; as the dominant imperial power of the moment, U.S. elites have a clear stake in the contemporary propaganda value of that history. Obscuring bitter truths about historical crimes helps perpetuate the fantasy of American benevolence, which makes it easier to sell contemporary imperial adventures -- such as the invasion and occupation of Iraq -- as another benevolent action.
Any attempt to complicate this story guarantees hostility from mainstream culture. After raising the barbarism of America's much-revered founding fathers in a lecture, I was once accused of trying to "humble our proud nation" and "undermine young people's faith in our country."
Yes, of course -- that is exactly what I would hope to achieve. We should practice the virtue of humility and avoid the excessive pride that can, when combined with great power, lead to great abuses of power.
History does matter, which is why people in power put so much energy into controlling it. The United States is hardly the only society that has created such mythology. While some historians in Great Britain continue to talk about the benefits that the empire brought to India, political movements in India want to make the mythology of Hindutva into historical fact.
Abuses of history go on in the former empire and the former colony. History can be one of the many ways we create and impose hierarchy, or it can be part of a process of liberation. The truth won't set us free, but the telling of truth at least opens the possibility of freedom.
As Americans sit down on Thanksgiving Day to gorge themselves on the bounty of empire, many will worry about the expansive effects of overeating on their waistlines. We would be better to think about the constricting effects of the day's mythology on our minds.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
SC104-3
http://www.oftwominds.com/blogmay10/burden-of-knowing05-10.html
The Burden of Knowing
Knowing what lies ahead is a great emotional burden.
The knowledge that the present is unsustainable is, for many of us, a great emotional burden. It troubles our sleep, our minds, and our basic emotional well-being. Knowledge, like memory, cannot be erased at will, and thus it runs in the background of our lives, unseen by others but deeply troubling to the knower.
I am not alone in feeling this weight; correspondents and readers write me that they feel it, too.
Yet it is not just the knowledge that all this is based on cheap, abundant oil and a rapidly imploding financial system based on fraud and lies that burdens us; it is the mirror image of reality pressed upon us by the status quo: the Mainstream Media, the corrupt Savior State beholden to Power Elites and crony-capitalist, predatory monopoly-capital cartels and Global Corporate America (which conveniently enough owns the mainstream media).
One of the most chilling stories to emerge from China's Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and early 60s--in which peasants were instructed to "make steel" by melting down their metal farming and cooking tools, leaving them to starve in countless millions--involves the artifices presented to Mao to cover up the grotesque consequences of his policies.
Communist party officials fearful of Mao's ire and losing their own perquisites arranged to have a specific route through the countryside planted thickly with rice. Five meters deep on each side of this road, rice was planted so closely that it appeared to be the very acme of abundance; the road was seemingly a thin ribbon of pavement cut through endless green abundance.
It was all artifice and lies. While the officials pointed out the phony bounty to Mao, tens of millions of peasants were starving to death. Behind the five meters of contrived abundance lay a barren landscape.
The American media and Savior State are busy planting their own five meters of apparent abundance and "growth" along every highway in the land. The vast majority of people--even people who should know better but who prefer not to know, and thus they studioudsly avoid peeking through the curtain of sham prosperity--accept that GDP growth means something positive is happening in their own lives, even as the visible evidence points to a mirror-image of this "growth" propaganda.
We know that all the contrivances of "modern life" are ultimately the result of one single condition: cheap, abundant oil. Everything--the plays on Broadway, the film industry, the iPods made in China for cheap, the endless Mcmansions in gated exurbs, the grain-fattened, fat-marbled beef, the "cheap" fast-food meals, the Savior State and its Global Empire--is all based on cheap, abundant oil. There is no substitute in the near term.
Every "solution" fails to hold up beyond the most cursory examination. Natural gas? Well, yes, but then all those "fracc'ed" wells the industry extols as the "solution" have a nasty habit of depleting rather quickly. There are an an estimated 254.4 million vehicles in the U.S.; would you care to guess the cost of converting them to natural gas?
Will "entrepreneurship" re-make the distribution system to enable fueling those tens of millions of vehicles with natural gas? At what cost, and to whom?
How about that "new discovery" of a 1 billion-barrel oil field in deep water? Does the MSM or Savior State propaganda ministry mention that 1 billion barrels is less than two months of U.S. consumption, or that it may take 5 years to extract the first drop, or that the costs of such deepwater drilling are so prohibitive that oil extracted will not be cheap?
How about that "endless" shale oil? How many MSM stories note that production tops out at 2 million barrels a day, a mere 10% of U.S. consumption--and the Canadians and Chinese have claims on much of that production?
Even a cursory read of this site, or others which peek through the thick green screen of State/corporate propaganda, reveals the multiple frauds at the very heart of American finance, governance, real estate and the stock market.
Yet most people don't want to know. They adamantly accept the mirror-image of reality presented by the media and State: that the economy is "growing" and fundamentally sound, even though the reality is the opposite; that "reform" will fix the core problems, even though the reforms are simulacra designed to give the appearance of reform; and that sickcare "reform" will lower costs even as the sickcare cartels increase their take of the economy every year.
This heavily promoted and contrived mirror-image disconnect between what we are told is true and what is actually true threatens us with a very draining madness. Some readers donate money to this site because they say that it provides some sort of landing in a sea of lies, propaganda, misinformation and misprepresentation--that in reading it they know they are not alone and that they are not crazy.
The unease and insecurity is very real. None of us know the future; we only know that the present is vastly unsustainable, and that if we as a nation and species rely on simulacra, artifice, lies, fraud and propaganda instead of reality, then the status quo will end very badly. Any sane person who knows this finds it worrisome.
Hence the rational desire to hope for the best but prepare for the worst.
Yet many readers tell me they meet fierce resistance from those around them. I understand completely; I personally do not know a single person in my circle or neighborhood who has prepared for even a few days without the global supply chain--and I live in "earthquake country" where a massive earthquake is not a possibility, it is a certainty; the only missing bit of knowledge is "when."
As one correspondent put it recently, most people have more dog food on hand than they do food for themselves.
I don't advertise my own preparations, and I pass them off as "earthquake preparedness" as that strikes people as only slightly mad and paranoid rather than the full-blown madness of knowing the whole system is extremely vulnerable and precarious.
Very few people I know well have any savings to speak of either. I have repeatedly suggested that they sell--sell their second home, sell their office condo, sell anything and everything to reduce or eliminate their debt, but they persist in working themselves to death to pay the mortgages on their mini-real estate empire.
They all hope that the bubble will somehow magically reinflate, even though the possibility of that happening with 19 million vacant dwellings, rising interest rates and 5 million foreclosed homes in the pipeline is essentially zero.
Readers ask me for investment advice; I cannot offer any, because I am not qualified to do so, nor do I care to do so; the future is unknown to us all. I can only say that I don't trust the stock market or the propaganda, and so cash is King in my eyes, and whatever their drawbacks, gold and silver will not go to zero, while paper assets and even real estate can either go to near-zero or become a capital trap.
I don't have a "cure" for this MSM-Savior-State induced madness, or the emotional burdens of knowing it is all interlocking dependencies supported by webs of lies and fraud, and thus is it really is "different this time," but not in the way the shills, carnies and toadies think.
It does not have to turn out that badly; we could get by on much less. Half the energy in the nation is squandered, as is half the food produced from the fields. If you visit any orchard in the land post-harvest, ton after ton of fruit lays wasted on the ground, rotting, in row after row, acre after acre, state after state. The dumpsters are weighted down with the food we have thrown away, just as the air conditioners are running when nobody is even in the building. A staggering 5% of our electricity is wasted on zombie electronics on standby. The list of waste is almost endless.
I have carried water to a garden in 5-gallon buckets and gotten by on handfuls of beans and corn or brown rice, and been happy doing so. Life does not end when the exurbs no longer make sense and the Savior State checks stop coming. Our sense of reality has become so skewed, so riven with mirror images and marketing, that we have as a culture have lost touch with much more than "mere" reality.
It doesn't have to end badly, but it might. Power Elites desperate to maintain their perquisities have always found that fanning the winds of war distracts their citizenry from their own incompetence and greed.
So what is the solution? I don't know; nobody knows. We only know our own limitations, and what we can do, however modest it might be. We can turn off the TV, that is easily done and extremely helpful. We can also limit our time online, as that is just another firehose of information which quickly overloads our sense of identity and proportion.
There are feedback loops in every system. I know 2015 will not be like 2010, but I cannot know precisely how it will be different. I know 2020 will be very different from 2010 and 2015, but I don't know exactly how different; nobody else knows, either.
All that we can do is to realize the carefully planted screen is only thick and abundant along the specified route, and that we owe it to ourselves to peek through to the barren terrain beyond, and to base our decisions and identity on that reality.
We cannot convince our loved ones, friends, family and associates; in the odd moment, we can make a suggestion or leave a book for them to glance through. That is all we can do; the emotional burden we feel only gets heavier if we push too hard and create needless conflict. So all we can do is make our own preparations as responsible individuals, as autonomous beings seeking liberty, and act accordingly.
Prudence is a good screen. Having a bit of non-frozen food on hand is after all merely prudent, isn't it? And so are the rest: water filters, propane stoves, and so on. Camping equipment is good to have on hand; gardening is worthy exercise, and a nice hobby. Eliminating fast food and packaged food from one's diet is also merely prudent; why poision ourselves if we have any sort of choice at all?
Voting against every incumbent who has supported the bailouts of banking Elites, the fraudulent "reforms" and all the Savior State propaganda is also merely prudent; why reward liars and thieves if there is any other choice available?
Having savings is also prudent, as is eliminating debt. Limiting our exposure to the lies, marketing and madness of Corporate-State media is also prudent. So perhaps we can agree to be prudent, and perhaps others will accept it all as mere prudence.
The Burden of Knowing
Knowing what lies ahead is a great emotional burden.
The knowledge that the present is unsustainable is, for many of us, a great emotional burden. It troubles our sleep, our minds, and our basic emotional well-being. Knowledge, like memory, cannot be erased at will, and thus it runs in the background of our lives, unseen by others but deeply troubling to the knower.
I am not alone in feeling this weight; correspondents and readers write me that they feel it, too.
Yet it is not just the knowledge that all this is based on cheap, abundant oil and a rapidly imploding financial system based on fraud and lies that burdens us; it is the mirror image of reality pressed upon us by the status quo: the Mainstream Media, the corrupt Savior State beholden to Power Elites and crony-capitalist, predatory monopoly-capital cartels and Global Corporate America (which conveniently enough owns the mainstream media).
One of the most chilling stories to emerge from China's Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and early 60s--in which peasants were instructed to "make steel" by melting down their metal farming and cooking tools, leaving them to starve in countless millions--involves the artifices presented to Mao to cover up the grotesque consequences of his policies.
Communist party officials fearful of Mao's ire and losing their own perquisites arranged to have a specific route through the countryside planted thickly with rice. Five meters deep on each side of this road, rice was planted so closely that it appeared to be the very acme of abundance; the road was seemingly a thin ribbon of pavement cut through endless green abundance.
It was all artifice and lies. While the officials pointed out the phony bounty to Mao, tens of millions of peasants were starving to death. Behind the five meters of contrived abundance lay a barren landscape.
The American media and Savior State are busy planting their own five meters of apparent abundance and "growth" along every highway in the land. The vast majority of people--even people who should know better but who prefer not to know, and thus they studioudsly avoid peeking through the curtain of sham prosperity--accept that GDP growth means something positive is happening in their own lives, even as the visible evidence points to a mirror-image of this "growth" propaganda.
We know that all the contrivances of "modern life" are ultimately the result of one single condition: cheap, abundant oil. Everything--the plays on Broadway, the film industry, the iPods made in China for cheap, the endless Mcmansions in gated exurbs, the grain-fattened, fat-marbled beef, the "cheap" fast-food meals, the Savior State and its Global Empire--is all based on cheap, abundant oil. There is no substitute in the near term.
Every "solution" fails to hold up beyond the most cursory examination. Natural gas? Well, yes, but then all those "fracc'ed" wells the industry extols as the "solution" have a nasty habit of depleting rather quickly. There are an an estimated 254.4 million vehicles in the U.S.; would you care to guess the cost of converting them to natural gas?
Will "entrepreneurship" re-make the distribution system to enable fueling those tens of millions of vehicles with natural gas? At what cost, and to whom?
How about that "new discovery" of a 1 billion-barrel oil field in deep water? Does the MSM or Savior State propaganda ministry mention that 1 billion barrels is less than two months of U.S. consumption, or that it may take 5 years to extract the first drop, or that the costs of such deepwater drilling are so prohibitive that oil extracted will not be cheap?
How about that "endless" shale oil? How many MSM stories note that production tops out at 2 million barrels a day, a mere 10% of U.S. consumption--and the Canadians and Chinese have claims on much of that production?
Even a cursory read of this site, or others which peek through the thick green screen of State/corporate propaganda, reveals the multiple frauds at the very heart of American finance, governance, real estate and the stock market.
Yet most people don't want to know. They adamantly accept the mirror-image of reality presented by the media and State: that the economy is "growing" and fundamentally sound, even though the reality is the opposite; that "reform" will fix the core problems, even though the reforms are simulacra designed to give the appearance of reform; and that sickcare "reform" will lower costs even as the sickcare cartels increase their take of the economy every year.
This heavily promoted and contrived mirror-image disconnect between what we are told is true and what is actually true threatens us with a very draining madness. Some readers donate money to this site because they say that it provides some sort of landing in a sea of lies, propaganda, misinformation and misprepresentation--that in reading it they know they are not alone and that they are not crazy.
The unease and insecurity is very real. None of us know the future; we only know that the present is vastly unsustainable, and that if we as a nation and species rely on simulacra, artifice, lies, fraud and propaganda instead of reality, then the status quo will end very badly. Any sane person who knows this finds it worrisome.
Hence the rational desire to hope for the best but prepare for the worst.
Yet many readers tell me they meet fierce resistance from those around them. I understand completely; I personally do not know a single person in my circle or neighborhood who has prepared for even a few days without the global supply chain--and I live in "earthquake country" where a massive earthquake is not a possibility, it is a certainty; the only missing bit of knowledge is "when."
As one correspondent put it recently, most people have more dog food on hand than they do food for themselves.
I don't advertise my own preparations, and I pass them off as "earthquake preparedness" as that strikes people as only slightly mad and paranoid rather than the full-blown madness of knowing the whole system is extremely vulnerable and precarious.
Very few people I know well have any savings to speak of either. I have repeatedly suggested that they sell--sell their second home, sell their office condo, sell anything and everything to reduce or eliminate their debt, but they persist in working themselves to death to pay the mortgages on their mini-real estate empire.
They all hope that the bubble will somehow magically reinflate, even though the possibility of that happening with 19 million vacant dwellings, rising interest rates and 5 million foreclosed homes in the pipeline is essentially zero.
Readers ask me for investment advice; I cannot offer any, because I am not qualified to do so, nor do I care to do so; the future is unknown to us all. I can only say that I don't trust the stock market or the propaganda, and so cash is King in my eyes, and whatever their drawbacks, gold and silver will not go to zero, while paper assets and even real estate can either go to near-zero or become a capital trap.
I don't have a "cure" for this MSM-Savior-State induced madness, or the emotional burdens of knowing it is all interlocking dependencies supported by webs of lies and fraud, and thus is it really is "different this time," but not in the way the shills, carnies and toadies think.
It does not have to turn out that badly; we could get by on much less. Half the energy in the nation is squandered, as is half the food produced from the fields. If you visit any orchard in the land post-harvest, ton after ton of fruit lays wasted on the ground, rotting, in row after row, acre after acre, state after state. The dumpsters are weighted down with the food we have thrown away, just as the air conditioners are running when nobody is even in the building. A staggering 5% of our electricity is wasted on zombie electronics on standby. The list of waste is almost endless.
I have carried water to a garden in 5-gallon buckets and gotten by on handfuls of beans and corn or brown rice, and been happy doing so. Life does not end when the exurbs no longer make sense and the Savior State checks stop coming. Our sense of reality has become so skewed, so riven with mirror images and marketing, that we have as a culture have lost touch with much more than "mere" reality.
It doesn't have to end badly, but it might. Power Elites desperate to maintain their perquisities have always found that fanning the winds of war distracts their citizenry from their own incompetence and greed.
So what is the solution? I don't know; nobody knows. We only know our own limitations, and what we can do, however modest it might be. We can turn off the TV, that is easily done and extremely helpful. We can also limit our time online, as that is just another firehose of information which quickly overloads our sense of identity and proportion.
There are feedback loops in every system. I know 2015 will not be like 2010, but I cannot know precisely how it will be different. I know 2020 will be very different from 2010 and 2015, but I don't know exactly how different; nobody else knows, either.
All that we can do is to realize the carefully planted screen is only thick and abundant along the specified route, and that we owe it to ourselves to peek through to the barren terrain beyond, and to base our decisions and identity on that reality.
We cannot convince our loved ones, friends, family and associates; in the odd moment, we can make a suggestion or leave a book for them to glance through. That is all we can do; the emotional burden we feel only gets heavier if we push too hard and create needless conflict. So all we can do is make our own preparations as responsible individuals, as autonomous beings seeking liberty, and act accordingly.
Prudence is a good screen. Having a bit of non-frozen food on hand is after all merely prudent, isn't it? And so are the rest: water filters, propane stoves, and so on. Camping equipment is good to have on hand; gardening is worthy exercise, and a nice hobby. Eliminating fast food and packaged food from one's diet is also merely prudent; why poision ourselves if we have any sort of choice at all?
Voting against every incumbent who has supported the bailouts of banking Elites, the fraudulent "reforms" and all the Savior State propaganda is also merely prudent; why reward liars and thieves if there is any other choice available?
Having savings is also prudent, as is eliminating debt. Limiting our exposure to the lies, marketing and madness of Corporate-State media is also prudent. So perhaps we can agree to be prudent, and perhaps others will accept it all as mere prudence.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
SC104-2
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26795.htm
Thank a Vet?
We’ve all seen the bumper stickers: "My son is in the Air Force," "If You Can Read This in English, Thank a Marine," "Proud Vietnam Veteran," "Fly Navy," and of course, "Thank a Vet."
Why should we?
Why should we call them heroes, give them military discounts, grant them veterans preference, express our support for them with ribbons on our cars, honor them with a holiday, hold military appreciation church services for them, and thank them for their "service"?
Veterans Day began as Armistice Day to commemorate the signing of the armistice that ended World War I. It had nothing to do with honoring current and former members of the military like Veterans Day is celebrated today. And if the sole purpose of Armistice Day was to honor World War I veterans, it should never have been celebrated since no American soldier did anything honorable by intervening in a European foreign war. And it doesn’t matter if he was drafted or not.
Britain’s last World War I combat veteran, Harry Patch, died last year at the age of 111. He boasted that he hadn’t killed anyone in combat. "War isn’t worth one life," Patch said, it is "calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings." In his autobiography The Last Fighting Tommy, Patch wrote that "politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder." In the last years of his life, Patch warned some young naval recruits that they shouldn’t join.
Frank Buckles, age 109, is the only American veteran of World War I still living. When asked while being honored for his service at a 2007 Veterans Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery what he thought about being there while the United States was at war, he replied: "I’m no authority, but I’m not in favor of war unless it’s an emergency." I think that Buckles is more of an authority on the horrors of war and the folly and wickedness of war than the current members of the Joint Chiefs.
It is only because World War I did not turn out to be the "war to end all wars" that the holiday was changed to Veterans Day as a tribute to all soldiers who fought for their country.
Although I believe World War II to be neither necessary nor good, I come not on this Veterans Day to criticize the "greatest generation," who, it turns out, were also great at pillaging and carousing.
For reasons I explained in "U.S. Presidents and Those Who Kill for Them," World War II marks the permanent establishment of the American military as the president’s personal attack force to kill by his decree Koreans, Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, Grenadians, Panamanians, Yugoslavs, Serbians, Afghans, Iraqis, Somalis, Yemenis, and Pakistanis. Next on the list is Iranians. Sometimes these presidential decrees are rubberstamped by a congressional authorization to use force, but they are always preceded by presidential lies and warmonger propaganda.
So why should a Vietnam veteran be proud? He was typically young, ignorant, deceived, and drafted. He may have fought obediently, valiantly, selflessly, and fearlessly, but since he had no business fighting in Vietnam in the first place, I have nothing to thank him for. And I certainly can’t thank him for preventing the Viet Cong from turning America into a socialist republic. Besides, LBJ beat Ho Chi Minh to that anyway. Many Vietnam veterans have written me and expressed shame, remorse, anger, and resentment – not pride – for having been duped into going thousands of miles away from American soil to intervene in another country’s civil war. In fact, I have found that it is those who are not Vietnam veterans who are the most vociferous defenders of the war in Vietnam.
The most undeserved and oftentimes disgusting outpouring of thankfulness I have ever seen is over those who have fought or are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. The praise and adoration of those fighting in "the front lines in the war on terror" reaches its apex on Veterans Day, which has become a day to defend U.S. wars and recognize all things military. These soldiers certainly have done nothing worthy of thanks. Sure, they have rebuilt infrastructure – after bombing it to smithereens. They no doubt removed a brutal dictator – and unleashed American brutality in the process. And yes, they have rescued orphan children – after blowing their parents and brothers and sisters to kingdom come.
What is there to thank our soldiers for? They are not defending our freedoms. They are not keeping us safe from our enemies. They are not protecting us from terrorists. They are not guaranteeing our First Amendment rights. They are not defending U.S. borders. They are not guarding U.S. shores. They are not patrolling U.S. coasts. They are not enforcing no-fly zones over U.S. skies. They are not fighting "over there" so we don’t have to fight "over here." They are not avenging 9/11. They are not safeguarding the American way of life. Oh, and they are not ensuring that I have the liberty to write what I do about the military.
What, then, should we thank our soldiers for? Should we thank them for fighting an unconstitutional war, an unscriptural war, an immoral war, an offensive war, an unjust war, or a senseless war? Should we thank our veterans for helping to carry out an aggressive, reckless, belligerent, and interventionist foreign policy? Should we thank the military for sucking $1 trillion out of the federal budget?
But, some will say, these soldiers are just doing their jobs. They can’t help it if the U.S. military sends them to fight in an unjust war in Iraq or Afghanistan. They are just following orders. They didn’t enlist in the military to kill people.
What would any sane man think about a doctor who takes a job at a hospital knowing that the hospital instructs its doctors to euthanize old and sickly patients – and then says he was just doing his job, following orders, and didn’t take the job to kill people?
Why are soldiers treated so differently? Why do they get a pass on committing or supporting those who commit murder and mayhem?
But, someone else says, the military has lowered its recruiting standards and is scraping the bottom of the barrel. Many soldiers are ignorant about the true nature of the military and U.S. foreign policy. Why should we fault them for their ignorance? Why should they be criticized for unjustly killing Iraqis or Afghans or Pakistanis? They are just following orders.
Let’s go back to the doctor I mentioned. Suppose that after he takes a job in ignorance at what he thinks is a reputable hospital he is instructed to euthanize old and sickly patients?
What should he do? I don’t know of anyone who would say anything else but that he should quit his job or at least refuse to euthanize anyone.
Again, why are soldiers treated so differently? Why do they get a pass on committing or supporting those who commit murder and mayhem?
But, comes another reply, soldiers have a term of enlistment. They can’t just quit their jobs. Doctors can walk away from their jobs at any time. Then I guess it all comes down to morality: Be a mercenary and kill for the state or refuse to do so and suffer the consequences of dishonorable discharge and/or imprisonment.
It is high time that Americans stop holding veterans and current members of the military in such high esteem........
Thank a Vet?
We’ve all seen the bumper stickers: "My son is in the Air Force," "If You Can Read This in English, Thank a Marine," "Proud Vietnam Veteran," "Fly Navy," and of course, "Thank a Vet."
Why should we?
Why should we call them heroes, give them military discounts, grant them veterans preference, express our support for them with ribbons on our cars, honor them with a holiday, hold military appreciation church services for them, and thank them for their "service"?
Veterans Day began as Armistice Day to commemorate the signing of the armistice that ended World War I. It had nothing to do with honoring current and former members of the military like Veterans Day is celebrated today. And if the sole purpose of Armistice Day was to honor World War I veterans, it should never have been celebrated since no American soldier did anything honorable by intervening in a European foreign war. And it doesn’t matter if he was drafted or not.
Britain’s last World War I combat veteran, Harry Patch, died last year at the age of 111. He boasted that he hadn’t killed anyone in combat. "War isn’t worth one life," Patch said, it is "calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings." In his autobiography The Last Fighting Tommy, Patch wrote that "politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder." In the last years of his life, Patch warned some young naval recruits that they shouldn’t join.
Frank Buckles, age 109, is the only American veteran of World War I still living. When asked while being honored for his service at a 2007 Veterans Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery what he thought about being there while the United States was at war, he replied: "I’m no authority, but I’m not in favor of war unless it’s an emergency." I think that Buckles is more of an authority on the horrors of war and the folly and wickedness of war than the current members of the Joint Chiefs.
It is only because World War I did not turn out to be the "war to end all wars" that the holiday was changed to Veterans Day as a tribute to all soldiers who fought for their country.
Although I believe World War II to be neither necessary nor good, I come not on this Veterans Day to criticize the "greatest generation," who, it turns out, were also great at pillaging and carousing.
For reasons I explained in "U.S. Presidents and Those Who Kill for Them," World War II marks the permanent establishment of the American military as the president’s personal attack force to kill by his decree Koreans, Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, Grenadians, Panamanians, Yugoslavs, Serbians, Afghans, Iraqis, Somalis, Yemenis, and Pakistanis. Next on the list is Iranians. Sometimes these presidential decrees are rubberstamped by a congressional authorization to use force, but they are always preceded by presidential lies and warmonger propaganda.
So why should a Vietnam veteran be proud? He was typically young, ignorant, deceived, and drafted. He may have fought obediently, valiantly, selflessly, and fearlessly, but since he had no business fighting in Vietnam in the first place, I have nothing to thank him for. And I certainly can’t thank him for preventing the Viet Cong from turning America into a socialist republic. Besides, LBJ beat Ho Chi Minh to that anyway. Many Vietnam veterans have written me and expressed shame, remorse, anger, and resentment – not pride – for having been duped into going thousands of miles away from American soil to intervene in another country’s civil war. In fact, I have found that it is those who are not Vietnam veterans who are the most vociferous defenders of the war in Vietnam.
The most undeserved and oftentimes disgusting outpouring of thankfulness I have ever seen is over those who have fought or are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. The praise and adoration of those fighting in "the front lines in the war on terror" reaches its apex on Veterans Day, which has become a day to defend U.S. wars and recognize all things military. These soldiers certainly have done nothing worthy of thanks. Sure, they have rebuilt infrastructure – after bombing it to smithereens. They no doubt removed a brutal dictator – and unleashed American brutality in the process. And yes, they have rescued orphan children – after blowing their parents and brothers and sisters to kingdom come.
What is there to thank our soldiers for? They are not defending our freedoms. They are not keeping us safe from our enemies. They are not protecting us from terrorists. They are not guaranteeing our First Amendment rights. They are not defending U.S. borders. They are not guarding U.S. shores. They are not patrolling U.S. coasts. They are not enforcing no-fly zones over U.S. skies. They are not fighting "over there" so we don’t have to fight "over here." They are not avenging 9/11. They are not safeguarding the American way of life. Oh, and they are not ensuring that I have the liberty to write what I do about the military.
What, then, should we thank our soldiers for? Should we thank them for fighting an unconstitutional war, an unscriptural war, an immoral war, an offensive war, an unjust war, or a senseless war? Should we thank our veterans for helping to carry out an aggressive, reckless, belligerent, and interventionist foreign policy? Should we thank the military for sucking $1 trillion out of the federal budget?
But, some will say, these soldiers are just doing their jobs. They can’t help it if the U.S. military sends them to fight in an unjust war in Iraq or Afghanistan. They are just following orders. They didn’t enlist in the military to kill people.
What would any sane man think about a doctor who takes a job at a hospital knowing that the hospital instructs its doctors to euthanize old and sickly patients – and then says he was just doing his job, following orders, and didn’t take the job to kill people?
Why are soldiers treated so differently? Why do they get a pass on committing or supporting those who commit murder and mayhem?
But, someone else says, the military has lowered its recruiting standards and is scraping the bottom of the barrel. Many soldiers are ignorant about the true nature of the military and U.S. foreign policy. Why should we fault them for their ignorance? Why should they be criticized for unjustly killing Iraqis or Afghans or Pakistanis? They are just following orders.
Let’s go back to the doctor I mentioned. Suppose that after he takes a job in ignorance at what he thinks is a reputable hospital he is instructed to euthanize old and sickly patients?
What should he do? I don’t know of anyone who would say anything else but that he should quit his job or at least refuse to euthanize anyone.
Again, why are soldiers treated so differently? Why do they get a pass on committing or supporting those who commit murder and mayhem?
But, comes another reply, soldiers have a term of enlistment. They can’t just quit their jobs. Doctors can walk away from their jobs at any time. Then I guess it all comes down to morality: Be a mercenary and kill for the state or refuse to do so and suffer the consequences of dishonorable discharge and/or imprisonment.
It is high time that Americans stop holding veterans and current members of the military in such high esteem........
Friday, November 5, 2010
SC104-1
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=21760
The Impotence of Elections
Americans out of work, out of income, out of homes, out of hope....
In his historical novel, The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa writes that things have to change in order to remain the same. That is what happened in the US congressional elections on November 2.
Jobs offshoring, which began on a large scale with the collapse of the Soviet Union, has merged the Democrats and Republicans into one party with two names. The Soviet collapse changed attitudes in socialist India and communist China and opened those countries, with their large excess supplies of labor, to Western capital.
Pushed by Wall Street and Wal-Mart, American manufacturers moved production for US markets offshore to boost profits and shareholder earnings by utilizing cheap labor. The decline of the US manufacturing work force reduced the political power of unions and the ability of unions to finance the Democratic Party. The end result was to make the Democrats dependent on the same sources of financing as Republicans.
Prior to this development, the two parties, despite their similarities, represented different interests and served as a check on one another. The Democrats represented labor and focused on providing a social safety net. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment insurance, housing subsidies, education, and civil rights were Democratic issues. Democrats were committed to a full employment policy and would accept some inflation to secure more employment.
The Republicans represented business. The Republicans focused on curtailing big government in all its manifestations from social welfare spending to regulation. The Republicans’ economic policy consisted of opposing federal budget deficits.
These differences resulted in political competition.
Today both parties are dependent for campaign finance on Wall Street, the military/security complex, AIPAC, the oil industry, agri-business, pharmaceuticals, and the insurance industry. Campaigns no longer consist of debates over issues. They are mud-slinging contests.
Angry voters take their anger out on incumbents, and that is what we saw in the election. Tea Party candidates defeated Republican incumbents in primaries, and Republicans defeated
Democrats in the congressional elections.
Policies, however, will not change qualitatively. Quantitatively, Republicans will be more inclined to more rapidly dismantle more of the social safety net than Democrats and more inclined to finish off the remnants of civil liberties. But the powerful private oligarchs will continue to write the legislation that Congress passes and the President signs. New members of Congress will quickly discover that achieving re-election requires bending to the oligarchs’ will.
This might sound harsh and pessimistic. But look at the factual record. In his campaign for the presidency, George W. Bush criticized President Clinton’s foreign adventures and vowed to curtail America’s role as the policeman of the world. Once in office, Bush pursued the neoconservatives’ policy of US world hegemony via military means, occupation of countries, setting up puppet governments, and financial intervention in other countries’ elections.
Obama promised change. He vowed to close Guantanamo prison and to bring the troops home. Instead, he restarted the war in Afghanistan and started new wars in Pakistan and Yemen, while continuing Bush’s policy of threatening Iran and encircling Russia with military bases.
Americans out of work, out of income, out of homes and prospects, and out of hope for their children’s careers are angry. But the political system offers them no way of bringing about change. They can change the elected servants of the oligarchs, but they cannot change the policies or the oligarchs.
The American situation is dire. As a result of the high speed Internet, the loss of manufacturing jobs was followed by the loss of professional service jobs, such as software engineering, that were career ladders for American university graduates. The middle class has no prospects. Already, the American labor force and income distribution mimics that of a third world country, with income and wealth concentrated in a few hands at the top and most of the rest of the population employed in domestic services jobs. In recent years net new job creation has been concentrated in lowly paid occupations, such as waitresses and bartenders, ambulatory health care services, and retail clerks. The population and new entrants into the work force continue to grow more rapidly than job opportunities.
Turning this around would require more realization than exists among policymakers and a deeper crisis. Possibly it could be done by using taxation to encourage US corporations to manufacture domestically the goods and services that they sell in US markets. However, the global corporations and Wall Street would oppose this change.
The tax revenue loss from job losses, bank bailouts, stimulus programs, and the wars have caused a three-to-four-fold jump in the US budget deficit. The deficit is now too large to be financed by the trade surpluses of China, Japan, and OPEC. Consequently, the Federal Reserve is making massive purchases of Treasury and other debt. The continuation of these purchases threatens the dollar’s value and its role as reserve currency. If the dollar is perceived as losing that role, flight from dollars will devastate the remnants of Americans’ retirement incomes and the ability of the US government to finance itself.
Yet, the destructive policies continue. There is no re-regulation of the financial industry, because the financial industry will not allow it. The unaffordable wars continue, because they serve the profits of the military/security complex and promote military officers into higher ranks with more retirement pay. Elements within the government want to send US troops into Pakistan and into Yemen. War with Iran is still on the table. And China is being demonized as the cause of US economic difficulties.
Whistleblowers and critics are being suppressed. Military personnel who leak evidence of military crimes are arrested. Congressmen call for their execution. Wikileaks’ founder is in hiding, and neoconservatives write articles calling for his elimination by CIA assassination teams. Media outlets that report the leaks apparently have been threatened by Pentagon chief Robert Gates. According to Antiwar.com, on July 29 Gates “insisted that he would not rule out targeting Wikileaks founder Julian Assange or any of the myriad media outlets which reported on the leaks.” http://news.antiwar.com/2010/07/29/gates-wont-rule-out-targeting-assange-media-in-leak-investigation/
The control of the oligarchs extends to the media. The Clinton administration permitted a small number of mega-corporations to concentrate the US media in a few hands. Corporate advertising executives, not journalists, control the new American media, and the value of the mega-companies depends on government broadcast licenses. The media’s interest is now united with that of the government and the oligarchs.
On top of all the other factors that have made American elections meaningless, voters cannot even get correct information from the media about the problems that they and the country face.
As the economic situation is likely to continue deteriorating, the anger will grow. But the oligarchs will direct the anger away from themselves and toward the vulnerable elements of the domestic population and “foreign enemies.”
The Impotence of Elections
Americans out of work, out of income, out of homes, out of hope....
In his historical novel, The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa writes that things have to change in order to remain the same. That is what happened in the US congressional elections on November 2.
Jobs offshoring, which began on a large scale with the collapse of the Soviet Union, has merged the Democrats and Republicans into one party with two names. The Soviet collapse changed attitudes in socialist India and communist China and opened those countries, with their large excess supplies of labor, to Western capital.
Pushed by Wall Street and Wal-Mart, American manufacturers moved production for US markets offshore to boost profits and shareholder earnings by utilizing cheap labor. The decline of the US manufacturing work force reduced the political power of unions and the ability of unions to finance the Democratic Party. The end result was to make the Democrats dependent on the same sources of financing as Republicans.
Prior to this development, the two parties, despite their similarities, represented different interests and served as a check on one another. The Democrats represented labor and focused on providing a social safety net. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment insurance, housing subsidies, education, and civil rights were Democratic issues. Democrats were committed to a full employment policy and would accept some inflation to secure more employment.
The Republicans represented business. The Republicans focused on curtailing big government in all its manifestations from social welfare spending to regulation. The Republicans’ economic policy consisted of opposing federal budget deficits.
These differences resulted in political competition.
Today both parties are dependent for campaign finance on Wall Street, the military/security complex, AIPAC, the oil industry, agri-business, pharmaceuticals, and the insurance industry. Campaigns no longer consist of debates over issues. They are mud-slinging contests.
Angry voters take their anger out on incumbents, and that is what we saw in the election. Tea Party candidates defeated Republican incumbents in primaries, and Republicans defeated
Democrats in the congressional elections.
Policies, however, will not change qualitatively. Quantitatively, Republicans will be more inclined to more rapidly dismantle more of the social safety net than Democrats and more inclined to finish off the remnants of civil liberties. But the powerful private oligarchs will continue to write the legislation that Congress passes and the President signs. New members of Congress will quickly discover that achieving re-election requires bending to the oligarchs’ will.
This might sound harsh and pessimistic. But look at the factual record. In his campaign for the presidency, George W. Bush criticized President Clinton’s foreign adventures and vowed to curtail America’s role as the policeman of the world. Once in office, Bush pursued the neoconservatives’ policy of US world hegemony via military means, occupation of countries, setting up puppet governments, and financial intervention in other countries’ elections.
Obama promised change. He vowed to close Guantanamo prison and to bring the troops home. Instead, he restarted the war in Afghanistan and started new wars in Pakistan and Yemen, while continuing Bush’s policy of threatening Iran and encircling Russia with military bases.
Americans out of work, out of income, out of homes and prospects, and out of hope for their children’s careers are angry. But the political system offers them no way of bringing about change. They can change the elected servants of the oligarchs, but they cannot change the policies or the oligarchs.
The American situation is dire. As a result of the high speed Internet, the loss of manufacturing jobs was followed by the loss of professional service jobs, such as software engineering, that were career ladders for American university graduates. The middle class has no prospects. Already, the American labor force and income distribution mimics that of a third world country, with income and wealth concentrated in a few hands at the top and most of the rest of the population employed in domestic services jobs. In recent years net new job creation has been concentrated in lowly paid occupations, such as waitresses and bartenders, ambulatory health care services, and retail clerks. The population and new entrants into the work force continue to grow more rapidly than job opportunities.
Turning this around would require more realization than exists among policymakers and a deeper crisis. Possibly it could be done by using taxation to encourage US corporations to manufacture domestically the goods and services that they sell in US markets. However, the global corporations and Wall Street would oppose this change.
The tax revenue loss from job losses, bank bailouts, stimulus programs, and the wars have caused a three-to-four-fold jump in the US budget deficit. The deficit is now too large to be financed by the trade surpluses of China, Japan, and OPEC. Consequently, the Federal Reserve is making massive purchases of Treasury and other debt. The continuation of these purchases threatens the dollar’s value and its role as reserve currency. If the dollar is perceived as losing that role, flight from dollars will devastate the remnants of Americans’ retirement incomes and the ability of the US government to finance itself.
Yet, the destructive policies continue. There is no re-regulation of the financial industry, because the financial industry will not allow it. The unaffordable wars continue, because they serve the profits of the military/security complex and promote military officers into higher ranks with more retirement pay. Elements within the government want to send US troops into Pakistan and into Yemen. War with Iran is still on the table. And China is being demonized as the cause of US economic difficulties.
Whistleblowers and critics are being suppressed. Military personnel who leak evidence of military crimes are arrested. Congressmen call for their execution. Wikileaks’ founder is in hiding, and neoconservatives write articles calling for his elimination by CIA assassination teams. Media outlets that report the leaks apparently have been threatened by Pentagon chief Robert Gates. According to Antiwar.com, on July 29 Gates “insisted that he would not rule out targeting Wikileaks founder Julian Assange or any of the myriad media outlets which reported on the leaks.” http://news.antiwar.com/2010/07/29/gates-wont-rule-out-targeting-assange-media-in-leak-investigation/
The control of the oligarchs extends to the media. The Clinton administration permitted a small number of mega-corporations to concentrate the US media in a few hands. Corporate advertising executives, not journalists, control the new American media, and the value of the mega-companies depends on government broadcast licenses. The media’s interest is now united with that of the government and the oligarchs.
On top of all the other factors that have made American elections meaningless, voters cannot even get correct information from the media about the problems that they and the country face.
As the economic situation is likely to continue deteriorating, the anger will grow. But the oligarchs will direct the anger away from themselves and toward the vulnerable elements of the domestic population and “foreign enemies.”
Thursday, November 4, 2010
SC103-15
http://seekingalpha.com/article/233962-the-biggest-debt-bubble-in-the-history-of-the-world-3-charts
The Biggest Debt Bubble in the History of the World: 3 Charts
Do you want to see something truly frightening? Just check out the 3 charts posted further down in this article. These charts prove that we are now in the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world. As Americans have enjoyed an incredibly wonderful standard of living over the past three decades, most of them have believed that it was because we are the wealthiest, most prosperous nation on the planet with economic and financial systems that are second to none. But that is not even close to accurate. The reason why we have had an almost unbelievably high standard of living over the past three decades is because we have piled up the biggest mountains of debt in the history of the world. Once upon a time the United States was the wealthiest country on the planet, but all of that prosperity was not good enough for us. So we started borrowing and borrowing and borrowing and we have now been living beyond our means for so long that we consider it to be completely normal.
We have been robbing future generations blind for so long that it doesn't even seem to bother most people anymore. We have become accustomed to living in debt. We go into massive amounts of debt to get an education, we go into massive amounts of debt to buy a home, we go into massive amounts of debt to buy our cars, and we even pile up debt to buy holiday gifts and to purchase groceries.
Just check out the chart posted below. It shows the total credit market debt owed in the United States. In other words, it is a measure of what everyone owes (government, businesses and consumers).
30 years ago, total credit market debt owed was less than 5 trillion dollars. Today, it is over 50 trillion dollars. Total credit market debt is now at a level equivalent to about 360 percent of GDP. This is what has been fueling the great era of "economic prosperity" that we have been experiencing....
Click charts to enlarge
So what is the answer to this problem?
The truth is that there is not an easy answer under our current system. The only way that the U.S. economy continues to "grow" is if the debt bubble continues to "expand".
If our leaders allowed the debt bubble to "pop" and the U.S. economy went into a deleveraging cycle, it would mean that we would start living far below our means for an extended period of time and it would spawn a deflationary depression that would make the Great Depression look like a Sunday picnic.
Most Americans are in no mood to take that kind of hard medicine.
Do you really think that the American people are going to vote in politicians who tell them that it is time to live below our means and that we are going to have to experience a standard of living far below what our parents experienced in order to pay for all the debt that they racked up?
No, that is clearly a dog that isn't going to hunt. The American people want to hear that better times are ahead. One way to give the American people "better times", for the short-term at least, is to crank the debt spiral back up.
By introducing another huge flood of paper money into the economy, the Federal Reserve and the U.S. government are hoping that banks will start lending again and that U.S. consumers will start going into more debt again. Already, as you can see from the chart below, U.S. household debt has started to sink just a little bit. But considering the fact that approximately 70 percent of our GDP is generated by U.S. consumer spending, that is not good news for "economic growth" statistics.
Three decades of "economic expansion" have been fueled by consumer debt that has spiralled completely out of control. Over the past 30 years, total U.S. household debt has gone from less than 2 trillion dollars to almost 14 trillion dollars....
So where did the housing bubble come from? It came from Americans going into insane amounts of debt that they could not afford. The truth is that only the top 5 percent of all U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
Not only that, but Americans are going into staggering amounts of debt in order to pay for their educations. Total student loan debt in the United States is climbing at a rate of approximately $2,853.88 per second, and today Americans owe an all-time record of more than $849 billion on student loans, which is actually more than the total amount that Americans owe on their credit cards.
The truth is that American families are stretched thinner financially than they ever have been in the post-World War 2 era. According to a poll taken last year, 61 percent of Americans "always or usually" live paycheck to paycheck. That was up significantly from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.
Many Americans have come to the absolute breaking point. 1.41 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009 – a 32 percent increase over 2008.
But remember, approximately 70 percent of our GDP is generated by U.S. consumer spending, so without more consumer spending there won't be more economic growth.
So, instead of Obama and the Federal Reserve encouraging Americans to get out of debt and to save money, they are trying to get the American people to spend even more money and to go into even more debt because they desperately need positive "economic growth" figures.
The worst offender of all when it comes to debt, of course, is the U.S. federal government. Over the last 30 years, the U.S. national debt has gone from about 1 trillion dollars to almost 14 trillion dollars....
This is the largest single debt in the history of the world.
So just how big is one trillion dollars? If right this moment you went out and started spending one dollar every single second, it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars. Yet somehow the U.S. government has accumulated a debt that is well over 13 trillion dollars.
Unfortunately, it keeps getting worse month after month after month. According to the U.S. Treasury Department, the U.S. national debt is rapidly closing in on 14 trillion dollars and and will climb to an estimated $19.6 trillion by 2015.
Should we all throw a big party when it crosses the 20 trillion dollar mark? I can just hear the theme song now.... "I'm going to party like I'm 19.99 trillion in debt!"
But the cold, hard reality is that we are in far, far more trouble than what the official government numbers tell us.
In a recent article, Boston University economics professor Laurence J. Kotlikoff analyzed the financial condition of the U.S. government, and he summarized the horror we are facing by making the following statement: "Let’s get real. The U.S. is bankrupt."
After carefully going over Congressional Budget Office data, Kotlikoff came to the conclusion that the U.S. government is now facing a "fiscal gap" of $202 trillion dollars.
Now how in the world did that happen? Well, it turns out that we have made promises to future generations that we cannot possibly even come close to keeping. Social Security and Medicare are fiscal nightmares that are far more immense than anything that U.S. government has ever faced before.
According to an official U.S. government report (pdf), rapidly growing interest costs on the U.S. national debt together with spending on major entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare will absorb approximately 92 cents of every dollar of federal revenue by the year 2019. That is before a single penny is spent on anything else.
That is just 9 years away.
When people speak of the financial situation of the U.S. government being "unsustainable", they aren't kidding around. The truth is that the U.S. government has been running gigantic Ponzi schemes which are about to collapse.
Take the Social Security shell game for example. Back in 1950, each retiree's Social Security benefit was paid for by approximately 16 workers. Today, each retiree's Social Security benefit is paid for by approximately 3.3 workers. By 2025, it is projected that there will be approximately two workers for each retiree.
So exactly how is that supposed to work?
For much more on the coming Social Security nightmare, please see an article that I posted earlier this year: 22 Statistics About America’s Coming Pension Crisis That Will Make You Lose Sleep At Night.
Sadly, Professor Kotlikoff is not exaggerating in the least when he proclaims that the U.S. government is bankrupt. At our current pace, the Congressional Budget Office is projecting that U.S. government public debt will hit 716 percent of GDP by the year 2080. Public debt at a level of 100 percent of GDP is supposed to be an absolute nightmare scenario.
Needless to say, the whole thing is going to come crashing down long, long before we ever get to 2080. We have been living far, far beyond our means for decades, and it has been the greatest party in the history of the world.
But it is time to turn out the lights because the party is over.
The Biggest Debt Bubble in the History of the World: 3 Charts
Do you want to see something truly frightening? Just check out the 3 charts posted further down in this article. These charts prove that we are now in the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world. As Americans have enjoyed an incredibly wonderful standard of living over the past three decades, most of them have believed that it was because we are the wealthiest, most prosperous nation on the planet with economic and financial systems that are second to none. But that is not even close to accurate. The reason why we have had an almost unbelievably high standard of living over the past three decades is because we have piled up the biggest mountains of debt in the history of the world. Once upon a time the United States was the wealthiest country on the planet, but all of that prosperity was not good enough for us. So we started borrowing and borrowing and borrowing and we have now been living beyond our means for so long that we consider it to be completely normal.
We have been robbing future generations blind for so long that it doesn't even seem to bother most people anymore. We have become accustomed to living in debt. We go into massive amounts of debt to get an education, we go into massive amounts of debt to buy a home, we go into massive amounts of debt to buy our cars, and we even pile up debt to buy holiday gifts and to purchase groceries.
Just check out the chart posted below. It shows the total credit market debt owed in the United States. In other words, it is a measure of what everyone owes (government, businesses and consumers).
30 years ago, total credit market debt owed was less than 5 trillion dollars. Today, it is over 50 trillion dollars. Total credit market debt is now at a level equivalent to about 360 percent of GDP. This is what has been fueling the great era of "economic prosperity" that we have been experiencing....
Click charts to enlarge
So what is the answer to this problem?
The truth is that there is not an easy answer under our current system. The only way that the U.S. economy continues to "grow" is if the debt bubble continues to "expand".
If our leaders allowed the debt bubble to "pop" and the U.S. economy went into a deleveraging cycle, it would mean that we would start living far below our means for an extended period of time and it would spawn a deflationary depression that would make the Great Depression look like a Sunday picnic.
Most Americans are in no mood to take that kind of hard medicine.
Do you really think that the American people are going to vote in politicians who tell them that it is time to live below our means and that we are going to have to experience a standard of living far below what our parents experienced in order to pay for all the debt that they racked up?
No, that is clearly a dog that isn't going to hunt. The American people want to hear that better times are ahead. One way to give the American people "better times", for the short-term at least, is to crank the debt spiral back up.
By introducing another huge flood of paper money into the economy, the Federal Reserve and the U.S. government are hoping that banks will start lending again and that U.S. consumers will start going into more debt again. Already, as you can see from the chart below, U.S. household debt has started to sink just a little bit. But considering the fact that approximately 70 percent of our GDP is generated by U.S. consumer spending, that is not good news for "economic growth" statistics.
Three decades of "economic expansion" have been fueled by consumer debt that has spiralled completely out of control. Over the past 30 years, total U.S. household debt has gone from less than 2 trillion dollars to almost 14 trillion dollars....
So where did the housing bubble come from? It came from Americans going into insane amounts of debt that they could not afford. The truth is that only the top 5 percent of all U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
Not only that, but Americans are going into staggering amounts of debt in order to pay for their educations. Total student loan debt in the United States is climbing at a rate of approximately $2,853.88 per second, and today Americans owe an all-time record of more than $849 billion on student loans, which is actually more than the total amount that Americans owe on their credit cards.
The truth is that American families are stretched thinner financially than they ever have been in the post-World War 2 era. According to a poll taken last year, 61 percent of Americans "always or usually" live paycheck to paycheck. That was up significantly from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.
Many Americans have come to the absolute breaking point. 1.41 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009 – a 32 percent increase over 2008.
But remember, approximately 70 percent of our GDP is generated by U.S. consumer spending, so without more consumer spending there won't be more economic growth.
So, instead of Obama and the Federal Reserve encouraging Americans to get out of debt and to save money, they are trying to get the American people to spend even more money and to go into even more debt because they desperately need positive "economic growth" figures.
The worst offender of all when it comes to debt, of course, is the U.S. federal government. Over the last 30 years, the U.S. national debt has gone from about 1 trillion dollars to almost 14 trillion dollars....
This is the largest single debt in the history of the world.
So just how big is one trillion dollars? If right this moment you went out and started spending one dollar every single second, it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars. Yet somehow the U.S. government has accumulated a debt that is well over 13 trillion dollars.
Unfortunately, it keeps getting worse month after month after month. According to the U.S. Treasury Department, the U.S. national debt is rapidly closing in on 14 trillion dollars and and will climb to an estimated $19.6 trillion by 2015.
Should we all throw a big party when it crosses the 20 trillion dollar mark? I can just hear the theme song now.... "I'm going to party like I'm 19.99 trillion in debt!"
But the cold, hard reality is that we are in far, far more trouble than what the official government numbers tell us.
In a recent article, Boston University economics professor Laurence J. Kotlikoff analyzed the financial condition of the U.S. government, and he summarized the horror we are facing by making the following statement: "Let’s get real. The U.S. is bankrupt."
After carefully going over Congressional Budget Office data, Kotlikoff came to the conclusion that the U.S. government is now facing a "fiscal gap" of $202 trillion dollars.
Now how in the world did that happen? Well, it turns out that we have made promises to future generations that we cannot possibly even come close to keeping. Social Security and Medicare are fiscal nightmares that are far more immense than anything that U.S. government has ever faced before.
According to an official U.S. government report (pdf), rapidly growing interest costs on the U.S. national debt together with spending on major entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare will absorb approximately 92 cents of every dollar of federal revenue by the year 2019. That is before a single penny is spent on anything else.
That is just 9 years away.
When people speak of the financial situation of the U.S. government being "unsustainable", they aren't kidding around. The truth is that the U.S. government has been running gigantic Ponzi schemes which are about to collapse.
Take the Social Security shell game for example. Back in 1950, each retiree's Social Security benefit was paid for by approximately 16 workers. Today, each retiree's Social Security benefit is paid for by approximately 3.3 workers. By 2025, it is projected that there will be approximately two workers for each retiree.
So exactly how is that supposed to work?
For much more on the coming Social Security nightmare, please see an article that I posted earlier this year: 22 Statistics About America’s Coming Pension Crisis That Will Make You Lose Sleep At Night.
Sadly, Professor Kotlikoff is not exaggerating in the least when he proclaims that the U.S. government is bankrupt. At our current pace, the Congressional Budget Office is projecting that U.S. government public debt will hit 716 percent of GDP by the year 2080. Public debt at a level of 100 percent of GDP is supposed to be an absolute nightmare scenario.
Needless to say, the whole thing is going to come crashing down long, long before we ever get to 2080. We have been living far, far beyond our means for decades, and it has been the greatest party in the history of the world.
But it is time to turn out the lights because the party is over.
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