http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/
The Power That Remains
The passing of fitness icon Jack Lalanne, who died last Sunday at the age of 96, called up a modest flurry of tributes and retrospectives in the media, and a great many of these made a point I don’t think their authors had in mind. If I’d tried to dream up an imaginary example of the way our culture’s obsessions distort our sense of history, I doubt I could have managed anything half so telling.
Not, you understand, that Lalanne’s life and achievements didn’t deserve the attention the media gave them, or indeed a good deal more than they’re likely to get. If the value of an exercise system is best measured by the long-term health and strength of its chief promoter, which seems fair enough, Lalanne is hard to beat, given that he was still doing strength feats in his nineties that would put most of today’s muscular twentysomethings to shame. Nor were these achievements the result of the gimmickry that so often catapults people to their fifteen minutes of fame; Lalanne’s feats as well as his career as a fitness teacher were achieved the old-fashioned way, through the unfaddish combination of sound practical advice, hard work, and a cheerful and consistent willingness to walk his own talk.
No, the thing that made the media tributes so striking is the extraordinary way that they edited Lalanne right out of his actual historical context. Stories in print and electronic media alike called Lalanne a pioneer, the man who first taught Americans to exercise. It’s no discredit to the man to point out that he was nothing of the kind. Lalanne was, rather, one of the very last great figures in what was once a huge and influential movement in American culture, and has now been systematically erased from our collective memory.
The phrase that was standard before that erasure took place was “physical culture.” From the 1870s until the Second World War, across the English-speaking world and in many other countries as well, those words conjured up much the same imagery that the current Lalanne retrospectives put back into circulation, however briefly, in the imagination of our time: a genial blend of robust exercise, healthy eating, spectacular feats of strength, and more or less colorful showmanship. Against a background of Victorian ladies doffing their corsets to swing Indian clubs, young men stripped to the waist hefting kettlebells full of lead shot, and circus strongmen challenging all comers to match them lift for lift, scores of figures now forgotten made their names into household bywords: Eugen Sandow, whose impressive exploits and even more impressive physique first made weightlifting fashionable in the Western world; Genevieve Stebbins, who taught exercise to three generations of American girls around the turn of the last century; Joseph Greenstein aka “The Mighty Atom,” the diminutive Polish-American strongman whose signature trick was tying a #2 iron horseshoe into an overhand knot with his bare hands, and many more – among them, and far from the least, Jack Lalanne.
It takes only the briefest bout of research, especially in the age of the internet, to uncover all this and put Lalanne into his proper context. Why, then, the distortion of history, reminiscent of nothing so much as those Politburo photos from Stalin-era Russia from which former members were so studiously erased? Why, for that matter, is it a fairly safe bet that when Jane Fonda passes away, the media will briefly if lavishly praise her as the pioneer who taught America to exercise, and pretend that Jack Lalanne never existed?
There are at least three reasons, and all of them are relevant to the wider project of this blog.
The first, a point discussed here tolerably often, is the contemporary American obsession with fantasies of progress. We don’t like to think about the fact that by and large, Americans these days are weaker, less healthy, and less capable than their great-grandparents. When we do think about that, we like to frame it in a narrative that turns it into a brand new problem ready for some clever solution or other – that is to say, another opportunity for progress. Now it so happens that declining health and fitness in industrial societies has been a recognized issue since the nineteenth century, the physical culture movement emerged as a response to that issue, and what we are pleased to call cultural progress since that time has undercut the response and made the situation significantly worse, but this doesn’t fit the sort of historical narrative most of us prefer. The tacit amputation of the past is a neat solution to that difficulty.
The second reason, which is closely related to the first, is that from its beginning, the physical culture movement took a critical stance toward the products of industry and the lifestyles made possible by the extravagant use of fossil fuels. That expressed itself in a great many obvious ways – Jack Lalanne’s trademark habit of teaching people to exercise using simple household items instead of expensive apparatus, and his insistence on leaving most industrially processed foods out of the diet, are classic examples – but it also ran right down to the root assumptions of the whole movement. The core idiom of modern industrial society, after all, is the replacement of human capacities with gaudy technological crutches; we buy cars as substitutes for feet, televisions as substitutes for imagination, and so on.
Physical culture focused instead on developing the innate, extraordinary capacities hardwired into the human individual. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a great many people were deeply concerned about the consequences of human dependence on an industrial technostructure, that was an exhilarating prospect, and it’s no accident that the most famous stunts of the more colorful physical culturists very often took the form of an unassisted human body accomplishing some feat usually left to machines. These days most of us have surrendered to the technostructure so completely that we try to avoid thinking of the downside of that surrender, and spectacles that astonished and delighted our great-grandparents make today’s audiences uncomfortable and bored. How many people would turn out nowadays to watch the Mighty Atom tie horseshoes into knots? We’ve all seen fancier things done with CGI, and CGI allows us to avoid the awkward and quite explicit subtext of the Mighty Atom’s demonstrations, which was that anybody who was willing to do the necessary work could accomplish the same thing – or, for that matter, very nearly anything else.
That brings up the third reason why Jack Lalanne had to be presented as a unique, eccentric, and therefore harmless figure, rather than the last major public exponent of a movement that invited everyone’s participation. His accomplishments, like those of the great physical culturists before him, depended on something utterly unmentionable in contemporary industrial culture. It’s more strictly tabooed than sex or death or the total dependence of today’s middle-class American lifestyles on Third World slave labor. Yes, we’re talking about self-discipline.
It’s an interesting wrinkle of history that imperial societies in decline normally fear what’s left of their virtues far more than they fear their vices. James Francis’ useful 1994 study Subversive Virtue: Asceticism and Authority in the Second-Century Pagan World chronicles how Rome’s rulers found the reasoned self-discipline taught by Stoic and Platonic philosophies an unendurable challenge to their authority. You can find similar conflicts in the history of imperial China, the Muslim world, or, really, wherever the decline of imperial states is well enough documented. The reason behind these conflicts is simple enough: people who are ruled by their passions and appetites can be ruled just as efficiently by any political system willing to pander to those things, while those who control themselves can’t reliably be controlled by anyone else. Thus the Roman government regularly sent Rome’s philosophers into exile, failing Chinese dynasties praised Confucius to the skies while doing away with anybody who took his teachings too seriously, and modern America uses every trick in the media’s book to marginalize those who remind us that the life of a channel-surfing couch potato might not express the highest potentials of our humanity.
The taboo on self-discipline in contemporary America is all the more intriguing because just at the moment, sadomasochism has become the hottest new fad on the American left. Connoisseurs of the return of the repressed have much to appreciate in the spectacle of a subculture that claims to place an absolute value on human equality, but is busily getting its rocks off by acting out fantasies in which male dominance and female submission are far and away the most popular themes. Still, I suspect that part of what set this fad in motion is an inchoate but widespread sense that there are whole worlds of human possibility that can’t be reached by drifting along aimlessly and doing whatever seems easiest at the moment. Those who have that sense and are unable to conceive of self-mastery inevitably seek masters elsewhere; we will be very fortunate indeed if that quest goes no further than latex lingerie and a fashion for wearing leather collars.
However that process works out, though, Jack Lalanne and the movement that gave him his context have another lesson to teach that will be of key importance in the decades to come. The replacement of human capacities with technological crutches that provides industrial society with its central idiom depends utterly on the ability of industrial society to keep itself fueled with the energy resources that keep those crutches powered, supplied with spare parts, and replaced when they break down. As we move further into the twilight space beyond the world peak of conventional petroleum production, the ability to keep those resources flowing as abundantly as current expectations demand is coming into question. Those nations with the power to push their way to the head of the petroleum feeding trough are doing so with even more alacrity than before, while those shoved back to the end of the line are increasingly facing crippling energy shortages. Within nations, those classes and pressure groups with a similar preponderance of power are behaving in much the same way, with similar results.
The instinctive response to these struggles is generally to get right down there into the mud-wrestling pit and fight for a share. A more effective strategy, though, might well take the opposite tack. When a resource is depleting and no plausible replacement for it is in sight, staying dependent on that resource is a fool’s game; even if you win this round, sooner or later you’re going to lose, and time that could have been spent learning to function without the resource has been wasted floundering around in the mud. Phase out your dependence on the resource before you have to do so, recognizing that the actual requirements of human existence are quite modest and can be met in many different ways, and you put yourself in a much better position for the future.
Over the weeks to come, as this blog returns to the nitty gritty of the Green Wizards project, we’ll be discussing various ways to cut back on dependence on fossil fuels and the goods and services they provide. Much of the material to be covered in the posts to come will involve tools and devices of various kinds – most of them cheap, many of them suited to basement-workshop manufacture, all of them means toward a certain degree of independence from the vagaries of an industrial civilization that faces a rising spiral of crises and an increasing lack of ability to provide its inhabitants with the goods and services they have become used to getting from it. Still, it’s too often forgotten that the vast majority of the energy and technology most of us use each day goes to provide support of various kinds for an individual human body and mind. If that body and mind require less support from outside their own boundaries, there’s less need for the energy and technology in the first place. When every other source of power runs short, that’s the power that remains.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that you ought to break out the Indian clubs and kettlebells and download a couple of old physical culture manuals off the internet, or for that matter pick up an old Jack Lalanne book or two, though I certainly wouldn’t discourage anybody who chooses to do this; there’s a certain definite attraction, after all, in the prospect of reaching one’s nineties with the kind of physique and vitality that most thirty-year-olds only dream about. What it means, rather, is that a certain capacity to cope with physical challenges, take over responsibility for your own health, and get by comfortably in most situations without a great deal of technological assistance, are all useful items in the toolkit of anyone who hopes to face the difficult years ahead with any degree of efficiency and grace. How you choose to pursue that is up to you, but however you do it, if you do it, I suspect that Sandow, Stebbins, the Mighty Atom, and all their sturdy peers – Jack Lalanne very much among them – would be pleased.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
SC104-15
http://www.realitysandwich.com/worlds_ominous_reckoning
The World's Ominous Reckoning
In a recent Washington Post article titled Europe's ominous reckoning, economist Robert Samuelson correctly argued that "Ireland's economic crisis is ... not about Ireland." What he seems to not recognize is that "Europe's ominous reckoning" is not about Europe.
The reckoning will be global because the money and banking regime is global -- and deeply flawed.
Discussions about possible solutions to the debt crisis tend to degenerate into ideological bickering because ideologies provides an inadequate framework in which to understand the nature of the problem and discover real effective solutions. Fiscal conservatives want to cut social spending so as to avoid raising taxes on the rich and privileged class. Political liberals have largely caved in to the same interests because they think that supporting the privileged class's agenda is their only hope of gaining power. They will pay lip service to a social agenda and throw a few crumbs to the masses in an attempt to get elected, but they will ultimately advance the same elitist agenda, as have Presidents Clinton and Obama. Progressives argue that budgets can be balanced by cutting the military budget and raising taxes on the rich, but they remain impotent because political power has been so thoroughly centralized that popular progressive agendas have not a prayer of being implemented. Even if they were, they would simply make matters worse because under the present money and banking regime, a balanced government budget is not possible. How can the debate move beyond ideologies, and common ground be found?
Samuelson, like almost all conventionally trained economists, blames the woes of Ireland, and every other country, on failures in policy. He says, "Most European economies suffer from the ill effects of some combination of easy money, unsustainable social spending and big budget deficits," but he fails to address the deeper questions of why? Why has money been easy? Why is social spending unsustainable? Why have budget deficits been too big?
It is not only a problem of European economies, it is a problem for virtually all national economies. As Samuelson points out, even the most prosperous countries have accumulated enormous debts. The governments of Germany and France, for example, have, respectively, gross debts of 76 percent and 86 percent of GDP (GDP is a measure of total economic output).
The debt of the United States government is projected to exceed 100% of GDP within the next couple of years. And this picture does not even include the debts of lower levels of government -- states, counties, and municipalities -- or all of the private sector debt that burdens companies and individuals.
If the world has become so prosperous and productive, why all this debt, and why does it continue to grow ever more rapidly?
It is not a matter of policy, i.e., how we operate a flawed system. The problem is structural and systemic. The system is designed to create debt, and ever more of it. Like a pernicious cancer, debt is a parasite that is killing us, and in the end a parasite will die along with its host. How much of our well-being shall we sacrifice to keep feeding this cancer? Are we willing to starve ourselves and our children, to endure cuts in spending for education and public services, to sacrifice our hard-won freedoms, in order to sustain a system that despoils the earth, destroys the social fabric, and creates ever greater economic inequities?
A few have been calling for "debt forgiveness," a remedy analogous to cancer surgery. That may be a good start, but even that does no go far enough. We can excise the cancer, but if we do not recognize and eliminate its fundamental cause it will simply grow back. We can restart the game of Monopoly, but the outcome of the next round will be very much like that of the previous round unless we change the rules -- or choose to play a different game.
The fact is, there is a debt imperative that is built into the global system of money and banking, and debt is eating us alive. As I wrote in my first book more than 20 years ago, our money system, based as it is on banks' lending money into circulation at compound interest, requires debt to grow with the passage of time. Virtually all of the money today is created when banks make "loans." The compounding of interest on these loans means that debt must grow as time goes on, not slowly, but at an accelerating rate. Ever greater amounts of money must be borrowed into circulation for this system to continue. When the private sector debt can no longer be expanded, government assumes the role of "borrower of last resort." That is why government budget deficits have become chronic and continue to grow. In the latest cycle of Bubble and Bust, governments are rescuing the banks by taking "toxic" debt off their hands and giving them government bonds in return. In this way, the system can be sustained a little bit longer, but at costs that have yet to be tallied.
The current global predicament is the late-stage symptom of this fundamental flaw. Every political currency collectivizes credit. It is our credit that supports each national currency. We have allowed the banks to control our credit and we pay them interest for the "privilege" of accessing some of it as bank "loans."
What must be done? The answer is simple, but few have been willing to hear it: interest must be eliminated from the money system to put an end to the growth imperative. To modern economists, such a proposition is heresy, foolish even, unthinkable! Interest to them is an essential inducement to save and invest and a necessary means of regulating credit and the economy. Nonsense, I say, a gross error and delusion fostered by incessant propaganda, media hype, and financial mumbo-jumbo. In an economy that is free from inflation, preservation of one's capital is sufficient motivation for saving, and return on productive investments can be had in the form of ownership shares (so called equity investment) instead of interest on debt. Such equity investments share both the rewards and the risks inherent in a productive enterprise, making the relationship between the user of funds and the provider of funds more harmonious and fair. As for regulating credit, we don't need interest to do that; we can merely decide to withhold or offer credit, to whom, for what purpose, and in what amounts.
We need to learn to play a different game. We need to organize an entirely new structure of money, banking, and finance, one that is interest-free, decentralized, and controlled, not by banks or central governments, but by businesses and individuals that associate and organize themselves into cashless trading networks. This is a way to reclaim "the credit commons" from monopoly control and create healthy community economies.
In brief, any group of traders can organize to allocate their own collective credit amongst themselves, interest-free. This is merely an extension of the common business practice of selling on open account -- "I'll ship you the goods now and you can pay me later," except it is organized, not on a bilateral basis, but within a community of many buyers and sellers. Done on a large enough scale that includes a sufficiently broad range of goods and services spanning all levels of the supply chain from retail, to wholesale, to manufacturing, to basic commodities, such systems can avoid the dysfunctions inherent in conventional money and banking and open the way to more harmonious and mutually beneficial trading relationships that enable the emergence of sustainable economies and promote the common good.
This approach is no pie-in-the-sky pipedream, it is proven and well established. Known as mutual credit clearing, it is a process that is used by scores of commercial "barter" companies around the world to provide cashless trading for their business members. In this process, the things you sell pay for the things you buy without using money as an intermediate exchange medium. It's as simple as that. According to the International Reciprocal Trade Association (IRTA), a major trade association for the industry, "IRTA Member companies using the "Modern Trade and Barter" process, made it possible for over 400,000 companies World Wide to utilizetheir excess business capacities and underperforming assets, to earn anestimated $12 billion dollars in previously lost and wasted revenues."
Perhaps the best example of a credit clearing exchange that has been successful over a long period of time is the WIR Economic Circle Cooperative. Founded in Switzerland as a self-help organization in 1934 in the midst of the Great Depression, WIR provided a means for its business members to trade with one another despite the shortage of official money in circulation. Over three quarters of a century, in good time and bad, WIR has continued to thrive. Its more than 60,000 members throughout Switzerland trade about $2 billion worth of goods and services annually.
Yes, it is possible to transcend the dysfunctional money and banking system and to take back our power from bankers and politicians who use it to abuse and exploit us. We do it, not by petitioning politicians who are already bought and paid for by an ever more powerful elite group, but by using the power that is already ours to use the resources we have to support each other's productivity and to give credit where credit is due.
The World's Ominous Reckoning
In a recent Washington Post article titled Europe's ominous reckoning, economist Robert Samuelson correctly argued that "Ireland's economic crisis is ... not about Ireland." What he seems to not recognize is that "Europe's ominous reckoning" is not about Europe.
The reckoning will be global because the money and banking regime is global -- and deeply flawed.
Discussions about possible solutions to the debt crisis tend to degenerate into ideological bickering because ideologies provides an inadequate framework in which to understand the nature of the problem and discover real effective solutions. Fiscal conservatives want to cut social spending so as to avoid raising taxes on the rich and privileged class. Political liberals have largely caved in to the same interests because they think that supporting the privileged class's agenda is their only hope of gaining power. They will pay lip service to a social agenda and throw a few crumbs to the masses in an attempt to get elected, but they will ultimately advance the same elitist agenda, as have Presidents Clinton and Obama. Progressives argue that budgets can be balanced by cutting the military budget and raising taxes on the rich, but they remain impotent because political power has been so thoroughly centralized that popular progressive agendas have not a prayer of being implemented. Even if they were, they would simply make matters worse because under the present money and banking regime, a balanced government budget is not possible. How can the debate move beyond ideologies, and common ground be found?
Samuelson, like almost all conventionally trained economists, blames the woes of Ireland, and every other country, on failures in policy. He says, "Most European economies suffer from the ill effects of some combination of easy money, unsustainable social spending and big budget deficits," but he fails to address the deeper questions of why? Why has money been easy? Why is social spending unsustainable? Why have budget deficits been too big?
It is not only a problem of European economies, it is a problem for virtually all national economies. As Samuelson points out, even the most prosperous countries have accumulated enormous debts. The governments of Germany and France, for example, have, respectively, gross debts of 76 percent and 86 percent of GDP (GDP is a measure of total economic output).
The debt of the United States government is projected to exceed 100% of GDP within the next couple of years. And this picture does not even include the debts of lower levels of government -- states, counties, and municipalities -- or all of the private sector debt that burdens companies and individuals.
If the world has become so prosperous and productive, why all this debt, and why does it continue to grow ever more rapidly?
It is not a matter of policy, i.e., how we operate a flawed system. The problem is structural and systemic. The system is designed to create debt, and ever more of it. Like a pernicious cancer, debt is a parasite that is killing us, and in the end a parasite will die along with its host. How much of our well-being shall we sacrifice to keep feeding this cancer? Are we willing to starve ourselves and our children, to endure cuts in spending for education and public services, to sacrifice our hard-won freedoms, in order to sustain a system that despoils the earth, destroys the social fabric, and creates ever greater economic inequities?
A few have been calling for "debt forgiveness," a remedy analogous to cancer surgery. That may be a good start, but even that does no go far enough. We can excise the cancer, but if we do not recognize and eliminate its fundamental cause it will simply grow back. We can restart the game of Monopoly, but the outcome of the next round will be very much like that of the previous round unless we change the rules -- or choose to play a different game.
The fact is, there is a debt imperative that is built into the global system of money and banking, and debt is eating us alive. As I wrote in my first book more than 20 years ago, our money system, based as it is on banks' lending money into circulation at compound interest, requires debt to grow with the passage of time. Virtually all of the money today is created when banks make "loans." The compounding of interest on these loans means that debt must grow as time goes on, not slowly, but at an accelerating rate. Ever greater amounts of money must be borrowed into circulation for this system to continue. When the private sector debt can no longer be expanded, government assumes the role of "borrower of last resort." That is why government budget deficits have become chronic and continue to grow. In the latest cycle of Bubble and Bust, governments are rescuing the banks by taking "toxic" debt off their hands and giving them government bonds in return. In this way, the system can be sustained a little bit longer, but at costs that have yet to be tallied.
The current global predicament is the late-stage symptom of this fundamental flaw. Every political currency collectivizes credit. It is our credit that supports each national currency. We have allowed the banks to control our credit and we pay them interest for the "privilege" of accessing some of it as bank "loans."
What must be done? The answer is simple, but few have been willing to hear it: interest must be eliminated from the money system to put an end to the growth imperative. To modern economists, such a proposition is heresy, foolish even, unthinkable! Interest to them is an essential inducement to save and invest and a necessary means of regulating credit and the economy. Nonsense, I say, a gross error and delusion fostered by incessant propaganda, media hype, and financial mumbo-jumbo. In an economy that is free from inflation, preservation of one's capital is sufficient motivation for saving, and return on productive investments can be had in the form of ownership shares (so called equity investment) instead of interest on debt. Such equity investments share both the rewards and the risks inherent in a productive enterprise, making the relationship between the user of funds and the provider of funds more harmonious and fair. As for regulating credit, we don't need interest to do that; we can merely decide to withhold or offer credit, to whom, for what purpose, and in what amounts.
We need to learn to play a different game. We need to organize an entirely new structure of money, banking, and finance, one that is interest-free, decentralized, and controlled, not by banks or central governments, but by businesses and individuals that associate and organize themselves into cashless trading networks. This is a way to reclaim "the credit commons" from monopoly control and create healthy community economies.
In brief, any group of traders can organize to allocate their own collective credit amongst themselves, interest-free. This is merely an extension of the common business practice of selling on open account -- "I'll ship you the goods now and you can pay me later," except it is organized, not on a bilateral basis, but within a community of many buyers and sellers. Done on a large enough scale that includes a sufficiently broad range of goods and services spanning all levels of the supply chain from retail, to wholesale, to manufacturing, to basic commodities, such systems can avoid the dysfunctions inherent in conventional money and banking and open the way to more harmonious and mutually beneficial trading relationships that enable the emergence of sustainable economies and promote the common good.
This approach is no pie-in-the-sky pipedream, it is proven and well established. Known as mutual credit clearing, it is a process that is used by scores of commercial "barter" companies around the world to provide cashless trading for their business members. In this process, the things you sell pay for the things you buy without using money as an intermediate exchange medium. It's as simple as that. According to the International Reciprocal Trade Association (IRTA), a major trade association for the industry, "IRTA Member companies using the "Modern Trade and Barter" process, made it possible for over 400,000 companies World Wide to utilizetheir excess business capacities and underperforming assets, to earn anestimated $12 billion dollars in previously lost and wasted revenues."
Perhaps the best example of a credit clearing exchange that has been successful over a long period of time is the WIR Economic Circle Cooperative. Founded in Switzerland as a self-help organization in 1934 in the midst of the Great Depression, WIR provided a means for its business members to trade with one another despite the shortage of official money in circulation. Over three quarters of a century, in good time and bad, WIR has continued to thrive. Its more than 60,000 members throughout Switzerland trade about $2 billion worth of goods and services annually.
Yes, it is possible to transcend the dysfunctional money and banking system and to take back our power from bankers and politicians who use it to abuse and exploit us. We do it, not by petitioning politicians who are already bought and paid for by an ever more powerful elite group, but by using the power that is already ours to use the resources we have to support each other's productivity and to give credit where credit is due.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
SC104-14
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/
The Onset of Catabolic Collapse
I’ve commented more than once in these essays on the gap in perception between history as it appears in textbooks and history as it’s lived by people on the spot at the time. That’s a gap worth watching, because the foreshortening of history that comes with living in the middle of it quite often gets in the way of figuring out a useful response to a time of crisis – for example, the one we’re in right now.
This is all the more challenging because the foreshortening of history cuts both ways; it makes small but sudden events look more important than they are, and it also helps hide slow but massive shifts that will play a much greater role in shaping the future. Recent increases in the price of oil, for example, kicked off a flurry of predictions suggesting that hyperinflation and the sudden collapse of industrial society are right around the corner; identical predictions were made the last time oil prices spiked, the time before that, and the time before that, too, so the traditional grain of salt may be worth adding to them this time around. (We’ll most likely get hyperinflation in the US, granted, but my guess is that that will come further down the road.) Look at all these price spikes and notice that the peaks and troughs have both tended gradually upwards, on the other hand, and you may just catch sight of the signal hidden in all that noise – the fact that providing industrial civilization with its most important fuel is loading a greater burden on the world’s economies with every year that passes.
The same gap in perception afflicts most current efforts to make sense of the future looming up ahead of us. Ever since my original paper on catabolic collapse first found its way onto the internet, I’ve fielded questions fairly regularly from people who want to know whether I think some current or imminent crisis will tip industrial society over into catabolic collapse in some unmistakably catastrophic way. It’s a fair question, but it’s based on a fundamental misreading both of the concept of catabolic collapse and of our present place in the long cycles of rise and fall that define the history of civilizations.
Let’s start with some basics, for the sake of those of my readers who haven’t waded their way through the fine print of the paper. The central idea of catabolic collapse is that human societies pretty consistently tend to produce more stuff than they can afford to maintain. What we are pleased to call “primitive societies” – that is, societies that are well enough adapted to their environments that they get by comfortably without huge masses of cumbersome and expensive infrastructure – usually do so in a fairly small way, and very often evolve traditional ways of getting rid of excess goods at regular intervals so that the cost of maintaining it doesn’t become a burden. As societies expand and start to depend on complex infrastructure to support the daily activities of their inhabitants, though, it becomes harder and less popular to do this, and so the maintenance needs of the infrastructure and the rest of the society’s stuff gradually build up until they reach a level that can’t be covered by the resources on hand.
It’s what happens next that’s crucial to the theory. The only reliable way to solve a crisis that’s caused by rising maintenance costs is to cut those costs, and the most effective way of cutting maintenance needs is to tip some fraction of the stuff that would otherwise have to be maintained into the nearest available dumpster. That’s rarely popular, and many complex societies resist it as long as they possibly can, but once it happens the usual result is at least a temporary resolution of the crisis. Now of course the normal human response to the end of a crisis is the resumption of business as usual, which in the case of a complex society generally amounts to amassing more stuff. Thus the normal rhythm of history in complex societies cycles back and forth between building up, or anabolism, and breaking down, or catabolism. Societies that have been around a while – China comes to mind – have cycled up and down through this process dozens of times, with periods of prosperity and major infrastructure projects alternating with periods of impoverishment and infrastructure breakdown.
A more dramatic version of the same process happens when a society is meeting its maintenance costs with nonrenewable resources. If the resource is abundant enough – for example, the income from a global empire, or half a billion years of ancient sunlight stored underground in the form of fossil fuels – and the rate at which it’s extracted can be increased over time, at least for a while, a society can heap up unimaginable amounts of stuff without worrying about the maintenance costs. The problem, of course, is that neither imperial expansion nor fossil fuel drawdown can keep on going indefinitely on a finite planet. Sooner or later you run into the limits of growth; at that point the costs of keeping wealth flowing in from your empire or your oil fields begin a ragged but unstoppable increase, while the return on that investment begins an equally ragged and equally unstoppable decline; the gap between your maintenance needs and available resources spins out of control, until your society no longer has enough resources on hand even to provide for its own survival, and it goes under.
That’s catabolic collapse. It’s not quite as straightforward as it sounds, because each burst of catabolism on the way down does lower maintenance costs significantly, and can also free up resources for other uses. The usual result is the stairstep sequence of decline that’s traced by the history of so many declining civilizations—half a century of crisis and disintegration, say, followed by several decades of relative stability and partial recovery, and then a return to crisis; rinse and repeat, and you’ve got the process that turned the Forum of imperial Rome into an early medieval sheep pasture.
It’s easy enough to track catabolic collapse at work in retrospect, when you can glance over a couple of centuries of decline in an evening with one of Michael Grant’s excellent histories of Rome in one hand and a glass of decent bourbon in the other. Catching it in process, though, can be a much more challenging task, because it happens on a scale considerably larger than a human lifespan. In its early stages, the signal is hard to tease out from ordinary economic and political fluctuations; later on, it’s all too easy to believe that any given period of stabilization has solved the problem, at least until the next wave of crises rolls in; late in the game, as crisis piles on top of crisis and cracks are opening up everywhere, your society’s glory days are so far in the past that it’s surprisingly easy to lose track of the fact that calamity isn’t the normal shape of things.
Still, the attempt is worth making, and I propose to make it here. In fact, I’d like to suggest that it’s possible at this point to provide a fairly exact date for the onset of catabolic collapse here in the United States of America.
That America is a prime candidate for catabolic collapse seems tolerably clear at this point, though I’m sure plenty of people can find reasons to argue with that assessment. It’s considered impolite to talk about America’s empire nowadays, but the US troops currently garrisoned in 140 countries around the world are not there for their health, after all, and it requires a breathtaking suspension of disbelief to insist that this global military presence has nothing to do with the fact that the 5% of our species that live in this country use around a quarter of the world’s total energy production and around a third of its raw materials and industrial products. The United States has an empire, then, and it’s become an extraordinarily expensive empire to maintain; the fact that the US spends as much money on its military annually as all the other nations on Earth put together is only one measure of the maintenance cost involved.
That America is also irrevocably committed to dependence on dwindling supplies nonrenewable fossil fuels also seems clear at this point, though here again there are plenty who would dispute the point. Even if there were other energy resources available in the same gargantuan amounts – and despite decades of enthusiastic claims, every attempt to deploy other energy resources to replace a significant amount of fossil fuels has run headfirst into crippling problems of scale – the political will to carry out a transition soon enough to matter has not been present, and the careful analyses in the 2005 Hirsch report are among the many good reasons for thinking that the window of opportunity for that transition is long past. The notion that America can drill its way out of crisis would be funny if the situation was not so serious; despite dizzyingly huge government subsidies and the best oil exploration and extraction technology on Earth, US oil production has been in decline since 1972. As the first nation to develop a commercial petroleum industry, it was probably inevitable that we would be among the very first to hit the limits to production and begin slipping down the arc of decline. As for coal and natural gas, the abundance of the former and the glut of the latter are the product of short term factors; while press releases aimed mostly at boosting stock prices insist that we’ll have supplies of both for centuries to come, more sober analysts have gotten past the hype and the hugely inflated reserve figures and predicted hard peaks for both fuels within thirty years, and quite possibly sooner.
That being the case, the question is simply when to place the first wave of catabolism in America – the point at which crises bring a temporary end to business as usual, access to real wealth becomes a much more challenging thing for a large fraction of the population, and significant amounts of the national infrastructure are abandoned or stripped for salvage. It’s not a difficult question to answer, either.
The date in question is 1974.
That was the year when the industrial heartland of the United States, a band of factories that reached from Pennsylvania and upstate New York straight across to Indiana and Michigan, began its abrupt transformation into the Rust Belt. Hundreds of thousands of factory jobs, the bread and butter of America’s then-prosperous working class, went away forever, and state and local governments went into a fiscal tailspin that saw many basic services cut to the bone and beyond. Meanwhile, wild swings in markets for agricultural commodities and fossil fuels, worsened by government policy, pushed most of rural America into a depression from which it has never recovered. In the terms I’ve suggested in this post, the US catabolized most of its heavy industry, most of its family farms, and a good half or so of its working class, among other things. It also set in motion the process of catabolizing one of the most important resources it had left at that time, the oil reserves of the Alaska North Slope. That oil could have been eked out over decades to cushion the transition to a low-energy future; instead, it was pumped and burnt at a breakneck pace in order to deal with the immediate crisis.
The United States was not alone in embracing catabolism in the mid-1970s. Britain abandoned most of its own heavy industry at the same time, plunging large parts of the industrial Midlands and Scotland into permanent depression, and set about catabolizing its own North Sea oil reserves with the same misplaced enthusiasm that American politicians lavished on the North Slope. The result was exactly what history would suggest; by embracing catabolism, the US and Britain both staggered through the crisis years of the 1970s and came out the other side into a breathing space of relative stability in the Reagan and Thatcher years,. That breathing space was extended significantly when the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, beginning in 1989, allowed American and British economic interests and their local surrogates to snap up wealth across Eurasia for pennies on the hundred-dollar bill, in the process imposing the same sort of economic collapse on most of a continent that had previously been inflicted on the steelworkers of Pittsburgh and the shipbuilders of Glasgow.
That breathing space ended in 2008. At this point, I’d suggest, we’re in the early stages of a second and probably more severe round of catabolism here in America, and throughout Europe as well. What happened to the industrial working class in the 1970s is now happening to a very broad swath of the middle class, as jobs evaporate, public services are slashed, and half a dozen states stumble down the slope that will turn them into the Rust Belt equivalents of the early 21st century. Exactly what will happen as that process continues is anybody’s guess, but it’s unlikely to end as soon as the round of catabolism in the 1970s, and it may very well cut deeper; neither we nor Britain nor any other of our close allies has a big new petroleum reserve just waiting to be tapped, after all.
It’s crucial to remember, though, that catabolism is a response to crisis and at least in the short term, much more often than not, an effective response. The fact that we’re moving into the second stage of our society’s long descent into catabolic collapse doesn’t mean that America will fall apart in the next decade or so; quite the contrary, it strongly suggests that America will not fall apart this time around. As the current round of catabolism picks up speed, a great many jobs will go away, and most of them will never return; a great many people who depend on those jobs will descend into poverty, and most of them will never rise back out of it; much of the familiar fabric of life in America as it’s been lived in recent decades will be shredded beyond repair, and new and far less lavish patterns will emerge instead; outside the narrowing circle of the privileged classes, even those who maintain relative affluence will be making do with much less than they or their equivalents do today. All these are ways that a society in decline successfully adapts to the contraction of its economic base and the mismatch between available resources and maintenance costs.
Twenty or thirty or forty years from now, in turn, it’s a fairly safe bet that the years of crisis will come to a close and a newly optimistic America will reassure itself that everything really is all right again. The odds are pretty high that by then it will be, for all practical purposes, a Third World nation, with little more than dim memories remaining from its former empire or its erstwhile status as a superpower; it’s not at all impossible, for that matter, that it will be more than one nation, split asunder along lines traced out by today’s increasingly uncompromising culture wars. Fast forward another few decades, and another round of crises arrives, followed by another respite, and another round of crises, until finally peasant farmers plow their fields in sight of the crumbling ruins of our cities.
That’s the way civilizations end, and that’s the way ours is ending. The phrasing is deliberate: "is ending," not "will end." If I’m right, we’re already half a lifetime into the decline and fall of industrial civilization. It can be challenging to keep that awareness in mind when wrestling with the day to day details of getting by in an ailing, sclerotic nation with a half-failed economy – or, for that matter, when trying out some of the technologies and tricks I’ve been discussing here in recent months. Still, it’s worth making the attempt, because the wider view arguably makes it a bit easier to keep current events in perspective and plan for the future in which we will all, after all, be spending the rest of our lives.
The Onset of Catabolic Collapse
I’ve commented more than once in these essays on the gap in perception between history as it appears in textbooks and history as it’s lived by people on the spot at the time. That’s a gap worth watching, because the foreshortening of history that comes with living in the middle of it quite often gets in the way of figuring out a useful response to a time of crisis – for example, the one we’re in right now.
This is all the more challenging because the foreshortening of history cuts both ways; it makes small but sudden events look more important than they are, and it also helps hide slow but massive shifts that will play a much greater role in shaping the future. Recent increases in the price of oil, for example, kicked off a flurry of predictions suggesting that hyperinflation and the sudden collapse of industrial society are right around the corner; identical predictions were made the last time oil prices spiked, the time before that, and the time before that, too, so the traditional grain of salt may be worth adding to them this time around. (We’ll most likely get hyperinflation in the US, granted, but my guess is that that will come further down the road.) Look at all these price spikes and notice that the peaks and troughs have both tended gradually upwards, on the other hand, and you may just catch sight of the signal hidden in all that noise – the fact that providing industrial civilization with its most important fuel is loading a greater burden on the world’s economies with every year that passes.
The same gap in perception afflicts most current efforts to make sense of the future looming up ahead of us. Ever since my original paper on catabolic collapse first found its way onto the internet, I’ve fielded questions fairly regularly from people who want to know whether I think some current or imminent crisis will tip industrial society over into catabolic collapse in some unmistakably catastrophic way. It’s a fair question, but it’s based on a fundamental misreading both of the concept of catabolic collapse and of our present place in the long cycles of rise and fall that define the history of civilizations.
Let’s start with some basics, for the sake of those of my readers who haven’t waded their way through the fine print of the paper. The central idea of catabolic collapse is that human societies pretty consistently tend to produce more stuff than they can afford to maintain. What we are pleased to call “primitive societies” – that is, societies that are well enough adapted to their environments that they get by comfortably without huge masses of cumbersome and expensive infrastructure – usually do so in a fairly small way, and very often evolve traditional ways of getting rid of excess goods at regular intervals so that the cost of maintaining it doesn’t become a burden. As societies expand and start to depend on complex infrastructure to support the daily activities of their inhabitants, though, it becomes harder and less popular to do this, and so the maintenance needs of the infrastructure and the rest of the society’s stuff gradually build up until they reach a level that can’t be covered by the resources on hand.
It’s what happens next that’s crucial to the theory. The only reliable way to solve a crisis that’s caused by rising maintenance costs is to cut those costs, and the most effective way of cutting maintenance needs is to tip some fraction of the stuff that would otherwise have to be maintained into the nearest available dumpster. That’s rarely popular, and many complex societies resist it as long as they possibly can, but once it happens the usual result is at least a temporary resolution of the crisis. Now of course the normal human response to the end of a crisis is the resumption of business as usual, which in the case of a complex society generally amounts to amassing more stuff. Thus the normal rhythm of history in complex societies cycles back and forth between building up, or anabolism, and breaking down, or catabolism. Societies that have been around a while – China comes to mind – have cycled up and down through this process dozens of times, with periods of prosperity and major infrastructure projects alternating with periods of impoverishment and infrastructure breakdown.
A more dramatic version of the same process happens when a society is meeting its maintenance costs with nonrenewable resources. If the resource is abundant enough – for example, the income from a global empire, or half a billion years of ancient sunlight stored underground in the form of fossil fuels – and the rate at which it’s extracted can be increased over time, at least for a while, a society can heap up unimaginable amounts of stuff without worrying about the maintenance costs. The problem, of course, is that neither imperial expansion nor fossil fuel drawdown can keep on going indefinitely on a finite planet. Sooner or later you run into the limits of growth; at that point the costs of keeping wealth flowing in from your empire or your oil fields begin a ragged but unstoppable increase, while the return on that investment begins an equally ragged and equally unstoppable decline; the gap between your maintenance needs and available resources spins out of control, until your society no longer has enough resources on hand even to provide for its own survival, and it goes under.
That’s catabolic collapse. It’s not quite as straightforward as it sounds, because each burst of catabolism on the way down does lower maintenance costs significantly, and can also free up resources for other uses. The usual result is the stairstep sequence of decline that’s traced by the history of so many declining civilizations—half a century of crisis and disintegration, say, followed by several decades of relative stability and partial recovery, and then a return to crisis; rinse and repeat, and you’ve got the process that turned the Forum of imperial Rome into an early medieval sheep pasture.
It’s easy enough to track catabolic collapse at work in retrospect, when you can glance over a couple of centuries of decline in an evening with one of Michael Grant’s excellent histories of Rome in one hand and a glass of decent bourbon in the other. Catching it in process, though, can be a much more challenging task, because it happens on a scale considerably larger than a human lifespan. In its early stages, the signal is hard to tease out from ordinary economic and political fluctuations; later on, it’s all too easy to believe that any given period of stabilization has solved the problem, at least until the next wave of crises rolls in; late in the game, as crisis piles on top of crisis and cracks are opening up everywhere, your society’s glory days are so far in the past that it’s surprisingly easy to lose track of the fact that calamity isn’t the normal shape of things.
Still, the attempt is worth making, and I propose to make it here. In fact, I’d like to suggest that it’s possible at this point to provide a fairly exact date for the onset of catabolic collapse here in the United States of America.
That America is a prime candidate for catabolic collapse seems tolerably clear at this point, though I’m sure plenty of people can find reasons to argue with that assessment. It’s considered impolite to talk about America’s empire nowadays, but the US troops currently garrisoned in 140 countries around the world are not there for their health, after all, and it requires a breathtaking suspension of disbelief to insist that this global military presence has nothing to do with the fact that the 5% of our species that live in this country use around a quarter of the world’s total energy production and around a third of its raw materials and industrial products. The United States has an empire, then, and it’s become an extraordinarily expensive empire to maintain; the fact that the US spends as much money on its military annually as all the other nations on Earth put together is only one measure of the maintenance cost involved.
That America is also irrevocably committed to dependence on dwindling supplies nonrenewable fossil fuels also seems clear at this point, though here again there are plenty who would dispute the point. Even if there were other energy resources available in the same gargantuan amounts – and despite decades of enthusiastic claims, every attempt to deploy other energy resources to replace a significant amount of fossil fuels has run headfirst into crippling problems of scale – the political will to carry out a transition soon enough to matter has not been present, and the careful analyses in the 2005 Hirsch report are among the many good reasons for thinking that the window of opportunity for that transition is long past. The notion that America can drill its way out of crisis would be funny if the situation was not so serious; despite dizzyingly huge government subsidies and the best oil exploration and extraction technology on Earth, US oil production has been in decline since 1972. As the first nation to develop a commercial petroleum industry, it was probably inevitable that we would be among the very first to hit the limits to production and begin slipping down the arc of decline. As for coal and natural gas, the abundance of the former and the glut of the latter are the product of short term factors; while press releases aimed mostly at boosting stock prices insist that we’ll have supplies of both for centuries to come, more sober analysts have gotten past the hype and the hugely inflated reserve figures and predicted hard peaks for both fuels within thirty years, and quite possibly sooner.
That being the case, the question is simply when to place the first wave of catabolism in America – the point at which crises bring a temporary end to business as usual, access to real wealth becomes a much more challenging thing for a large fraction of the population, and significant amounts of the national infrastructure are abandoned or stripped for salvage. It’s not a difficult question to answer, either.
The date in question is 1974.
That was the year when the industrial heartland of the United States, a band of factories that reached from Pennsylvania and upstate New York straight across to Indiana and Michigan, began its abrupt transformation into the Rust Belt. Hundreds of thousands of factory jobs, the bread and butter of America’s then-prosperous working class, went away forever, and state and local governments went into a fiscal tailspin that saw many basic services cut to the bone and beyond. Meanwhile, wild swings in markets for agricultural commodities and fossil fuels, worsened by government policy, pushed most of rural America into a depression from which it has never recovered. In the terms I’ve suggested in this post, the US catabolized most of its heavy industry, most of its family farms, and a good half or so of its working class, among other things. It also set in motion the process of catabolizing one of the most important resources it had left at that time, the oil reserves of the Alaska North Slope. That oil could have been eked out over decades to cushion the transition to a low-energy future; instead, it was pumped and burnt at a breakneck pace in order to deal with the immediate crisis.
The United States was not alone in embracing catabolism in the mid-1970s. Britain abandoned most of its own heavy industry at the same time, plunging large parts of the industrial Midlands and Scotland into permanent depression, and set about catabolizing its own North Sea oil reserves with the same misplaced enthusiasm that American politicians lavished on the North Slope. The result was exactly what history would suggest; by embracing catabolism, the US and Britain both staggered through the crisis years of the 1970s and came out the other side into a breathing space of relative stability in the Reagan and Thatcher years,. That breathing space was extended significantly when the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, beginning in 1989, allowed American and British economic interests and their local surrogates to snap up wealth across Eurasia for pennies on the hundred-dollar bill, in the process imposing the same sort of economic collapse on most of a continent that had previously been inflicted on the steelworkers of Pittsburgh and the shipbuilders of Glasgow.
That breathing space ended in 2008. At this point, I’d suggest, we’re in the early stages of a second and probably more severe round of catabolism here in America, and throughout Europe as well. What happened to the industrial working class in the 1970s is now happening to a very broad swath of the middle class, as jobs evaporate, public services are slashed, and half a dozen states stumble down the slope that will turn them into the Rust Belt equivalents of the early 21st century. Exactly what will happen as that process continues is anybody’s guess, but it’s unlikely to end as soon as the round of catabolism in the 1970s, and it may very well cut deeper; neither we nor Britain nor any other of our close allies has a big new petroleum reserve just waiting to be tapped, after all.
It’s crucial to remember, though, that catabolism is a response to crisis and at least in the short term, much more often than not, an effective response. The fact that we’re moving into the second stage of our society’s long descent into catabolic collapse doesn’t mean that America will fall apart in the next decade or so; quite the contrary, it strongly suggests that America will not fall apart this time around. As the current round of catabolism picks up speed, a great many jobs will go away, and most of them will never return; a great many people who depend on those jobs will descend into poverty, and most of them will never rise back out of it; much of the familiar fabric of life in America as it’s been lived in recent decades will be shredded beyond repair, and new and far less lavish patterns will emerge instead; outside the narrowing circle of the privileged classes, even those who maintain relative affluence will be making do with much less than they or their equivalents do today. All these are ways that a society in decline successfully adapts to the contraction of its economic base and the mismatch between available resources and maintenance costs.
Twenty or thirty or forty years from now, in turn, it’s a fairly safe bet that the years of crisis will come to a close and a newly optimistic America will reassure itself that everything really is all right again. The odds are pretty high that by then it will be, for all practical purposes, a Third World nation, with little more than dim memories remaining from its former empire or its erstwhile status as a superpower; it’s not at all impossible, for that matter, that it will be more than one nation, split asunder along lines traced out by today’s increasingly uncompromising culture wars. Fast forward another few decades, and another round of crises arrives, followed by another respite, and another round of crises, until finally peasant farmers plow their fields in sight of the crumbling ruins of our cities.
That’s the way civilizations end, and that’s the way ours is ending. The phrasing is deliberate: "is ending," not "will end." If I’m right, we’re already half a lifetime into the decline and fall of industrial civilization. It can be challenging to keep that awareness in mind when wrestling with the day to day details of getting by in an ailing, sclerotic nation with a half-failed economy – or, for that matter, when trying out some of the technologies and tricks I’ve been discussing here in recent months. Still, it’s worth making the attempt, because the wider view arguably makes it a bit easier to keep current events in perspective and plan for the future in which we will all, after all, be spending the rest of our lives.
Friday, January 14, 2011
SC104-13
http://www.fcnp.com/commentary/national/8238-the-peak-oil-crisis-civil-unrest.html
Peak Oil and Civil Unrest
Buried in the millions of words that were written about the shootings in Arizona last week was a recent poll showing that only 13 percent of the American people think favorably of the U.S. Congress. The implication, of course, is that as 87 percent or roughly 270 million Americans harbor some level of animosity towards their elected federal representatives, the emergence of people who believe that exercising their 2nd Amendment rights is solution to the nation’s woes is inevitable.
Why are so many, so mad at the Congress? The answer is simple – they have no idea what is happening to their lives. Since the beginning of the great recession way back in 2007 they have been told by two Presidents, their senior officials, 99 percent of the Congress, and most of the media that recovery was on the way and that prosperity would return shortly.
As unemployment in the U.S. grew and grew, every politician with a prayer of winning positioned him or herself as the “jobs” candidate who could and would get us all working at good high-paying jobs again. This of course has not returned and is unlikely to do so. We are not only contending with a growing debt bubble of gigantic proportions, we are also rapidly running out of the cheap, abundant energy that allowed us to be so prosperous for the last 200 years.
America’s problem today is that almost nobody in any official position is willing to publically recognize the real nature of the problem we face and start talking about realistic solutions. So long as our elected officials and our media continue to speak endlessly about the recovery that is supposedly underway and continue to hold out the hope that, by voting for this or that candidate, all will be well, the great charade will continue and the people will get madder and madder.
The lack of realism on the part of those in a position to lead public opinion, and the endless repletion of fictions, such as the U.S. unemployment rate now being only 9.4 percent, has left open the door to what were once thought of as extremists to join the political debate and even the Congress. Proposals that are tantamount to national, or perhaps even global, suicide such as defaulting on the national debt, rolling back health care, or dropping environmental regulation are seriously debated as solutions to creating more jobs.
The real problem, of course, is that without a continually growing source of cheap and abundant energy, such as that provided by fossil fuels, there will never again be significant economic growth in the sense to which we have become accustomed. It is inevitable that we are all going to get much poorer, in a material sense, and this is the great secret of our age that so far few have had the courage to express. The easier path has been Keynesian stimulation of the economy, government bailouts of what were held to be key financial and industrial institutions, and tax cuts to mollify those who believe all problems stem from taxes. These measures were accompanied by endless expressions of hope that things would soon be better.
However, as the real economic situation continues to deteriorate in the midst of so little appreciation of why it is happening, frustrations with the political system grows and grows. In America, we have now had a run of well over 100 years with minimal domestic unrest on the scale of the Civil or Indian wars. This, however, may not continue to be the case much longer. As unemployment grows and people see the standards of living they have always known slipping away, their frustrations can take many forms. Last November as a nation we threw out dozens of politicians and replaced them with new faces equally devoid of any comprehension of the problem or what we as a nation will have to do next in order to survive, much less prosper.
Next year we will face another round of elections and all indications suggest that 20 odd months from now our economic situation will be materially worse and gasoline will be approaching unaffordability for many. While realism could surface in the intervening time, the odds are it won’t and next year we will be faced with a plethora of silly proposals to deal with imagined problems. As the situation deteriorates further however, some may see violence as the answer to their woes. So far in America violence against individual public officials has been perpetrated by individuals with mental problems or a cause to further. This may not always be the case.
As has been frequently noted by the media in recent days, the level of political discourse in America has been droping markedly in recent years and while no one of any stature seems to be openly advocating violence, some are getting mighty close. Another few years of economic stagnation and increasing unemployment could easily bring us to the point where the line will be crossed.
All this is by way of saying that there is a serious downside to simply ignoring the realities of the current situation and relying on hope rather than leveling with the American people. By failure to guide the country to real solutions to real problems, our leaders are risking increasing violence as the frustrations of an unknowing people continue to grow.
Peak Oil and Civil Unrest
Buried in the millions of words that were written about the shootings in Arizona last week was a recent poll showing that only 13 percent of the American people think favorably of the U.S. Congress. The implication, of course, is that as 87 percent or roughly 270 million Americans harbor some level of animosity towards their elected federal representatives, the emergence of people who believe that exercising their 2nd Amendment rights is solution to the nation’s woes is inevitable.
Why are so many, so mad at the Congress? The answer is simple – they have no idea what is happening to their lives. Since the beginning of the great recession way back in 2007 they have been told by two Presidents, their senior officials, 99 percent of the Congress, and most of the media that recovery was on the way and that prosperity would return shortly.
As unemployment in the U.S. grew and grew, every politician with a prayer of winning positioned him or herself as the “jobs” candidate who could and would get us all working at good high-paying jobs again. This of course has not returned and is unlikely to do so. We are not only contending with a growing debt bubble of gigantic proportions, we are also rapidly running out of the cheap, abundant energy that allowed us to be so prosperous for the last 200 years.
America’s problem today is that almost nobody in any official position is willing to publically recognize the real nature of the problem we face and start talking about realistic solutions. So long as our elected officials and our media continue to speak endlessly about the recovery that is supposedly underway and continue to hold out the hope that, by voting for this or that candidate, all will be well, the great charade will continue and the people will get madder and madder.
The lack of realism on the part of those in a position to lead public opinion, and the endless repletion of fictions, such as the U.S. unemployment rate now being only 9.4 percent, has left open the door to what were once thought of as extremists to join the political debate and even the Congress. Proposals that are tantamount to national, or perhaps even global, suicide such as defaulting on the national debt, rolling back health care, or dropping environmental regulation are seriously debated as solutions to creating more jobs.
The real problem, of course, is that without a continually growing source of cheap and abundant energy, such as that provided by fossil fuels, there will never again be significant economic growth in the sense to which we have become accustomed. It is inevitable that we are all going to get much poorer, in a material sense, and this is the great secret of our age that so far few have had the courage to express. The easier path has been Keynesian stimulation of the economy, government bailouts of what were held to be key financial and industrial institutions, and tax cuts to mollify those who believe all problems stem from taxes. These measures were accompanied by endless expressions of hope that things would soon be better.
However, as the real economic situation continues to deteriorate in the midst of so little appreciation of why it is happening, frustrations with the political system grows and grows. In America, we have now had a run of well over 100 years with minimal domestic unrest on the scale of the Civil or Indian wars. This, however, may not continue to be the case much longer. As unemployment grows and people see the standards of living they have always known slipping away, their frustrations can take many forms. Last November as a nation we threw out dozens of politicians and replaced them with new faces equally devoid of any comprehension of the problem or what we as a nation will have to do next in order to survive, much less prosper.
Next year we will face another round of elections and all indications suggest that 20 odd months from now our economic situation will be materially worse and gasoline will be approaching unaffordability for many. While realism could surface in the intervening time, the odds are it won’t and next year we will be faced with a plethora of silly proposals to deal with imagined problems. As the situation deteriorates further however, some may see violence as the answer to their woes. So far in America violence against individual public officials has been perpetrated by individuals with mental problems or a cause to further. This may not always be the case.
As has been frequently noted by the media in recent days, the level of political discourse in America has been droping markedly in recent years and while no one of any stature seems to be openly advocating violence, some are getting mighty close. Another few years of economic stagnation and increasing unemployment could easily bring us to the point where the line will be crossed.
All this is by way of saying that there is a serious downside to simply ignoring the realities of the current situation and relying on hope rather than leveling with the American people. By failure to guide the country to real solutions to real problems, our leaders are risking increasing violence as the frustrations of an unknowing people continue to grow.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
SC104-12
http://survivalacres.com/wordpress/
January 10, 2011
January 2010 - Global Signs Of Collapse Continue140 Views
Filed under: General, World Affairs, War, Terrorism, Tyranny, Collapse — admin @ 2:07 pm
Order volume for food orders continues to worsen in lock-step with global climate disasters and the national collapse news events.
Australia is having truly biblical-level flooding events only 1 month into their normal rainy season. Found over on Desdemona: Two You Tub Videos
These floods are coming on the heels of Pakistan’s massive flooding as extreme climatic events are intensifying.Some time back (this blog is over 5 years old) I wrote about how we would experience wider and wider weather extremes, and eventually, we would reach the point where we would all be having a tough time just trying to survive. This would also have a very real and dramatic effect on world / regional food supplies, prices and the economy. I think it is pretty safe to say that we have definitely arrived at that so-called ‘prediction’.It was just common sense, already charted in the increasing global temperatures and known effects that this would cause. Climate change has long been known to last for several thousand years into our future, but better science and better data is making these ‘predictions’ more and more accurate all of the time.Greenland’s ice melt is dramatically intensifying, and is considered by scientist completely irreversible, as are the melting glaciers all over the world. These are not processes that can be easily reversed by humans, or in reality, reversed at all by humans. The geological time scale involved is way beyond human ability to reverse. The outflow of methane from the Siberian permafrost and the Arctic also continues to increase, creating truly “trigger events” that depict irreversible global warming and even more climatic extremes ahead.Life on earth for all living beings is going to be increasingly difficult, this is now an absolute certainty. The only thing we do not know is how difficult, but a number of studies have been performed showing that most inhabitable regions of the Earth will experience extreme climatic events, with many of these regions becoming totally uninhabitable.The inexorable rise of C02 cannot be ignored as this video shows: Another You Tube Video
There is staggeringly clear evidence that humans have created truly inhospitable conditions on Earth for many, many generations to come — and yet this is still being widely denied because of our incredible short-sightedness and arrogance (hubris). It is as if “until it happens to you” that the climatic extremes don’t carry any true weight or meaning. As long as the trucks continue to run and stock the supermarkets and big box store shelves, we simply don’t care how we have treated the planet, or what sort of horrifying inheritance we have given to our children and grandchildren.
Sigh…. I’ve harped on this theme again and again, and believe me, I do realize the sheer futility of telling it like it is. We are not going to make any of the critical changes to our lifestyles and living habits that are necessary in time, and indeed I believe it is far too late already. We are all, every single one of us, living on the last dregs of a once-abundant Earth and the resources that were so easy for us to plunder. We did so with abandon, a truly “the devil be damned” approach to getting as much as we could for ourselves, ignoring the ancient wisdom of indigenous societies around the world that rightly decried our unbelievable greed and arrogance as we turned their carbon-sinks into carbon dumps, desertifying and polluting entire landscapes for thousands of years to come.
It is NOT going to help us now to provide “more proof” and “more evidence” as our corporate-based dominionist culture is so indoctrinated into our lifestyles and ingrained into our way of thinking that anything that refutes this rapacious belief system is instantly denied and rejected. A “kill the messenger” attitude is being widely sponsored by the ignorant and even the informed, because the maintaining the status-quo is the unthinking and irresponsible oft-held “solution”.Of course, this in is itself absolutely ridiculous, if the status-quo hasn’t worked up until this point, what makes anyone in their right mind think it will suddenly work now? The truth is nothing will now work, and I mean nothing and avoid collapse. We’ve already written the next several chapters, indeed entire volumes of the future human history on this planet already, but most of us are simply too ignorant to realize this. Not everyone of course, but the critical mass of humanity that refuses to comprehend the truly horrifying scale of events that lie ahead for all of us.
Many try to escape into alternative realities, through religion, new age movements or alternative belief systems, all with escape valves being “built-in” to these alternative realities that foster the illusion that we’re going to get out of this mess, somehow, someway. Either a magical rescue from above or a magical transformation of humanity from within that “remakes” us somehow into what we are truly destined to “be”.It’s all hogwash, every bit of it. If you want to know what we are, and what we will be, just go look into the mirror. Or walk through a crowd. Or sit in the mall and people watch. Or attend any sporting event stadium. Or witness the flocking of humans to televisions, theaters and entertainment venues. Sit in a restaurant or at the bar, and observer. Take any Hollywood program, from sitcom to drama and you will very quickly realize what we are and are “destined to be”. Our future outcome is written right there in the script being played out every single day. I find this all so obvious that I can barely make myself make mention of it.There will be no magical rescue of any sort, at any time. Any student or study of history can attest to this as a well-established fact — not one single civilization before us was rescued (ever). All either collapsed or were wiped out (same thing) or devastated their environment so badly that the few survivors left had to relocate.We may harbor fanciful illusions of “rescue”, but the truth is already evident. We are here for the duration, long or short, and can only survive here as long as the planet still remains hospitable to life (all life, not just human life). Because we are now truly a global civilization and a terrifying global force capable of extinguishing all life very rapidly, we need to realize just how precarious our situation has now become. But more then just “realize” this, we need to finally live as if life on Earth is a valuable gift to be cherished and protected, but not raped, plundered and consumed with total disregard. But this is not happening.I’ve also shared my thoughts on how there would be a massive increase in state-sponsored terrorism as governments turn inward against their own citizens. Any transgression to state control would be swiftly and brutally oppressed. This too was self-evident as the fear-state ratchets up higher and higher, manufacturing a state of paranoia and media sponsored fear-mongering. The true terrorists were those who were creating this artificial environment and belief system, the actual number of real terrorists events were unbelievably minuscule, far less dangerous to any American then the risk of simply walking across a busy street.There was also the auspicious “timing” of certain events that seemed to come just at the appropriate time to gain passage of draconian legislation and political rhetoric. The number of these events and government sponsored bills trying to get passed boggled the mind, but the sleeping public bought it all, hook, line and sinker. Having landed their fatted carp with gaping mouths and sluggish world-views, it was an easy thing to mold them even further into accepting two regional wars, global state-sponsored terrorism and torture, prison camps and renditions, and even the outright assassination of anyone, including Americans that were deemed “enemy combatants” with no proof or evidence required.
This is of course, a situation that continues to exist today, with the nanny state and “Big Sis” reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984 now firmly entrenched into the American psyche and consciousness. I mean, you truly cannot get away from this anywhere as they sniff our underwear and finger our wives and daughters at those places they call “security checkpoints”. Florida is now gathering DNA evidence at mandatory roadblocks, the so-called “sobriety checkpoints” where a judge is now on site in order to issue instant search warrants should anyone refuse. The DNA collected will now go into government databases for life. God forbid you sell some of your useless junk at a garage sale and two years later this shows up at the scene of a crime with your DNA still on it.
Amerika has become a helpless, pathetic country of dumbed-down sheeple, too afraid and too indoctrinated to even begin to comprehend their programmed slavery and support to state-sponsored terrorism. And then we get the blue-moon events of irate Americans who fly their planes into an IRS building or go on a shooting rampage in total but misguided event of frustration and anger, and the rest of us just brace for more draconian bullshit from do-gooder politicians that are convinced that the pathways that they are carving “are for our own good”.
Well, no thank you, I’m not that stupid, and the truth is quite the opposite as I have long shared.Freedom, true freedom carries inherent risks. It does not require or need or justify whatsoever the nanny state underwear sniffers. It does not need or want surveillance cameras on every street corner, or Wi-Fi eavesdropping on every home or coffee shop. It does not believe that surveillance drones and cell phone eavesdropping is even remotely justified or necessary. The truth is quite the opposite, real terrorism in this country is nearly non-existent as revealed in the Foreign Policy, but the multi-billion dollar inflated budgets of the so-called “security state” being developed, the nanny-state crackdown on Americans is not about terrorism at all, it is about the total control of the Amerikan population.
Like the war on terror, targets must be identified. And if they cannot be readily identified, they must be created, to justify the very existence of the entities (and budgets) involved. Any casual search of history will reveal America’s support for Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden and a large number of other notable “terrorists” sponsored by America. A slightly deeper examination will even show CIA support for the so-called terrorists training camps, and of course, especially that notorious American example, the School of the Americas where assassins are trained right here. Hey, if you can’t find them, then make some!
The FBI has been taking lessons here too, funding, training and encouraging deranged individuals around the country to plan “actions”, even giving out real explosives to kill Americans, but has yet to achieve the same level of truly stupid notoriety given to the CIA. It’s not called entrapment when it is the government itself that encourages you to attack someone, it’s called Homeland Security. Nor is it called torture when brutal methods are used on the accused without evidence, this is called National Security.
The security card has been so badly overplayed by these morons that anybody that falls for this deserves my loathing and disrespect. I have NEVER been at risk from terrorists in this country, but am constantly imperiled by these so-called protectors who are convinced that bombs may be found in my underwear or hidden in my socks. The TSA has not caught a single terrorist — or stopped a single plot, but this simple fact remains ignored by tens of millions of sheep.
Of course, I don’t fly and never, ever will as a useless protest to this stupid insanity going on at airports all over the country. But then again, I don’t have to. If I did, I’d change careers in an instant, and refuse to give any credence to the nanny-state protectors that are often-as-not, uncovered to be pedophiles and rapists. Some “security” we have there, where even their own background checks put criminals in charge of our protection.America has become a nation of dumbed down, shaking-in-their-boots sheep, with their wool pulled up tight around their own eyes. They refuse to see what we have become and where we are going, and they are quite willing to believe anything that they are told. The outcome of all this was also predicted — a massive police-state surveillance society, the likes of which the world has never seen before. We have already surpassed the crimes of Nazi Germany — we export our torture with the approval and support of governments around the world, we bomb whatever countries we damned well please and there is none to put a stop to any of it. Our drones now circle the globe and are even being used against Americans right here in this nation. But the sheep doze on, oblivious and uncaring in the slightest as the tiny shreds of privacy and freedom they have left are vaporized.
Our technological prowess means we can watch everybody, everywhere, all of the time, especially in the digital world where cell phone, Internet, email, faxes, credit card transactions and even GPS systems all entermesh nicely together to give a total picture over an individual life. If you ever want to know “how come” they can find out so much so fast about the figures popping up into the news it is because of this. They are either already tracking everything or have the ability to uncover all the sordid details that they might possibly want.Our complicit media is either too afraid or too stupid to report what really causes dissent abroad and here at home, we already know for certain that they are working in league with whatever they’re being told to report as “news”. Embedded journalism is the same thing as saying “we’re one of you” with all of its brutality, coverup and corruption as any gangster-led organization.
The sum total of all this is is we are all facing “extreme events” of such magnitude and scale that “coping” will no longer be appropriate terminology, whereas “survival” will be. Ask anybody that has endured any of these events — survival is their #1 thought and how to live through what is happening to them.
I’ve written extensively about personal collapse and how we have engineered the majority of these events right into our way of life. We created them, deliberately and with forethought and a whole lot of arrogance and indifference, but still, these things remain ours and we absolutely must own up to them. Every single grassroot movement in this entire country has been co-opted and derailed from accomplishing any meaningful reform and what lies ahead now only promises to be even worse. I cannot offer anyone any “hope” that restoration, restitution and deregulation will even exist within our lifetimes, there is no evidence at all in my book that we are going to make things even slightly better. The downward slide on the environment, the economy, freedom, tyranny, terrorism and state control is ever-downward with literally no end in sight.
Frankly, I suspect “we ain’t seen nothing yet” to be honest, because the bottom is still a long ways off and I suspect things will get dramatically worse long before we can ever hope for things to get better. You can’t take a grossly overpopulated and polluted, plundered planet existing on limited resources and expect any sort of magical or “legislated” turn-around. Realize that politicians are NEVER the answer and why they cannot fix anything. Our culture was the only answer their ever was, but this is like trying to explain greed to a Wall Street banker. Our corporate-controlled world simply has no interest whatsoever ensuring a habitable future, the instant gratification and profit-motives dominate all else.
So there you have it, again — the ongoing decline of Planet Earth, the Amerikan Empire and the future of man. This is exactly what I shared in the 2010-2020 predictions, my half-attempt to lay it all out there and what I think can happen in our collective futures.
2011 will be bad. The only thing you can do is assess your own life and make the necessary changes for your adaptation and survival. Don’t look for any rescue from government, politicians, religion or pie-in-the-sky answers, they won’t be forthcoming. Do what you can to help yourself because quite frankly, nobody else will do this for you.
January 10, 2011
January 2010 - Global Signs Of Collapse Continue140 Views
Filed under: General, World Affairs, War, Terrorism, Tyranny, Collapse — admin @ 2:07 pm
Order volume for food orders continues to worsen in lock-step with global climate disasters and the national collapse news events.
Australia is having truly biblical-level flooding events only 1 month into their normal rainy season. Found over on Desdemona: Two You Tub Videos
These floods are coming on the heels of Pakistan’s massive flooding as extreme climatic events are intensifying.Some time back (this blog is over 5 years old) I wrote about how we would experience wider and wider weather extremes, and eventually, we would reach the point where we would all be having a tough time just trying to survive. This would also have a very real and dramatic effect on world / regional food supplies, prices and the economy. I think it is pretty safe to say that we have definitely arrived at that so-called ‘prediction’.It was just common sense, already charted in the increasing global temperatures and known effects that this would cause. Climate change has long been known to last for several thousand years into our future, but better science and better data is making these ‘predictions’ more and more accurate all of the time.Greenland’s ice melt is dramatically intensifying, and is considered by scientist completely irreversible, as are the melting glaciers all over the world. These are not processes that can be easily reversed by humans, or in reality, reversed at all by humans. The geological time scale involved is way beyond human ability to reverse. The outflow of methane from the Siberian permafrost and the Arctic also continues to increase, creating truly “trigger events” that depict irreversible global warming and even more climatic extremes ahead.Life on earth for all living beings is going to be increasingly difficult, this is now an absolute certainty. The only thing we do not know is how difficult, but a number of studies have been performed showing that most inhabitable regions of the Earth will experience extreme climatic events, with many of these regions becoming totally uninhabitable.The inexorable rise of C02 cannot be ignored as this video shows: Another You Tube Video
There is staggeringly clear evidence that humans have created truly inhospitable conditions on Earth for many, many generations to come — and yet this is still being widely denied because of our incredible short-sightedness and arrogance (hubris). It is as if “until it happens to you” that the climatic extremes don’t carry any true weight or meaning. As long as the trucks continue to run and stock the supermarkets and big box store shelves, we simply don’t care how we have treated the planet, or what sort of horrifying inheritance we have given to our children and grandchildren.
Sigh…. I’ve harped on this theme again and again, and believe me, I do realize the sheer futility of telling it like it is. We are not going to make any of the critical changes to our lifestyles and living habits that are necessary in time, and indeed I believe it is far too late already. We are all, every single one of us, living on the last dregs of a once-abundant Earth and the resources that were so easy for us to plunder. We did so with abandon, a truly “the devil be damned” approach to getting as much as we could for ourselves, ignoring the ancient wisdom of indigenous societies around the world that rightly decried our unbelievable greed and arrogance as we turned their carbon-sinks into carbon dumps, desertifying and polluting entire landscapes for thousands of years to come.
It is NOT going to help us now to provide “more proof” and “more evidence” as our corporate-based dominionist culture is so indoctrinated into our lifestyles and ingrained into our way of thinking that anything that refutes this rapacious belief system is instantly denied and rejected. A “kill the messenger” attitude is being widely sponsored by the ignorant and even the informed, because the maintaining the status-quo is the unthinking and irresponsible oft-held “solution”.Of course, this in is itself absolutely ridiculous, if the status-quo hasn’t worked up until this point, what makes anyone in their right mind think it will suddenly work now? The truth is nothing will now work, and I mean nothing and avoid collapse. We’ve already written the next several chapters, indeed entire volumes of the future human history on this planet already, but most of us are simply too ignorant to realize this. Not everyone of course, but the critical mass of humanity that refuses to comprehend the truly horrifying scale of events that lie ahead for all of us.
Many try to escape into alternative realities, through religion, new age movements or alternative belief systems, all with escape valves being “built-in” to these alternative realities that foster the illusion that we’re going to get out of this mess, somehow, someway. Either a magical rescue from above or a magical transformation of humanity from within that “remakes” us somehow into what we are truly destined to “be”.It’s all hogwash, every bit of it. If you want to know what we are, and what we will be, just go look into the mirror. Or walk through a crowd. Or sit in the mall and people watch. Or attend any sporting event stadium. Or witness the flocking of humans to televisions, theaters and entertainment venues. Sit in a restaurant or at the bar, and observer. Take any Hollywood program, from sitcom to drama and you will very quickly realize what we are and are “destined to be”. Our future outcome is written right there in the script being played out every single day. I find this all so obvious that I can barely make myself make mention of it.There will be no magical rescue of any sort, at any time. Any student or study of history can attest to this as a well-established fact — not one single civilization before us was rescued (ever). All either collapsed or were wiped out (same thing) or devastated their environment so badly that the few survivors left had to relocate.We may harbor fanciful illusions of “rescue”, but the truth is already evident. We are here for the duration, long or short, and can only survive here as long as the planet still remains hospitable to life (all life, not just human life). Because we are now truly a global civilization and a terrifying global force capable of extinguishing all life very rapidly, we need to realize just how precarious our situation has now become. But more then just “realize” this, we need to finally live as if life on Earth is a valuable gift to be cherished and protected, but not raped, plundered and consumed with total disregard. But this is not happening.I’ve also shared my thoughts on how there would be a massive increase in state-sponsored terrorism as governments turn inward against their own citizens. Any transgression to state control would be swiftly and brutally oppressed. This too was self-evident as the fear-state ratchets up higher and higher, manufacturing a state of paranoia and media sponsored fear-mongering. The true terrorists were those who were creating this artificial environment and belief system, the actual number of real terrorists events were unbelievably minuscule, far less dangerous to any American then the risk of simply walking across a busy street.There was also the auspicious “timing” of certain events that seemed to come just at the appropriate time to gain passage of draconian legislation and political rhetoric. The number of these events and government sponsored bills trying to get passed boggled the mind, but the sleeping public bought it all, hook, line and sinker. Having landed their fatted carp with gaping mouths and sluggish world-views, it was an easy thing to mold them even further into accepting two regional wars, global state-sponsored terrorism and torture, prison camps and renditions, and even the outright assassination of anyone, including Americans that were deemed “enemy combatants” with no proof or evidence required.
This is of course, a situation that continues to exist today, with the nanny state and “Big Sis” reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984 now firmly entrenched into the American psyche and consciousness. I mean, you truly cannot get away from this anywhere as they sniff our underwear and finger our wives and daughters at those places they call “security checkpoints”. Florida is now gathering DNA evidence at mandatory roadblocks, the so-called “sobriety checkpoints” where a judge is now on site in order to issue instant search warrants should anyone refuse. The DNA collected will now go into government databases for life. God forbid you sell some of your useless junk at a garage sale and two years later this shows up at the scene of a crime with your DNA still on it.
Amerika has become a helpless, pathetic country of dumbed-down sheeple, too afraid and too indoctrinated to even begin to comprehend their programmed slavery and support to state-sponsored terrorism. And then we get the blue-moon events of irate Americans who fly their planes into an IRS building or go on a shooting rampage in total but misguided event of frustration and anger, and the rest of us just brace for more draconian bullshit from do-gooder politicians that are convinced that the pathways that they are carving “are for our own good”.
Well, no thank you, I’m not that stupid, and the truth is quite the opposite as I have long shared.Freedom, true freedom carries inherent risks. It does not require or need or justify whatsoever the nanny state underwear sniffers. It does not need or want surveillance cameras on every street corner, or Wi-Fi eavesdropping on every home or coffee shop. It does not believe that surveillance drones and cell phone eavesdropping is even remotely justified or necessary. The truth is quite the opposite, real terrorism in this country is nearly non-existent as revealed in the Foreign Policy, but the multi-billion dollar inflated budgets of the so-called “security state” being developed, the nanny-state crackdown on Americans is not about terrorism at all, it is about the total control of the Amerikan population.
Like the war on terror, targets must be identified. And if they cannot be readily identified, they must be created, to justify the very existence of the entities (and budgets) involved. Any casual search of history will reveal America’s support for Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden and a large number of other notable “terrorists” sponsored by America. A slightly deeper examination will even show CIA support for the so-called terrorists training camps, and of course, especially that notorious American example, the School of the Americas where assassins are trained right here. Hey, if you can’t find them, then make some!
The FBI has been taking lessons here too, funding, training and encouraging deranged individuals around the country to plan “actions”, even giving out real explosives to kill Americans, but has yet to achieve the same level of truly stupid notoriety given to the CIA. It’s not called entrapment when it is the government itself that encourages you to attack someone, it’s called Homeland Security. Nor is it called torture when brutal methods are used on the accused without evidence, this is called National Security.
The security card has been so badly overplayed by these morons that anybody that falls for this deserves my loathing and disrespect. I have NEVER been at risk from terrorists in this country, but am constantly imperiled by these so-called protectors who are convinced that bombs may be found in my underwear or hidden in my socks. The TSA has not caught a single terrorist — or stopped a single plot, but this simple fact remains ignored by tens of millions of sheep.
Of course, I don’t fly and never, ever will as a useless protest to this stupid insanity going on at airports all over the country. But then again, I don’t have to. If I did, I’d change careers in an instant, and refuse to give any credence to the nanny-state protectors that are often-as-not, uncovered to be pedophiles and rapists. Some “security” we have there, where even their own background checks put criminals in charge of our protection.America has become a nation of dumbed down, shaking-in-their-boots sheep, with their wool pulled up tight around their own eyes. They refuse to see what we have become and where we are going, and they are quite willing to believe anything that they are told. The outcome of all this was also predicted — a massive police-state surveillance society, the likes of which the world has never seen before. We have already surpassed the crimes of Nazi Germany — we export our torture with the approval and support of governments around the world, we bomb whatever countries we damned well please and there is none to put a stop to any of it. Our drones now circle the globe and are even being used against Americans right here in this nation. But the sheep doze on, oblivious and uncaring in the slightest as the tiny shreds of privacy and freedom they have left are vaporized.
Our technological prowess means we can watch everybody, everywhere, all of the time, especially in the digital world where cell phone, Internet, email, faxes, credit card transactions and even GPS systems all entermesh nicely together to give a total picture over an individual life. If you ever want to know “how come” they can find out so much so fast about the figures popping up into the news it is because of this. They are either already tracking everything or have the ability to uncover all the sordid details that they might possibly want.Our complicit media is either too afraid or too stupid to report what really causes dissent abroad and here at home, we already know for certain that they are working in league with whatever they’re being told to report as “news”. Embedded journalism is the same thing as saying “we’re one of you” with all of its brutality, coverup and corruption as any gangster-led organization.
The sum total of all this is is we are all facing “extreme events” of such magnitude and scale that “coping” will no longer be appropriate terminology, whereas “survival” will be. Ask anybody that has endured any of these events — survival is their #1 thought and how to live through what is happening to them.
I’ve written extensively about personal collapse and how we have engineered the majority of these events right into our way of life. We created them, deliberately and with forethought and a whole lot of arrogance and indifference, but still, these things remain ours and we absolutely must own up to them. Every single grassroot movement in this entire country has been co-opted and derailed from accomplishing any meaningful reform and what lies ahead now only promises to be even worse. I cannot offer anyone any “hope” that restoration, restitution and deregulation will even exist within our lifetimes, there is no evidence at all in my book that we are going to make things even slightly better. The downward slide on the environment, the economy, freedom, tyranny, terrorism and state control is ever-downward with literally no end in sight.
Frankly, I suspect “we ain’t seen nothing yet” to be honest, because the bottom is still a long ways off and I suspect things will get dramatically worse long before we can ever hope for things to get better. You can’t take a grossly overpopulated and polluted, plundered planet existing on limited resources and expect any sort of magical or “legislated” turn-around. Realize that politicians are NEVER the answer and why they cannot fix anything. Our culture was the only answer their ever was, but this is like trying to explain greed to a Wall Street banker. Our corporate-controlled world simply has no interest whatsoever ensuring a habitable future, the instant gratification and profit-motives dominate all else.
So there you have it, again — the ongoing decline of Planet Earth, the Amerikan Empire and the future of man. This is exactly what I shared in the 2010-2020 predictions, my half-attempt to lay it all out there and what I think can happen in our collective futures.
2011 will be bad. The only thing you can do is assess your own life and make the necessary changes for your adaptation and survival. Don’t look for any rescue from government, politicians, religion or pie-in-the-sky answers, they won’t be forthcoming. Do what you can to help yourself because quite frankly, nobody else will do this for you.
Monday, January 10, 2011
SC104-11
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/6052
The Tyranny of Entitlement
I’M CONTINUALLY stunned by how many seemingly sane people believe you can have infinite economic growth on a finite planet. Perpetual economic growth and its cousin, limitless technological expansion, are beliefs so deeply held by so many in this culture that they often go entirely unquestioned. Even more disturbing is the fact that these beliefs are somehow seen as the ultimate definition of what it is to be human: perpetual economic growth and limitless technological expansion are what we do.
Some of those who believe in perpetual growth are out-and-out nut jobs, like the economist and former White House advisor Julian Simon, who said, “We have in our hands now—actually in our libraries-—the technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next 7 billion years.” And showing that, when it comes to U.S. economic policies, insanity is never out of season, are yet more nut jobs, like Lawrence Summers, who has served as chief economist at the World Bank, U.S. secretary of the treasury, president of Harvard, and as President Obama’s director of the National Economic Council, and who said, “There are no . . . limits to the carrying capacity of the earth that are likely to bind at any time in the foreseeable future. . . . The idea that we should put limits on growth because of some natural limit is a profound error.”
Others are a bit more nuanced in their nut-jobbery. They may acknowledge that, yes, physical limits might possibly exist, but they also believe that if you just slap the word sustainable in front of the phrase “economic growth,” then you can still somehow have continued growth on a finite planet, perhaps through so-called “soft” or “service” or “high-tech” economies, or through nifty “green” innovations like a really neat nanotech gizmo that can be woven into your clothes and when you dance it generates enough electricity to power your iPod, ignoring the facts that people still need to eat, that humans have overshot carrying capacity and are systematically destroying the natural world, and that even something as groovy as an iPod requires mining, industrial, and energy infrastructures, all of which are functionally unsustainable.
Alongside the nut jobs, there are an awful lot of people who probably just don’t think about it: they simply absorb the perspective of the newscasters who say, “Economic growth, good; economic stagnation, bad.” And of course if you care more about the economic system than life on the planet, this is true. If, however, you care more about life than the economic system, it is not quite so true, because this economic system must constantly increase production to grow, and what, after all, is production? It is the conversion of the living to the dead, the conversion of living forests into two-by-fours, living rivers into stagnant pools for generating hydroelectricity, living fish into fish sticks, and ultimately all of these into money. And what, then, is gross national product? It is a measure of this conversion of the living to the dead. The more quickly the living world is converted into dead products, the higher the GNP. These simple equations are complicated by the fact that when GNP goes down, people often lose jobs. No wonder the world is getting killed.
Once a people have committed (or enslaved) themselves to a growth economy, they’ve pretty much committed themselves to a perpetual war economy, because in order to maintain this growth, they will have to continue to colonize an ever-wider swath of the planet and exploit its inhabitants. I’m sure you can see the problem this presents on a finite planet. But in the short run, there is good news for those committed to a growth economy (and bad news for everyone else), which is that by converting your landbase into weapons (for example, cutting down trees to build warships), you gain a short-term competitive advantage over those peoples who live sustainably, and you can steal their land and overuse it to fuel your perpetual-growth economy. As for those whose land you’ve stolen, well, you can either massacre these newly conquered peoples, enslave them, or (most often forcibly) assimilate them into your growth economy. Usually it’s some combination of all three. The massacre of the bison, to present just one example, was necessary to destroy the Plains Indians’ traditional way of life and force them to at least somewhat assimilate (and become dependent upon the growth economy instead of the land for their very lives). The bad news for those committed to a growth economy is that it’s essentially a dead-end street: once you’ve overshot your home’s carrying capacity, you have only two choices: keep living beyond the means of the planet until your culture collapses; or proactively elect to give up the benefits you gained from the conquest in order to save your culture.
A perpetual-growth economy is not only insane (and impossible), it is also by its very essence abusive, by which I mean that it’s based on the same conceit as more personal forms of abuse. It is, in fact, the macroeconomic enshrinement of abusive behavior. The guiding principle of abusive behavior is that the abuser refuses to respect or abide by limits or boundaries put up by the victim. As Lundy Bancroft, former codirector of Emerge, the nation’s first therapeutic program for abusive men, writes, “Entitlement is the abuser’s belief that he has a special status and that it provides him with exclusive rights and privileges that do not apply to his partner. The attitudes that drive abuse can largely be summarized by this one word.”
The relevance of this word applies on the larger social scale. Of course humans are a special species to whom a wise and omnipotent God has granted the exclusive rights and privileges of dominion over this planet that is here for us to use. And of course even if you subscribe to the religion of Science instead of Christianity, humans possess special intelligence and abilities that grant us exclusive rights and privileges to work our will on the world that is still here for us to use. Growth economies are essentially unchecked and will push past any boundaries set up by anyone other than the perpetrators: certainly the fact that indigenous cultures already are living on this or that piece of ground has never stopped those in power from expanding their economy; nor is the death of the oceans stopping their exploitation; nor is the heating of the planet stopping the exploitation; nor is the grinding poverty of the dispossessed.
And the truth is, you cannot talk abusers out of their behavior. Perpetrators of domestic violence are among the most intractable of all who commit violence, so intractable, in fact, that in 2000 the United Kingdom removed funding for therapy sessions designed to treat men guilty of domestic violence (putting the money instead into shelters and other means of keeping women safe from their attackers). Lundy Bancroft also says this: “An abuser doesn’t change because he feels guilty or gets sober or finds God. He doesn’t change after seeing the fear in his children’s eyes or feeling them drift away from him. It doesn’t suddenly dawn on him that his partner deserves better treatment. Because of his self-focus, combined with the many rewards he gets from controlling you, an abuser changes only when he feels he has to, so the most important element in creating a context for change in an abuser is placing him in a situation where he has no other choice.”
How do we stop the abusers who perpetrate a perpetual-growth economy? Seeing oiled pelicans and burned sea turtles won’t move them to stop. Nor will hundred-degree days in Moscow. We can’t stop them by making them feel guilty. We can’t stop them by appealing to them to do the right thing. The only way to stop them is to make it so they have no other choice.
The Tyranny of Entitlement
I’M CONTINUALLY stunned by how many seemingly sane people believe you can have infinite economic growth on a finite planet. Perpetual economic growth and its cousin, limitless technological expansion, are beliefs so deeply held by so many in this culture that they often go entirely unquestioned. Even more disturbing is the fact that these beliefs are somehow seen as the ultimate definition of what it is to be human: perpetual economic growth and limitless technological expansion are what we do.
Some of those who believe in perpetual growth are out-and-out nut jobs, like the economist and former White House advisor Julian Simon, who said, “We have in our hands now—actually in our libraries-—the technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next 7 billion years.” And showing that, when it comes to U.S. economic policies, insanity is never out of season, are yet more nut jobs, like Lawrence Summers, who has served as chief economist at the World Bank, U.S. secretary of the treasury, president of Harvard, and as President Obama’s director of the National Economic Council, and who said, “There are no . . . limits to the carrying capacity of the earth that are likely to bind at any time in the foreseeable future. . . . The idea that we should put limits on growth because of some natural limit is a profound error.”
Others are a bit more nuanced in their nut-jobbery. They may acknowledge that, yes, physical limits might possibly exist, but they also believe that if you just slap the word sustainable in front of the phrase “economic growth,” then you can still somehow have continued growth on a finite planet, perhaps through so-called “soft” or “service” or “high-tech” economies, or through nifty “green” innovations like a really neat nanotech gizmo that can be woven into your clothes and when you dance it generates enough electricity to power your iPod, ignoring the facts that people still need to eat, that humans have overshot carrying capacity and are systematically destroying the natural world, and that even something as groovy as an iPod requires mining, industrial, and energy infrastructures, all of which are functionally unsustainable.
Alongside the nut jobs, there are an awful lot of people who probably just don’t think about it: they simply absorb the perspective of the newscasters who say, “Economic growth, good; economic stagnation, bad.” And of course if you care more about the economic system than life on the planet, this is true. If, however, you care more about life than the economic system, it is not quite so true, because this economic system must constantly increase production to grow, and what, after all, is production? It is the conversion of the living to the dead, the conversion of living forests into two-by-fours, living rivers into stagnant pools for generating hydroelectricity, living fish into fish sticks, and ultimately all of these into money. And what, then, is gross national product? It is a measure of this conversion of the living to the dead. The more quickly the living world is converted into dead products, the higher the GNP. These simple equations are complicated by the fact that when GNP goes down, people often lose jobs. No wonder the world is getting killed.
Once a people have committed (or enslaved) themselves to a growth economy, they’ve pretty much committed themselves to a perpetual war economy, because in order to maintain this growth, they will have to continue to colonize an ever-wider swath of the planet and exploit its inhabitants. I’m sure you can see the problem this presents on a finite planet. But in the short run, there is good news for those committed to a growth economy (and bad news for everyone else), which is that by converting your landbase into weapons (for example, cutting down trees to build warships), you gain a short-term competitive advantage over those peoples who live sustainably, and you can steal their land and overuse it to fuel your perpetual-growth economy. As for those whose land you’ve stolen, well, you can either massacre these newly conquered peoples, enslave them, or (most often forcibly) assimilate them into your growth economy. Usually it’s some combination of all three. The massacre of the bison, to present just one example, was necessary to destroy the Plains Indians’ traditional way of life and force them to at least somewhat assimilate (and become dependent upon the growth economy instead of the land for their very lives). The bad news for those committed to a growth economy is that it’s essentially a dead-end street: once you’ve overshot your home’s carrying capacity, you have only two choices: keep living beyond the means of the planet until your culture collapses; or proactively elect to give up the benefits you gained from the conquest in order to save your culture.
A perpetual-growth economy is not only insane (and impossible), it is also by its very essence abusive, by which I mean that it’s based on the same conceit as more personal forms of abuse. It is, in fact, the macroeconomic enshrinement of abusive behavior. The guiding principle of abusive behavior is that the abuser refuses to respect or abide by limits or boundaries put up by the victim. As Lundy Bancroft, former codirector of Emerge, the nation’s first therapeutic program for abusive men, writes, “Entitlement is the abuser’s belief that he has a special status and that it provides him with exclusive rights and privileges that do not apply to his partner. The attitudes that drive abuse can largely be summarized by this one word.”
The relevance of this word applies on the larger social scale. Of course humans are a special species to whom a wise and omnipotent God has granted the exclusive rights and privileges of dominion over this planet that is here for us to use. And of course even if you subscribe to the religion of Science instead of Christianity, humans possess special intelligence and abilities that grant us exclusive rights and privileges to work our will on the world that is still here for us to use. Growth economies are essentially unchecked and will push past any boundaries set up by anyone other than the perpetrators: certainly the fact that indigenous cultures already are living on this or that piece of ground has never stopped those in power from expanding their economy; nor is the death of the oceans stopping their exploitation; nor is the heating of the planet stopping the exploitation; nor is the grinding poverty of the dispossessed.
And the truth is, you cannot talk abusers out of their behavior. Perpetrators of domestic violence are among the most intractable of all who commit violence, so intractable, in fact, that in 2000 the United Kingdom removed funding for therapy sessions designed to treat men guilty of domestic violence (putting the money instead into shelters and other means of keeping women safe from their attackers). Lundy Bancroft also says this: “An abuser doesn’t change because he feels guilty or gets sober or finds God. He doesn’t change after seeing the fear in his children’s eyes or feeling them drift away from him. It doesn’t suddenly dawn on him that his partner deserves better treatment. Because of his self-focus, combined with the many rewards he gets from controlling you, an abuser changes only when he feels he has to, so the most important element in creating a context for change in an abuser is placing him in a situation where he has no other choice.”
How do we stop the abusers who perpetrate a perpetual-growth economy? Seeing oiled pelicans and burned sea turtles won’t move them to stop. Nor will hundred-degree days in Moscow. We can’t stop them by making them feel guilty. We can’t stop them by appealing to them to do the right thing. The only way to stop them is to make it so they have no other choice.
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
SC104-10
http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/david-korten/the-missing-vision
The Missing Vision: A New Agenda For A New Economy
Few and fortunate are those whose lives have not been directly touched by the 2008 Wall Street meltdown and its consequences. People want to understand what went wrong and how we can set it right. Yet the public commentary continues to center primarily on finger-pointing. Who knew what when? Which regulators were asleep at the switch, and why?
Most calls for action seek only to limit the excesses and deceptions of greedy bankers and complicit regulators. We have yet to engage in a much-needed national conversation that addresses essential, yet unasked, questions. For example:
Do Wall Street institutions do anything so vital for the national interest as to justify opening the national purse strings and showering them with trillions of dollars in order to save them from the consequences of their own excess?
Is it possible that the whole Wall Street edifice is built on an illusion that has no substance yet carries deadly economic, social, and environmental consequences for the larger society?
Might there be other ways to provide necessary and beneficial financial services with greater effectiveness and at less cost?
The true alternative to Wall Street capitalism is a system of locally rooted, self-reliant economies that honor true market principles.
Ultimately, it comes down to a question of the values we believe the economy should serve. Should it give priority to money, or to life? To the fortunes of the few, or the well-being of all?
The existing Wall Street-led economy is highly effective and efficient at converting real living wealth to phantom financial wealth to make rich people richer. It is a path to collective suicide.
Our future and that of our children depend on replacing the values and institutions of the Wall Street economy with the culture and institutions of a New Economy designed to provide an adequate and satisfying livelihood for all people in balanced relationship to Earth’s biosphere.I believe that an honest public examination of these questions will lead to a unifying national political consensus that Wall Street institutions produce nothing of value to the society and fulfill no need not better served in other ways. They can and should be replaced with institutions that act like mature, caring adults and serve real needs in ways appropriate to the realities of the twenty-first century.
We cannot, however, simply let the Wall Street financial institutions collapse, as would have happened in 2008 without the federal bailout. Wall Street controls the creation and flow of the money that facilitates the economic transactions on which we depend for meeting most all our material needs. If its institutions suddenly shut down with no alternative in place, we would be left only the money in our pockets and instantly reduced to barter for most essentials of daily life, including food and water.
The process of shutting down Wall Street properly proceeds in parallel with action to put in place the institutions of a New Economy, including a new system for creating and allocating national currencies in ways more responsive to society’s needs.
Building Community: An Economic Approach: David Korten: What economic transformation has to do with building stronger, happier communities.
Leadership for institutional transformation rarely comes from within the institutions of Empire, which bring special privilege to the few and hardship to the many. It invariably comes from authentic grassroots movements that self-organize from outside the establishment to challenge the status quo and create alternative institutions that ultimately displace those that no longer serve.
Efforts to form a social movement to confront the Wall Street-Washington axis are handicapped, however, by the absence of a broadly shared vision of an economic system structured to achieve and maintain financial stability, ecological balance, prosperity for all, and full democratic participation.
As I will elaborate in a future blog, the true alternative to the Wall Street capitalism that is imposing an intolerable burden on society is not totalitarian Soviet-style socialism. It is a system of locally rooted, self-reliant market economies that honor true market principles, operate by clear rules maintained and enforced by truly democratic governments, and mimic the structure and dynamics of Earth’s biosphere.
The Missing Vision: A New Agenda For A New Economy
Few and fortunate are those whose lives have not been directly touched by the 2008 Wall Street meltdown and its consequences. People want to understand what went wrong and how we can set it right. Yet the public commentary continues to center primarily on finger-pointing. Who knew what when? Which regulators were asleep at the switch, and why?
Most calls for action seek only to limit the excesses and deceptions of greedy bankers and complicit regulators. We have yet to engage in a much-needed national conversation that addresses essential, yet unasked, questions. For example:
Do Wall Street institutions do anything so vital for the national interest as to justify opening the national purse strings and showering them with trillions of dollars in order to save them from the consequences of their own excess?
Is it possible that the whole Wall Street edifice is built on an illusion that has no substance yet carries deadly economic, social, and environmental consequences for the larger society?
Might there be other ways to provide necessary and beneficial financial services with greater effectiveness and at less cost?
The true alternative to Wall Street capitalism is a system of locally rooted, self-reliant economies that honor true market principles.
Ultimately, it comes down to a question of the values we believe the economy should serve. Should it give priority to money, or to life? To the fortunes of the few, or the well-being of all?
The existing Wall Street-led economy is highly effective and efficient at converting real living wealth to phantom financial wealth to make rich people richer. It is a path to collective suicide.
Our future and that of our children depend on replacing the values and institutions of the Wall Street economy with the culture and institutions of a New Economy designed to provide an adequate and satisfying livelihood for all people in balanced relationship to Earth’s biosphere.I believe that an honest public examination of these questions will lead to a unifying national political consensus that Wall Street institutions produce nothing of value to the society and fulfill no need not better served in other ways. They can and should be replaced with institutions that act like mature, caring adults and serve real needs in ways appropriate to the realities of the twenty-first century.
We cannot, however, simply let the Wall Street financial institutions collapse, as would have happened in 2008 without the federal bailout. Wall Street controls the creation and flow of the money that facilitates the economic transactions on which we depend for meeting most all our material needs. If its institutions suddenly shut down with no alternative in place, we would be left only the money in our pockets and instantly reduced to barter for most essentials of daily life, including food and water.
The process of shutting down Wall Street properly proceeds in parallel with action to put in place the institutions of a New Economy, including a new system for creating and allocating national currencies in ways more responsive to society’s needs.
Building Community: An Economic Approach: David Korten: What economic transformation has to do with building stronger, happier communities.
Leadership for institutional transformation rarely comes from within the institutions of Empire, which bring special privilege to the few and hardship to the many. It invariably comes from authentic grassroots movements that self-organize from outside the establishment to challenge the status quo and create alternative institutions that ultimately displace those that no longer serve.
Efforts to form a social movement to confront the Wall Street-Washington axis are handicapped, however, by the absence of a broadly shared vision of an economic system structured to achieve and maintain financial stability, ecological balance, prosperity for all, and full democratic participation.
As I will elaborate in a future blog, the true alternative to the Wall Street capitalism that is imposing an intolerable burden on society is not totalitarian Soviet-style socialism. It is a system of locally rooted, self-reliant market economies that honor true market principles, operate by clear rules maintained and enforced by truly democratic governments, and mimic the structure and dynamics of Earth’s biosphere.
Monday, January 3, 2011
SC104-9
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=22558
Incipient Fascist State: America Has Gone Away
Anyone who doesn’t believe that the US is an incipient fascist state needs only to consult the latest assault on civil liberty by Fox News (sic). Instead of informing citizens, Fox News (sic) informs on citizens. Jason Ditz reports (antiwar.com Dec. 28) that Fox News (sic) “no longer content to simply shill for a growing police state,” turned in a grandmother to the Department of Homeland Security for making “anti-American comments.”
The media have segued into the police attitude, which regards insistence on civil liberties and references to the Constitution as signs of extremism, especially when the Constitution is invoked in defense of dissent or privacy or placarded on a bumper sticker. President George W. Bush set the scene when he declared: “you are with us or against us.”
Bush’s words demonstrate a frightening decline in our government’s respect for dissent since the presidency of John F. Kennedy. In a speech to the Newspaper Publishers Association in 1961, President Kennedy said:
“No president should fear public scrutiny of his program, for from that scrutiny comes understanding, and from that understanding comes support or opposition; and both are necessary. . . . Without debate, without criticism, no administration and no country can succeed, and no republic can survive. That is why the Athenian law makers once decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. And that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment.”
The press is not protected, Kennedy told the newspaper publishers, in order that it can amuse and entertain, emphasize the trivial, or simply tell the public what it wants to hear. The press is protected so that it can find and report facts and, thus, inform, arouse “and sometimes even anger public opinion.”
In a statement unlikely to be repeated by an American president, Kennedy told the newspaper publishers: “I’m not asking your newspapers to support an administration, but I am asking your help in the tremendous task of informing and alerting the American people, for I have complete confidence in the response and dedication of our citizens whenever they are fully informed.”
The America of Kennedy’s day and the America of today are two different worlds. In America today the media are expected to lie for the government in order to prevent the people from finding out what the government is up to. If polls can be believed, Americans brainwashed and programmed by O’Reilly, Hannity, Beck, and Limbaugh want Bradley Manning and Julian Assange torn limb from limb for informing Americans of the criminal acts of their government. Politicians and journalists are screeching for their execution.
President Kennedy told the Newspaper Publishers Association that “it is to the printing press, the recorder of man’s deeds, the keeper of his conscience, the courier of his news, that we look for strength and assistance, confident that with your help man will be what he was born to be: Free and Independent.” Who can imagine a Bill Clinton, a George W. Bush, or a Barack Obama saying such a thing today?
Today the press is a propaganda ministry for the government. Any member who departs from his duty to lie and spin the news is expelled from the fraternity. A public increasingly unemployed, broke and homeless is told that they have vast enemies plotting to destroy them in the absence of annual trillion dollar expenditures for the military/security complex, wars lasting decades, no-fly lists, unlimited spying and collecting of dossiers on citizens supplemented by neighbors reporting on neighbors, full body scanners at airports, shopping centers, metro and train stations, traffic checks, and the equivalence of treason with the uttering of a truth.
Two years ago when he came into office President Obama admitted that no one knew what the military mission was in Afghanistan, including the president himself, but that he would find a mission and define it. On his recent trip to Afghanistan, Obama came up with the mission: to make the families of the troops safe in America, his version of Bush’s “we have to kill them over there before they kill us over here.”
No one snorted with derision or even mildly giggled. Neither the New York Times nor Fox News (sic) dared to wonder if perhaps, maybe, murdering and displacing large numbers of Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen and US support for Israel’s similar treatment of Lebanese and Palestinians might be creating a hostile environment that could breed terrorists. If there still is such a thing as the Newspaper Publishers Association, its members are incapable of such an unpatriotic thought.
Today no one believes that our country’s success depends on an informed public and a free press. America’s success depends on its financial and military hegemony over the world. Any information inconsistent with the indispensable people’s god-given right to dominate the world must be suppressed and the messenger discredited and destroyed.
Now that the press has voluntarily shed its First Amendment rights, the government is working to redefine free speech as a privilege limited to the media, not a right of citizens. Thus, the insistence that WikiLeaks is not a media organization and Fox News (sic) turning in a citizen for exercising free speech. Washington’s assault on Assange and WikiLeaks is an assault on what remains of the US Constitution. When we cheer for WikiLeaks’ demise, we are cheering for our own.
Incipient Fascist State: America Has Gone Away
Anyone who doesn’t believe that the US is an incipient fascist state needs only to consult the latest assault on civil liberty by Fox News (sic). Instead of informing citizens, Fox News (sic) informs on citizens. Jason Ditz reports (antiwar.com Dec. 28) that Fox News (sic) “no longer content to simply shill for a growing police state,” turned in a grandmother to the Department of Homeland Security for making “anti-American comments.”
The media have segued into the police attitude, which regards insistence on civil liberties and references to the Constitution as signs of extremism, especially when the Constitution is invoked in defense of dissent or privacy or placarded on a bumper sticker. President George W. Bush set the scene when he declared: “you are with us or against us.”
Bush’s words demonstrate a frightening decline in our government’s respect for dissent since the presidency of John F. Kennedy. In a speech to the Newspaper Publishers Association in 1961, President Kennedy said:
“No president should fear public scrutiny of his program, for from that scrutiny comes understanding, and from that understanding comes support or opposition; and both are necessary. . . . Without debate, without criticism, no administration and no country can succeed, and no republic can survive. That is why the Athenian law makers once decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. And that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment.”
The press is not protected, Kennedy told the newspaper publishers, in order that it can amuse and entertain, emphasize the trivial, or simply tell the public what it wants to hear. The press is protected so that it can find and report facts and, thus, inform, arouse “and sometimes even anger public opinion.”
In a statement unlikely to be repeated by an American president, Kennedy told the newspaper publishers: “I’m not asking your newspapers to support an administration, but I am asking your help in the tremendous task of informing and alerting the American people, for I have complete confidence in the response and dedication of our citizens whenever they are fully informed.”
The America of Kennedy’s day and the America of today are two different worlds. In America today the media are expected to lie for the government in order to prevent the people from finding out what the government is up to. If polls can be believed, Americans brainwashed and programmed by O’Reilly, Hannity, Beck, and Limbaugh want Bradley Manning and Julian Assange torn limb from limb for informing Americans of the criminal acts of their government. Politicians and journalists are screeching for their execution.
President Kennedy told the Newspaper Publishers Association that “it is to the printing press, the recorder of man’s deeds, the keeper of his conscience, the courier of his news, that we look for strength and assistance, confident that with your help man will be what he was born to be: Free and Independent.” Who can imagine a Bill Clinton, a George W. Bush, or a Barack Obama saying such a thing today?
Today the press is a propaganda ministry for the government. Any member who departs from his duty to lie and spin the news is expelled from the fraternity. A public increasingly unemployed, broke and homeless is told that they have vast enemies plotting to destroy them in the absence of annual trillion dollar expenditures for the military/security complex, wars lasting decades, no-fly lists, unlimited spying and collecting of dossiers on citizens supplemented by neighbors reporting on neighbors, full body scanners at airports, shopping centers, metro and train stations, traffic checks, and the equivalence of treason with the uttering of a truth.
Two years ago when he came into office President Obama admitted that no one knew what the military mission was in Afghanistan, including the president himself, but that he would find a mission and define it. On his recent trip to Afghanistan, Obama came up with the mission: to make the families of the troops safe in America, his version of Bush’s “we have to kill them over there before they kill us over here.”
No one snorted with derision or even mildly giggled. Neither the New York Times nor Fox News (sic) dared to wonder if perhaps, maybe, murdering and displacing large numbers of Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen and US support for Israel’s similar treatment of Lebanese and Palestinians might be creating a hostile environment that could breed terrorists. If there still is such a thing as the Newspaper Publishers Association, its members are incapable of such an unpatriotic thought.
Today no one believes that our country’s success depends on an informed public and a free press. America’s success depends on its financial and military hegemony over the world. Any information inconsistent with the indispensable people’s god-given right to dominate the world must be suppressed and the messenger discredited and destroyed.
Now that the press has voluntarily shed its First Amendment rights, the government is working to redefine free speech as a privilege limited to the media, not a right of citizens. Thus, the insistence that WikiLeaks is not a media organization and Fox News (sic) turning in a citizen for exercising free speech. Washington’s assault on Assange and WikiLeaks is an assault on what remains of the US Constitution. When we cheer for WikiLeaks’ demise, we are cheering for our own.
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