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http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-extend-and-pretend-coming-end

Extend And Pretend Coming To An End

The real world revolves around cash flow. Families across the land understand this basic concept. Cash flows in from wages, investments and these days from the government. Cash flows out for food, gasoline, utilities, cable, cell phones, real estate taxes, income taxes, payroll taxes, clothing, mortgage payments, car payments, insurance payments, medical bills, auto repairs, home repairs, appliances, electronic gadgets, education, alcohol (necessary in this economy) and a countless other everyday expenses. If the outflow exceeds the inflow a family may be able to fund the deficit with credit cards for awhile, but ultimately running a cash flow deficit will result in debt default and loss of your home and assets. Ask the millions of Americans that have experienced this exact outcome since 2008 if you believe this is only a theoretical exercise. The Federal government, Federal Reserve, Wall Street banks, regulatory agencies and commercial real estate debtors have colluded since 2008 to pretend cash flow doesn’t matter. Their plan has been to “extend and pretend”, praying for an economic recovery that would save them from their greedy and foolish risk taking during the 2003 – 2007 Caligula-like debauchery.

I wrote an article called Extend and Pretend is Wall Street’s Friend about one year ago where I detailed what I saw as the moneyed interest’s master plan to pretend that hundreds of billions in debt would be repaid, despite the fact that declining developer cash flow and plunging real estate prices would make that impossible. Here are a couple pertinent snippets from that article:

“A systematic plan to create the illusion of stability and provide no-risk profits to the mega-Wall Street banks was implemented in early 2009 and continues today. The plan was developed by Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner and the CEOs of the criminal Wall Street banking syndicate. The plan has been enabled by the FASB, SEC, IRS, FDIC and corrupt politicians in Washington D.C. This master plan has funneled hundreds of billions from taxpayers to the banks that created the greatest financial collapse in world history.

Part two of the master cover-up plan has been the extending of commercial real estate loans and pretending that they will eventually be repaid. In late 2009 it was clear to the Federal Reserve and the Treasury that the $1.2 trillion in commercial loans maturing between 2010 and 2013 would cause thousands of bank failures if the existing regulations were enforced. The Treasury stepped to the plate first. New rules at the IRS weren’t directly related to banking, but allowed commercial loans that were part of investment pools known as Real Estate Mortgage Investment Conduits, or REMICs, to be refinanced without triggering tax penalties for investors.

The Federal Reserve, which is tasked with making sure banks loans are properly valued, instructed banks throughout the country to “extend and pretend” or “amend and pretend,” in which the bank gives a borrower more time to repay a loan. Banks were “encouraged” to modify loans to help cash strapped borrowers. The hope was that by amending the terms to enable the borrower to avoid a refinancing that would have been impossible, the lender would ultimately be able to collect the balance due on the loan. Ben and his boys also pushed banks to do “troubled debt restructurings.” Such restructurings involved modifying an existing loan by changing the terms or breaking the loan into pieces. Bank, thrift and credit-union regulators very quietly gave lenders flexibility in how they classified distressed commercial mortgages. Banks were able to slice distressed loans into performing and non-performing loans, and institutions were able to magically reduce the total reserves set aside for non-performing loans.

If a mall developer has 40% of their mall vacant and the cash flow from the mall is insufficient to service the loan, the bank would normally need to set aside reserves for the entire loan. Under the new guidelines they could carve the loan into two pieces, with 60% that is covered by cash flow as a good loan and the 40% without sufficient cash flow would be classified as non-performing. The truth is that billions in commercial loans are in distress right now because tenants are dropping like flies. Rather than writing down the loans, banks are extending the terms of the debt with more interest reserves included so they can continue to classify the loans as “performing.” The reality is that the values of the property behind these loans have fallen 43%. Banks are extending loans that they would never make now, because borrowers are already grossly upside-down.”

Master Plan Malfunction
You have to admire the resourcefulness of the vested interests in disguising disaster and pretending that time will alleviate the consequences of their insatiable greed, blatant criminality and foolish risk taking. Extending bad loans and pretending they will be repaid does not create the cash flow necessary to actually pay the interest and principal on the debt. The chart below reveals the truth of what happened between 2005 and 2008 in the commercial real estate market. There was an epic feeding frenzy of overbuilding shopping centers, malls, office space, industrial space and apartments. During the sane 1980’s and 1990’s, commercial real estate loan issuance stayed consistently in the $500 billion to $700 billion range. The internet boom led to a surge to $1.1 trillion in 2000, with the resultant pullback to $900 billion by 2004. But thanks to easy Al and helicopter Ben, the bubble was re-inflated with easy money and zero regulatory oversight. Commercial real estate loan issuance skyrocketed to $1.6 trillion per year by 2008. Bankers sure have a knack for doing the exact opposite of what they should be doing at the exact wrong time. They doled out a couple trillion of loans to delusional developers at peak prices just prior to a historic financial cataclysm.

The difference between bad retail mortgage loans and bad commercial loans is about 25 years. Commercial real estate loans usually have five to seven year maturities. This meant that an avalanche of loans began maturing in 2010 and will not peak until 2013. With $1.2 trillion of loans coming due between 2010 and 2013, disaster for the Wall Street Too Big To Fail banks awaited if the properties were valued honestly. A perfect storm of declining property values and plunging cash flows for developers should have resulted in enormous losses for Wall Street banks and their shareholders, resulting in executives losing not only their obscene bonuses but even their jobs. Imagine the horror for the .01%.

The fact is that commercial property prices are currently 42% below the 2007 – 2008 peak. The slight increase in the national index is solely due to strong demand for apartments, as millions of Americans have been kicked out of their homes by Wall Street bankers using fraudulent loan documentation to foreclose on them. The national index has recently resumed its fall. Industrial and retail properties are leading the descent in prices according to Moodys. The master plan of extend and pretend was implemented in 2009 and three years later commercial real estate prices are 10% lower, after the official end of the recession.

Part one of the “extend and pretend” plan has failed. Part two anticipated escalating developer cash flows as the economy recuperated, Americans resumed spending like drunken sailors and retailers began to rake in profits at record levels again. Reality has interfered with their desperate last ditch gamble. Office vacancies remain at 17.3%, close to 20 year highs, as 12.3 million square feet of new space came to market in 2011. Vacancies are higher today than they were at the end of the recession in December 2009. The recovery in cash flow has failed to materialize for commercial developers. Strip mall vacancies at 11% remain stuck at 20 year highs. Regional mall vacancies at 9.2% linger near all-time highs. Vacancies remain elevated, with no sign of decreasing. Despite these figures, an additional 4.9 million square feet of new retail space was opened in 2011. The folly of this continued expansion will be revealed as bricks and mortar retailers are forced to close thousands of stores in the next five years.

Extending and pretending that hundreds of millions in commercial loans were payable for the last three years is now colliding with a myriad of other factors to create a perfect storm in 2012 and 2013. The extension of maturities has now set up a far more catastrophic scenario as described by Chris Macke, senior real estate strategist at CoStar Group:

“As banks and property owners continue to partake in loan extensions amid a softening economy, commercial banks continue to “delay and pray” that property values will rise. Many loans are piled up and concentrated in this year, and at the same time, the economy is slowing. This dilemma has resulted in the widening of what is commonly termed the “loan maturity cliff,” which is attributed to the so called extend-and-pretend loans. During the market downturn, lenders extended the maturity dates of loans with properties that had current values below their balances. Instead, however the practice has resulted in a race for property values to try to catch up with the loan maturity dates.”

The Federal Reserve, Wall Street banks, Mortgage Bankers Association and the rest of the confederates of collusion will continue the Big Lie for as long as possible. They point to declining commercial default rates as proof of improvement. The chart below details the 4th quarter default rates for real estate loans over the last six years. Default rates in the 4th quarter of 2009 peaked for all real estate loan types. Still, today’s default rate is 450% higher than the rate in 2006. A critical thinker might ask how commercial default rates could fall from 8.75% to 6.12% when commercial vacancies have increased and commercial property values have fallen. It’s amazing how low default rates can fall when a bank doesn’t require payments or collateral to back up the loan and can utilize accounting gimmicks to avoid write-offs.

The reality as detailed by honest analysts is much different than the numbers presented by Ben Bernanke and his banker cronies. A recent article from the Urban Land Institute provides some insight into the current state of the market:

Ann Hambly, who previously ran the commercial servicing departments at Prudential, Bank of New York, Nomura, and Bank of America said a wave of defaults is coming in commercial mortgage–backed securities (CMBS). And Carl Steck, a principal in MountainSeed Appraisal Management, an Atlanta-based firm that deals in the commercial real estate space, said property values are still falling.

Noting that CMBS investors booked $6 billion in real losses in 2011 and have already taken on $2 billion more in losses so far this year, Hambly told reporters in a private briefing that “it’s going to take a miracle” for many borrowers to refinance their deals when they come due between now and 2017.

Carl Steck said that lenders who are taking over the portfolios of failed institutions are finding that the values of the loans “are coming in a lot lower than they ever thought they would.” And as a result, he thinks a “fire sale” of commercial loans is just over the horizon.

Analysts expect 2012 to be a record-setting year for commercial real estate defaults. Last week delinquencies for office and retail loans hit their highest-ever levels, according to Fitch Ratings. The value of all delinquent commercial loans is now $57.7 billion, according to Trepp, LLC. If you think the criminal Wall Street banks limited their robo-signing fraud to just poor homeowners, you would be mistaken. The fraud uncovered in the commercial lending orbit will dwarf the residential swindle. Research by Harbinger Analytics Group shows the widespread use of inaccurate, fraudulent documents for land title underwriting of commercial real estate financing. According to the report:

This fraud is accomplished through inaccurate and incomplete filings of statutorily required records (commercial land title surveys detailing physical boundaries, encumbrances, encroachments, etc.) on commercial properties in California, many other western states and possibly throughout most of the United States. In the cases studied by Harbinger, the problems are because banks accepted the work of land surveyors who “have committed actual and/or constructive fraud by knowingly failing to conduct accurate boundary surveys and/or failing to file the statutorily required documentation in public records.”

The Wall Street geniuses bundled commercial real estate mortgages and re-sold them as securities around the world. The suckers holding those securities, already staggering from the overabundance of empty office space, will be devastated if it turns out they have no claim to the properties. They will rightly sue the lenders for falsely representing the properties. Mortgage holders in these cases may also turn to their title insurance to cover any losses. It is unknown if the title insurance companies have the wherewithal to withstand enormous claims on costly commercial properties. It looks like that light at the end of the tunnel is bullet train headed our way.

One of the fingers in the dyke of the “extend and pretend” dam has been removed by the FASB. The new leak threatens to turn into a gusher.

Andy Miller, cofounder of Miller Frishman Group, and one of the few analysts who saw the real estate crash coming two years before it surprised Bernanke and the CNBC cheerleaders sees a flood of defaults on the horizon. In a recent interview with The Casey Report Miller details a dramatic turn for the worse in the commercial real estate market he has witnessed in the last few months. His company deals with distressed commercial real estate. This segment of his business was booming in 2009 and into the middle of 2010. Then magically, there was no more distress as the “extend and pretend” plan was implemented by the governing powers. The distressed market dried up completely until November 2011. Miller describes what happened next:

“All of a sudden, right after Thanksgiving in 2011, the floodgates opened again. In the last six weeks we probably picked up seven or eight receiverships – and we’re now seeing some really big-ticket properties with major loans on them that have gone into distress, and they’re all sharing some characteristics in common. In 2008 and 2009, these borrowers were put on a workout or had a forbearance agreement put into place with their lenders. In 2009, their lenders were thinking, “Let’s do a two- or three-year workout with these guys. I’m sure by 2012 this market is going to get a lot better.” Well, 2012 is here now, and guess what? It’s not any better. In fact I would argue that it’s still deteriorating.”

Why the sudden surge in distressed properties coming to market in late 2011? It seems the FASB finally decided to grow a pair of balls after being neutered by Bernanke and Geithner in 2009 regarding mark to market accounting. They issued an Accounting Standards Update (ASU) that went into effect for all periods after June 15, 2011called Clarifications to Accounting for Troubled Debt Restructurings by Creditors. Essentially, if a lender is involved in a troubled debt restructuring with a debtor, including a forbearance agreement or a workout, the property MUST be marked to market. Andy Miller understands this is the beginning of the end for “extend and pretend”:

“I believe it’s a huge deal because it means you don’t have carte blanche anymore to kick the can down the road. After all, kicking the can down the road was a way to avoid taking a big hit to your capital. Well, you can’t do that anymore. It forces you to cut through the optical illusions by writing this asset to its fair market value.”

Ben Bernanke and the Wall Street banks are running out tricks in their bag of deception. Wall Street banks created billions in profits by using accounting entries to reduce their loan loss reserves. They’ve delayed mortgage foreclosures for two years to avoid taking the losses on their loan portfolios. They’ve pretended their commercial loan portfolios aren’t worth 50% less than their current carrying value. Bernanke has stuffed his Federal Reserve balance sheet with billions in worthless commercial mortgage backed securities. The Illusion of Recovery is being revealed as nothing more than a two bit magician’s trick. In the end it always comes back to cash flow. The debt cannot be serviced and must be written off. Thinking the American consumer will ride to the rescue is a delusional flight of the imagination.

Apocalypse Now – The Future of Retailers & Mall Owners

When I moved to my suburban community in 1995 there were two thriving shopping centers within three miles of my home and a dozen within a ten mile radius. Seventeen years later the population has increased dramatically in this area, and these two shopping centers are in their final death throes. The shopping center closest to my house has a vacant Genuardi grocery store(local chain bought out and destroyed by Safeway), vacant Blockbuster, vacant Sears Hardware, vacant Donatos restaurant, vacant book store, and soon to be vacant Pizza Pub. It’s now anchored by a near bankrupt Rite Aid and a Dollar store. This ghost-like strip mall is in the midst of a fairly thriving community. Anyone with their eyes open as they drive around today would think Space Available is the hot new retailer. According to the ICSC there are 105,000 shopping centers in the U.S., occupying 7.3 billion square feet of space. Total retail square feet in the U.S. tops 14.2 billion, or 46 square feet for every man, woman and child in the country. There are more than 1.1 million retail establishments competing for every discretionary dollar from consumers.

Any retailer, banker, politician, or consumer who thinks we will be heading back to the retail glory days of 2007 is delusional. Retail sales reached a peak of $375 billion per month in mid 2008. Today, retail sales have reached a new “nominal” peak of $400 billion per month. Even using the highly questionable BLS inflation figures, real retail sales are still below the 2008 peak. Using the inflation rate provided by John Williams at Shadowstats, as measured the way it was in 1980, real retail sales are 15% below the 2008 peak. The unvarnished truth is revealed in the declining profitability of major retailers and the bankruptcies and store closings plaguing the industry. National retail statistics and recent retailer earnings reports paint a bleak picture, and it’s about to get bleaker.

Retail sales in 1992 totaled $2.0 trillion. By 2011 they had grown to $4.7 trillion, a 135% increase in nineteen years. A full 64% of this rise is solely due to inflation, as measured by the BLS. In reality, using the true inflation figures, the entire increase can be attributed to inflation. Over this time span the U.S. population has grown from 255 million to 313 million, a 23% increase. Median household income has grown by a mere 8% over this same time frame. The increase in retail sales was completely reliant upon the American consumers willing to become a debt slaves to the Wall Street bank slave masters. It is obvious we have learned to love our slavery. Credit card debt grew from $265 billion in 1992 to a peak of $972 billion in September of 2008, when the financial system collapsed. The 267% increase in debt allowed Americans to live far above their means and enriched the Wall Street banking cabal. The decline to the current level of $800 billion was exclusively due to write-offs by the banks, fully funded by the American taxpayer.

Credit cards are currently being used far less as a way to live beyond your means, and more to survive another day. This can be seen in the details underlying the monthly retail sales figures. On a real basis, with inflation on the things we need to live like energy, food and clothing rising at a 10% clip, retail sales are declining. Gasoline, food and medicine are the drivers of retail today. The surge in automobile sales is just another part of the “extend and pretend” plan, as Bernanke provides free money to banks and finance companies so they can make seven year 0% interest loans to subprime borrowers. Easy credit extended to deadbeats will not create the cash flow needed to repay the debt. The continued penetration of on-line retailers does not bode well for the dying bricks and mortar zombie retailers like Sears, JC Penny, Macys and hundreds of other dead retailers walking. With gas prices soaring, the economy headed back into recession and the Federal Reserve out of ammunition, Andy Miller sums up the situation nicely:

“Well, I think we’re headed into an economy right now where there’s just not a lot of upside. Do we think, for example, in the shopping center business, that retail and consumer spending is going to go way up? Certainly not. I think that as times get tougher and unemployment remains high, it’s going to have a negative impact on consumer spending. In almost in any city in America right now, it doesn’t take a genius to see how much retail space has been constructed and is sitting there empty. Vacancy rates are as high as I’ve seen them in almost every venue that I visit. I’m very concerned about the retail business, and I think it’s extremely dangerous right now.”

The major big box retailers have been reporting their annual results in the last week. The results have been weak and even those whose results are being spun as positive by the mainstream media are performing dreadfully compared to 2007. A few examples are in order:

•Home Depot was praised for their fantastic 2011 result of $70 billion in sales and $6.7 billion of income. The MSM failed to mention that sales are $7 billion lower than 2007, despite having 18 more stores and profit exceeded $7.2 billion in 2007. Sales per square foot have declined from $335 to $296, a 12% decline in four years.
•Target made $2.9 billion on revenue of $67 billion in 2011. $953 million of this profit was generated from their credit card this year versus $744 million last year because they reduced their loan loss reserve by $260 million. Target is supposedly a retailer, but 33% of their bottom line comes from a credit card they desperately tried to sell in 2009. They have increased their store count from 1,600 to 1,800 since 2007 and their profit is flat. Sales per square foot have declined from $307 to $280 since 2007.
•J.C. Penney is a bug in search of a windshield. Their sales have declined from $20 billion in 2007 to $17 billion in 2011 despite increasing their store count from 1,067 to 1,114. Their profits have plunged from $1.1 billion to a loss of $152 million. Their sales per square foot have plunged by 14% since 2007. Turning to a former Apple marketing guru as their new CEO will fail. Everyday low pricing is not going to work on Americans trained like monkeys to salivate at the word SALE.
•The death spiral of Sears/Kmart is a sight to see. As the anchor in hundreds of dying malls across the land, this retail artifact will be joining Montgomery Ward on the scrap heap of retail history in the next few years. Its eventual bankruptcy and liquidation will leave over 4,000 rotting carcasses to spoil our landscape. The one-time genius and heir to the Warren Buffett mantle – Eddie Lampert – has proven to be as talented at retailing as his buddy Jim Cramer is at picking stocks. He has managed to decrease sales by $10 billion, from $53 billion to $43 billion in the space of four years despite opening 247 new stores. That is not an easy feat to accomplish. At least he was able to reduce profits from $1.5 billion to $133 million and drive the sales per square foot in his stores down by 15%.
•Widely admired Best Buy has screwed the pooch along with the other foolish retailers that have massively over expanded in the last decade. They have increased their domestic sales from $31 billion to $37 billion, a 19% increase in four years. This increase only required a 444 store expansion, from 873 stores to 1,317 stores. A 51% increase in store count for a 19% increase in sales seems to be a bad trade-off. Their chief competitor – Circuit City – went belly-up during this time frame, making the relative sales increase even more pathetic. The $6 billion increase in sales resulted in a $100 million decline in profits and a 13% decrease in sales per square foot since 2007. It might behoove the geniuses running this company to stop building new stores.
•The retailer that committed the greatest act of suicide in the last decade is Lowes. Their act of hubris, as Home Depot struggled in the mid 2000’s, is coming home to roost today. They increased their store count from 1,385 to 1,749 over four years. This 26% increase in store count resulted in an increase in sales from $47 billion to $49 billion, a 4% boost. Profitability has plunged from over $3 billion to under $2 billion over this same time frame. They’ve won the efficiency competition by seeing their sales per square feet fall by an astounding 21% over the last four years. I’ve witnessed their ineptitude as they opened four stores within 10 miles of each other in Montgomery County, PA and cannibalized themselves to death. The newest store, three miles from my house, is a pleasure to shop as there is generally more staff than customers even on a Saturday afternoon. This beautiful new store will be vacant rotting hulk within three years.

Do the results of these retail giants jive with the retail recovery stories being spun by the corporate mainstream media? When you see some stock shill on CNBC touting one of these retailers, realize he is blowing smoke up your ass. These six struggling retailers account for over 1.1 billion square feet of retail space in the U.S. One or more of them anchor every mall in America. Wal-Mart (600 million square feet in the U.S.) and Kohl’s (82 million square feet) continue to struggle as their lower middle class customers can barely make ends meet. The perfect storm is developing and very few people see it coming. Extend and pretend has failed. Americans are tapped out. Home prices continue to fall. Energy and food prices continue to rise. Wages are stagnant. Job growth is weak. Middle and lower class Americans are using credit cards just to pay their basic living expenses. The 99% are not about to go on a spending binge.

As consumers reduce consumption, retailers lose profits and will be forced to close stores. It is likely that at least 150,000 retail stores will need to close in the next five years. Less stores means less rent for mall developers. Less rent means the inability to service their debt as the value of their property declines with the outcome of Ghost Malls haunting your community. Maybe good old American ingenuity will come to the rescue as we convert ghost malls into FEMA prison camps for uncharged Ron Paul supporters, Obamacare death panel implementation centers, TSA groping educational facilities, housing for the millions kicked out of their homes by the Wall Street .01%ers, and bomb shelters for the imminent Iranian invasion.

Debt default means huge losses for the Wall Street criminal banks. Of course the banksters will just demand another taxpayer bailout from the puppet politicians. This repeat scenario gives new meaning to the term shop until you drop. Extending and pretending can work for awhile as accounting obfuscation, rolling over bad debts, and praying for a revival of the glory days can put off the day of reckoning for a couple years. Ultimately it comes down to cash flow, whether you’re a household, retailer, developer, bank or government. America is running on empty and extending and pretending is coming to an end.

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http://energybulletin.net/stories/2012-02-25/peak-energy-resources-climate-change-and-preservation-knowledge

Peak energy & resources, climate change, and the preservation of knowledge

Since there’s nothing that can be done about climate change, because there’s no scalable alternative to fossil fuels, I’ve always wondered why politicians and other leaders, who clearly know better, feel compelled to deny it. I think it’s for exactly the same reasons you don’t hear them talking about preparing for Peak Oil.

1) Our leaders have known since the 1970s energy crises that there’s no comparable alternative energy ready to replace fossil fuels. To extend the oil age as long as possible, the USA went the military path rather than a “Manhattan Project” of research and building up grid infrastructure, railroads, sustainable agriculture, increasing home and car fuel efficiency, and other obvious actions.

Instead, we’ve spent trillions of dollars on defense and the military to keep the oil flowing, the Straits of Hormuz open, and invade oil-producing countries. Being so much further than Europe, China, and Russia from the Middle East, where there’s not only the most remaining oil, but the easiest oil to get out at the lowest cost ($20-22 OPEC vs $60-80 rest-of-world per barrel), is a huge disadvantage. I think the military route was chosen in the 70s to maintain our access to Middle East oil and prevent challenges from other nations. Plus everyone benefits by our policing the world and keeping the lid on a world war over energy resources, perhaps that’s why central banks keep lending us money.

2) If the public were convinced climate change were real and demanded alternative energy, it would become clear pretty quickly that we didn’t have any alternatives. Already Californians are seeing public television shows and newspaper articles about why it’s so difficult to build enough wind, solar, and so on to meet the mandated 33% renewable energy sources by 2020.

For example, last night I saw a PBS program on the obstacles to wind power in Marin county, on the other side of the Golden Gate bridge. Difficulties cited were lack of storage for electricity, NIMBYism, opposition from the Audubon society over bird kills, wind blows at night when least needed, the grid needs expansion, and most wind is not near enough to the grid to be connected to it. But there was no mention of Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI) or the scale of how many windmills you’d need to have. So you could be left with the impression that these problems with wind could be overcome.

I don’t see any signs of the general public losing optimism yet. I gave my “Peak Soil” talk to a critical thinking group, very bright people, sparkling, interesting, well-read, thoughtful, and to my great surprise realized they weren’t worried until my talk, partly because so few people understand the Hirsch 2005 “liquid fuels” crisis concept, nor the scale of what fossil fuels do for us. I felt really bad, I’ve never spoken to a group before that wasn’t aware of the problem, I wished I were a counselor as well. The only thing I could think of to console them was to say that running out of fossil fuels was a good thing — we might not be driven extinct by global warming, which most past mass extinctions were caused by.

3) As the German military peak oil study stated, when investors realize Peak Oil is upon us, stock markets world-wide will crash (if they haven’t already from financial corruption), as it will be obvious that growth is no longer possible and investors will never get their money back.

4) As Richard Heinberg has pointed out, there’s a national survival interest in being the “Last Man (nation) Standing“. So leaders want to keep things going smoothly as long as possible. And everyone is hoping the crash is “not on my watch” — who wants to take the blame?

5) It would be political suicide to bring up the real problem of Peak Oil and have no solution to offer besides consuming less. Endless Growth is the platform of both the Republican and Democratic parties. More Consumption and “Drill, Baby, Drill” is the main plan to get out of the current economic and energy crises.

There’s also the risk of creating a panic and social disorder if the situation were made utterly clear — that the carrying capacity of the United States is somewhere between 100 million (Pimentel) and 250 million (Smil) without fossil fuels, like the Onion’s parody “Scientists: One-Third Of The Human Race Has To Die For Civilization To Be Sustainable, So How Do We Want To Do This?”

There’s no solution to peak oil, except to consume less in all areas of life, which is not acceptable to political leaders or corporations, who depend on growth for their survival. Meanwhile, too many problems are getting out of hand on a daily basis at local, state, and national levels. All that matters to politicians is the next election. So who’s going to work on a future problem with no solution? Jimmy Carter is perceived as having lost partly due to asking Americans to sacrifice for the future (i.e. put on a sweater).

I first became aware of this at the 2005 ASPO Denver conference. Denver Mayor Hickenlooper pointed out that one of his predecessors lost the mayoral election because he didn’t keep the snow plows running after a heavy snow storm. He worried about how he’d keep snow plows, garbage collection, and a host of other city services running as energy declined.

A Boulder city council member at this conference told us he had hundreds of issues and constituents to deal with on a daily basis, no way did he have time to spend on an issue beyond the next election.

Finally, Congressman Roscoe Bartlett told us that there was no solution, and he was angry that we’d blown 25 years even though the government knew peak was coming. His plan was to relentlessly reduce our energy demand by 5% per year, to stay under the depletion rate of declining oil. But not efficiency — that doesn’t work due to Jevons paradox.

The only solution that would mitigate suffering is to mandate that women bear only one child. Fat chance of that ever happening when even birth control is controversial, and Catholics are outraged that all health care plans are now required to cover the cost of birth control pills. Congressman Bartlett, in a small group discussion after his talk, told us that population was the main problem, but that he and other politicians didn’t dare mention it. He said that exponential growth would undo any reduction in demand we could make, and gave this example: if we have 250 years left of reserves in coal, and we turn to coal to replace oil, increasing our use by 2% a year — a very modest rate of growth considering what a huge amount is needed to replace oil — then the reserve would only last 85 years. If we liquefy it, then it would only last 50 years, because it takes a lot of energy to do that.

Bartlett was speaking about 250 years of coal reserves back in 2005. Now we know that the global energy from coal may have peaked last year, in 2011 (Patzek) or will soon in 2015 (Zittel). Other estimates range as far as 2029 to 2043. Heinberg and Fridley say that “we believe that it is unlikely that world energy supplies can continue to meet projected demand beyond 2020.” (Heinberg).

6) Political (and religious) leaders gain votes, wealth, and power by telling people what they want to hear. Several politicians have told me privately that people like to hear good news and that politicians who bring bad news don’t get re-elected. “Don’t worry, be happy” is a vote getter. Carrying capacity, exponential growth, die-off, extinction, population control — these are not ideas that get leaders elected.

7) Everyone who understands the situation is hoping The Scientists Will Come up With Something. Including the scientists. They’d like to win a Nobel prize and need funding. But researchers in energy resources know what’s at stake with climate change and peak oil and are as scared as the rest of us. U.C.Berkeley scientists are also aware of the negative environmental impacts of biofuels, and have chosen to concentrate on a politically feasible strategy of emphasizing lack of water to prevent large programs in this from being funded (Fingerman). They’re also working hard to prevent coal fired power plants from supplying electricity to California by recommending natural gas replacement plants instead, as well as expanding the grid, taxing carbon, energy efficiency, nuclear power, geothermal, wind, and so on — see http://rael.berkeley.edu/projects for what else some of UCB’s RAEL program is up to. Until a miracle happens, scientists and some enlightened policy makers are trying to extend the age of oil, reduce greenhouse gases, and so on. But with the downside of Hubbert’s curve so close, and the financial system liable to crash again soon given the debt and lack of reforms, I don’t know how long anyone can stretch things out.

The 1% can’t justify their wealth or the current economic system once the pie stops expanding and starts to shrink. The financial crisis will be a handy way to explain why people are getting poorer on the down side of peak oil too, delaying panic perhaps.

Other evidence that politicians know how serious the situation is, but aren’t saying anything, are Congressman Roscoe Bartlett’s youtube videos (Urban Danger). He’s the Chairman of the peak oil caucus in the House of Representatives, and he’s saying “get out of dodge” to those in the know. He’s educated all of the representatives in the House, but he says that peak oil “won’t be on their front burner until there’s an oil shock”.

9) Less than one percent of our elected leaders have degrees in science. They’re so busy raising money for the next election and their political duties, that even they may not have time to read enough for a “big picture view” of (systems) ecology, population, environment, natural resources, biodiversity / bioinvasion, water, topsoil and fishery depletion, and all the other factors that will be magnified when oil, the master resource that’s been helping us cope with these and many other problems, declines.

10) Since peak fossil fuel is here, now (we’re on a plateau), there’s less urgency to do something about climate change for many leaders, because they assume, or hope, that the remaining fossil fuels won’t trigger a runaway greenhouse. Climate change is a more distant problem than Peak Oil. And again, like peak oil, nothing can be done about it. There’s are no carbon free alternative liquid fuels, let alone a liquid fuel we can burn in our existing combustion engines, which were designed to only use gasoline. There’s no time left to rebuild a completely new fleet of vehicles based on electricity, the electric grid infrastructure and electricity generation from windmills, solar, nuclear, etc., are too oil dependent to outlast oil. Batteries are too heavy to ever be used by trucks or other large vehicles, and require a revolutionary breakthrough to power electric cars.

11) I think that those who deny climate change, despite knowing it is real, are thinking like chess players several moves ahead. They hope that by denying climate change an awareness of peak oil is less likely to occur, and I’m guessing their motivation is to keep our oil-based nation going as long as possible by preventing a stock market crash, panic, social disorder, and so on.

12) Politicians and corporate leaders probably didn’t get as far as they did without being (techno) optimists, and perhaps really believe the Scientists Will Come Up With Something. I fear that scientists are going to take a lot of the blame as things head South, even though there’s nothing they can do to change the laws of physics and thermodynamics.

Conclusion

We need government plans or strategies at all levels to let the air out of the tires of civilization as slowly as possible to prevent panic and sudden discontinuities.

Given history, I can’t imagine the 1% giving up their wealth (especially land, 85% of which is concentrated among 3% of owners). I’m sure they’re hoping the current system maintains its legitimacy as long as possible, even as the vast majority of us sink into 3rd world poverty beyond what we can imagine, and then are too poor and hungry to do anything but find our next meal.

Until there are oil shocks and governments at all levels are forced to “do something”, it’s up to those of us aware of what’s going on to gain skills that will be useful in the future, work to build community locally, and live more simply. Towns or regions that already have or know how to implement a local currency fast will be able to cope better with discontinuities in oil supplies and financial crashes than areas that don’t.

The best possible solution is de-industrialization, starting with Heinberg’s 50 million farmers, while also limiting immigration, instituting high taxes and other disincentives to encourage people to not have more than one child so we can get under the maximum carrying capacity as soon as possible.

Hirsch recommended preparing for peak 20 years ahead of time, and we didn’t do that. So many of the essential preparations need to be at a local, state, and federal level, they can’t be done at an individual level. Denial and inaction now are likely to lead to millions of unnecessary deaths in the future. Actions such as upgrading infrastructure essential to life, like water delivery and treatment systems (up to 100 years old in much of America and rusting apart), sewage treatment, bridges, and so on. After peak, oil will be scarce and devoted to growing and delivering food, with the remaining energy trickling down to other essential services — probably not enough to build new infrastructure, or even maintain what we have.

I wish it were possible for scientists and other leaders to explain what’s going on to the public, but I think scientists know it wouldn’t do any good given American’s low scientific literacy, and leaders see the vast majority of the public as big blubbering spoiled babies, like the spaceship characters on floating chairs in Wall-E, who expect, no demand, happy Hollywood endings.

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30620.htm

Let Your Life Be a Friction to Stop the Machine

The video link is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2Xh5eN2fXY&context=C3e0245cADOEgsToPDskJUMGx97_UAlkzmBQOcns95

Nightmare and insanity are akin: mysterious and involuntary states that skew and distort objective reality. One wakens from nightmare; from insanity there is no awakening.

Whether Americans live in the one state or the other is the paramount question of this era.

For two hundred years Americans have been indoctrinated with a mythology created, imposed and sustained by a manipulating cabal: the financial elite that built its absolute control on the muscle and blood, good will, ignorance and credulity, of its citizenry.

America began with the invasion of a populated continent and the genocide of its native people. Once solidly established, it grafted enslavement of another race onto that base.

With those two pillars of state firmly in place it declared itself an independent nation in a document that nobly proclaimed the equality of all mankind.

In that act of monumental hypocrisy America’s myth had its beginning.

* * *

A Constitution was written that came to be regarded as American Holy Writ. Its central purposes were to defend private property and suppress mass democracy. It has fulfilled both those mandates beyond the wildest dreams of its creators.

Once the existing oligarchy was secure in law and native people largely exterminated, the ruling class increased its wealth and power fantastically in the 19th century, using the government as its enabler, exploiting to the limit the device of chartered corporations.

With its phenomenal money power, the financial elite began to use the military to expand its sway beyond the continent. Regions, territories, islands, and whole countries were annexed, invaded, and possessed outright, their peoples crushed, suppressed, and ruled.

Because ordinary Americans, like any people, need to believe that whatever the ruling elite undertakes in their nation’s name must be essentially benevolent, noble in purpose and justified in fact, the myth had to be radically modified for imperial expansion.

The foundational story was that Americans had come to a howling wilderness teeming with godless savages and, through invincible strength of character and purity of purpose, had tamed the land and honorably earned the right to possess their bountiful home.

In the era of extra-territorial expansion that version was polished to justify and ennoble imperialism. The new corollary was that America could not ignore colonialist brutality but was obliged, by the Manifest Destiny that led us to civilize our own continent, to carry our mission into barbaric darkness wherever tyranny created abuse and suffering.

A national myth that absolutely binds the loyalty of a people to its government must be a subtle and powerful elixir that elevates and aggrandizes that people’s self-regard. National policy will then appear to be an extension of its superior citizenry’s inchoate will, and the basis for a justified arrogance toward the lesser world.

The simple, powerful myth of America’s altruistic and heroic benevolence, shaped and maintained by the financial/political power elite, infused Americans with a deep and outrageously hubristic sense of racial superiority that, mobilized behind various imperial enterprises, has given all such adventures the character of a quasi-religious crusade. In this way insatiable imperialism acquires the apparent moral perfection of a syllogism.

* * *

With WWII, the world was reconfigured. American Capitalism emerged supreme from the horror that had virtually wrecked its capitalist partners. The Soviet Union, though, having absorbed by far the greatest devastation from Nazi Germany, had astonishingly risen above its ruin to become the leading challenger to America as a world power.

This challenge was not competitive, it was systemic: Soviet Communism was a direct threat to American hegemony in that it categorically refuted the philosophical basis of Predatory Capitalism. Grounded in Marx and Lenin, it attacked Capitalism’s inherent evils, monstrous inequities and flagrant injustices that, exacerbated by speculation, exploitation and fraud, would destroy it. And it promoted world revolution to that end.

This face-off of giants in the Cold War necessitated further refinement of the American myth. Now, instead of simply intervening in situations where despotism or tyranny required America to forcefully implant our just and ethical democracy, America had to become the shield and bulwark of the sacred capitalist system in which “free enterprise” was magically and increasingly identified with democracy and equally to be defended.

This version prevailed through many surrogate confrontations around the globe in the era of Mutually Assured Destruction and survived even the debacle of Vietnam, lasting until the collapse of the Soviet Union, as the propaganda stream became ever more intense and pervasive. On radio and television Americans were subjected to an unrelenting barrage of hyper-patriotism in which American moral superiority was a given, and America’s self-touted courage, generosity and decency were its unchallengeable proofs.

The implosion of the Soviet Union left America, in its own terminology, the “Sole Superpower in a Unipolar World”. This, however, did not result in diminution of the myth. The practical effect of having no doomsday enemy--China couldn’t plausibly be cast in that role then--was to supercharge it by increasing its element of pure, hubristic ego. America was no longer just called upon to defend the “Free World” from monstrous heresy; it was now, by virtue of its universally acknowledged, beatific “exceptionalism”, required to oversee and police it in the interests, and for the benefit, of lesser nations.

* * *

“Power corrupts”, said Lord Mahan, “and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

When the only rival and counterweight to American power disintegrated there was a sense within the American power elite that the opportunity existed, for the first time in history, for one country to absolutely dominate and effectively control the entire world.

This consensus was expressed in a policy statement composed by a cadre of major right-wing political players representing massive corporate capitalist interests called the Project for a New American Century. This triumphalist manifesto laid out a plan for absolute American access and control of essential resources and raw materials worldwide, to be guaranteed by the military which would enforce Full Spectrum Dominance.

The American Myth, which had seemed to have lost momentum and its animating principle in the totally unexpected so-called Cold War “victory”, was now re-energized with a less defensive and reactive essence, and given the glowing radiance and patina of a true and, for the first time, self-professed and articulated, imperial mission.

The attack on the Towers, an unimaginable provocation, was the trigger mechanism for the explosive launch of the effort to impose that imperial model in practice on the world.

* * *

It has been without question the most spectacular failure in the history of American misadventure. After a decade marked by the waste of trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of American lives, the stunning bankruptcy of our internally burglarized nation, and a consequent recession more fundamentally damaging than the Great One, Imperial America has nothing to show for the botched folly of its arrogant overreach but unequivocal disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, with no end of madness in sight.

An impartial observer would have to say that the hypnotic hold of the American Myth on the loyalty of the people has led only to disgrace and disaster, and set a direct course to inevitable imperial decline and ruin. That would be inarguable on any rational basis, but it entirely mistakes the motive for, and the purpose of, the myth. The American Myth was never intended to serve the interests either of our country or of our people: it was created solely to buttress, shield, and exalt the ruling financial class. It has done that with astonishing and unbroken success that staggers the imagination from our earliest days.

The massive looting of Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan war funding to enrich the Corporate Tyranny—for that is what it has become—is on an unique scale of its own, without anything remotely comparable to its flagrant obscenity in the whole long history of war.

Neither the Pentagon nor any branch of the U.S. government can give any accounting whatever of the many billions of tax-generated dollars that have vanished, evaporated. There is no doubt but that beyond the outrageously inflated, no-bid contracts handed to giant corporate favorites with their preposterous guaranteed profits, much of the money was simply stolen in bulk by, through, or in spite of the military, and distributed among thieves and accomplices, some of it on huge pallets… for convenience, presumably.

* * *

While this wholesale robbery was going on under the oversight of the military abroad, the Corporate Tyranny had evolved a whole set of impenetrably complex devices for the generation of money without any economically productive source or result at home.

The sole driving force and purpose of Capitalism is the realization of profit. According to that calculus, reducing production costs increases profit margin. This leads to the obvious conclusion that as production costs near zero, profit is maximized.

There is no provision for social good in Capitalist theory. Corporations, created to optimize business opportunity through efficient specialization, were originally required to operate for public benefit but that provision was quickly finessed and forgotten.

American law courts have always favored corporate concentrations of wealth since they, like the Congress, exist to serve the moneyed interests. The American Myth was created to provide cover for the financial oligarchy to exploit the country and the citizenry, and the judiciary has consistently cooperated in ruling for corporations against the people.

Indeed, without ever considering the question in law, the Supreme Court long ago endowed corporations with “personhood”, that is with all rights of human beings under our Constitution. The way this travesty occurred--the slipshod by-product of an obliquely related case--shows that the court preferred to incorporate this perversion of the plain intent of the 14th amendment as an unexamined assumption rather than risk an eventual test which would unquestionably have created violent public outrage.

Given the collusion of Congress and the courts in securing legal invulnerability for the Corporate Tyranny and the principle that the only duty of corporations is maximization of profit, it was not surprising that megabanks, huge brokerage houses, giant insurance conglomerates, gilded hedge funds and the credit agencies pretending to certify their work, all engaged in massive and systemic fraud and deception for just that purpose. The result was the crash of ’08, the recession, and the stunning and unprecedented rescue and bailout of the biggest banks, investment houses, and insurance and credit conglomerates with taxpayer dollars. So much for the hallowed Invisible Hand of the Free Market…

* * *

The last decades have seen two related megatrends in American geopolitical mechanics, both with dire effects on the power of the American Myth. First, what belief the world at large had in it has been shattered by a catastrophic series of imbecile and irretrievable military failures and disasters, which has caused erosion of its efficacy at home. Second, in response to this, the State has made increasingly crude efforts to boost the Myth’s waning power by the imposition of totalitarian methods of surveillance, intimidation and coercion on the American people to a degree unprecedented in scope and scale.

The whole clanking, medieval apparatus of Homeland Security that has sprouted like an enormous poison fungus since 9/11 with its brutal police state mindset; the odious Patriot Act with its flagrant subversions of the Bill of Rights; the endless, fantasy-based terror-peddling of the prostitute corporate media with its clowns and harpies churning irrational fear and anger in the uninformed: all this grim, repressive endeavor is a concerted attempt to distract Americans from the real causes of their injury, abuse, and oppression.

And yet, even with the American Myth now totally and irreparably blown full of holes and exposed demonstrably for the tissue of lies, deceptions and frauds that it has always been, it somehow keeps its phenomenal hold on the great mass of the American people. The tragic reality is that, for the majority, their own identities have been so deeply and thoroughly infused with the myth that to disbelieve it is to disbelieve in themselves.

* * *

So the American Myth is dead, and yet it lives on in its deadness, horribly masking our crapshot economy, our bankrupt debtors prison of a society, our Ghost Dance charade of kabuki democracy, while typhoons of impending social, economic and ecological disaster build their enormous, lightning-charged thunderheads above the dark future before us.

And what is it that the dead Myth still imperfectly obscures for Americans? What is outside and beyond the opaque wall of faltering, failing dishonesty and deception? What is the horror that the shoddy, tattered Myth has so long and so effectively concealed?

It is the world that has suffered unrelieved exploitation by the violence of our imperialist mania. It is the many wrecked and pillaged economies financially looted by our imposed predatory capitalist austerity regimes. It is the teeming hundreds of millions of starved, deprived and dying children sacrificed to Wall Street commodities gaming. It is the multitudes of humble, innocent, ignorant people, barely surviving in absolutist and dictatorial regimes propped up in their barbaric cruelty by our military while our banks siphon off the profits left after arming their brutal police and armies and bribing their ruling Kings, Sheikhs or Generals. It is the millions of dead and maimed in the raped populations of simple tribal people whom our indiscriminately murderous juggernaut has left in its bloody wake in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. It is the appalling legacy of hate and repulsion, disdain and fear, that America has earned with its appalling hegemonist villainy in every corner of the world.

And at home, what is it we Americans have been so complicit in hiding from ourselves in our devotion to the perverse legend that has come to inhabit our souls like a succubus?

It is the millions of us with no work and no hope in middle age whose jobs and homes have been devoured by the heartless fraud machine of Wall Street. It is the trashed and demolished weedlots of our major cities eroding in crumbling, fire-gutted ruin. It is the many towns and cities with industries shut down and factories deserted or dismantled and shipped overseas. It is our decaying, disintegrating public schools, our bankrupt states and counties, our overtaxed, antiquated public transportation systems, our obsolete, dissolving infrastructure, our bloated, irrational prisons complex, our punishing and inadequate health care disaster, and over it all, the repressive mechanism of our police state, armed and empowered, ready for use against the American people themselves.

* * *

This is where we are. The great question now is whether we as a nation can awaken from this long historic nightmare and face the terrifying and exhilarating prospect of living in the full light of reality without the false props and dishonest constructs of a hoodwinked, herded and dishonored people or, whether we have internalized the falsity and disease to such an extent that it has become an organic, overmastering form of insanity?

In 1846, Henry David Thoreau, offended to his soul by the injustice of the American government’s invasion of Mexico, protested it and went to jail for his convictions. Later, in his essay On Civil Disobedience, he said this:

“If injustice is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.”

To attempt to break the hold of the American Myth will be a titanic, daunting challenge. To even begin to openly rebel against the might of the National Security State will require the courage to face much more than official disapproval and denunciation. Imperial America will not respond to even the most peaceful and orderly protest with anything less than hard police repression and the level of punishment will rise in relation to the scope and seriousness of the action undertaken.

Small protests will have no effect and will be meaningless. Organized mass events, when they occur, will draw the whole fiercely and brutally motivated National Security State apparatus down upon themselves. Americans, excepting those of our underclass who have felt it, have no experience with violent police or military repression. Those who commit peaceful civil disobedience, a first and innocent tactic of serious protest, will swiftly find out to their cost how it works. In a National Security State that has excised and eradicated all defensive laws and regulations intended to prevent abuse of the public, whatever the State does is legal. To such a pass have we in America come as a result of our long historic indoctrination in serving our financial elite, our Ruling Class.

To achieve any redemption for Americans, to make possible any more just, humane and life-honoring society, will require complete abandonment of the system of Predatory Capitalism. If offers no prospect of reform or improvement and we have all been witness to the idiocy of the so-called “democratic process” in action for generations now.

America is nearing the greatest crisis point in its history and the terrific cataclysm, when it happens, will determine the future our country is to have. If we cannot, in dominating numbers, rise to reject the heartless, mindless, soulless machine of Imperial Predatory Capitalism, we will be condemned to a fascistic command and control horror in which human beings are mere possessions of the State, units of production or service, and then perhaps not even that, as excess population in that brave, new world nay be eliminated.

That end is not inevitable. We are not lost. We are not even defeated because to this moment we have not engaged. We have not honored our responsibility as human beings. We have not risen to defend our humanity. We have let ourselves be ruled.

All around the world the thunder of vast and immeasurable discontent can be heard and felt. In Egypt and Spain, Jordan and Greece, Iraq and Sudan, Afghanistan and Ireland, Latin America, the Far East and Africa, the legitimate anger of humanity is expressing itself against the dead and killing hand of Predatory Capitalism and its agencies of violence. And here, in America, so long trapped and encapsulated, frozen like a fly in amber in a false religion of state idolatry, the anger is deep, widespread, and growing.

It is up to those who know and care to lead. As Thomas Paine said, “These are the times that try men’s souls.” Nothing is guaranteed us. That can’t matter. We cannot be concerned with odds or outcomes. We cannot let the Machine of Injustice grind on. We must oppose it with all the moral force we own. We must act with quiet courage to confront a vicious tyrannical system that is destroying the earth, its life, and its people. We must put our lives on the line to oppose it.

The Nightmare Machine of rapacious exploitation has overthrown humanity’s decency and reason and its bloody inhuman treason flourishes over us. This must be ended.

Let your life be a friction now to stop the Machine.

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http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=29383

Silencing The Critics

In 2010 the FBI invaded the homes of peace activists in several states and seized personal possessions in what the FBI--the lead orchestrator of fake “terrorist plots”--called an investigation of “activities concerning the material support of terrorism.”

Subpoenas were issued to compel antiwar protestors to testify before grand juries as prosecutors set about building their case that opposing Washington’s wars of aggression constitutes giving aid and comfort to terrorists. The purpose of the raids and grand jury subpoenas was to chill the anti-war movement into inaction.

Last week in one fell swoop the last two remaining critics of Washington/Tel Aviv imperialism were removed from the mainstream media. Judge Napolitano’s popular program, Freedom Watch, was cancelled by Fox TV, and Pat Buchanan was fired by MSNBC. Both pundits had wide followings and were appreciated for speaking frankly.

Many suspect that the Israel Lobby used its clout with TV advertisers to silence critics of the Israeli government’s efforts to lead Washington to war with Iran. Regardless, the point before us is that the voice of the mainstream media is now uniform. Americans hear one voice, one message, and the message is propaganda. Dissent is tolerated only on such issues as to whether employer-paid health benefits should pay for contraceptive devices. Constitutional rights have been replaced with rights to free condoms.

The western media demonizes those at whom Washington points a finger. The lies pour forth to justify Washington’s naked aggression: the Taliban are conflated with al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, Gaddafi is a terrorist and, even worse, fortified his troops with Viagra in order to commit mass rape against Libyan women.

President Obama and members of Congress along with Tel Aviv continue to assert that Iran is making a nuclear weapon despite public contradiction by the US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate. According to news reports, Pentagon chief Leon Panetta told members of the House of Representatives on February 16 that “Tehran has not made a decision to proceed with developing a nuclear weapon.” http://www.denverpost.com/nationworld/ci_19978801?source=rss However, in Washington facts don’t count. Only the material interests of powerful interest groups matter.

At the moment the american Ministry of Truth is splitting its time between lying about Iran and lying about Syria. Recently, there were some explosions in far away Thailand, and the explosions were blamed on Iran. Last October the FBI announced that the bureau had uncovered an Iranian plot to pay a used car salesman to hire a Mexican drug gang to kill the Saudi Ambassador to the US. The White House idiot professed to believe the unbelievable plot and declared that he had “strong evidence,” but no evidence was ever released. The purpose for announcing the non-existent plot was to justify Obama’s sanctions, which amount to an embargo--an act of war--against Iran for developing nuclear energy.

As a signatory to the non-proliferation treaty, Iran has the right to develop nuclear energy. IAEA inspectors are permanently in Iran and report no diversion of nuclear material to a weapons program.

In other words, according to the reports of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the US National Intelligence Estimate, and the current Secretary of Defense, there is no evidence that Iran has nukes or is making nukes. Yet, Obama has placed illegal sanctions on Iran and continues to threaten Iran with military attack on the basis of an accusation that is contradicted by all known evidence.

How can such a thing happen? It can happen because there is no Helen Thomas, who also was eliminated by the Israel Lobby, to question, as a member of the White House press, President Obama why he placed war-like sanctions on Iran when his own CIA and his own Secretary of Defense, along with the IAEA, report that there is no basis for the sanctions.

The idea that the US is a democracy when it most definitely does not have a free watchdog press is laughable. But the media is not laughing. It is lying. Just like the government, every time the US mainstream media opens its mouth or writes one word, it is lying. Indeed, its corporate masters pay its employees to tell lies. That is their job. Tell the truth, and you are history like Buchanan and Napolitano and Helen Thomas.

What the Ministry of Truth calls “peaceful protesters brutalized by Assad’s military” are in fact rebels armed and financed by Washington. Washington has fomented a civil war. Washington claims its intention is to rescue the oppressed and abused Syrian people from Assad, just as Washington rescued the oppressed and abused Libyan people from Gaddafi. Today “liberated” Libya is a shell of its former self terrorized by clashing militias. Thanks to Obama, another country has been destroyed.

Reports of atrocities committed against Syrian civilians by the military could be true, but the reports come from the rebels who desire Western intervention to put them into power. Moreover, how would these civilian casualties differ from the ones inflicted on Bahraini civilians by the US supported Bahraini government, the military of which was fortified by Saudi Arabian troops? There is no outcry in the western press about Washington’s blind eye to civilian atrocities committed by its puppet states.

How do the Syrian atrocities, if they are real, differ from Washington’s atrocities in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo prison, and secret CIA prison sites? Why is the american Ministry of Truth silent about these massive, unprecedented, violations of human rights?

Remember also the reports of Serbian atrocities in Kosovo that Washington and Germany used to justify NATO and US bombing of Serbian civilians, including the Chinese consulate, dismissed as another collateral damage. Now 13 years later, a prominent German TV program has revealed that the photographs that ignited the atrocity campaign were grossly misrepresented and were not photographs of atrocities committed by Serbs, but of Albanian separatists killed in a firefight between armed Albanians and Serbians. Serbian casualties were not shown. http://www.freenations.freeuk.com/news-2012-02-19.html

The problem that truth faces is that the western media continually lies. On the rare instances when the lies are corrected, it is always long after the event and, therefore, the crimes enabled by the media have been accomplished.

Washington set its puppet Arab League upon Syria in order to establish Syria’s isolation among its own kind, the better to attack Syria. Assad forestalled Washington’s set-up of Syria for destruction by calling a nationwide referendum on February 26 to establish a new constitution that would extend the prospect of rule beyond the Ba’athists (Assad’s party).

One might think that, if Washington and its Ministry of Truth really wanted democracy in Syria, Washington would get behind this gesture of good will by the ruling party and endorse the referendum. But Washington does not want a democratic Syrian government. Washington wants a puppet state. Washington’s response is that the dastardly Assad has outwitted Washington by taking steps toward Syrian democracy before Washington can obliterate Syria and install a puppet.

Here is Obama’s response to Assad’s move toward democracy: “It’s actually quite laughable--it makes a mockery of the Syrian revolution,” White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters aboard Air Force One.

Obama, the neoconservatives, and Tel Aviv are really pissed. If Washington and Tel Aviv can figure out how to get around Russia and China and overthrow Assad, Washington and Tel Aviv will put Assad on trial as a war criminal for proposing a democratic referendum.

Assad was an eye doctor in England until his father died, and he was called back to head the troubled government. Washington and Tel Aviv have demonized Assad for refusing to be their puppet. Another sore point is the Russian naval base at Tartus. Washington is desperate to evict the Russians from their only Mediterranean base in order to make the Mediterranean an american lake. Washington, inculcated with neocon visions of world empire, wants its own mare nostrum.

If the Soviet Union were still extant, Washington’s designs on Tartus would be suicidal. However, Russia is politically and militarily weaker than the Soviet Union. Washington has infiltrated Russia with NGOs that work against Russia’s interests and will disrupt the upcoming elections. Moreover, Washington-funded “color revolutions” have turned former constituent parts of the Soviet Union into Washington’s puppet states. Shorn of communist ideology, Washington does not expect Russia to push the nuclear button. Thus, Russia is there for the taking.

China is a more difficult problem. Washington’s plan is to cut China off from independent sources of energy. China’s oil investment in eastern Libya is the reason Gaddafi was overthrown, and oil is one of the main reasons that Washington has targeted Iran. China has large oil investments in Iran and gets 20% of its oil from Iran. Closing down Iran, or converting it into Washington’s puppet state, closes down 20% of the Chinese economy.

Russia and China are slow learners. However, when Washington and its NATO puppets abused the “no-fly” UN resolution concerning Libya and violated the UN resolution by turning it into armed military aggression against Libya’s armed forces, which had every right to put down a CIA sponsored rebellion, Russia and China finally got the message that Washington could not be trusted.

This time Russia and China did not fall into Washington’s trap. They vetoed the UN Security Council’s set-up of Syria for military attack. Now Washington and Tel Aviv (it is not always clear which is the puppet and which is the puppet master) have to decide whether to proceed in the face of Russian and Chinese opposition.

The risks for Washington have multiplied. If Washington proceeds, the information that is conveyed to Russia and China is that they are next in line after Iran. Therefore, Russia and China, both being well-armed with nuclear weapons, are likely to put their foot down more firmly at the line drawn over Iran. If the crazed warmongers in Washington and Tel Aviv, with veins running strong with hubris and arrogance, again override Russian and Chinese opposition, the risk of a dangerous confrontation rises.

Why isn’t the american media raising questions about these risks? Is it worth blowing up the world in order to stop Iran from having a nuclear energy program or even a nuclear weapon? Does Washington think China is unaware that Washington is taking aim at its energy supply? Does Washington think Russia is unaware that it is being encircled by hostile military bases?

Whose interests are being served by Washington’s endless and multi-trillion dollar wars? Certainly not the interests of the 50 million americans with no access to health care, nor by the 1,500,000 american children who are homeless, living in cars, rundown motel rooms, tent cities, and the storm sewers under Las Vegas, while huge amounts of public funds are used to bail out banks and squandered in wars of hegemony. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suJCvkazrTc

The US has no independent print and TV media. It has presstitutes who are paid for the lies that they tell. The US government in its pursuit of its immoral aims has attained the status of the most corrupt government in human history. Yet Obama speaks as if Washington is the font of human morality.

The US government does not represent americans. It represents a few special interests and a foreign power. US citizens simply don’t count, and certainly Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans, Somalians, Yemenis, and Pakistanis don’t count. Washington regards truth, justice, and mercy as laughable values. Money, power, hegemony are all that count for Washington, the city upon the hill, the light unto nations, the example for the world.

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http://carolynbaker.net/2012/02/19/toward-purpose-and-meaning-in-a-too-late-world-by-douglas-carhart/

Toward Purpose And Meaning In A Too-Late World

One night, just after moving to California in 1976, as a young man fresh out of college, I had a vivid dream. In the dream, I was driving my VW bug on an isolated stretch of highway when I saw three mushroom clouds rising on the horizon. Terrified, I pulled off the road and entered a clinic where I found myself aiding sufferers of the nuclear fallout. I was there for some time before I decided to leave, worried that I myself might become sick from working so closely with the patients. I next stumbled across some long-haired young men sweating in the sun, hand-building a small but sturdy wooden bridge across a dry creek bed. It was hard work. One guy had his shoulder wedged against the bank, straining with all his might to get a good fit with the bridge support against the side. The guys looked askance at me and complained, “Remember when we saw you last and said the next time you see us it will be too late? Well, it is…”

This dream comes back to me from time to time and I continue to reflect on its meaning in my life, “dreaming the dream onwards”, as the Jungians would say. It remains a little haunting. It still provokes me to ask some disturbing questions, all these years later. Do mushroom clouds “on the horizon” warn of apocalypse still to come? What is the meaning of the clinic and the people I am caring for? What is the disease I am afraid of contracting? What does it mean to leave there? Who are those long-haired guys, and what is the meaning of the “small but sturdy wooden bridge” they are building? And what is with the dry creek bed? Why build a bridge across that? Why are they angry with me? What difference could I have made? Am I partly responsible for this awful state of affairs? And it’s too late? Well, if it’s too late, why bother?

Thirty years ago I wondered about this dream in the context of the nuclear threat.

My M.A. thesis in Psychology was titled “Saving the Bomb: An Archetypal Look at the Nuclear Threat”. It is easy to forget how tense things were back then. It was a time of MAD (mutually assured destruction) as the stated foreign policy position of both the Soviet Union and theUS. President Ronald Reagan joked on air “We begin bombing in five minutes…” Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Nuclear Freeze, SoNoMore Atomics, etc. Remember? In my paper I hypothesized that the bomb was an image of death, and the “ultimate limit” to all our fantasies of growth and materialism. At that time I was grasping for the words to articulate what was really just an intuition, a sense that this growth just could not continue on the same way in the future. How could it? There was just too much, too fast, and everything at an ever-increasing rate. “Future Shock”. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but like many of my generation experiencing a kind of spiritual malaise, I knew something was out of balance, even if I couldn’t rationally explain it. Was the bomb some dark “cure” for this overgrowth that really is overkill? Something had to happen. Nothing grows forever, does it?

One day, twenty plus years later I heard a snippet of an interview on a Santa Rosa radio station where the speaker posited the possibility of homeless people squatting in San Francisco International Airport, because the airlines had gone broke after there was not enough fuel to fly them anymore. It’s interesting to note how in this information age so much comes at you, and so little of it really speaks to you. Well, this spoke to me. I can’t remember how long it was after hearing that sentence on the radio that I sped to the bookstore, but I’m sure it was that same day. The speaker was Richard Heinberg, and the book, of course, was The Party’s Over.

The book’s thesis about Peak Oil was so simple, its implications so obvious. I have not looked at the world in the same way since. From then on I could not help but imagine disturbing images of the world as it might appear “post peak”, as fossil fuels decline. My head became filled with new questions. Driving by the neatly mowed and nicely watered grassy median on my way to work I wondered “Who is going to mow this when there is no gas?” Will the streets be lined with abandoned cars? Where will my water come from when the diesel pump onSonoma Ave.dries up? Who will take my garbage, how will I dispose of my sewage? Where will my food come from when fossil fuel fertilizer becomes scarce? I saw all the millions of plastic things surrounding me with new eyes: my plastic razor, my keyboard, every single container in my garage and on the store shelf. It went on and on. I looked at a map of theUSand it seemed as if all the roads and highways were like drying-up blood vessels and capillaries in the human body that would lead to the death of the country—our fossil fuel life-blood drying up. “Oh, my God,” I thought, “millions of people are going to die!” I looked at my beautiful little boy and wondered if he might be one of them. Not only did I wonder if he would ever drive a car, or fly toEuropeand explore it as I had as a youth, but I wondered, “Will he survive?”

We made it through the nuclear threat, (so far, thank God) but now, here it was again, the image of an ultimate limit, not apocalyptic in its suddenness, perhaps, but far more certain, in fact, inevitable. Someday we would run out of fossil fuel. This was an inescapable fact. Someday sooner, perhaps very soon, this “running out” would start.

Peak Oil, of course, isn’t so much about “no gas” as it is about the consequences of a never-again increasing supply of fossil fuel. This is why it made such sense to me. Here, for the first time is the limit I wondered about years ago. Things were out of balance because the supply of fossil fuel made available to humans was always increasing. Our life was built on more cheap energy, all the time. The pace of modern life was always increasing because there was always more energy being pumped into it. It’s as if the whole twentieth century is one big algal bloom, economies, population, industrial production, transportation, all increasing without a second thought, because it could, because it had to. After a couple of generations that knew no difference, the whole of the civilized world came to expect this condition of unending, ever increasing growth as natural. If anyone thought to say “Slow down” or even “Where are we going?” they were looked at as if they were crazy. Why would anyone want to slow prosperity? The standard of living of the whole world was increasing, what is wrong with that?

There was, of course, one big problem: out of control growth, like cancer, was killing its host, the earth. Irony of ironies, Peak Oil, so potentially devastating for our industrial culture in this limit to further material growth and population might just prove to be the necessary cure for our suffering earth.

So here I am, along with so many others, with this new awareness, struggling with the question, “What to do?” Though I clearly see the implications of Peak Oil, I remain a cautious and conventional person. I am a husband and father, a suburban homeowner and a high school teacher. I read about others making great life changes in the face of Peak Oil, and am humbled by the courage of many of my peers. So, what do I do? “Buy gold!” “Sell that house, before it loses all its value!” “Move to the watery Northwest!” “Join an intentional community!” “Solar Panels!” “Rainwater Cisterns!” “Learn how to shoot!”

Years ago, when I was a prayerful young man, I would pray for two things, the wisdom to know the right thing to do, and the courage to do it. Am I condemned now to sense what is going on, but not have the guts to make the big changes appropriate to my vision of the future? This is a particularly touchy subject in the Carhart household, for family and friends who know me well attribute my interest in the subject of Peak Oil as “Doug’s Apocalyptic Thing”, and remembering my years of anguish struggling with the MA thesis, look at me with patient understanding and wait for the subject to change. It’s never a popular Thanksgiving comment is it, to wonder out loud, “I wonder how many gallons of diesel it took to ship these cranberries here today…”

So, I struggle privately with what I should do. Money limits some options. I struggle, like most all in the middle class, just to make ends meet. I cannot sell my house and move toWidbyIsland(or wherever) because my house, like so many others, is underwater. I have no money to buy gold, let alone put in a cistern rainwater catchment, solar panel, or grease conversion kit on my diesel VW.

So then, what is my work in these times of such fundamental change? Well, I am a High School teacher. That’s what I do. I have four classes full of longhaired (and not so long-haired) young men and women. I want to give them a sense of purpose and meaning for their future. But how do I when I myself remain so pessimistic? Dare I say that I think they will be riding horses or bikes to work when they are my age? Dare I utter “fifty million farmers” and all that implies? Dare I share the fact that the earth can only support about half its current population without fossil fuel fertilizer to grow crops? As their teacher, how can I inspire hope when I feel so hopeless?

So I remain careful in what I say to them. One of he most influential commentators on the nuclear threat, Robert Jay Lifton wrote of “Psychic Numbing”, describing the kind of “desensitized” attitude people must affect in the face of overwhelming threat, like the nuclear threat, and now, perhaps Peak Oil as well. He insisted the cure for this kind of numbing was to find an “animating relationship” to the problem. Empowerment. The problem is that my students, like 99% of all of us, remain in denial about Peak Oil. Understandably, they defend themselves from the reality of the situation with the whole range of current addictions: materialism, media, technology, drugs and alcohol, gang identifications, the social obsessions of adolescence, the current not so civil war between “Left” and “Right”, and so on. I don’t want to drive them further into denial by presenting them with my fearful scenarios of the future unless I can offer some empowering solutions to help them form Lifton’s “animating relationship” to the problem. If all I have to offer my students is fear and dread, it’s a good thing I am keeping my mouth shut for now. But, really, is my silence the best I have to offer?

So, I guess the real question is “What animates me and gives me hope?”

Perhaps it’s time to return to my dream and revisit those images with this new question in mind. Here’s what I think now. In reality, I am still isolated in the clinic of my psyche, nursing my fears about the dangers rising on the horizon. I am the patient there. The contagious disease is hopelessness. All hope is not lost, however, because the dream says that somehow I will find my way out of my isolation and hook up with other men hard at work. How that will happen, I don’t know. I just “find myself” there. And even though it’s “too late”, there they will be, determined and purposeful. But how can that be? If it’s too late, why bother? How can one muster that kind of strength and determination in a world where it’s already too late?

Well, if one world is ending, mustn’t another be beginning? Maybe “too late” refers to an old world already passed. Isn’t that world already gone anyway, with the mushroom clouds foretelling its destruction? If it’s too late to revivify the old world, (of what, materialism? consumerism? unending growth? profit?…) that must mean there is a new world already beginning, one full of new meaning and new purpose. Meaning and purpose that we don’t fully comprehend yet. This is why bridges must now be built, because a new world is coming to birth right before our eyes, and new connections needing our hands to make them are waiting to be formed. Bridges over ancient streambeds of long since evaporated wisdom and spiritual truth, archetypal waters from our preindustrial selves… Isn’t it really an act of prescience and hope to be building a bridge in anticipation of a truth that has not yet returned? What have we been thirsting for all this time really, that our material riches could not satisfy?

The bridge in the dream might provide an answer. Perhaps it’s a symbol of connection. We can agree that the modern industrial age has certainly severed our sense of connection to nature, and even to ourselves. Cheap fossil fuels gave us the illusion we could dominate, subjugate and use the natural world for our own ends, and in the process we forgot that we are a part of the world, not above it. It cut us off from our sense of our own natural selves and our sense of community with our neighbors. After 150 years of fossil fuel driven growth we have forgotten what this sense of connectedness feels like. Perhaps my dream says, “Prepare the ground for its return, build the bridges of connection. In the future this energy will flow again.”

This is not to say that the transition will be easy. The Jungians warn us not to “sweeten the image”. I’m afraid we are in for an awful, difficult time. In my dream it was very hard work to build that one sturdy little bridge. I still fear that there will be great social unrest and many deaths as the old world passes away. Is there any way around mass starvation? Will there be mass suicides as people grapple with their own sense of hopelessness. The collapse of unending growth as a dominant paradigm, is, after all, the death of a worldview that has been the whole reason d’être of the industry and economy of the twentieth century.

There can be no rebirth without the requisite death that precedes it, so a “Great Turning”, yes, but A Great Death, also. This is all the more reason why we need each other during this changing of worlds. As in all healthy ecosystems, the wider a person’s web of supportive interrelationships, the greater their chance of survival.

We all have our own way of building bridges. Some people organize, some join, some network very consciously, some are good “connecters” just by the power of their personality, some ask good questions, some research and publish, some build, some fight. There are as many ways as there are types of people, I guess.

So, what is my way? What is the bridge I should be helping to build? I don’t know, I guess the way I connect with others regarding this issue is still taking shape. Perhaps this little paper is my first informal reaching-out. Maybe I’ll walk over and show it to those guys building that sturdy little bridge over there, and see what they say. They sure look like they could use a hand…

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http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2012/02/nightmare-without-limits.html

Nightmare Without Limits

I must begin with a reminder. In "The Face of the Killer Who Is Your President," I excerpted an article by Nick Turse. Here are several passages from Turse's reporting:

Somewhere on this planet an American commando is carrying out a mission. Now, say that 70 times and you're done... for the day. Without the knowledge of the American public, a secret force within the U.S. military is undertaking operations in a majority of the world's countries. ...

While it's well known that U.S. Special Operations forces are deployed in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, and it's increasingly apparent that such units operate in murkier conflict zones like Yemen and Somalia, the full extent of their worldwide war has remained deeply in the shadows.

Last year, Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post reported that U.S. Special Operations forces were deployed in 75 countries, up from 60 at the end of the Bush presidency. By the end of this year, U.S. Special Operations Command [SOCOM] spokesman Colonel Tim Nye told me, that number will likely reach 120. "We do a lot of traveling -- a lot more than Afghanistan or Iraq," he said recently. This global presence -- in about 60% of the world's nations and far larger than previously acknowledged -- provides striking new evidence of a rising clandestine Pentagon power elite waging a secret war in all corners of the world.
...

SOCOM represents something new in the military. Whereas the late scholar of militarism Chalmers Johnson used to refer to the CIA as "the president's private army," today JSOC performs that role, acting as the chief executive's private assassination squad, and its parent, SOCOM, functions as a new Pentagon power-elite, a secret military within the military possessing domestic power and global reach.

In 120 countries across the globe, troops from Special Operations Command carry out their secret war of high-profile assassinations, low-level targeted killings, capture/kidnap operations, kick-down-the-door night raids, joint operations with foreign forces, and training missions with indigenous partners as part of a shadowy conflict unknown to most Americans. Once "special" for being small, lean, outsider outfits, today they are special for their power, access, influence, and aura.
Turse's article was published at the beginning of August 2011.

In a story dated today, February 12, 2012, the New York Times now reports:
As the United States turns increasingly to Special Operations forces to confront developing threats scattered around the world, the nation’s top Special Operations officer, a member of the Navy Seals who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, is seeking new authority to move his forces faster and outside of normal Pentagon deployment channels.

The officer, Adm. William H. McRaven, who leads the Special Operations Command, is pushing for a larger role for his elite units who have traditionally operated in the dark corners of American foreign policy. The plan would give him more autonomy to position his forces and their war-fighting equipment where intelligence and global events indicate they are most needed.

It would also allow the Special Operations forces to expand their presence in regions where they have not operated in large numbers for the past decade, especially in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
I'm sure you find all this tremendously reassuring. How good to know that Special Operations forces are used more and more frequently "to confront developing threats." What constitutes a "developing threat"? What are the factors involved? Who evaluates the available information and judges the severity of the threat?

And, if I may be so bold as to ask, what the hell does anyone in this criminal government mean by "threat" in the first damned place? Every bloody and blood-drenched official and miserable bureaucrat in Washington tells us that Iran is the gravest "threat" facing the United States -- except that it is no threat at all, nor will it ever be in the foreseeable future.

But Special Operations wants a still "larger role," and its leader wants "more autonomy to..." To what? Counter non-existent "threats"? And Special Operations wants "to expand their presence in regions" where they aren't yet killing whomever they choose and generally wreaking devastation whenever they feel like it. But I'm certain you'll sleep much better in light of all these wonderful reassurances.

I will give the NYT credit in one respect: their reporting on matters of this kind perfectly captures the nauseatingly hilarious mood of the murderous, maniacal farce that suffocates our lives. The very next paragraph of its story offers a series of real howlers:

While President Obama and his Pentagon’s leadership have increasingly made Special Operations forces their military tool of choice, similar plans in the past have foundered because of opposition from regional commanders and the State Department. The military’s regional combatant commanders have feared a decrease of their authority, and some ambassadors in crisis zones have voiced concerns that commandos may carry out missions that are perceived to tread on a host country’s sovereignty, like the rift in ties with Pakistan after the Bin Laden raid.
Don't you adore the fact that this collection of murderers and assassins exhibit the same petty squabbles over influence and power as are found in the moth-eaten bureaucracy of any pathetically rotten company you care to name? "No, no, you can't kill that guy! He's mine!" Or: "Wait a second, you miserable bastard. I'm the one who gets to order the destruction of those villages!" It's a magnificently edifying spectacle, it most surely is.

And I simply love that "some ambassadors" have "voiced concerns" that the always courteous and thoughtful United States might "tread on a host country's sovereignty." When killing a country's citizens, destroying their land, and exploiting their resources, you can never be too thoughtful. We wouldn't want to offend anyone, for heaven's sake.

I could go through the rest of the story, but honestly, neither you nor I deserve that kind of punishment. I want to make a few general points of some significance.

First, and I consider this absolutely crucial, stories like this -- especially when reported in the NYT, or the Washington Post or other organs of the State -- and let's please cut to the chase here and state what is indisputably the truth, for they are merely extensions of the State -- are what the State wants us to know. I repeat: this is what those with all the power want us to know.

I realize that all of us, including me, spend a lot of time analyzing and commenting on the "news." Of course we do: for the most part, what else do we have to go on? But do you honestly believe -- honestly, mind you -- that anything you read in the NYT or similar publications, or hear on radio or television, is what is actually going on right now? I haven't for decades. I don't consider this to be engaging in "conspiracy" theories to any degree whatsoever. I view it as the unvarnished, awful truth of where we are, and where we've been for a long time. To be sure, stories like this one bear some kind of very rough approximation to something that's going on -- but do they constitute a complete and accurate version of those events? Absolutely not.

The major purpose of this kind of "reporting" is to soften the public up, to get the suckers accustomed to what's already going on and/or what will happen very soon. That way, when a completely "unexpected" crisis occurs in some country no one has ever paid the slightest bit of attention to, we've already been conditioned for the "surprising" and uniformly awful "news." Perhaps it's an attack on the Third Minister of Transportation for the Fourth Southeastern Subdistrict in Middle Ofuquia. Lo and behold! Heroic Special Operations personnel just happen to be there to kill the "terrorists," and incidentally slaughter most of the inhabitants of all the surrounding towns. These things happen. And the fact that a small deployment remains to "guard" the nearby natural gas deposits is entirely coincidental. That's not reported in the NYT until a year later, and then only as a passing mention in a report on still another "crisis." An "unexpected" one, of course.

We've known for over half a year that Special Operations forces would be operating in roughly 120 countries by the end of 2011. It's now February 2012. The actual number is higher, if anything. And we know those forces are engaged in "high-profile assassinations, low-level targeted killings, capture/kidnap operations, kick-down-the-door night raids, joint operations with foreign forces, and training missions with indigenous partners as part of a shadowy conflict unknown to most Americans."

That's what they want us to know. The truth must be far worse. The latest NYT story, like all such stories, is at best a general, indistinct approximation of the truth. We can only guess at the rest.

As for all the talk about "developing threats" and the other "needs" that supposedly demand a U.S. presence in almost every corner of the world ... that's marketing. It's all about the marketing, baby. This bullshit sells. What's beneath the marketing? The ruling class has told us repeatedly, and with regard to this issue, they've been admirably clear over a period of many decades. As I recently explained once again:

[T]his is the view of the ruling class: "America is God. God's Will be done."

What they want is dominion over the world. They intend to have it. In pursuit of this aim, as they believe the necessity arises, they will destroy anyone and anything that stands in their way. To describe their behavior as insane is to miss the much more critical point, and to minimize the far greater danger. They know exactly what they're doing. They're hoping that you do not. To date, far too many people oblige them.

Don't help them in their pursuit of brutality, oppression, murder and vast destruction. I state again: they know exactly what they're doing. Be sure you judge them accordingly.

Believe it.