http://survivalacres.com/blog/you-have-a-decade-maybe/#more-3528
You Have A Decade (Maybe)
The process of global collapse and decline can be fairly described as a series of events, observations and measurements depicting an overall decline in the ability of a civilization to take care of itself.
While it is possible that a single event could precipitate a catastrophic collapse of civilization, the historical record demonstrates that this type of event is very, very rare. History most often shows that the collapse of civilization, which has happened many times before, is a variable period of lasting decades to thousands of years, although there are some exceptions to this.
Modern man has forgotten that all former civilizations are now gone. Their relics and monuments remain, but their applicability to “us” and our advanced modern world mystifies most of us. We may be the dependents of our ancestors, but we are nothing like them.
Our ethnocentric views, lack of history, and the overall general disconnect and indifference of how our civilization exists creates an illusion of false comfort, a sense of the “here and now” as being all that matters, creating a false sense of “protection” and blind faith that any possible collapse of the modern world is virtually “impossible”.
Hinging upon this false sense of security is the general lack of understanding of the interconnected Earth systems of which all humans (who have ever existed) and all life on Earth depend, and the fabricated human dependencies we have fashioned for ourselves (civilization itself), and the over-exploitation of the natural resources over the entire surface of this world.
Most people simply ignore what we are doing, and go right on doing what they were doing before, remaining generally ignorant and indifferent to their personal contribution and that of the larger society around them towards the “impossible”.
Indeed, it is the very construct of these devices and designs that we call civilization, now spanning the entire globe, that has created the illusion of safety and security. We’ve come to “depend” upon these steely layers of metal, concrete and asphalt and construction as a false security blanket against a world many of us barely seem to understand, yet it is the same world it has always been.
Ancient man lived closer to the land by necessity, taking sustenance and what comfort could be found by the work of his hands and the sweat of his brow and the sheer opportunity that presented itself. The Earth provided, the incredible abundance of this planet ensured that survival of the human race was all but guaranteed for hundreds of thousands of years, even millions into the future (at least), barring catastrophic disaster or perhaps the insane stupidity of a advanced civilization screwing things up too badly.
Yet the very unthinkable has now happened. The “impossible” has arrived at our doorstep by incremental degrees, like most collapse of civilizations before, and yet we barely recognize it, stubbornly clinging to our security blankets and the safety of ignorance embodied in the “here and now” existence we call daily life.
To all of my readers:
I often contemplate what to call the title of each blog post. First off, I want you to read it. I have zero interest in gaining your “following” or personal attention, knowing that this false illusion of self-importance destroys character and integrity. I publish anonymously, every time on purpose, so that the words and not the man are what is important. Secondly, I want you to contemplate and assess what is written. Weigh it out, think about it, decide for yourselves if it’s right or wrong. Over the years, I’ve written thousands of entries and articles here, there are even more elsewhere on now defunct forums. From the about me page:
The collapse of our society and particularly, the United States, is unfolding before our eyes. My focus is on sustainability and common sense, even if the United States somehow manages to stay intact, which I now very much doubt. Collapse is coming and finding ways to navigate this morass and devastation to come is now consuming the majority of my time and life. My purpose in ensure my own survival is quite simple – we have an obligation to all future generations to simply live. While we have squandered their (and our) inheritance in unbelievable ways, we stand a small chance of preserving humanity itself if we change our ways.
There is grave doubts regarding our chances and whether or not we will change our ways. Since starting this blog, I have come across a tremendous amount of evidence that the United States in particular will not change it’s ways in time or sufficiently enough to avoid a catastrophic collapse. I now believe that this is 100% unavoidable for the entire world. With collapse will come many radical and dangerous changes, the likes of which I have carefully documented on this blog.
I wrote that over 7 years ago. In that time, I have seen nothing but mounting evidence that the collapse of civilization is definitely happening — and that it will be more catastrophic then we can even imagine.
I very much “feel” for our future generations. I have a family, children, a wife, and people I care about. Yet there future survival is not a certainty, not at all. In fact, we may have unleashed a terrifying monster of epic proportions upon them. And this frightens me very, very much.
The title of this post then must be serious, because of late, I have had nothing but serious news to report. And this post is no different. Beyond my pleading words above that all readers truly listen with their hearts to the words written, this post is about what lies ahead. The “impossible” has happened, it is happening. It is a certainty, a guaranteed experience for the entire planet.
I am not a scientist, and I am not bound by any peer-rules of “don’t be too alarmist”. Yet it is the scientist themselves who are bringing forth the evidence.
I have long believed it is my duty as a human being, an inhabitant of this Earth, to speak the truth as loudly as I dare (in a time when telling the truth will get you killed or arrested). There are times indeed, when I say nothing, however, this is not one of those times. For some time now, I have been trying to convey how much, how fast, and how serious things are getting, because it is all working together in a mosaic of disaster for humanity and the Earth.
We need to know if we hope to change anything.
So know this. There is a new article – Albedo change in the Arctic
The graph below depicts the loss of sea ice in the Arctic. The black line is actual measurements since the early 80′s up to summer 2012 (now). The red line projects no sea ice as early as 2015.
There are more graphs on the link above, you should read the article too. The article also shows a trend line of no ice by 2014, just two years away.
How is this a big deal? The loss of sea ice exposes open ocean, changing the albedo (reflection). The albedo effect sends solar energy back out into space, critical to the survival of the biosphere (living things).
It’s also happening over land:
Apart from the albedo change that comes with this loss of sea ice, there’s also the loss of snow cover on land. Snow cover over Northern Hemisphere lands retreated rapidly in May and June, leaving the Arctic Ocean coastline nearly snow free, says the National Snow & Ice Data Center (NSIDC), adding that this rapid and early retreat of snow cover exposes large, darker underlying surfaces to the sun early in the season, fostering higher air temperatures and warmer soils.
So what’s the big deal?
The joint impact of loss of sea ice and loss of snow cover on land will make a huge difference; much more sunlight is now absorbed, instead of reflected back as was previously the case.
Professor Wadhams estimates the present summer area of sea ice at 4 million square km, with a summer albedo of about 0.60 (surface covered with melt pools). When the sea ice disappears, this is replaced by open water with an albedo of about 0.10. This will reduce the albedo of a fraction 4/510 of the earth’s surface by an amount 0.50. The average albedo of Earth at present is about 0.29. So, the disappearance of summer ice will reduce the global average albedo by 0.0039, which is about 1.35% relative to its present value.
As NASA describes, a drop of as little as 0.01 in Earth’s albedo would have a major warming influence on climate—roughly equal to the effect of doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which would cause Earth to retain an additional 3.4 watts of energy for every square meter of surface area.
It’s right there. The biosphere cannot safely absorb an additional 3.4 watts of energy to every square meter of the surface, it will heat up too fast. The speed by which this happens will be (and already is) faster then species (including humans) can adapt (those that survive). The net effect is the Earth will absorb FAR more energy that it can radiate back into space. Land, ocean and air will heat up far too fast.
Now you know why chemtrail geo-engineering has been going on (secretly) for so long. They’re trying to reflect energy back into space. Perhaps it’s worked somewhat, I don’t know — well, on second thought I do. It hasn’t worked sufficiently, as the graph above shows.
You have a decade, maybe more, maybe less, before hellish conditions will exist. Meanwhile, oxygen depletion will worsen due to increasing temperatures, to what degree I don’t know. I can safely say it won’t be getting better. Not unless we shut everything down, pronto, and hope like hell that we still have a chance to reverse what we started.
Unlikely. Which is why I never dwell on this hopium topic. It’s fantasy. Modern humans are simply too arrogant to believe that the impossible has now happened.
Between now and then — food destruction (crop loss), desertification, loss of oceans, reefs, fishing, storms, flooding (hydrological cycle will be greatly accelerated), resource wars, political pandering and finger pointing, all the usual sins and evils of mankind mixed in with chaotic Earth systems swinging wildly from the “norm” (ridding itself of the virus).
Get ready. Lame “advice”, I know, considering the size of the problem, but what else are you going to do? Wring your local politicians neck? That’ll come too, probably — sooner then we may think.
I’m not going to spend any time on the (s)Election, it’s utterly irrelevant and totally meaningless. The next idiot-in-charge will undoubtedly screw things up even worse, they always do.
Emergency planning on a global scale is clearly needed, but you won’t see this for a while, and there is a very high probability, knowing how government works and thinks, you won’t like it anyway. At all. First, it will be business as usual. Then, too little, too late. Then lots of hand-wringing and head rolling as a (very) few of those held responsible are sacrificed to appease the anger of the people. In the end, desperation will drive decision-making. It’s anybody’s guess “what” will be done, but it’s already very unlikely it will be sufficient. That’s more Hopium.
It is the refusal to face the facts, accept the evidence and deal with the expectations that will cause massive levels of suffering and loss on this planet. Kinda like what has been happening within the modern world since it’s arrival a few hundred years ago. We were hell-bent on wiping out everything in our path as our “Destiny” compelled us. Well, we got it, as they say. You just can’t save some things that were wrong to begin with. And we need to STOP TRYING. IT IS NOT THIS CIVILIZATION THAT WE SHOULD BE SAVING.
There are an increasing number of people and organizations that are saying that, so I’m not alone. The civilization we have now is virtually, figuratively and quite literally, TOAST.
So our job, as it were, is to collectively figure out what can be done if humans are to survive. First, I would strongly suggest that we preserve as much as the biosphere as we can, it is after all, what we depend upon for our own existence. Secondly, our civilization will need to be redesigned and rebuilt for survival. How? I don’t know. I’ve reviewed various proposals, some “get it” in regards to truly fundamental changes required, but most don’t. I’m working on it. I hope to contribute something in this direction in the future. My own plans are taking up all of my free time, but long ago I recognized that without community support, it was all for naught.
We don’t have time to screw around either, not at all. The entire world should be on emergency “war” footing right now to deal with this issue. Industry, business and government should be revamped as fast as humanly possible to both change their destructive ways and contributions to the problem and redesigned / modeled towards solutions. If there are any. There definitely exists a high probability that there aren’t any, because the drastic emergency actions that are needed are needed right now, not ten or twenty years from now. It would take the shut down of industrial civilization (globally) and immediate conversion to agrarian / locally grown / locally produced low-impact living (no more emissions), reforestation and population control (which is going to happen anyway) to offer the best, real chance humanity has. Everything else is Hopium. Space blankets blocking the sun, nuclear weapons discharging aluminum particles over the planet, iron oxide in the ocean — we have no frigging idea what the terrifying side-effects could be.
What is obvious though are two things: we won’t do it. We will cling to “this” civilization and its method of madness as long as we possibly can, to our own peril. So take that advice if you can. Don’t expect much. As usual, you are really and truly on your own (and always were, but now it’s starting to sink home I think).
The lines will be long, so keep that in mind. Discard everything else and start thinking about what you may want to do. I do not advocate giving up (and never have). Giving up means your entire life is wasted, you “quit”. Life isn’t something you quit, you live life. Living is just going to get a lot harder, but nobody promised any of us an easy road or an easy life unless you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth and a trust fund.
It’s brass tacks time people. I can’t make it any plainer then this. What we do now, and in the next decade, will dictate EVERYTHING.
Readers: please promote this post and the others linked in this article. I’ve never asked you to do this before, believing that all should decide for themselves. This time it’s different — please spread the word. We’ve got to try.
Friday, July 20, 2012
SC112-4
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/
On the Far Side of Denial
Any readers of The Archdruid Report who grew up, as I did, watching old black and white science fiction serials repackaged for the afternoon TV market may be forgiven for an overload of déjà vu just now. Somewhere near the end of any given serial, there’s inevitably a moment when the evil overlord says, “No! This cannot be! I am invincible!” It’s usually a close-up shot on the evil overlord’s sinister face, and it’s followed within fifteen seconds or so by a cataclysmic explosion that vaporizes the evil overlord, his death ray, his fortress of doom, his legions of terror, and everything else within a couple of planetary diameters or so, except the hero and any other characters who are sympathetic enough to be allowed by the scriptwriters to get to safety behind the zarkonite shield.
Well, it’s been said. Get ready for the explosion.
The example I’m thinking of right now is Lord Browne, formerly the chairman of British Petroleum and now a major player in the fracking industry. A few days ago, in a public appearance, he insisted that the United States would be able to stop importing foreign oil by 2030, because the supply of shale gas that would be made available to the US by fracking technology was, and I quote, effectively infinite.
Ahem.
I found myself wondering if Lord Browne might possibly have been one of the contestants in the Monty Python Upper Class Twit Of The Year Contest skit which, in a nice bit of synchronicity, a reader forwarded to me right about the time that his lordship was making a very public fool of himself. Browne has been employed for some time in the oil industry, and therefore has had every opportunity to find out that the word "infinite" does not belong in any meaningful statement about fossil fuels. Now of course he may simply have been engaged in the same sort of puffery that we saw not too long ago from mortgage brokers and real estate agents, who had pressing financial reasons to spend much of their time expressing equally expansive and equally inaccurate notions of where their market was headed. Still, I suspect there’s more going on than this.
Over the last six months or so an extraordinary torrent of nonsense about limitless gas and oil supplies has been sloshing through the media, spouting out from an equally extraordinary assortment of people who ought to know better. We’ve seen pundits loudly claiming that the United States had become a net petroleum exporter, when what was going on was that modest amounts of gasoline and other refined petroleum products that Americans are too poor to afford nowadays are being sold to more prosperous countries abroad. We’ve seen fracking technology, which the oil industry has been using for decades, waved around as a brand new technological breakthrough; we’ve seen the Bakken shale, which has been known since the 1970s and doesn’t actually have that much accessible oil in it, ballyhooed as a brand new game-changing discovery; we’ve seen the most blatant falsehoods proclaimed as fact—I’m thinking here of the pundit I critiqued in a previous post, who insisted that kerogen shales are exactly the same as what’s being drilled in the Bakken, and that the US therefore has some absurd amount of shale oil ready for pumping.
Over the last few weeks, a number of my fellow peak oil writers have expressed worries about this outpouring of counterfactual drivel. Myself, I find it a very hopeful sign. What we are seeing is the shattering of the consensus that has excluded any discussion of peak oil from the collective conversation of our time. Plenty of pundits who refused to talk about peak oil at all are now talking about it incessantly. Even though they’re screeching at the top of their lungs that it can’t happen, and scrabbling around for any argument, however feeble or blatantly false, they can use to back up that proposition, they’re still talking about it.
That is to say, industrial society is collectively entering the stage of denial.
The application of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ five stages of grief to the process of dealing with peak oil has become common enough in the peak oil scene that an offhand reference to one stage or another in a talk or blog post on the subject rarely needs an explanation. It’s not just peak oil: the sequence of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance has become part of the common currency of thought in the modern world. For all its drawbacks and critics—and it has plenty of both—the five stages do a tolerably good job of modeling the way many people go through the grieving process in most contexts, which is after all as much as any theoretical structure can be expected to do.
Whatever its more general applicability, furthermore, it very often fits the experience that people have when they start to wrestle with peak oil and everything that it implies. Those of us who have been in the peak oil scene for a while now have watched plenty of people stumble their way through it one step at a time. There’s the denial stage—no, that can’t possibly happen, I’m sure they’ll come up with something, there must be plenty of oil around here somewhere. There’s the anger stage—it’s all the fault of the politicians, the bankers, the oil companies, David Icke’s evil space lizards, or somebody, and if we just denounce them loudly enough on our favorite blogs, we’ll be fine. There’s the bargaining stage—okay, the age of abundance is over, but if we build lots of wind turbines or buy organic coffee or go to one more round of meetings where we all come to a consensus about the nice cozy future we think we want, it’ll all work out, right? There’s the depression phase—we’ve failed as a species, humanity is irremediably awful, it would be better for the whole cosmos if Gaia just got it over with and chucked us into extinction’s compost heap, and so on. Then, finally, comes acceptance, when you’ve finished dealing with your emotional issues about the end of the petroleum age and can get to work at last on the practical stuff.
Now of course some people go through the stages in a different order, some people skip one or more of them, and some people get stuck in one or another of them. (Kubler-Ross recognized that the same thing happens in the kinds of grieving she studied, a point her critics don’t often remember.) Still, the model stays in use in the peak oil scene because something roughly comparable to the five stage process can be traced in the experiences of a lot of people who go through a peak oil awakening. That much is a fairly common realization in the peak oil scene; what I don’t think many of us anticipated, though, is that the same process might happen on a collective level as well. I suggest that this is what’s been happening in recent months, and that it’s what has driven the tirades against peak oil that we’ve all seen splashed over the media.
With that in mind, I’d like to glance over at a considerably more useful artifact of the current stage of the peak oil debate. Feasta has just released a study by David Korowicz on the ways that a financial crash could kickstart a more general economic implosion by gutting the fiscal gimmickry that keeps international trade running. (You can download a PDF here.) It’s a thoughtful analysis, and it takes the time to make its assumptions explicit, which is useful; in the very few places where it runs off the rails, it’s fairly easy to glance back to the presuppositions governing the study and figure out where the problem lies.
Korowicz argues, if I may oversimplify his careful prose, that the current global financial system is a tottering mess that could come apart at the seams in no time flat, and it’s under stress already from a variety of factors, including peak oil. If and when it comes apart, he suggests, the entire structure of letters of credit and currency flows that supports global trade in little luxuries like enough food to eat could quite readily come apart also, producing a fiscal cardiac arrest that could shatter supply chains and bring most nations’ economies to a screeching halt in a matter of days or weeks.
Is this a plausible scenario? It’s considerably more than that, for a close equivalent happened in late 1932 and early 1933 in the United States. A banking system that had been fatally wounded by the 1929 stock market crash and its aftermath had been propped up temporarily by federal money—they called it the Reconstruction Finance Corporation then; that’s spelled "TARP" this time around—but was still loaded to the breaking point with huge amounts of worthless debt and unprepared for ongoing economic contraction. Then a new round of economic crisis triggered by events in Europe—no, I’m not making up any of this; look it up—pushed the US banking system over the edge; as banks folded one after another, the basic trust that makes a credit-based economy function evaporated; nobody could be sure if the bank that received their deposits or their loans would still be there the next day, bank runs followed, and the whole economy shuddered to a halt. Paychecks could not be cashed, businesses could not pay their suppliers or get paid for their products, and many of the negative consequences Korowicz sketches out duly happened.
Could that happen again, on a global scale? You bet. It’s the sequel, though, that didn’t get into Korowicz’ analysis. Faced with the imminent reality of national collapse, the US government did not sit on its hands, which is what those with the capacity to do something are always required to do in fast collapse theories. Instead, it temporarily nationalized the entire American banking system, declared that all assets held by the banks were owned by the government until further notice, made private ownership of gold by US citizens illegal, and ordered every scrap of gold in the country much bigger than a wedding ring sold to the government at a fixed, below-market price, with stiff legal penalties for anybody who tried to hang onto their gold stash. (I’m not making up any of this, either. Look it up.) Flush with seized bank assets and confiscated gold, the government poured money into the nationalized banks, which could then meet every demand for funds, stopping the panic in its tracks. Once stability returned, the banks returned to private ownership and got their assets back, though gold remained a government monopoly for decades longer.
This sort of drastic measure is far from rare in economic history. Germany in the 1920s put paid to its era of hyperinflation by issuing a new currency, the rentenmark, which was backed by taking out one big mortgage on every single piece of real property in the country. Other countries have done things even more extreme. A nation facing collapse, it bears remembering, has plenty of options, and it also has the means, motive, and opportunity to use them.
It’s only fair to point out that this sort of drastic response is something that the Feasta study specifically excludes. One of Korowicz’ basic assumptions, stated as such in his study, is that governments will respond to the crisis by choosing the minimal option they think will solve the immediate problem. It’s a reasonable assumption, right up to the point that national survival is at stake, but at that point history shows in no uncertain terms that the assumption goes right out the window. Nation-states are good at surviving—that’s why they’ve become the standard form of human political organization in the viciously Darwinian environment of modern history—and it’s hard to think of anything a nation-state won’t do if it thinks its survival is threatened.
That said, Korowicz’ study points to one very plausible way that the next major round of crisis could slam into the industrial world. The fact that the nations affected by it could kluge together responses to it, slap the equivalent of defibrillator paddles onto their prostrate economies, and get a heartbeat again for the time being doesn’t change the fact that a financial collapse followed by even a partial supply chain breakdown would be a massive crisis, the sort of thing that could well plunge hundreds of millions of people into permanent poverty and push the global economy further down a long ragged decline that will be much less amenable to drastic responses. We’re in agreement, in effect, that the patient is terminally ill; the question is simply whether first aid measures available to the paramedics on site can get his heart beating again, so he can drag out the dying process for a while longer.
Of course this is not the way the Feasta study is being discussed over much of the peak oil blogosphere. The fascination with sudden collapse—call it the Seneca cliff if you must, though it’s only fair to note that Seneca was talking about morality rather than the survival of civilization, and the civilization to which he himself belonged took centuries to decline and fall—is to the peak oil scene exactly what the fixation on Bakken shale oil and "effectively infinite" natural gas is to the collective imagination of industrial society as a whole: a means of denial. It’s just one more way of pretending that we and our grandchildren’s grandchildren don’t have to endure the long bitter centuries of decline and fall that are waiting for us—a future that, let’s face it, is considerably more frightening than a sudden collapse. Claiming that it’ll all be over in a flash is not that much different, all things considered, from claiming that it won’t happen at all.
Wry reflections about evil overlords aside, I suspect we’ve got a ways still to go before the various modes of denial finish working their way through the collective imagination of our time. The pundits and corporate flacks who have, for all practical purposes, gone barking mad about the world’s energy supply—I really don’t think any less forceful phrasing reflects the nature of these strident claims that scraping the bottom of the barrel, via fracking or otherwise, ought to be treated as proof that the barrel’s still full—are by and large associated with the two economic sectors, finance and petroleum, that are going to be clobbered first and hardest as the reality of peak oil sets in. The elephant’s in their living rooms; that’s why their shrill denials that elephants exist can be heard so clearly all through the neighborhood. As the elephant roams a little more widely, I suspect that the same frantic tone will travel with it, until finally we find ourselves on the far side of denial and the next phase starts.
That phase, for those who haven’t kept track, is anger. It’s once that stage arrives in force that the explosion will follow.
On the Far Side of Denial
Any readers of The Archdruid Report who grew up, as I did, watching old black and white science fiction serials repackaged for the afternoon TV market may be forgiven for an overload of déjà vu just now. Somewhere near the end of any given serial, there’s inevitably a moment when the evil overlord says, “No! This cannot be! I am invincible!” It’s usually a close-up shot on the evil overlord’s sinister face, and it’s followed within fifteen seconds or so by a cataclysmic explosion that vaporizes the evil overlord, his death ray, his fortress of doom, his legions of terror, and everything else within a couple of planetary diameters or so, except the hero and any other characters who are sympathetic enough to be allowed by the scriptwriters to get to safety behind the zarkonite shield.
Well, it’s been said. Get ready for the explosion.
The example I’m thinking of right now is Lord Browne, formerly the chairman of British Petroleum and now a major player in the fracking industry. A few days ago, in a public appearance, he insisted that the United States would be able to stop importing foreign oil by 2030, because the supply of shale gas that would be made available to the US by fracking technology was, and I quote, effectively infinite.
Ahem.
I found myself wondering if Lord Browne might possibly have been one of the contestants in the Monty Python Upper Class Twit Of The Year Contest skit which, in a nice bit of synchronicity, a reader forwarded to me right about the time that his lordship was making a very public fool of himself. Browne has been employed for some time in the oil industry, and therefore has had every opportunity to find out that the word "infinite" does not belong in any meaningful statement about fossil fuels. Now of course he may simply have been engaged in the same sort of puffery that we saw not too long ago from mortgage brokers and real estate agents, who had pressing financial reasons to spend much of their time expressing equally expansive and equally inaccurate notions of where their market was headed. Still, I suspect there’s more going on than this.
Over the last six months or so an extraordinary torrent of nonsense about limitless gas and oil supplies has been sloshing through the media, spouting out from an equally extraordinary assortment of people who ought to know better. We’ve seen pundits loudly claiming that the United States had become a net petroleum exporter, when what was going on was that modest amounts of gasoline and other refined petroleum products that Americans are too poor to afford nowadays are being sold to more prosperous countries abroad. We’ve seen fracking technology, which the oil industry has been using for decades, waved around as a brand new technological breakthrough; we’ve seen the Bakken shale, which has been known since the 1970s and doesn’t actually have that much accessible oil in it, ballyhooed as a brand new game-changing discovery; we’ve seen the most blatant falsehoods proclaimed as fact—I’m thinking here of the pundit I critiqued in a previous post, who insisted that kerogen shales are exactly the same as what’s being drilled in the Bakken, and that the US therefore has some absurd amount of shale oil ready for pumping.
Over the last few weeks, a number of my fellow peak oil writers have expressed worries about this outpouring of counterfactual drivel. Myself, I find it a very hopeful sign. What we are seeing is the shattering of the consensus that has excluded any discussion of peak oil from the collective conversation of our time. Plenty of pundits who refused to talk about peak oil at all are now talking about it incessantly. Even though they’re screeching at the top of their lungs that it can’t happen, and scrabbling around for any argument, however feeble or blatantly false, they can use to back up that proposition, they’re still talking about it.
That is to say, industrial society is collectively entering the stage of denial.
The application of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ five stages of grief to the process of dealing with peak oil has become common enough in the peak oil scene that an offhand reference to one stage or another in a talk or blog post on the subject rarely needs an explanation. It’s not just peak oil: the sequence of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance has become part of the common currency of thought in the modern world. For all its drawbacks and critics—and it has plenty of both—the five stages do a tolerably good job of modeling the way many people go through the grieving process in most contexts, which is after all as much as any theoretical structure can be expected to do.
Whatever its more general applicability, furthermore, it very often fits the experience that people have when they start to wrestle with peak oil and everything that it implies. Those of us who have been in the peak oil scene for a while now have watched plenty of people stumble their way through it one step at a time. There’s the denial stage—no, that can’t possibly happen, I’m sure they’ll come up with something, there must be plenty of oil around here somewhere. There’s the anger stage—it’s all the fault of the politicians, the bankers, the oil companies, David Icke’s evil space lizards, or somebody, and if we just denounce them loudly enough on our favorite blogs, we’ll be fine. There’s the bargaining stage—okay, the age of abundance is over, but if we build lots of wind turbines or buy organic coffee or go to one more round of meetings where we all come to a consensus about the nice cozy future we think we want, it’ll all work out, right? There’s the depression phase—we’ve failed as a species, humanity is irremediably awful, it would be better for the whole cosmos if Gaia just got it over with and chucked us into extinction’s compost heap, and so on. Then, finally, comes acceptance, when you’ve finished dealing with your emotional issues about the end of the petroleum age and can get to work at last on the practical stuff.
Now of course some people go through the stages in a different order, some people skip one or more of them, and some people get stuck in one or another of them. (Kubler-Ross recognized that the same thing happens in the kinds of grieving she studied, a point her critics don’t often remember.) Still, the model stays in use in the peak oil scene because something roughly comparable to the five stage process can be traced in the experiences of a lot of people who go through a peak oil awakening. That much is a fairly common realization in the peak oil scene; what I don’t think many of us anticipated, though, is that the same process might happen on a collective level as well. I suggest that this is what’s been happening in recent months, and that it’s what has driven the tirades against peak oil that we’ve all seen splashed over the media.
With that in mind, I’d like to glance over at a considerably more useful artifact of the current stage of the peak oil debate. Feasta has just released a study by David Korowicz on the ways that a financial crash could kickstart a more general economic implosion by gutting the fiscal gimmickry that keeps international trade running. (You can download a PDF here.) It’s a thoughtful analysis, and it takes the time to make its assumptions explicit, which is useful; in the very few places where it runs off the rails, it’s fairly easy to glance back to the presuppositions governing the study and figure out where the problem lies.
Korowicz argues, if I may oversimplify his careful prose, that the current global financial system is a tottering mess that could come apart at the seams in no time flat, and it’s under stress already from a variety of factors, including peak oil. If and when it comes apart, he suggests, the entire structure of letters of credit and currency flows that supports global trade in little luxuries like enough food to eat could quite readily come apart also, producing a fiscal cardiac arrest that could shatter supply chains and bring most nations’ economies to a screeching halt in a matter of days or weeks.
Is this a plausible scenario? It’s considerably more than that, for a close equivalent happened in late 1932 and early 1933 in the United States. A banking system that had been fatally wounded by the 1929 stock market crash and its aftermath had been propped up temporarily by federal money—they called it the Reconstruction Finance Corporation then; that’s spelled "TARP" this time around—but was still loaded to the breaking point with huge amounts of worthless debt and unprepared for ongoing economic contraction. Then a new round of economic crisis triggered by events in Europe—no, I’m not making up any of this; look it up—pushed the US banking system over the edge; as banks folded one after another, the basic trust that makes a credit-based economy function evaporated; nobody could be sure if the bank that received their deposits or their loans would still be there the next day, bank runs followed, and the whole economy shuddered to a halt. Paychecks could not be cashed, businesses could not pay their suppliers or get paid for their products, and many of the negative consequences Korowicz sketches out duly happened.
Could that happen again, on a global scale? You bet. It’s the sequel, though, that didn’t get into Korowicz’ analysis. Faced with the imminent reality of national collapse, the US government did not sit on its hands, which is what those with the capacity to do something are always required to do in fast collapse theories. Instead, it temporarily nationalized the entire American banking system, declared that all assets held by the banks were owned by the government until further notice, made private ownership of gold by US citizens illegal, and ordered every scrap of gold in the country much bigger than a wedding ring sold to the government at a fixed, below-market price, with stiff legal penalties for anybody who tried to hang onto their gold stash. (I’m not making up any of this, either. Look it up.) Flush with seized bank assets and confiscated gold, the government poured money into the nationalized banks, which could then meet every demand for funds, stopping the panic in its tracks. Once stability returned, the banks returned to private ownership and got their assets back, though gold remained a government monopoly for decades longer.
This sort of drastic measure is far from rare in economic history. Germany in the 1920s put paid to its era of hyperinflation by issuing a new currency, the rentenmark, which was backed by taking out one big mortgage on every single piece of real property in the country. Other countries have done things even more extreme. A nation facing collapse, it bears remembering, has plenty of options, and it also has the means, motive, and opportunity to use them.
It’s only fair to point out that this sort of drastic response is something that the Feasta study specifically excludes. One of Korowicz’ basic assumptions, stated as such in his study, is that governments will respond to the crisis by choosing the minimal option they think will solve the immediate problem. It’s a reasonable assumption, right up to the point that national survival is at stake, but at that point history shows in no uncertain terms that the assumption goes right out the window. Nation-states are good at surviving—that’s why they’ve become the standard form of human political organization in the viciously Darwinian environment of modern history—and it’s hard to think of anything a nation-state won’t do if it thinks its survival is threatened.
That said, Korowicz’ study points to one very plausible way that the next major round of crisis could slam into the industrial world. The fact that the nations affected by it could kluge together responses to it, slap the equivalent of defibrillator paddles onto their prostrate economies, and get a heartbeat again for the time being doesn’t change the fact that a financial collapse followed by even a partial supply chain breakdown would be a massive crisis, the sort of thing that could well plunge hundreds of millions of people into permanent poverty and push the global economy further down a long ragged decline that will be much less amenable to drastic responses. We’re in agreement, in effect, that the patient is terminally ill; the question is simply whether first aid measures available to the paramedics on site can get his heart beating again, so he can drag out the dying process for a while longer.
Of course this is not the way the Feasta study is being discussed over much of the peak oil blogosphere. The fascination with sudden collapse—call it the Seneca cliff if you must, though it’s only fair to note that Seneca was talking about morality rather than the survival of civilization, and the civilization to which he himself belonged took centuries to decline and fall—is to the peak oil scene exactly what the fixation on Bakken shale oil and "effectively infinite" natural gas is to the collective imagination of industrial society as a whole: a means of denial. It’s just one more way of pretending that we and our grandchildren’s grandchildren don’t have to endure the long bitter centuries of decline and fall that are waiting for us—a future that, let’s face it, is considerably more frightening than a sudden collapse. Claiming that it’ll all be over in a flash is not that much different, all things considered, from claiming that it won’t happen at all.
Wry reflections about evil overlords aside, I suspect we’ve got a ways still to go before the various modes of denial finish working their way through the collective imagination of our time. The pundits and corporate flacks who have, for all practical purposes, gone barking mad about the world’s energy supply—I really don’t think any less forceful phrasing reflects the nature of these strident claims that scraping the bottom of the barrel, via fracking or otherwise, ought to be treated as proof that the barrel’s still full—are by and large associated with the two economic sectors, finance and petroleum, that are going to be clobbered first and hardest as the reality of peak oil sets in. The elephant’s in their living rooms; that’s why their shrill denials that elephants exist can be heard so clearly all through the neighborhood. As the elephant roams a little more widely, I suspect that the same frantic tone will travel with it, until finally we find ourselves on the far side of denial and the next phase starts.
That phase, for those who haven’t kept track, is anger. It’s once that stage arrives in force that the explosion will follow.
SC112-3
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31961
War On All Fronts
Washington's three-front war: Syria, Lebanon, Iran in the Middle East, China in the Far East, Russia in Europe...
The Russian government has finally caught on that its political opposition is being financed by the US taxpayer-funded National Endowment for Democracy and other CIA/State Department fronts in an attempt to subvert the Russian government and install an American puppet state in the geographically largest country on earth, the one country with a nuclear arsenal sufficient to deter Washington’s aggression.
Just as earlier this year Egypt expelled hundreds of people associated with foreign-funded “non-governmental organizations” (NGOs) for “instilling dissent and meddling in domestic policies,” the Russian Duma (parliament) has just passed a law that Putin is expected to sign that requires political organizations that receive foreign funding to register as foreign agents. The law is based on the US law requiring the registration of foreign agents.
Much of the Russian political opposition consists of foreign-paid agents, and once the law passes leading elements of the Russian political opposition will have to sign in with the Russian Ministry of Justice as foreign agents of Washington. The Itar-Tass News Agency reported on July 3 that there are about 1,000 organizations in Russia that are funded from abroad and engaged in political activity. Try to imagine the outcry if the Russians were funding 1,000 organizations in the US engaged in an effort to turn America into a Russian puppet state. (In the US the Russians would find a lot of competition from Israel.)
The Washington-funded Russian political opposition masquerades behind “human rights” and says it works to “open Russia.” What the disloyal and treasonous Washington-funded Russian “political opposition” means by “open Russia” is to open Russia for brainwashing by Western propaganda, to open Russia to economic plunder by the West, and to open Russia to having its domestic and foreign policies determined by Washington.
“Non-governmental organizations” are very governmental. They have played pivotal roles in both financing and running the various “color revolutions” that have established American puppet states in former constituent parts of the Soviet Empire. NGOs have been called “coup d’etat machines,” and they have served Washington well in this role. They are currently working in Venezuela against Chavez.
Of course, Washington is infuriated that its plans for achieving hegemony over a country too dangerous to attack militarily have been derailed by Russia’s awakening, after two decades, to the threat of being politically subverted by Washington-financed NGOs. Washington requires foreign-funded organizations to register as foreign agents (unless they are Israeli funded). However, this fact doesn’t stop Washington from denouncing the new Russian law as “anti-democratic,” “police state,” blah-blah. Caught with its hand in subversion, Washington calls Putin names. The pity is that most of the brainwashed West will fall for Washington’s lies, and we will hear more about “gangster state Russia.”
China is also in Washington’s crosshairs. China’s rapid rise as an economic power is perceived in Washington as a dire threat. China must be contained. Obama’s US Trade Representative has been secretly negotiating for the last 2 or 3 years a Trans Pacific Partnership, whose purpose is to derail China’s natural economic leadership in its own sphere of influence and replace it with Washington’s leadership.
Washington is also pushing to form new military alliances in Asia and to establish new military bases in the Philippines, S. Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere.
Washington quickly inserted itself into disputes between China and Vietnam and China and the Philippines. Washington aligned with its former Vietnamese enemy in Vietnam’s dispute with China over the resource rich Paracel and Spratly islands and with the Philippines in its dispute with China over the resource rich Scarborough Shoal.
Thus, like England’s interference in the dispute between Poland and National Socialist Germany over the return to Germany of German territories that were given to Poland as World War I booty, Washington sets the stage for war.
China has been cooperative with Washington, because the offshoring of the US economy to China was an important component in China’s unprecedented high rate of economic development. American capitalists got their short-run profits, and China got the capital and technology to build an economy that in another 2 or 3 years will have surpassed the sinking US economy. Jobs offshoring, mistaken for free trade by free market economists, has built China and destroyed America.
Washington’s growing interference in Chinese affairs has convinced China’s government that military countermeasures are required to neutralize Washington’s announced intentions to build its military presence in China’s sphere of influence. Washington’s view is that only Washington, no one else, has a sphere of influence, and
Washington’s sphere of influence is the entire world.
On July 14 China’s official news agency, Xinhua, said that Washington was interfering in Chinese affairs and making China’s disputes with Vietnam and the Philippines impossible to resolve.
It looks as if an over-confident US government is determined to have a three-front war: Syria, Lebanon, and Iran in the Middle East, China in the Far East, and Russia in Europe. This would appear to be an ambitious agenda for a government whose military was unable to occupy Iraq after nine years or to defeat the lightly-armed Taliban after eleven years, and whose economy and those of its NATO puppets are in trouble and decline with corresponding rising internal unrest and loss of confidence in political leadership.
War On All Fronts
Washington's three-front war: Syria, Lebanon, Iran in the Middle East, China in the Far East, Russia in Europe...
The Russian government has finally caught on that its political opposition is being financed by the US taxpayer-funded National Endowment for Democracy and other CIA/State Department fronts in an attempt to subvert the Russian government and install an American puppet state in the geographically largest country on earth, the one country with a nuclear arsenal sufficient to deter Washington’s aggression.
Just as earlier this year Egypt expelled hundreds of people associated with foreign-funded “non-governmental organizations” (NGOs) for “instilling dissent and meddling in domestic policies,” the Russian Duma (parliament) has just passed a law that Putin is expected to sign that requires political organizations that receive foreign funding to register as foreign agents. The law is based on the US law requiring the registration of foreign agents.
Much of the Russian political opposition consists of foreign-paid agents, and once the law passes leading elements of the Russian political opposition will have to sign in with the Russian Ministry of Justice as foreign agents of Washington. The Itar-Tass News Agency reported on July 3 that there are about 1,000 organizations in Russia that are funded from abroad and engaged in political activity. Try to imagine the outcry if the Russians were funding 1,000 organizations in the US engaged in an effort to turn America into a Russian puppet state. (In the US the Russians would find a lot of competition from Israel.)
The Washington-funded Russian political opposition masquerades behind “human rights” and says it works to “open Russia.” What the disloyal and treasonous Washington-funded Russian “political opposition” means by “open Russia” is to open Russia for brainwashing by Western propaganda, to open Russia to economic plunder by the West, and to open Russia to having its domestic and foreign policies determined by Washington.
“Non-governmental organizations” are very governmental. They have played pivotal roles in both financing and running the various “color revolutions” that have established American puppet states in former constituent parts of the Soviet Empire. NGOs have been called “coup d’etat machines,” and they have served Washington well in this role. They are currently working in Venezuela against Chavez.
Of course, Washington is infuriated that its plans for achieving hegemony over a country too dangerous to attack militarily have been derailed by Russia’s awakening, after two decades, to the threat of being politically subverted by Washington-financed NGOs. Washington requires foreign-funded organizations to register as foreign agents (unless they are Israeli funded). However, this fact doesn’t stop Washington from denouncing the new Russian law as “anti-democratic,” “police state,” blah-blah. Caught with its hand in subversion, Washington calls Putin names. The pity is that most of the brainwashed West will fall for Washington’s lies, and we will hear more about “gangster state Russia.”
China is also in Washington’s crosshairs. China’s rapid rise as an economic power is perceived in Washington as a dire threat. China must be contained. Obama’s US Trade Representative has been secretly negotiating for the last 2 or 3 years a Trans Pacific Partnership, whose purpose is to derail China’s natural economic leadership in its own sphere of influence and replace it with Washington’s leadership.
Washington is also pushing to form new military alliances in Asia and to establish new military bases in the Philippines, S. Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere.
Washington quickly inserted itself into disputes between China and Vietnam and China and the Philippines. Washington aligned with its former Vietnamese enemy in Vietnam’s dispute with China over the resource rich Paracel and Spratly islands and with the Philippines in its dispute with China over the resource rich Scarborough Shoal.
Thus, like England’s interference in the dispute between Poland and National Socialist Germany over the return to Germany of German territories that were given to Poland as World War I booty, Washington sets the stage for war.
China has been cooperative with Washington, because the offshoring of the US economy to China was an important component in China’s unprecedented high rate of economic development. American capitalists got their short-run profits, and China got the capital and technology to build an economy that in another 2 or 3 years will have surpassed the sinking US economy. Jobs offshoring, mistaken for free trade by free market economists, has built China and destroyed America.
Washington’s growing interference in Chinese affairs has convinced China’s government that military countermeasures are required to neutralize Washington’s announced intentions to build its military presence in China’s sphere of influence. Washington’s view is that only Washington, no one else, has a sphere of influence, and
Washington’s sphere of influence is the entire world.
On July 14 China’s official news agency, Xinhua, said that Washington was interfering in Chinese affairs and making China’s disputes with Vietnam and the Philippines impossible to resolve.
It looks as if an over-confident US government is determined to have a three-front war: Syria, Lebanon, and Iran in the Middle East, China in the Far East, and Russia in Europe. This would appear to be an ambitious agenda for a government whose military was unable to occupy Iraq after nine years or to defeat the lightly-armed Taliban after eleven years, and whose economy and those of its NATO puppets are in trouble and decline with corresponding rising internal unrest and loss of confidence in political leadership.
Saturday, July 14, 2012
SC112-2
http://carolynbaker.net/2012/07/10/four-fiscal-cliffs-ahead-and-a-jobs-war-by-paul-farrell/
Four Fiscal Cliffs Ahead And A Jobs War
Election wars are masking the fiscal cliff that America is destined to drop off in early 2013, warns the Congressional Budget Office. History tells us our politicians will slowly drive America off the fiscal cliff and into a mid-1930s-style sinkhole. Why? Because no matter who’s elected, our dysfunctional government will continue to be driven by secretive super-PAC billionaires obsessed about either holding on to or regaining the presidency in 2016.
America’s fiscal cliff is actually four cliffs. And any one can easily trigger the other three. By 2013 the public will wake up to discover America is still a political war zone facing a recession no politician can solve, igniting further rage with warring politicians and their billionaire buddies.
The fiscal cliff includes four dangerous cliffs:
1.The health-care cliff: Admit it, it’s a systemic failure. And repealing or tweaking Obamacare won’t stop the hemorrhaging. Costs will keep rising, no matter who’s chief.
2.The taxes/spending cliff: The CBO says that allowing the Bush-era tax cuts to expire, combined with agreed-upon spending cuts, would reduce GDP by 1.3%. That deal is certain to get renegotiated. But until then, uncertainty, and if politicians just kick the can down the road again, new interest costs will increase the deficit, increasing long-term problems.
3.The military budget cliff: Do nothing and the Pentagon automatically gets $55 billion cut in 2013, more over the next decade. In addition, Romney’s on record to increase military spending, even as two wars wind down. U.S. Representative Paul Ryan, Republican from Wisconsin, has said the same.
4.The social programs cliff: Along with military cuts, the same deal negotiated last year included automatic cuts to domestic social-program spending by $492 billion over the next decade. Cuts will intensify stress on the poor and middle-class jobless.
Obviously there are global threats that could kill recovery: euro-land sinking, China slowing, emerging markets stalling. But the bottom line is that America’s at war with itself, most noticeably visible in gridlocked Washington, less visible in our billionaires’ super-PAC anarchy.
Job wars are far bigger threat than all four fiscal cliffs
The real financial cliff is measured in jobs, warns Jim Clifton, chief executive of Gallup, the polling firm, in his new book “The Coming Jobs War.”
Not just in America, but all nations worldwide. Get it? The lack of jobs is a bigger threat to America than government spending, debt, the environment and terrorism. “If countries fail at creating jobs, their societies will fall apart,” warns Clifton, “experience suffering, instability, chaos, and eventually revolutions.”
Warning: The jobs war will defeat us from within. The U.S. has 8% unemployment, officially. In fact, it’s more like 20% unemployed and underemployed, 30 million. We’re outsourcing too many jobs. We need 5 million net new jobs today, 10 million during the next presidential term according to Gallup’s research.
But unfortunately, our divisive politicians don’t get it. They’re not only making matters worse this year, but little will change from 2013 through 2016, no matter who’s elected president. Why? Because the secret wars of the billionaires’ super-PACs will keep running our government long after the elections, pushing off cliff after cliff after cliff. America is now an anarchy.
In fact, my guess is that whoever loses the 2012 presidential election, he and his party will be secretly relieved, because the pit after the coming fiscal cliffs are so incredibly, irrationally, absurdly deep, that little more will get done in Washington in the next four years than in the last four. In short, the jobs wars will intensify.
America’s ‘worst decade’ now faces ‘double-dip depression’ risk
Racing toward the fiscal cliff reminds me of our earlier prediction of “America’s Worst Decade.” Financial historian Niall Ferguson warns in Newsweek of a “double-dip depression…We forget that the Great Depression was like a soccer match, there were two halves.” The 1929 crash kicked off the first half. But what “made the depression truly ‘great’ …began with the European banking crisis of 1931.”
Likewise, our November elections will push America into the second half of a new era. But it doesn’t matter whether Romney or Obama is our quarterback, the goal posts just keep moving further away.
As Ferguson puts it: “To understand what has been happening in our own borderline depression, you need to know this history. But hardly anyone does.” Get it? He says America’s already in a “depression,” with clueless leaders and no real solutions, much as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson were clueless in 2008. Worse, no one appears able to stop our depression from turning into another Great Depression.
More bad news: Back in December 2011, the first year of this “Worst Decade in American History,” economist and longtime Forbes columnist Gary Shilling had just issued his semiannual outlook: “Global Recession Likely” for 2012. Now, in his midyear update, it’s worse: “Recent data makes that forecast more probable.”
Recapping some predictions for ‘America’s Worst Decade Ever’
A look back, then ahead: Over the past decade we predicted the 2000 crash, the 2008 meltdown, the 2009 bottom and rally. Historians like Ferguson and others already see the 2011-2020 decade developing as “America’s Worst Decade.” Yet totally predictable. And totally denied. So here’s our update of some of the economic and market predictions in a historical context that will continue unfolding for years:
2012: Billionaires solidify absolute power over our political system
In 2010, the Supreme Court legalized anonymous political bribery, turning America into a superrich anarchy. Now billions flow from billionaires to lobbyists to politicians and super-PACs with one goal: to get favors for special interests.
Meanwhile, the middle class is in a rapid trickle-down to third-world status. So the inequality gap will keep widening as billionaires tighten control of state and the federal governments.
2013: Global population bubble exploding, rapidly wasting resources
America’s superrich capitalists keep siphoning trillions from the middle class. And ironically they also see the world’s population growth of roughly 100 million annually not as wasting the planet’s scarce resources, but as an expanding market for increased wealth-building, proving “more is never enough” as environmental warnings are denied.
2014: Pentagon’s global commodity wars accelerate toward 2020 peak
Near the start of the Iraq war, Fortune reported on a Pentagon report predicting “climate could change radically and fast” as “the mother of all national security issues.” And billions of new people will spread unrest worldwide as “massive droughts, turning farmland into dust bowls and forests to ashes” as world population exploded to 10 billion, with “warfare defining human life.”
2015: ‘Gilded Age’ globalization explodes America’s global empire
About the same time the Pentagon was predicting “global warfare” by 2020, former Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips warned in “Wealth & Democracy” that “most great nations, at the peak of their economic power, become arrogant and wage great world wars at great cost, wasting vast resources, taking on huge debt, and ultimately burning themselves out.”
Niall Ferguson made similar warnings in “Colossus: The Rise and Fall of The American Empire,” that we are in denial, thinking “about the political process in seasonal, cyclical terms.”
2016: Free-market capitalism self-destructs, crashes, bank bankruptcies
The 2016 elections may be too late to plan for what’s ahead. “What if history is not cyclical and slow-moving but arrhythmic?” Ferguson asks. “What if collapse does not arrive over a number of centuries but comes suddenly,” too rapid to respond in time, especially if the president keeps ignoring the lessons of history?
Wake up America. There’s a deadly time bomb ticking. You are living in “ America’s Worst Decade Ever .” Go back and read the remaining years till 2020. See why our nation and the whole world will continue deteriorating no matter who’s president, because this drama will accelerate. As politicians and billionaires continue fighting like grade-school kids at recess, they’ll keep pushing America off the four fiscal cliffs. They fight because “more really is never enough” for America’s narcissistic, obsessed, heartless free-market capitalists.
Wake up and listen to Clifton on the “Coming Jobs Wars” … to environmentalists warning “it may already be too late” … to historians warning of a “rapid collapse of the American empire” … to the Pentagon warning that by 2020 “warfare will define human life” … to a lone hedge-fund manager telling you to “think Swiss Family Robinson” as you nudge yourself closer to the fiscal cliffs.
Four Fiscal Cliffs Ahead And A Jobs War
Election wars are masking the fiscal cliff that America is destined to drop off in early 2013, warns the Congressional Budget Office. History tells us our politicians will slowly drive America off the fiscal cliff and into a mid-1930s-style sinkhole. Why? Because no matter who’s elected, our dysfunctional government will continue to be driven by secretive super-PAC billionaires obsessed about either holding on to or regaining the presidency in 2016.
America’s fiscal cliff is actually four cliffs. And any one can easily trigger the other three. By 2013 the public will wake up to discover America is still a political war zone facing a recession no politician can solve, igniting further rage with warring politicians and their billionaire buddies.
The fiscal cliff includes four dangerous cliffs:
1.The health-care cliff: Admit it, it’s a systemic failure. And repealing or tweaking Obamacare won’t stop the hemorrhaging. Costs will keep rising, no matter who’s chief.
2.The taxes/spending cliff: The CBO says that allowing the Bush-era tax cuts to expire, combined with agreed-upon spending cuts, would reduce GDP by 1.3%. That deal is certain to get renegotiated. But until then, uncertainty, and if politicians just kick the can down the road again, new interest costs will increase the deficit, increasing long-term problems.
3.The military budget cliff: Do nothing and the Pentagon automatically gets $55 billion cut in 2013, more over the next decade. In addition, Romney’s on record to increase military spending, even as two wars wind down. U.S. Representative Paul Ryan, Republican from Wisconsin, has said the same.
4.The social programs cliff: Along with military cuts, the same deal negotiated last year included automatic cuts to domestic social-program spending by $492 billion over the next decade. Cuts will intensify stress on the poor and middle-class jobless.
Obviously there are global threats that could kill recovery: euro-land sinking, China slowing, emerging markets stalling. But the bottom line is that America’s at war with itself, most noticeably visible in gridlocked Washington, less visible in our billionaires’ super-PAC anarchy.
Job wars are far bigger threat than all four fiscal cliffs
The real financial cliff is measured in jobs, warns Jim Clifton, chief executive of Gallup, the polling firm, in his new book “The Coming Jobs War.”
Not just in America, but all nations worldwide. Get it? The lack of jobs is a bigger threat to America than government spending, debt, the environment and terrorism. “If countries fail at creating jobs, their societies will fall apart,” warns Clifton, “experience suffering, instability, chaos, and eventually revolutions.”
Warning: The jobs war will defeat us from within. The U.S. has 8% unemployment, officially. In fact, it’s more like 20% unemployed and underemployed, 30 million. We’re outsourcing too many jobs. We need 5 million net new jobs today, 10 million during the next presidential term according to Gallup’s research.
But unfortunately, our divisive politicians don’t get it. They’re not only making matters worse this year, but little will change from 2013 through 2016, no matter who’s elected president. Why? Because the secret wars of the billionaires’ super-PACs will keep running our government long after the elections, pushing off cliff after cliff after cliff. America is now an anarchy.
In fact, my guess is that whoever loses the 2012 presidential election, he and his party will be secretly relieved, because the pit after the coming fiscal cliffs are so incredibly, irrationally, absurdly deep, that little more will get done in Washington in the next four years than in the last four. In short, the jobs wars will intensify.
America’s ‘worst decade’ now faces ‘double-dip depression’ risk
Racing toward the fiscal cliff reminds me of our earlier prediction of “America’s Worst Decade.” Financial historian Niall Ferguson warns in Newsweek of a “double-dip depression…We forget that the Great Depression was like a soccer match, there were two halves.” The 1929 crash kicked off the first half. But what “made the depression truly ‘great’ …began with the European banking crisis of 1931.”
Likewise, our November elections will push America into the second half of a new era. But it doesn’t matter whether Romney or Obama is our quarterback, the goal posts just keep moving further away.
As Ferguson puts it: “To understand what has been happening in our own borderline depression, you need to know this history. But hardly anyone does.” Get it? He says America’s already in a “depression,” with clueless leaders and no real solutions, much as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson were clueless in 2008. Worse, no one appears able to stop our depression from turning into another Great Depression.
More bad news: Back in December 2011, the first year of this “Worst Decade in American History,” economist and longtime Forbes columnist Gary Shilling had just issued his semiannual outlook: “Global Recession Likely” for 2012. Now, in his midyear update, it’s worse: “Recent data makes that forecast more probable.”
Recapping some predictions for ‘America’s Worst Decade Ever’
A look back, then ahead: Over the past decade we predicted the 2000 crash, the 2008 meltdown, the 2009 bottom and rally. Historians like Ferguson and others already see the 2011-2020 decade developing as “America’s Worst Decade.” Yet totally predictable. And totally denied. So here’s our update of some of the economic and market predictions in a historical context that will continue unfolding for years:
2012: Billionaires solidify absolute power over our political system
In 2010, the Supreme Court legalized anonymous political bribery, turning America into a superrich anarchy. Now billions flow from billionaires to lobbyists to politicians and super-PACs with one goal: to get favors for special interests.
Meanwhile, the middle class is in a rapid trickle-down to third-world status. So the inequality gap will keep widening as billionaires tighten control of state and the federal governments.
2013: Global population bubble exploding, rapidly wasting resources
America’s superrich capitalists keep siphoning trillions from the middle class. And ironically they also see the world’s population growth of roughly 100 million annually not as wasting the planet’s scarce resources, but as an expanding market for increased wealth-building, proving “more is never enough” as environmental warnings are denied.
2014: Pentagon’s global commodity wars accelerate toward 2020 peak
Near the start of the Iraq war, Fortune reported on a Pentagon report predicting “climate could change radically and fast” as “the mother of all national security issues.” And billions of new people will spread unrest worldwide as “massive droughts, turning farmland into dust bowls and forests to ashes” as world population exploded to 10 billion, with “warfare defining human life.”
2015: ‘Gilded Age’ globalization explodes America’s global empire
About the same time the Pentagon was predicting “global warfare” by 2020, former Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips warned in “Wealth & Democracy” that “most great nations, at the peak of their economic power, become arrogant and wage great world wars at great cost, wasting vast resources, taking on huge debt, and ultimately burning themselves out.”
Niall Ferguson made similar warnings in “Colossus: The Rise and Fall of The American Empire,” that we are in denial, thinking “about the political process in seasonal, cyclical terms.”
2016: Free-market capitalism self-destructs, crashes, bank bankruptcies
The 2016 elections may be too late to plan for what’s ahead. “What if history is not cyclical and slow-moving but arrhythmic?” Ferguson asks. “What if collapse does not arrive over a number of centuries but comes suddenly,” too rapid to respond in time, especially if the president keeps ignoring the lessons of history?
Wake up America. There’s a deadly time bomb ticking. You are living in “ America’s Worst Decade Ever .” Go back and read the remaining years till 2020. See why our nation and the whole world will continue deteriorating no matter who’s president, because this drama will accelerate. As politicians and billionaires continue fighting like grade-school kids at recess, they’ll keep pushing America off the four fiscal cliffs. They fight because “more really is never enough” for America’s narcissistic, obsessed, heartless free-market capitalists.
Wake up and listen to Clifton on the “Coming Jobs Wars” … to environmentalists warning “it may already be too late” … to historians warning of a “rapid collapse of the American empire” … to the Pentagon warning that by 2020 “warfare will define human life” … to a lone hedge-fund manager telling you to “think Swiss Family Robinson” as you nudge yourself closer to the fiscal cliffs.
Thursday, July 5, 2012
SC112-1
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31749
Death of the US Constitution: Can Americans Escape the Deception?
Recently Washington reduced the “collateral damage” count by declaring every murdered male of military age to have been a Taliban fighter or terrorist. Obviously, Washington has no way of knowing whether they were or not, but Washington’s declaration is intended as a green light to murder Afghan males of military age.
Scores of top level demolition experts and experts on the design, engineering, and construction of high rise steel structures provide the scientific, architectural, and engineering reasons that the three World Trade Center buildings came down only with the assistance of explosives that were placed and timed to remove the powerful structural support and permit the sudden collapse of the buildings. As the buildings were engineered and constructed according to known and tested principles that absolutely prevent rapid collapse, fire and structural damage that two of the three skyscrapers suffered from airliners could not possibly have caused the sudden disintegration of the three buildings.
The film was shown at the 7 Stages Theater on Euclid Avenue, the former Euclid Theater to which 65 years ago we kids used to ride our bikes to see Tarzan battle giant reptiles and ride elephants to victory over evil black tribesmen or evil white hunters, or to watch Randolph Scott bring justice with his six-shooter to a town ruled by black hats, or to witness the brave American soldiers liberate Europe from the Nazis. We never dreamed that we, residents of the “land of the free” would be menaced by a gestapo police state.
Death of the US Constitution: Can Americans Escape the Deception?
Hot Air Day is upon us. On July 4 hot air will spew forth all over the country as dignitaries deliver homilies to our “freedom and democracy” and praise “our brave troops” who are protecting our freedom by “killing them over there before they come over here.”
Not a single one of these speeches will contain one word of truth. No speaker will lament the death of the US Constitution or urge his audience to action to restore the only document that protects their liberty. No speaker will acknowledge that in the 21st century the Bush/Obama Regime, with the complicity of the Department of Justice, federal courts, Congress, presstitute media, law schools, bar associations, and an insouciant public have murdered the Constitution in the name of the “war on terror.”
As in medieval times, American citizens can be thrown into dungeons and never accounted for. No evidence or charges need be presented to a court. No trial is required, and no conviction.
As in tyrannies, US citizens can be executed at the sole discretion of the despot in the Oval Office, who sits there drawing up lists of people to be murdered.
Protestors exercising their constitutionally guaranteed rights to freedom of speech and freedom of association are attacked by armed police, beaten, tasered, tear-gassed, pepper sprayed, and arrested.
Whistleblowers who report the government’s crimes are prosecuted despite the statute that protects them.
US soldier Bradley Manning, who allegedly gave Wikileaks the documents revealing US war crimes, including the video of US soldiers in a helicopter gunship enjoying themselves murdering civilians walking along the street as if the soldiers were playing a video game, has been arrested and held in conditions of torture while the government tries to invent a case against him.
According to the US Military Code, US soldiers are required to make war crimes known. However, the law on the books provided no protection to Bradley Manning, and conservative Republicans whom I know are foaming at the mouth for Manning to be executed for letting out the truth. The truth, what is mere truth compared to the “exceptionalism of the great american people”? America has carte blanche to do whatever it wishes to the unexceptional peoples. Manning deserves to die, they say, because he took the side of the oppressed and not the side of the amerikan oppressors.
After the Swedish prosecutorial office dropped the case against Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, ruling that the charges of rape had no foundation, another prosecutor, many believe at the urging of the US government, demanded Assange be extradited from England in order to be questioned. Normally, extradition only applies to those who have been charged with a crime and for whom a warrant has been issued, which is most certainly not the case with Assange. But, of course, if Washington wants Assange, Washington will be sure every law is broken or bent until they get him. The Swedish puppet will do the exceptional country’s will and be paid well for its service.
Peace activists in several states had their homes invaded by FBI, computers and personal records taken, and a grand jury was convened in an attempt to indict them for supporting terrorism by their protests of Washington’s illegal wars, wars that are war crimes under the Nuremberg standard established by the US government itself.
None of this will be mentioned in July 4 patriotic speeches. The inebriated masses will be wrapped in the flag and return home full of the hubris that despises lesser foreigners, such as Muslims, Arabs, Chinese, and the French.
And no dignitary will mention that those that “we are killing over there” are mainly women, children, village elders, and aid workers. The US troops seem to specialize in soft targets like weddings, funerals, kids’ soccer games, farm houses, and schools.
Recently Washington reduced the “collateral damage” count by declaring every murdered male of military age to have been a Taliban fighter or terrorist. Obviously, Washington has no way of knowing whether they were or not, but Washington’s declaration is intended as a green light to murder Afghan males of military age.
Currently, Washington has wars underway, or occupations, or is violating the sovereignty of countries with drones and/or troops in seven Muslim countries, and is
arming rebels in Syria. All of this is being done without the constitutionally-required authorization by Congress, allegedly the people’s representatives. What a joke!
In short, in “freedom and democracy” america, the people have no voice and no rights and no representatives.
Yet, this huge deficit of democracy and liberty will pass unmentioned by July 4th orators.
The crimes against humanity, the dismantling of the US Constitution and the lawlessness both domestic and international that define 21st century amerika are the results of September 11, 2001.
Washington’s account of 9/11 is the wildest conspiracy theory known to mankind. The absurdity of Washington’s account is as follows: A few Saudi Arabians without any government’s backing or that of any intelligence service outwitted not only the CIA and the FBI but all 16 US intelligence agencies, even the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, together with the intelligence agencies of all of Washington’s NATO allies and Israel’s Mossad, which has infiltrated every radical Muslim group.
These humble Saudis of no known distinction or powers also simultaneously outwitted the National Security Council, NORAD, the Pentagon, Air Traffic Control, and caused Airport Security to fail four times in one hour on the same morning.
In other words, every part of America’s defenses failed at the same moment.
Think about that for a minute. If such a thing had actually happened, the President, Vice President, Congress, and media would have been demanding to know how such universal failure of every aspect of the national security state was possible. An investigation would have started immediately, not over a year later as a result of pressure from 9/11 families who could not be bought off with monetary payments. Such complete and total failure of every aspect of US security would mean that americans were not safe one single minute during the 40-year stand-off with the Soviet Union. At any moment the Soviets could have utterly destroyed the US and we would never have known what hit us.
In a real investigation, the 9/11 evidence would not have been illegally destroyed, and the investigation would have been conducted by experts, not by government agencies assigned a cover-up and by political hacks. The NIST report is abject nonsense. It explains nothing. It is a fabricated computer simulation of a non-event. The co-chairmen and legal counsel of the 9/11 Commission later wrote books in which they stated that information was withheld from the commission, the military lied to the commission, and the commission “was set up to fail.” Yet, these astounding admissions by the leaders of the 9/11 Commission had no impact on Congress, the presstitute media, or the public. All heads were in the sand. Please, whatever you do, don’t make us emotional weaklings face the facts.
More than one hundred firefighters, police, first responders, and building maintenance personnel report hearing and experiencing scores of explosions in the twin towers, including powerful explosions in the sub-basements prior to the collapse of the towers.
Distinguished scientists, authors of many peer-reviewed scientific papers, report finding unreacted nano-thermite in the dust from the towers, tested it for its explosive and high-heat producing ability, and reported the unequivocal results.
Seventeen hundred architects and engineers have testified in a petition to Congress that the three World Trade Center buildings were not brought down by fire and airplanes and have demanded a real scientific investigation of the cause of the buildings’ destruction.
Yet, we are left with the paradox that scientific opinion based on careful examination of the remaining evidence has been designated by the ignorant and unwashed as a “conspiracy theory,” while Washington’s absurd conspiracy theory stands as the truth of the event.
Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth headed by high-rise architect Richard Gage has driven the final nail in the coffin of Washington’s concocted conspiracy theory with its new film: “9/11: Explosive Evidence -- Experts Speak Out,” and they do speak out.
Scores of top level demolition experts and experts on the design, engineering, and construction of high rise steel structures provide the scientific, architectural, and engineering reasons that the three World Trade Center buildings came down only with the assistance of explosives that were placed and timed to remove the powerful structural support and permit the sudden collapse of the buildings. As the buildings were engineered and constructed according to known and tested principles that absolutely prevent rapid collapse, fire and structural damage that two of the three skyscrapers suffered from airliners could not possibly have caused the sudden disintegration of the three buildings.
I saw the film in Atlanta on July 2. Atlanta was a stop on the 32-city premier of the film.
The film was shown at the 7 Stages Theater on Euclid Avenue, the former Euclid Theater to which 65 years ago we kids used to ride our bikes to see Tarzan battle giant reptiles and ride elephants to victory over evil black tribesmen or evil white hunters, or to watch Randolph Scott bring justice with his six-shooter to a town ruled by black hats, or to witness the brave American soldiers liberate Europe from the Nazis. We never dreamed that we, residents of the “land of the free” would be menaced by a gestapo police state.
America’s descent into a gestapo police state could be arrested, perhaps, if americans were not so ignorant of science or were capable of even realizing that what they see with their own eyes when they watch videos of the twin towers’ destruction is buildings blowing up, not buildings falling down from structural damage. Building 7’s destruction is the total and complete picture of controlled demolition.
At the end of the powerful film, psychologists explain why the majority of a population lacks the mental and emotional strength to confront highly disturbing facts. A government that so thoroughly spies on its population as Washington does obviously knows its population’s profile and sees nothing but weakness and fear that can be manipulated.
What fact is more disturbing than the likely fact that 9/11 was a false flag event designed to provide the neoconservatives with their “new Pearl Harbor” in order to launch Washington’s Wars of Hegemony in the Middle East, and from there to Iran and to the nuclear powers: Russia and China, which are being encircled, as Iran has been, with US military bases?
What we are experiencing is a replay of the French Revolution, this time on a world stage. Napoleon, the inheritor of the French Revolution, conquered Europe several times in the effort to expand the New Order in France to all of Europe. The French Revolution was the first claim of a New World Order, but at that time the world was Europe.
Washington’s “wars of liberation” are wars of world hegemony and wars of massive profits for the military/security complex. The combination of power and money that are the motives for Washington’s concocted wars are hidden motives, wrapped in the flag, patriotic sentiments, and fear of dark-skinned demonized Muslims.
Can Architects and Engineers for 9/11 truth or any truth break through and liberate americans from the artificial reality created by government liars and a corrupt presstitute media, or are americans doomed to expire in the Matrix that has been created for them?
Perhaps the hope is that the economy will collapse under the would-be hegemons, and people who will not fight for principles and their liberty will fight for their economic survival.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
