http://carolynbaker.net/2012/09/21/why-we-cannot-save-the-world-by-dave-pollard/
Why We Cannot Save The World
Hardly a day passes when I don’t hear a cry for us all to work together to do X, because if we do that, everything will change and the world will be saved (or at least be rid of some horrific and intractable problem and hence made immeasurably better). Many variations of X are proposed, and they’re often about (a) comprehensively reforming our political, economic, education or other system, (b) achieving some large-scale behaviour change through mass persuasion or education, or (c) bringing together great minds and volunteer energies to bring ingenuity and innovation to bear collaboratively on some issue or crisis.
It is perfectly reasonable to believe that such change is possible: Look at what we have done in past to eradicate diseases, to institute democracy and ‘free’ enterprise worldwide, to dramatically reduce the prevalence of slavery, to pull the world out of the Great Depression, to produce astonishing technologies and improve the position of women and minorities, we are told. All we need is the same kind of effort dedicated to X. If we work together we can accomplish anything.
It is perfectly reasonable to believe that such change is possible. But such change, I would argue, is not possible. The belief that substantive and sustained change comes about by large-scale concerted efforts, or by the proverbial Margaret Mead “small group of thoughtful, committed citizens” misses a critical point — throughout human history such change efforts have only occurred when there was no choice but to do them, when the alternative of inaction was so obviously and inarguably calamitous that the status quo was out of the question. And even then such efforts usually fail — either they run up against fierce and powerful opposition and are suppressed, or they bring about a new status quo that is arguably worse than what it replaced. Alas, the history books are written and rewritten by the victors, so “what might have been” is invariably portrayed as worse than what is.
I have tried to capture this realization in what I have come to call Pollard’s Laws:
Pollard’s Law of Human Behaviour: We do what we must (our personal, unavoidable imperatives of the moment), then we do what’s easy, and then we do what’s fun. There is never time left for things that are merely important.
Pollard’s Law of Complexity: Things are the way they are for a reason. If you want to change something, it helps to know that reason. If that reason is complex, success at changing it is unlikely, and adapting to it is probably a better strategy.
The human mind is astonishingly malleable; that is one of the reasons we have adapted so quickly and effectively to changes that most creatures could never manage. But a consequence of that malleability is that we can be persuaded that things are good, or at least OK (and improving), when they are not. We can even be convinced that the history of human civilization, allegedly from brutish to enslaved to democratic and affluent, is one of “progress”, when there is overwhelming evidence that it is not.
We can be persuaded that our exhaustion, our physical, intellectual, emotional, spiritual and imaginative poverty, the debilitating chronic diseases that are now epidemic in our culture, the ghastly suffering to which we subject other animals in the name of food and human safety, the epidemic of physical, sexual and psychological abuse in our homes and institutions, the endemic sense of grief and depression about our lives and our world, the accelerating extinction of all non-human life on Earth except for human parasites, the rapid depletion of cheap energy upon which our whole culture totally depends, the endlessly growing gap between the tiny affluent minority and the massive struggling majority, the runaway climate change that our human pollutants has triggered, the utter impossibility of ever repaying the staggering debts we have dumped on future generations, and the consequences when those debts come due — we can be persuaded that all of these things can be somehow fixed, that all of these unintended consequences of the way we have been living our lives for a thousand generations, can somehow be resolved in one or two, by a concerted effort to do X.
They cannot. That is not how the world, or human civilizations, work, or ever have worked. Our human civilization, like all living systems, is complex, and complex systems do not lend themselves to mechanical ‘fixes’. They evolve, slowly, unpredictably, over millennia. We may be able to change many malleable human minds in a hurry, if we’re motivated, and if we must, at least for a while until we can go back to what we were doing. But we cannot change our bodies, which are still evolving slowly, trying to adapt to our minds’ relatively recent decision to leave the rainforest, to eat meat, to settle in large, crowded, stressful, hierarchical cities, to walk upright. Our weary, pretzel-bent bodies are complaining about the changes we have forced on them over the past million years, and struggling with them. Too much too fast, they say.
And we cannot begin to enable the ecosystems of which we are a part to adapt to these changes, ecosystems now in states of massive collapse, exhaustion, desolation and extinction. We do not know what to do. We are limited to mechanical solutions — technology and engineering — and mechanical solutions cannot ‘solve’ these crises — crises that technology and engineering have themselves substantially caused....
....We want to understand things, and we want to be able to control them, so it is not surprising that we’ve become so adept at representing (‘re-presenting’) organic processes through the use of models, theories, ‘laws’ and other human constructs. But these models are absurdly oversimplified representations, and when we mistake the model or theory for reality we do so at our peril. A car is a construct, and it works quite well for awhile, but it is no replacement for the mobility processes of a living creature. Likewise, a computer is a construct, and a very useful one, but it is not a replacement for, or even a facsimile of, the processes of a living brain.
When we look at the operations of an organization — a corporation, association, a governing body, or other group working together to some shared purpose — we tend to conflate the construct of the organization with the organic processes of the people engaged with it (as employees, managers, customers, partners etc.) and the environments in which it operates. “China launches inquiry”, or “Microsoft declined to comment”, or “Sudbury Office celebrates anniversary”, we might say. The executives of organizations often encourage this confusion, since it lets them take credit for successes that usually are the accidental result of a thousand or a million people’s uncoordinated decisions, reported as if they were manageable, predictable and controllable. Consumer tastes shift, markets move, new resources are found, a million other variables factor in in unfathomable ways, and the consequences show up as “success” or “failure” in meeting the organization’s (management’s) objectives, goals and mission.
But I have learned from working with and studying organizations for half a lifetime that executives and their actions have essentially nothing to do with that success or failure. The collective organic processes of all of the people working with the organization have somewhat more to do with success or failure, but even they cannot control or predict customers’ actions and what happens in the rest of the economy, which has a huge impact.
People aren’t robots; they don’t do what they’re told while working for the organization, in fact they don’t believe or understand much of what they’re told by anyone. They do what they must, and then they do what’s easy and then they do what’s fun. What they ‘must’ do is utterly personal and ephemeral, and very few people know themselves well enough to know what they ‘must’ do (and these ‘musts’ can change in an instant).
Most people really do want the best for the people with whom they work, and for their customers and loved ones, so what they ‘must’ do most of the time, in my observation, is workarounds. That is, they consider what they think will be best for themselves, their customers, co-workers, and others they care about, and then they figure out how to do that despite what they have been told they are supposed to do. In short, they do their best despite what the ‘organization’ supposedly has them doing. The ‘organization’ is just a construct — it ‘does’ nothing, and the reports of its ‘accomplishments’ are fiction.
As philosopher Alfred Korzybski said, “The map is not the territory”. And certainly the map is not the infinite, unfathomable, dynamic processes that occur continuously on the territory. It is not the effect of the rain on the windblown seeds or the sun on the leaves or the fallen leaves on the soil. The map tells you so little, and captures none of the complexity of the place.
Einstein referred to scientists’ arrogant tendency to place “excessive authority” in their theories, to mistake them for reality. A theory, he said, should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. He realized that human inventions and other constructs, as useful as they may be, are inherently fragile, mechanical, and temporary, no substitute for living processes that have evolved successfully over millions of years. As for technology, he said: “Our entire much-praised technological progress, and civilization generally, could be compared to an axe in the hand of a pathological criminal.” If you doubt this, consider that the containment of our horrifically toxic nuclear wastes now depends on our constructed cooling and storage systems continuing to function for the next million years.
Einstein asserted: “I believe with Schopenhauer: We can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must. Practically, I am, nevertheless, compelled to act as if freedom of the will existed. If I wish to live in a civilized community, I must act as if man is a responsible being.” This is a more nuanced version of my Law of Human Behaviour, but it says the same thing: We cannot be other than who we are. We are not machines or constructs like the Borg, able to be recruited for single-minded purposes. As I’m trying to convey in the use of the term “organic processes” rather than “organisms” in the chart above, we are not really “things” at all, in the way inanimate matter (perhaps) is. “We” are processes; what makes us us is what we do, what happens inside and through and among us. We are verbs, not nouns.
Einstein also said: “The ordinary human being does not live long enough to draw any substantial benefit from his own experience. And no one, it seems, can benefit by the experiences of others. Being both a father and teacher, I know we can teach our children nothing. We can transmit to them neither our knowledge of life nor of mathematics. Each must learn its lesson anew.” This realization was probably behind Einstein’s increasing pessimism as he got older, and his awareness that human “progress” is an illusion. Each of us starts from scratch, each of us is utterly alone, and we muddle through our lives, a complicity of the creatures that comprise us, doing what our bodies and our culture tell us we must, in the moment, until the next moment comes and they tell us to do something else. Our lives and our actions, as ‘individuals’ and collectively are incoherent; they are opportunistic, spontaneous and improvisational. They are responsive to the needs of the moment.
That is who we are, who we have evolved, very successfully, to be, and why we cannot suddenly be something other, capable of the type of concerted and coordinated and informed and sustained effort needed to “save the world”, or, more precisely, save the civilization that has become the world’s undoing. We cannot just agree to start doing X.
So why do we go on clinging to this hopeful, idealistic view that we can? I think it’s because we want to do our best, so we want to believe we have enough control over ourselves and our actions and the world in which we live to be able to “progress”, to solve problems and deal effectively with crises. Life is wonderful and we want it to go on and be wonderful for everyone, now and in the future.
Our models may be fragile and absurdly inadequate and oversimplified, but they are very useful. A computer model can simulate the possible movement of a flock of migrating birds very powerfully, because within the narrow constraints of the migration process, birds temporarily, instinctively and voluntarily limit their flying behaviour to obey three simple, programmable rules. Likewise, workers on an assembly line can be persuaded, at least for a while, to conform their processes to those in the organization’s procedure manuals, to the point we might delude ourselves that the organization was synonymous with the people that work for it, that the organization (the construct) was in fact an organism, rather than what it is in fact — merely a model attempting to describe and direct (or at least influence) a small part of its workers’, customers’ and environment’s complex, unfathomable and unpredictable processes.
And scientific theories and models do appear to represent accurately much of what we observe and care about in organic processes, to the point we can put people in space and build nuclear bombs, cars and computers that employ mechanical processes that mimic certain aspects of organic processes long enough and accurately enough to last until we no longer need them.
But it does not follow, just because it’s possible to convince 70 million Germans that the world would be better if they ruled the world and exterminated non-Aryans, or to convince a billion Chinese that 80 million deaths was an appropriate price to pay for an agrarian revolution, or to convince half of the US population that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago by a human-looking gray-bearded divinity, that we can galvanize the people and energies needed to pull our civilization back from the brink of collapse. Why not?
Because, getting back to my Law of Human Behaviour (or Schopenhauer’s and Einstein’s version if you prefer), this change is not widely perceived as something we must do immediately, and the necessary change will be enormously difficult to achieve....
....This explains the steady drift to the right in the US since the Nixon era: Those determined to institute right-wing policies have both a greater sense of urgency (they feel threatened by the complexity and unfamiliarity of the world, especially since 2001) and an easier job than progressives (what could be simpler than shrinking the non-military, non-security components of government until, as right-wing extremist Grover Norquist put it, “we can drown it in the bathtub”)?
This is why things are the way they are, and why some movements try fiercely to bring about change, even in the face of almost certain failure, while others stumble. We do what we must, then we do what’s easy. Important things like the Occupy movement are laudable, but they will not attract our energies until and unless they attain the same level of urgency that the political and religious right brings to their movement.
And this is why we cannot save the world. The challenges we face are overwhelming, and they’ve been accelerating in size and complexity for millennia. The more we learn about them, and their interrelatedness, the more daunting they become.
Many of them are subject to the Jevons Paradox, a quality of organic processes by which attempts to intervene in them to reverse what are called in systems thinking terms “positive feedback loops” (or colloquially, vicious cycles), produce unexpected consequences that more than negate the attempted change. So, for example, increasing the fuel efficiency of automobiles leads to drivers making more trips in their now more-economical vehicles, to the point their fuel consumption actually rises.
We see similar feedback loops accelerating the melting of arctic ice and glaciers so quickly that climate scientists are aghast (one of the qualities of organic systems is their unpredictability). Meanwhile, the epidemic of chronic diseases in affluent nations is creating a runaway toll of lost labour and skyrocketing health management costs, so much that the Davos global risk management experts consistently rate it as one of the top risks to the global economy. This epidemic of hundreds of immune system hyperactivity (“autoimmune”) diseases now appears due to a combination of nutritional deficiencies, food system toxins, and overuse of antibiotics, which together have so damaged our bodies’ ability to recognize and cope with the ingredients of what we eat that our immune systems are indiscriminately attacking nutrients and even our own tissues, essentially making ourselves chronically ill.
This is what happens when we (encouraged by the medical, pharmaceutical and agricultural industries) mess with a complex organism’s evolved processes, utterly ignorant of the consequences. We introduce antibiotics to try to kill some pathogen, and our body, defeated in its attempts to do what a million years of co-evolution with the creatures in our bodies had taught it to do, resigns, or goes haywire. Meanwhile, the pathogen, opportunistic like all organic creatures, quickly evolves immunity to the antibiotics and returns with a vengeance. Yet still we allow the people in these industries to develop new toxins which they test on us, in the hope they might be right, for awhile, this time, and the result is GMOs (construct/organism hybrids, the consequences of which we cannot hope to understand or predict), superbugs, and yet more epidemics of new “civilization diseases”.
Engineers are now working on ways to grow human organs on caged animals, raised for just that purpose, and to fight atmospheric warming by shooting metallic particles into the stratosphere in the hope that this will reflect sunlight before it reaches us (so-called “geo-engineering”). Total madness.
What makes the predicaments in the lower-left square of the above matrix so intractable is that our constructs, our contrivances, our technologies — the only tools we have to deal with “problems” — are useless when dealing with these massively complex organic processes. The only way we can cope with them is by accepting the limitations they impose on our behaviour and adapting ourselves and our behaviour to them.
So if we want to deal with the economic crises we have precipitated, neither austerity nor stimulus will work. We have to reinvent our whole economy as a steady-state one without debt or credit. But we can’t do that, because without growth our economy will collapse and plunge us into the worst depression civilization has ever known. And with growth our resources will run out faster and climate change will accelerate, precipitating both energy and ecological collapse globally. We have created a problem that has no solution, and it’s the same one, as Jared Diamond and Ronald Wright have explained, that led to the downfall of past civilizations. Except this time the problem is global, and we’re all going down.
The same kind of dilemma faces us in trying to cope with peak oil. Research such as George Monbiot’s has demonstrated that there are no renewable or sustainable substitutes for oil (even with the loftiest predictions about human ingenuity and improvements in technology) that can provide anywhere near the power that hydrocarbons do. But our whole civilization, even our food system, is hooked on cheap oil. When it runs out, in a series of crises that will get steadily much worse as the century unfolds, our economy will collapse, all of our technologies will run out of power, and billions will starve. A future world with ten billion people trying to live on a planet that, without the subsidy of cheap, abundant energy, can perhaps support a tenth that number, is almost too ghastly to imagine. And in our desperate effort to forestall that energy and resource collapse, we are likely, just as the Easter Islanders did, to excavate every mountaintop, dig into the seas and the sands and the deepest depths of the planet, and cut down every tree until nothing is left standing.
That is why, when a problem or series of problems or crises appear intractable, extremely difficult if not impossible to resolve, our tendency is to resist dealing with them, to deny the problems, to leave it up to future generations or higher powers to deal with them. We would rather slot these issues into the lower left square of the matrix, than give them power over us by acknowledging their urgency and intractability, in the dreadful upper left square where denial is impossible and success is improbable. We don’t want to know. We don’t want to hear. Give me factory farm meat, we say, and keep it all hidden away and unreported so we don’t have to acknowledge the atrocity of the system that produces it. Keep it in that lower left square. Yes we should probably do something but not now; we’re too busy with urgent matters.
So the die is cast — we cannot save the world. What then are we to do? What is the “joyful pessimist’s” prescription for coping with a world that is coming irrevocably undone? The only honest answer to these questions is: I don’t know.
I can tell you what I think we should not do: Let the hopelessness and helplessness of our situation obscure the fact that our lives are wonderful, miraculous, and worth living and savouring every moment of. Devote our lives to working for others in the hope that will ‘buy’ us retirement time to do what we really want to do, to do what we ‘must’ do and what is easy and fun to do. Get so caught up in the fight to ‘save the world’ by trying to convince people we need to do X, that we forget how to wonder, to play, to really be, here, in the moment. Give up everything — our own dreams, our health, our freedom, our precious time — in the hope that our descendants will be able to do what we cannot. Retreat from the ‘grim’ ‘real’ ‘outside’ world inside our heads where things are safer and simpler.
Once I realized how the world really works a few years ago, and overcame the first denial — that everything is and will be OK, I began to beat myself up for not doing more to make the world a better place, for not having the ‘courage of my convictions’, for not sacrificing myself, my time and my freedom in the fight to prevent or mitigate the collapse of our civilization.
And then more recently I overcame the second denial — that this collapse can, with great effort, be prevented or mitigated, or transitioned around. And it was if a great weight was lifted off my shoulders. We cannot save the world. And suddenly I realized how precious this life and my time was, and how life that is not lived to the full every moment, presently, is no life at all, but rather like a story I’m watching on a screen, as if I were a passive spectator. And that every moment is an eternity and every moment wasted in anxious ‘clock’ time is an eternity lost. That there is only here, and now. And that everything my culture had told me, taught me, was an unintended lie. The wild, feral creature I had always been began to be liberated from civilization’s grasp.
To many of my friends and (dwindling, disappointed) readers, and to some people I dearly love, this is not a revelation but a cop-out, a rationalization for laziness and inaction. Even if it seems impossible, they say, you have to try. You can’t give up. Without hope we can’t go on.
But I’ve tried being the responsible pacifist, and the reformist. I don’t believe this gets us anywhere, for the reasons I’ve tried to explain above. I’ve tried being an activist, a resistance fighter. My heart isn’t in it — I can’t see taking the dreadful risk of being imprisoned or injured to try to stop the Tar Sands or factory farming when Jevons, and everything I have learned, tells me anything I accomplish will be undone, and more. I am beyond hope.
How can you just sit by when our planet is being destroyed, and when so many creatures are suffering, especially when your ability to live so comfortably depends on that destruction and suffering, and when you know you could do something?, I’m asked. Do something, anything.
I could give away all my money to good causes, causes in support of the good, if hopeless, fight. I could move into a tiny cabin and grow all my own food and buy nothing and live naked without electricity or heat or technology and reduce my ecological footprint to almost zero. And someone else would move into the house I rent and probably generate more CO2 from it than I do. And the stuff I don’t buy will depress prices ever so little so that others can, and will, buy a little bit more, more than what I don’t. And the money I gave would temporarily slow down destruction and suffering, and then it would be gone, and the destruction and suffering would resume its normal pace. And the Tar Sands bitumen sludge I went to prison for trying to prevent the mining of would, for a short time, be left in the ground, and after that as the shortage of cheap energy grows, its value would be even higher and the Chinese who are building entire ghost cities just for the sake of accelerating endless growth in the belief this leads to a better life will be eager to buy that sludge at any price. And then what?
What I am doing, instead, is (by writing articles like this one) passing along what I’ve learned about how the world really works, and what I believe we should not be wasting our time doing (trying to reform, or ‘save’, or transition around the collapse of, civilization culture). My hope is that eventually enough people will get past the second denial that we can start to focus attention on adapting to and increasing our resilience in the face of, the cascading crises that will eventually (I think by century’s end) lead to civilizational collapse.
This will be grim work, because these crises are likely to be ghastly, and we are totally unequipped to deal with them. And it will be local work, because centralized ‘organizations’ will be crumbling and unable to provide any ‘top-down’ or coordinated help. We can start now (as soon as each of us ‘must’) to acquire the old and new skills and capacities we will need to cope with collapse — relearning and relocalizing many basic skills of our grandparents, both technical (e.g. permaculture) and soft skills (e.g. facilitation), as we rediscover how to live in community and how to live together self-sufficiently.
With collapse, many of the constructs of civilization (centralized hospitals and expensive medicine, institutional schooling, corporations and the industrial concepts of ‘employment’ and ‘jobs’, processed, monoculture, GMO and ‘fast’ foods, private cars and private homes and private ‘property’, central currencies and credit, marketing, mass ‘information’ and entertainment media, mass production, imported goods, private pensions and savings, prisons, central governments, even computers and the internet — at least in the profligate, throwaway way we now consume them) will gradually disappear, replaced, with great difficulty, by local substitutes. If we are wise (and in this we might instinctively be) we will drastically and voluntarily reduce our human birth rates so that the level of one billion or so people that might be able to live comfortably without subsidized civilization culture will be reached relatively painlessly.
There is much hard work to be done, but it is far too early to expect to be able to do much of it now. It is, after all, in the lower left square of the Urgency/Ease matrix, and most people will wait until they ‘must’ (i.e. until after several cascading crises convince them that this is a permanent, not a temporary change), before they will see the need to start.
Until the old systems die, we won’t be able to see what, and how much, really needs to be done anyway, and the remains of the old systems will struggle defiantly to resist new experiments (this is already happening). We can do some advance learning, and practice dealing with crises in a personal, proactive way (i.e. rather than expecting the government to fix each crisis as it occurs, and to tell us what to do).
We can get to know our neighbours, including the ones who are annoying and ignorant and unable to self-manage, and what we can do with and for each other, and lay the foundations for true, local communities. We can get to know the place we live, the organic process of which we are most immediately a part, and what else lives and can naturally thrive there. We can experiment with new models and constructs of how to live sustainably and joyfully, provided we recognize they are just experiments and are unlikely to flourish until the old systems crumble.
Much of this early preparation can be easy, and fun, if we choose to make space for it. And this still leaves us time, time saved by not trying to hold on desperately to our dying civilization culture, to just be, to play, to do things that are easy and fun, to live each moment of this amazing life at this amazing time to the fullest. To free ourselves, and be wild again, welcomed back into the organic process that is all-life-on-Earth, where we always belonged.
Friday, September 21, 2012
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
SC112-15
http://kunstler.com/blog/2012/09/what-does-it-mean.html
What Does It Mean?
In the word-cloud of current events, the phrase "parasitic financial system" billows up to a degree that suggests even so-called thinking persons begin to understand what's happening: that banking shenanigans are sucking the life out of advanced societies. That's why Matt Taibbi's metaphor of Goldman Sachs as "a Vampire Squid jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money" remains so potent years after it was minted.
Of course the pervasive accounting fraud and routine swindling that drive the banking "industry" are abetted by the phantom government "policy" of the Federal Reserve, an institution that 99.999 percent of the American public could not explain under threat of water-boarding. The bottom line is political and economic leadership that can only pretend the economy works, and the destiny of such pretense is the death of legitimacy - meaning the public's faith in the system. Sooner or later either the public will revolt against such a system, or the system will just implode and leave the public floundering in a period of dreadful chaos.
Nobody capable of thinking through these rather abstruse matters believes Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke anymore, and his demeanor in public is of a depressed person who has lost belief in himself and what he does. He announced last week's policy salvo - the long-awaited QE-3 - with absolutely no conviction. The Fed will spend $40 billion a month in money created out of thin air to buy non-performing mortgages from banks eager to dump them and interest rates on new mortgages will fall to record low levels. This will supposedly "stimulate" the housing market.
Virtually nobody else out there in blog-and-pundit land will tell you what this so-called "housing market" is, so I will. It basically refers to suburban sprawl, which I have previously defined in two ways: 1) the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world, and 2) a living arrangement with no future. The first proposition is obviously a function of the second. Interestingly, one of the first effects of Ben Bernanke's QE3 salvo was the inflation of oil prices to nearly $100-a-barrel, with a flow-through effect of gasoline above $4 at the pump, which only shortens the horizon of the suburban sprawl paradigm. Like the zombie banks choking on bad mortgages, sprawl is dead but doesn't know it.
Unfortunately, the suburban sprawl system was interchangeable with the wormy old political chestnut known as the American Dream. Consider that the hysterical extremism ruling Republican politics derives from terror over the death of that flimsy dream - a home of our own, behind the strip mall! They can't believe it's over, that it's lost its value, that they're stuck with the losses, and they're looking for someone to blame for it. All the rest of their blather is just the noise of dissociated anxiety - the religious idiocy, the exceptionalism fairy tale, the family values touted by closet cases, the military chauvinism.
Among the many tragic ramifications of the dynamic is that the final blowout of sprawl-building which ran roughly from the early 1990s to 2007 - and peaked, you may notice, with the final blowout of cheap oil ($11 a barrel in 1999) - became one of two intertwined activities that propped up the US economy. The other was, of course, the expansion of the financial "industry" to about 40 percent of all economic activity, largely based on fraud in mortgage issuance and the repackaging of that debt in booby-trapped bundles of MBS, CDOs, and other instruments that have been destroying banks, governments, retirement funds, and individual investment accounts like a long-running hemorrhagic fever. The results of that orgy can be seen now an over-supply of suburban buildings of all kinds (houses, strip malls, box stores) that will continue to lose value, and a banking system disabled by ruined balance sheets.
There's no remedy for this except acknowledging losses on the grand scale, writing them off, making the necessary lifestyle adjustments to the write-offs, and making a fresh start with an economy based on something other than suburban sprawl building and banking fraud. American politics can't accept this. Neither party understands the contraction underway throughout the industrial world and the very different future it portends.
Despite the pervasive fraud and incessant central bank interventions, there are routine operations of money that must go on for societies to remain stable. Checks or transactions have to be cleared, payments must be made, letters of credit must be issued to permit the exchange of goods and commodities between nations, bonds must be rolled over, markets must allow truthful asset price and interest rate discovery, currencies must hold their value. The terrible stresses being applied by central banks to avoid acknowledging systemic losses threaten to paralyze these routine operations of money. Too many things can go wrong now.
The fault lines for the moment are crackling along the margins, in foreign lands such as Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen. There is not a whole lot keeping this infection from spreading into Saudi Arabia. The Saud royal family leadership has passed from one king over eighty years old to another. Nobody knows what will shake out between Israel and Iran. One way or another, an awful lot of the world's oil supply is at stake in that part of the world, and if that gets stoppered or blown up all the central bank machinations ever dreamed up will not avail to save Europe, North America, China, and Japan.
My guess is that the euphoria over QE3 has already passed. The Fed actions of last week will mean nothing except the steady erosion of dollar value, higher food and fuel costs for all us muppets, and increased mistrust between crippled banks, further crippling bank activity, including the routine operations that make civilized life possible.
Therefore, uncivilized life is not out of the question.
What Does It Mean?
In the word-cloud of current events, the phrase "parasitic financial system" billows up to a degree that suggests even so-called thinking persons begin to understand what's happening: that banking shenanigans are sucking the life out of advanced societies. That's why Matt Taibbi's metaphor of Goldman Sachs as "a Vampire Squid jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money" remains so potent years after it was minted.
Of course the pervasive accounting fraud and routine swindling that drive the banking "industry" are abetted by the phantom government "policy" of the Federal Reserve, an institution that 99.999 percent of the American public could not explain under threat of water-boarding. The bottom line is political and economic leadership that can only pretend the economy works, and the destiny of such pretense is the death of legitimacy - meaning the public's faith in the system. Sooner or later either the public will revolt against such a system, or the system will just implode and leave the public floundering in a period of dreadful chaos.
Nobody capable of thinking through these rather abstruse matters believes Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke anymore, and his demeanor in public is of a depressed person who has lost belief in himself and what he does. He announced last week's policy salvo - the long-awaited QE-3 - with absolutely no conviction. The Fed will spend $40 billion a month in money created out of thin air to buy non-performing mortgages from banks eager to dump them and interest rates on new mortgages will fall to record low levels. This will supposedly "stimulate" the housing market.
Virtually nobody else out there in blog-and-pundit land will tell you what this so-called "housing market" is, so I will. It basically refers to suburban sprawl, which I have previously defined in two ways: 1) the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world, and 2) a living arrangement with no future. The first proposition is obviously a function of the second. Interestingly, one of the first effects of Ben Bernanke's QE3 salvo was the inflation of oil prices to nearly $100-a-barrel, with a flow-through effect of gasoline above $4 at the pump, which only shortens the horizon of the suburban sprawl paradigm. Like the zombie banks choking on bad mortgages, sprawl is dead but doesn't know it.
Unfortunately, the suburban sprawl system was interchangeable with the wormy old political chestnut known as the American Dream. Consider that the hysterical extremism ruling Republican politics derives from terror over the death of that flimsy dream - a home of our own, behind the strip mall! They can't believe it's over, that it's lost its value, that they're stuck with the losses, and they're looking for someone to blame for it. All the rest of their blather is just the noise of dissociated anxiety - the religious idiocy, the exceptionalism fairy tale, the family values touted by closet cases, the military chauvinism.
Among the many tragic ramifications of the dynamic is that the final blowout of sprawl-building which ran roughly from the early 1990s to 2007 - and peaked, you may notice, with the final blowout of cheap oil ($11 a barrel in 1999) - became one of two intertwined activities that propped up the US economy. The other was, of course, the expansion of the financial "industry" to about 40 percent of all economic activity, largely based on fraud in mortgage issuance and the repackaging of that debt in booby-trapped bundles of MBS, CDOs, and other instruments that have been destroying banks, governments, retirement funds, and individual investment accounts like a long-running hemorrhagic fever. The results of that orgy can be seen now an over-supply of suburban buildings of all kinds (houses, strip malls, box stores) that will continue to lose value, and a banking system disabled by ruined balance sheets.
There's no remedy for this except acknowledging losses on the grand scale, writing them off, making the necessary lifestyle adjustments to the write-offs, and making a fresh start with an economy based on something other than suburban sprawl building and banking fraud. American politics can't accept this. Neither party understands the contraction underway throughout the industrial world and the very different future it portends.
Despite the pervasive fraud and incessant central bank interventions, there are routine operations of money that must go on for societies to remain stable. Checks or transactions have to be cleared, payments must be made, letters of credit must be issued to permit the exchange of goods and commodities between nations, bonds must be rolled over, markets must allow truthful asset price and interest rate discovery, currencies must hold their value. The terrible stresses being applied by central banks to avoid acknowledging systemic losses threaten to paralyze these routine operations of money. Too many things can go wrong now.
The fault lines for the moment are crackling along the margins, in foreign lands such as Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen. There is not a whole lot keeping this infection from spreading into Saudi Arabia. The Saud royal family leadership has passed from one king over eighty years old to another. Nobody knows what will shake out between Israel and Iran. One way or another, an awful lot of the world's oil supply is at stake in that part of the world, and if that gets stoppered or blown up all the central bank machinations ever dreamed up will not avail to save Europe, North America, China, and Japan.
My guess is that the euphoria over QE3 has already passed. The Fed actions of last week will mean nothing except the steady erosion of dollar value, higher food and fuel costs for all us muppets, and increased mistrust between crippled banks, further crippling bank activity, including the routine operations that make civilized life possible.
Therefore, uncivilized life is not out of the question.
Sunday, September 16, 2012
SC112-14
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/growth_is_the_problem_20120910/
Growth Is the Problem
The ceaseless expansion of economic exploitation, the engine of global capitalism, has come to an end. The futile and myopic effort to resurrect this expansion—a fallacy embraced by most economists—means that we respond to illusion rather than reality. We invest our efforts into bringing back what is gone forever. This strange twilight moment, in which our experts and systems managers squander resources in attempting to re-create an expanding economic system that is moribund, will inevitably lead to systems collapse. The steady depletion of natural resources, especially fossil fuels, along with the accelerated pace of climate change, will combine with crippling levels of personal and national debt to thrust us into a global depression that will dwarf any in the history of capitalism. And very few of us are prepared.
“Our solution is our problem,” Richard Heinberg, the author of “The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality,” told me when I reached him by phone in California. “Its name is growth. But growth has become uneconomic. We are worse off because of growth. To achieve growth now means mounting debt, more pollution, an accelerated loss of biodiversity and the continued destabilization of the climate. But we are addicted to growth. If there is no growth there are insufficient tax revenues and jobs. If there is no growth existing debt levels become unsustainable. The elites see the current economic crisis as a temporary impediment. They are desperately trying to fix it. But this crisis signals an irreversible change for civilization itself. We cannot prevent it. We can only decide whether we will adapt to it or not.”
Heinberg, a senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, argues that we cannot grasp the real state of the global economy by the usual metrics—GDP, unemployment, housing, durable goods, national deficits, personal income and consumer spending—although even these measures point to severe and chronic problems. Rather, he says, we have to examine the structural flaws that sit like time bombs embedded within the economic edifice. U.S. household debt enabled the expansion of consumer spending during the boom years, he says, but consumer debt cannot continue to grow as house prices decline to realistic levels. Toxic assets litter the portfolios of the major banks, presaging another global financial meltdown. The Earth’s natural resources are being exhausted. And climate change, with its extreme weather conditions, is beginning to exact a heavy economic toll on countries, including the United States, through the destruction brought about by droughts, floods, wildfires and loss of crop yields.
Heinberg also highlights what he calls “the highly dysfunctional U.S. political system,” which is paralyzed and hostage to corporate power. It is unable to respond rationally to the crisis or solve “even the most trivial of problems.”
“The government at this point exacerbates nearly every crisis the nation faces,” he said. “Policy decisions do not emerge from deliberations between the public and elected leaders. They arise from unaccountable government agencies and private interest groups. The Republican Party has taken leave of reality. It exists in a hermetically sealed ideasphere where climate change is a hoax and economic problems can be solved by cutting spending and taxes. The Democrats, meanwhile, offer no realistic strategy for coping with the economic unraveling or climate change.”
The collision course is set. It is now only a matter of time and our personal response.
“It could implode in a few weeks, in a few months or maybe in a few years,” Heinberg said, “but unless radical steps are taken to restructure the economy, it will implode. And when it does the financial system will seize up far more dramatically than in 2008. You will go to the bank or the ATM and there will be no money. Food will be scarce and expensive. Unemployment will be rampant. And government services will break down. Living standards will plummet. ‘Austerity’ programs will become more draconian. Economic inequality will widen to create massive gaps between a tiny, oligarchic global elite and the masses. The collapse will also inevitably trigger the kind of instability and unrest, including riots, that we have seen in countries such as Greece. The elites, who understand and deeply fear the possibility of an unraveling, have been pillaging state resources to save their corrupt, insolvent banks, militarize their police forces and rewrite legal codes to criminalize dissent.”
If nations were able to respond rationally to the crisis they could forestall social collapse by reconfiguring their economies away from ceaseless growth and exploitation. It remains possible, at least in the industrialized world, to provide to most citizens the basics—food, water, housing, medical care, employment, education and public safety. This, however, as Heinberg points out, would require a radical reversal of the structures of power. It would necessitate a massive cancellation of debt, along with the slashing of bloated militaries, heavy regulation and restraints placed on the financial sector and high taxes imposed on oligarchic elites and corporations in order to reduce unsustainable levels of inequality. While this economic reconfiguration would not mitigate the effects of climate change and the depletion of natural resources it would create the social stability needed to cope with a new post-growth regime. But Heinberg says he doubts a rational policy is forthcoming. He fears that as deterioration accelerates there will be a greater resolve on the part of the power elite to “cannibalize the resources of society in order to prop up megabanks and military establishments.”
Survival will be determined by localities. Communities will have to create collectives to grow their own food and provide for their security, education, financial systems and self-governance, efforts that Heinberg suspects will “be discouraged and perhaps criminalized by those in authority.” This process of decentralization will, he said, become “the signal economic and social trend of the 21st century.” It will be, in effect, a repudiation of classic economic models such as free enterprise versus the planned economy or Keynesian stimulus versus austerity. The reconfiguration will arise not through ideologies, but through the necessities of survival forced on the poor and former members of the working and middle class who have joined the poor. This will inevitably create conflicts as decentralization weakens the power of the elites and the corporate state.
Joseph Tainter, an archeologist, in his book “The Collapse of Complex Societies” provides a useful blueprint for how such societies unravel. All of history’s major 24 civilizations have collapsed and the patterns are strikingly similar, he writes. The difference this time around is that we will unravel as a planet. Tainter notes that as societies become more complex they inevitably invest greater and greater amounts of diminishing resources in expanding systems of complexity. This proves to be fatal.
“More complex societies are costlier to maintain than simpler ones and require higher support levels per capita,” Tainter writes. The investments required to maintain an overly complex system become too costly, and these investments yield declining returns. The elites, in a desperate effort to maintain their own levels of consumption and preserve the system that empowers them, through repression and austerity measures squeeze the masses harder and harder until the edifice collapses. This collapse leaves behind decentralized, autonomous pockets of human communities.
Heinberg says this is our fate. The quality of our lives will depend on the quality of our communities. If communal structures are strong we will be able to endure. If they are weak we will succumb to the bleakness. It is important that these structures be set in place before the onset of the crisis, he says. This means starting to “know your neighbors.” It means setting up food banks and farmers’ markets. It means establishing a local currency, carpooling, creating clothing exchanges, establishing cooperative housing, growing gardens, raising chickens and buying local. It is the matrix of neighbors, family and friends, Heinberg says, that will provide “our refuge and our opportunity to build anew.”
“The inevitable decline in resources to support societal complexity will generate a centrifugal force,” Heinberg said. “It will break up existing economic and governmental power structures. It will unleash a battle for diminishing resources. This battle will see conflicts erupt between nations and within nations. Localism will soon be our fate. It will also be our strategy for survival. Learning practical skills, becoming more self-sufficient, forming bonds of trust with our neighbors will determine the quality of our lives and the lives of our children.”
Growth Is the Problem
The ceaseless expansion of economic exploitation, the engine of global capitalism, has come to an end. The futile and myopic effort to resurrect this expansion—a fallacy embraced by most economists—means that we respond to illusion rather than reality. We invest our efforts into bringing back what is gone forever. This strange twilight moment, in which our experts and systems managers squander resources in attempting to re-create an expanding economic system that is moribund, will inevitably lead to systems collapse. The steady depletion of natural resources, especially fossil fuels, along with the accelerated pace of climate change, will combine with crippling levels of personal and national debt to thrust us into a global depression that will dwarf any in the history of capitalism. And very few of us are prepared.
“Our solution is our problem,” Richard Heinberg, the author of “The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality,” told me when I reached him by phone in California. “Its name is growth. But growth has become uneconomic. We are worse off because of growth. To achieve growth now means mounting debt, more pollution, an accelerated loss of biodiversity and the continued destabilization of the climate. But we are addicted to growth. If there is no growth there are insufficient tax revenues and jobs. If there is no growth existing debt levels become unsustainable. The elites see the current economic crisis as a temporary impediment. They are desperately trying to fix it. But this crisis signals an irreversible change for civilization itself. We cannot prevent it. We can only decide whether we will adapt to it or not.”
Heinberg, a senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, argues that we cannot grasp the real state of the global economy by the usual metrics—GDP, unemployment, housing, durable goods, national deficits, personal income and consumer spending—although even these measures point to severe and chronic problems. Rather, he says, we have to examine the structural flaws that sit like time bombs embedded within the economic edifice. U.S. household debt enabled the expansion of consumer spending during the boom years, he says, but consumer debt cannot continue to grow as house prices decline to realistic levels. Toxic assets litter the portfolios of the major banks, presaging another global financial meltdown. The Earth’s natural resources are being exhausted. And climate change, with its extreme weather conditions, is beginning to exact a heavy economic toll on countries, including the United States, through the destruction brought about by droughts, floods, wildfires and loss of crop yields.
Heinberg also highlights what he calls “the highly dysfunctional U.S. political system,” which is paralyzed and hostage to corporate power. It is unable to respond rationally to the crisis or solve “even the most trivial of problems.”
“The government at this point exacerbates nearly every crisis the nation faces,” he said. “Policy decisions do not emerge from deliberations between the public and elected leaders. They arise from unaccountable government agencies and private interest groups. The Republican Party has taken leave of reality. It exists in a hermetically sealed ideasphere where climate change is a hoax and economic problems can be solved by cutting spending and taxes. The Democrats, meanwhile, offer no realistic strategy for coping with the economic unraveling or climate change.”
The collision course is set. It is now only a matter of time and our personal response.
“It could implode in a few weeks, in a few months or maybe in a few years,” Heinberg said, “but unless radical steps are taken to restructure the economy, it will implode. And when it does the financial system will seize up far more dramatically than in 2008. You will go to the bank or the ATM and there will be no money. Food will be scarce and expensive. Unemployment will be rampant. And government services will break down. Living standards will plummet. ‘Austerity’ programs will become more draconian. Economic inequality will widen to create massive gaps between a tiny, oligarchic global elite and the masses. The collapse will also inevitably trigger the kind of instability and unrest, including riots, that we have seen in countries such as Greece. The elites, who understand and deeply fear the possibility of an unraveling, have been pillaging state resources to save their corrupt, insolvent banks, militarize their police forces and rewrite legal codes to criminalize dissent.”
If nations were able to respond rationally to the crisis they could forestall social collapse by reconfiguring their economies away from ceaseless growth and exploitation. It remains possible, at least in the industrialized world, to provide to most citizens the basics—food, water, housing, medical care, employment, education and public safety. This, however, as Heinberg points out, would require a radical reversal of the structures of power. It would necessitate a massive cancellation of debt, along with the slashing of bloated militaries, heavy regulation and restraints placed on the financial sector and high taxes imposed on oligarchic elites and corporations in order to reduce unsustainable levels of inequality. While this economic reconfiguration would not mitigate the effects of climate change and the depletion of natural resources it would create the social stability needed to cope with a new post-growth regime. But Heinberg says he doubts a rational policy is forthcoming. He fears that as deterioration accelerates there will be a greater resolve on the part of the power elite to “cannibalize the resources of society in order to prop up megabanks and military establishments.”
Survival will be determined by localities. Communities will have to create collectives to grow their own food and provide for their security, education, financial systems and self-governance, efforts that Heinberg suspects will “be discouraged and perhaps criminalized by those in authority.” This process of decentralization will, he said, become “the signal economic and social trend of the 21st century.” It will be, in effect, a repudiation of classic economic models such as free enterprise versus the planned economy or Keynesian stimulus versus austerity. The reconfiguration will arise not through ideologies, but through the necessities of survival forced on the poor and former members of the working and middle class who have joined the poor. This will inevitably create conflicts as decentralization weakens the power of the elites and the corporate state.
Joseph Tainter, an archeologist, in his book “The Collapse of Complex Societies” provides a useful blueprint for how such societies unravel. All of history’s major 24 civilizations have collapsed and the patterns are strikingly similar, he writes. The difference this time around is that we will unravel as a planet. Tainter notes that as societies become more complex they inevitably invest greater and greater amounts of diminishing resources in expanding systems of complexity. This proves to be fatal.
“More complex societies are costlier to maintain than simpler ones and require higher support levels per capita,” Tainter writes. The investments required to maintain an overly complex system become too costly, and these investments yield declining returns. The elites, in a desperate effort to maintain their own levels of consumption and preserve the system that empowers them, through repression and austerity measures squeeze the masses harder and harder until the edifice collapses. This collapse leaves behind decentralized, autonomous pockets of human communities.
Heinberg says this is our fate. The quality of our lives will depend on the quality of our communities. If communal structures are strong we will be able to endure. If they are weak we will succumb to the bleakness. It is important that these structures be set in place before the onset of the crisis, he says. This means starting to “know your neighbors.” It means setting up food banks and farmers’ markets. It means establishing a local currency, carpooling, creating clothing exchanges, establishing cooperative housing, growing gardens, raising chickens and buying local. It is the matrix of neighbors, family and friends, Heinberg says, that will provide “our refuge and our opportunity to build anew.”
“The inevitable decline in resources to support societal complexity will generate a centrifugal force,” Heinberg said. “It will break up existing economic and governmental power structures. It will unleash a battle for diminishing resources. This battle will see conflicts erupt between nations and within nations. Localism will soon be our fate. It will also be our strategy for survival. Learning practical skills, becoming more self-sufficient, forming bonds of trust with our neighbors will determine the quality of our lives and the lives of our children.”
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
SC112-13
http://kunstler.com/blog/2012/09/zeitgeist-failure.html
Zeitgeist Failure
In an age of gross zeitgeist dysfunction -- when untruth, delusion, and deception rule - politics is mere advertising, which is to say surface shimmer playing on the public's wish-fulfillment fantasies. The trouble at this moment in history is that the American public's wishful fantasies are inconsistent with the circumstances that reality offers to us and the choices for action that they present.
President Obama's historical role will be seen as a wish-fulfillment totem for late 20th century progressive liberalism - the first black president. The Democratic Party apotheosized the genial young lawyer with his appealing family in order to demonstrate the triumph of social justice, which was their great struggle of the era. Evidence of that is the striking divergence from the get-go between Mr. Obama's Hope and Change advertising and his sedulous defense of pervasive racketeering at the highest levels of polity once in office. Otherwise, you must decide whether he was a tool of the giant banks, or a dupe-made-hostage to them, or simply too clueless to understand what was required in 2009 - namely the break-up and reorganization of the banks plus hearty prosecution of their executives for massive swindling (along with reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act). I voted for him in 2008, by the way, since the wish-fulfillment motif moved me, and also because of the horrifying McCain-Palin opposition.
In office, then, Mr. Obama quickly proved to be a different breed of porpoise than the voters bargained for. He let the Wall Street privateers run amuck another four years, aided with colossal infusions of conjured-out-of-nothing "money" from the Federal Reserve. He let loose the demons of a high-tech totalitarian "security" state with every sort of electronic surveillance, citizen data-mining, and drone spying that innovation allowed. He stood silent like a Banana Republic store mannequin after the supreme court decided that corporations could buy elections (he could have pushed loudly for legislation or even a constitutional amendment to redefine corporate "personhood"). And of course, he continued to prosecute the absurd war in Afghanistan where, after nine years, US forces are unable to accomplish the only aims of being there: to control the terrain and to moderate the behavior of the people who live there.
Hence, the appalling spectacle of the Democratic convention last week, with its odor of ideological bankruptcy, stale rhetoric, and empty promises. The party seeks only validation of its cherished fantasy: the social justice of reelecting the first black president. And all it really has to offer is cheerleading to that end - with some social justice table-scraps tossed to the lesser totems of social justice politics: women, assorted ethnic minorities, and gays.
Meanwhile, the "advanced nations" of industrial civilization all spiral into coordinated disintegration, especially in the realm where economy meets finance. Economy is about what we actually do to stay alive: make things, trade things, grow things, run things. Finance is supposed to be about maintaining the flows of accumulated wealth to support these things we do - with a modest service charge for the financiers who do the work. But in the great divorce of truth from reality in our time, finance is only about pretending to maintain these "capital" flows. In fact, it has degenerated into a set of looting operations, swindles, frauds, and political dodges, and it is on the verge of blowing up.
There's a fair chance that global finance (and trade) will blow up this season leading to the US elections. The nations of Europe are stuck in an intractable predicament. The European Union can't control the fiscal operations (taxing and spending) of its sovereign members, and it only pretends to be able to lend them the money to cover the interest payments on their previous loans. That shuck-and-jive is now headed for a climax. But the situation is not materially different in the USA and Japan. In one way or another, they are bankrupt, too, as are probably most of their commercial banks. China's banks are certainly a fiasco, since they are government-run, with no independent accounting oversight whatsoever. China does have a big cushion of US Treasury holdings, huge stockpiles of industrial metals and cement, and many new tons of recently-acquired gold. But they are also hostage to the bankrupt West's lost appetite for "consumer" goods, and tens of millions of laid-off Chinese factory workers could foment political upheaval in a delicate time of regime transition coming later this year.
The antics of the ECB, the US Federal Reserve, and all the other central banks in conjuring ever more money-out-of-nothing draws us toward that event horizon where faith is lost in a faith-based money system. The only question really is whether wealth destruction (deleveraging, debt default) out-paces currency destruction (inflation). My own guess continues to be that wealth destruction wins that contest, with massive unpayable debt sucked into a black hole, and then all the advanced industrial nations waking up one oddly warm morning to find their standards of living destroyed.
As a political matter in the face of all this, the big question is how we will reorganize daily life - the activities of a whole culture - to comport with the reality of a compressive contraction in economic reality. It also includes the shape and content of the consensus we construct to explain to ourselves what is happening. The obvious epic failure of the two major parties in the USA to even begin this necessary work may propel this country into an historic political convulsion to attend the financial implosion. Imagine, for instance, if the failure of international banks leads to the rapid paralysis of trade supply lines and then to empty shelves in American supermarkets.
People complain about "the size and burden of government," but our problems extend to the size and burden of everything, beginning with the number of human beings now vying to occupy the planet and moving to the size and scale of every activity supporting them. Truthful political leadership would engage in preparing the public for a long "to do" list of necessary tasks - from the return to Main Street economies that will follow the inevitable collapse of WalMart to the reorganization of food production when agri-biz style farming fails from scarcities of cheap oil, phosphates, and capital for revolving loans. Include also the rebuilding of transportation networks not based on cars and airplanes and the painful reconstruction of a monetary and banking system based on the rule of law.
This is the true work of the future: the rebuilding of these systems. All the blather about "jobs" from the presidential convoys is based on looking backward to a way of life that is ending: the age of giant everything, especially corporations. The days of cubicle serfdom are numbered. Useful, gainful work in the decades ahead will be much more about how you fit into your local community. The word "job" may even become obsolete - a curious artifact of the industrial past. Which party is preparing young people for local agriculture and all the value-added activities around it? Which party understands that the national chain-store model of trade is doomed and Main Streets all over America will have to be re-activated? Which party understands that we're in the twilight of mass motoring and commercial aviation? And what are they doing to prepare for the implications of that?
The two doddering parties want to promise more of what we've already got in a world that doesn't have anymore of that to give. The result is likely to be that we will go through all the noisy motions of the 2012 elections only to find ourselves plunged into a political crisis possibly worse than the Civil War.
Zeitgeist Failure
In an age of gross zeitgeist dysfunction -- when untruth, delusion, and deception rule - politics is mere advertising, which is to say surface shimmer playing on the public's wish-fulfillment fantasies. The trouble at this moment in history is that the American public's wishful fantasies are inconsistent with the circumstances that reality offers to us and the choices for action that they present.
President Obama's historical role will be seen as a wish-fulfillment totem for late 20th century progressive liberalism - the first black president. The Democratic Party apotheosized the genial young lawyer with his appealing family in order to demonstrate the triumph of social justice, which was their great struggle of the era. Evidence of that is the striking divergence from the get-go between Mr. Obama's Hope and Change advertising and his sedulous defense of pervasive racketeering at the highest levels of polity once in office. Otherwise, you must decide whether he was a tool of the giant banks, or a dupe-made-hostage to them, or simply too clueless to understand what was required in 2009 - namely the break-up and reorganization of the banks plus hearty prosecution of their executives for massive swindling (along with reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act). I voted for him in 2008, by the way, since the wish-fulfillment motif moved me, and also because of the horrifying McCain-Palin opposition.
In office, then, Mr. Obama quickly proved to be a different breed of porpoise than the voters bargained for. He let the Wall Street privateers run amuck another four years, aided with colossal infusions of conjured-out-of-nothing "money" from the Federal Reserve. He let loose the demons of a high-tech totalitarian "security" state with every sort of electronic surveillance, citizen data-mining, and drone spying that innovation allowed. He stood silent like a Banana Republic store mannequin after the supreme court decided that corporations could buy elections (he could have pushed loudly for legislation or even a constitutional amendment to redefine corporate "personhood"). And of course, he continued to prosecute the absurd war in Afghanistan where, after nine years, US forces are unable to accomplish the only aims of being there: to control the terrain and to moderate the behavior of the people who live there.
Hence, the appalling spectacle of the Democratic convention last week, with its odor of ideological bankruptcy, stale rhetoric, and empty promises. The party seeks only validation of its cherished fantasy: the social justice of reelecting the first black president. And all it really has to offer is cheerleading to that end - with some social justice table-scraps tossed to the lesser totems of social justice politics: women, assorted ethnic minorities, and gays.
Meanwhile, the "advanced nations" of industrial civilization all spiral into coordinated disintegration, especially in the realm where economy meets finance. Economy is about what we actually do to stay alive: make things, trade things, grow things, run things. Finance is supposed to be about maintaining the flows of accumulated wealth to support these things we do - with a modest service charge for the financiers who do the work. But in the great divorce of truth from reality in our time, finance is only about pretending to maintain these "capital" flows. In fact, it has degenerated into a set of looting operations, swindles, frauds, and political dodges, and it is on the verge of blowing up.
There's a fair chance that global finance (and trade) will blow up this season leading to the US elections. The nations of Europe are stuck in an intractable predicament. The European Union can't control the fiscal operations (taxing and spending) of its sovereign members, and it only pretends to be able to lend them the money to cover the interest payments on their previous loans. That shuck-and-jive is now headed for a climax. But the situation is not materially different in the USA and Japan. In one way or another, they are bankrupt, too, as are probably most of their commercial banks. China's banks are certainly a fiasco, since they are government-run, with no independent accounting oversight whatsoever. China does have a big cushion of US Treasury holdings, huge stockpiles of industrial metals and cement, and many new tons of recently-acquired gold. But they are also hostage to the bankrupt West's lost appetite for "consumer" goods, and tens of millions of laid-off Chinese factory workers could foment political upheaval in a delicate time of regime transition coming later this year.
The antics of the ECB, the US Federal Reserve, and all the other central banks in conjuring ever more money-out-of-nothing draws us toward that event horizon where faith is lost in a faith-based money system. The only question really is whether wealth destruction (deleveraging, debt default) out-paces currency destruction (inflation). My own guess continues to be that wealth destruction wins that contest, with massive unpayable debt sucked into a black hole, and then all the advanced industrial nations waking up one oddly warm morning to find their standards of living destroyed.
As a political matter in the face of all this, the big question is how we will reorganize daily life - the activities of a whole culture - to comport with the reality of a compressive contraction in economic reality. It also includes the shape and content of the consensus we construct to explain to ourselves what is happening. The obvious epic failure of the two major parties in the USA to even begin this necessary work may propel this country into an historic political convulsion to attend the financial implosion. Imagine, for instance, if the failure of international banks leads to the rapid paralysis of trade supply lines and then to empty shelves in American supermarkets.
People complain about "the size and burden of government," but our problems extend to the size and burden of everything, beginning with the number of human beings now vying to occupy the planet and moving to the size and scale of every activity supporting them. Truthful political leadership would engage in preparing the public for a long "to do" list of necessary tasks - from the return to Main Street economies that will follow the inevitable collapse of WalMart to the reorganization of food production when agri-biz style farming fails from scarcities of cheap oil, phosphates, and capital for revolving loans. Include also the rebuilding of transportation networks not based on cars and airplanes and the painful reconstruction of a monetary and banking system based on the rule of law.
This is the true work of the future: the rebuilding of these systems. All the blather about "jobs" from the presidential convoys is based on looking backward to a way of life that is ending: the age of giant everything, especially corporations. The days of cubicle serfdom are numbered. Useful, gainful work in the decades ahead will be much more about how you fit into your local community. The word "job" may even become obsolete - a curious artifact of the industrial past. Which party is preparing young people for local agriculture and all the value-added activities around it? Which party understands that the national chain-store model of trade is doomed and Main Streets all over America will have to be re-activated? Which party understands that we're in the twilight of mass motoring and commercial aviation? And what are they doing to prepare for the implications of that?
The two doddering parties want to promise more of what we've already got in a world that doesn't have anymore of that to give. The result is likely to be that we will go through all the noisy motions of the 2012 elections only to find ourselves plunged into a political crisis possibly worse than the Civil War.
Saturday, September 8, 2012
SC112-12
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-republicans-cross-the-rubicon/
The Republicans Cross The Rubicon
Does anyone remember when National Public Radio was an independent voice?
During the 1980s NPR was continually on the case of the Reagan administration. NPR certainly had a Democratic slant, and a lot of its reporting about the Reagan administration was one-sided. Yet, NPR was an independent voice, and it sometimes got things correct.
In the 21st century that voice has disappeared, which was the intention of the George W. Bush regime. Bush put a Republican woman in charge who made it clear to NPR producers and show hosts that the federal part of their funding was at risk.
Money often over-rules principle, and when corporations added their really big money NPR collapsed. Today the local stations still pretend to be funded by listeners, but if you have noticed, as I have, there are now a large number of corporate advertisements, disguised in the traditional terms “with support from . . .” If you are not listening to classical music, you are listening to corporate advertisements.
Today the entire “mainstream media” is closed to truth-tellers. The US media is Washington’s propaganda ministry. The US media has only one function–to lie for Washington.
What reminded me of NPR’s surrender was NPR’s August 31 report with its two regular talking voice political pundits discussing the Republican Convention and Romney’s speech. After witnessing the Republicans at their nominating convention at Tampa violate all their own rules and ride roughshod over the Ron Paul delegates, one expected some discussion of the Republican Party’s refusal to allow Ron Paul to be placed in nomination or his delegate account to be announced.
The operative question was obvious: How can the American people trust the Republicans with the awesome power of the executive branch when the Republican Party just finished demonstrating for all to see its Stalinist qualities by crushing the anti-war, anti-police state wing of its party?
The authoritarianism was gratuitous. Romney had a sufficient number of delegates to be nominated. It would have cost Romney nothing to follow the rules and allow Ron Paul to be placed in nomination and his delegate numbers to be reported. Instead, Romney wrote off the liberty contingent of the Republican Party. The Brown shirts demonstrated their power.
The last Republican who wrote off a chunk of his own party was Barry Goldwater, and he went down to crushing defeat. Makes one wonder if the Republicans are relying on those electronic voting machines programed with proprietary Republican software that leave no paper trail. The Democrats have acquiesced to Republican election theft. There have been numerous cases where exit polls indicate that voters chose a different candidate than the one chosen by the Republican programmed voting machines.
One would have thought that NPR and its pundits would have found the parallel with Goldwater worth comment, but the suppression of the Ron Paul delegates was already down the memory hole.
One would also have thought that NPR and its pundits would have found Clint Eastwood’s speech a fascinating topic of discussion. Eastwood had a Republican National Committee approved speech, but discarded it. Instead, Eastwood stood beside an empty chair and pretended to be talking to Obama, but it could just as well have been Romney in the chair. By pretending to be talking to Obama, Eastwood made his points without eliciting boos from the Republican audience.
Not many in the Republican audience caught on, but there were some stony faces when Eastwood said “I haven’t cried that hard since I found out that there are 23 million unemployed people in this country.” More stony Republican faces when Eastwood showed his opposition to the Iraq and Afghan wars and asks the chair, “why don’t you just bring them [the troops] home tomorrow morning?” Those who thought he was digging at Obama cheered; those who realized he was criticizing hardline Republican positions were displeased.
But NPR and the US media in general are uncomfortable with such real news as a political party being told off by one of its heroes and a political party sufficiently stupid to repeat Barry Goldwater’s mistake. The establishment might complain. The money might dry up or employees be fired for permitting such a story to be aired. The Democrats lost their independent financing when jobs offshoring destroyed the unions. There are no longer countervailing powers to Wall Street and the corporations, which have been endowed by the Republican US Supreme Court with First Amendment rights to purchase US elections and placed in charge of the US Treasury, the regulatory agencies and the Federal Reserve.
In Tampa the Republicans wrote off the Ron Paul vote, because they are enamored of power and its gratuitous demonstration. Can people so desirous of power and the thrill of its use be trusted to let go of power when they lose the next election? There are enough presidential executive orders and national security orders, even some signed by the Democrat Obama, that any president can assert them and refuse to face election.
Once Rome accepted Julius Caesar’s coup, the Roman Republic was gone. Those who tried to save the Roman Republic by assassinating Caesar failed, because the majority of the legions had gone over to the dictatorship, which promised them more money than the Republic had. Caesar’s name became the title for Rome’s dictators.
In the US, even your friendly local police have gone over to dictatorship. And they are armed with its tools. A friend, a competitive shooter for accuracy, told me that as he left his gun club on August 27, a local sheriff department entered in a military armored vehicle, something one would expect to see on a battlefield, followed by a large sheriff’s department truck full of military equipment. He says that the gun club allows local police to use the club’s facilities so that club members are not stopped and harassed about their firearms as they go to and from the club. He reports that the police will line up 30 abreast, with automatic weapons, not allowed to club members, and fire at one target, with 30 police emptying 30-round magazines at the same target.
He once asked our protectors if they were practicing for some competition. The answer was, “No, we are preparing to control the outcome when there is trouble.”
Control is the operative word. We have seen for a number of years now that the Republican Party is power-addicted. Remember when the Bush administration fired the US Attorneys who refused the order to indict only Democrats? Remember the Republican Party’s transparent frame-up of popular Alabama Democratic governor Don Siegelman? Evidence indicates that the Republican operative Karl Rove took advantage of a Republican federal judge, vulnerable according to news reports to corruption charges, and a compliant Republican US attorney in Alabama to railroad Governor Siegelman. The message to Democrats was: if you get elected in our Southern Territory, we will get you.
But never fear, we have “freedom and democracy.” George W. Bush told us so himself.
The weak, chicken-hearted Obama administration has not commuted Siegelman’s outrageous sentence. The inability of the Democrats to stand up for their own members and their own principles is the best indication we have that Republican tyranny will prevail.
It didn’t take Caesar George W. Bush 10 minutes to wipe out the prison sentence of vice president Dick Cheney’s chief aid for revealing the identity of a CIA operative, a felony under US law. But the Obama Justice (sic) Department supports Karl Rove’s destruction of one of its most popular governors.
It was the German left-wing’s weak opposition to the National Socialists that gave the world Hitler.
The Republican Party has become the Party of Hate. Decades of frustration have made Republicans mean. They object to everything that has happened since the Great Depression in the 1930s to make the US a more just and humane society.
The Republican Party wants power so that it can smash all vestiges of regulation and welfare and all those of whom Republicans disapprove: the poor, the minorities, liberals, the imagined “foreign enemies,” war protestors and others who challenge authority, those American weaklings who have compassion for the unfortunate, the US Constitution, that pinko-liberal-commie document that coddles criminals, illegal aliens, and terrorists, and all dissenters from the policy of enriching the one percent at the expense of the 99 percent.
Above all else, the Republicans want to turn Social Security and Medicare into profit centers for private corporations.
Would the world be surprised if Republicans donned brown shirts? America has declared itself to be “the indispensable nation,” justifying its hegemony over the world. Any country that does not submit to Washington is “a foe.” The neoconservative propaganda that America is the indispensable nation with a right to world hegemony sounds a lot like “Deutschland uber alles.”
A decade ago the Bush regime demonstrated that it could over-ride US statutory law, the US Constitution, and the constitutional separation of powers in order to concentrate unaccountable power in the office of the president.
The Democrats, when they gained control of Congress in the mid-term elections, did nothing about the unprecedented legal and constitutional crimes of George W. Bush. The Democratic Speaker of the US House of Representatives, who could easily have impeached George W. Bush for his obvious crimes against US law and the US Constitution, announced that “impeachment is off the table.” Money was more important to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi than the rule of law.
When a people have no political party that represents them, they are doomed to tyranny.
And to war.
Russia and China are in the way of Washington’s hegemony. Romney, the Republican presidential candidate, has declared Russia to be “our number one geopolitical foe” for opposing Washington’s plans to overthrow by violence the Syrian government. Why is overthrowing the Syrian government so advantageous to Washington that Romney in a fit of pique recklessly brought the United States into direct confrontation with Russia?
Arrogance and hubris lead to wars. Do Americans really want a person as president who is so reckless as to gratuitously declare a large nuclear-armed country to be our number one enemy? The American and Israeli trained Georgian army did not last an hour when the former Soviet republic foolishly, on Washington’s encouragement, provoked the Russian bear.
Meanwhile the Obama regime, concerned with China’s rapid economic rise, has indicated that it thinks China is the number one enemy. The Obama regime has forgot that China, when a primitive, backward country, fought the US to a stalemate in Korea more than a half century ago.
The Obama regime has announced that the US Navy is being repositioned to the Eastern Pacific, that the US regards the South China Sea as America’s national interest, and that new naval, air, and troop bases are being established in the Philippines, South Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere in the region. The purpose of these bases is to block China’s access to energy and raw materials, which is what Washington did to Japan in the 1930s.
Are Americans aware that the hubris and idiocy of their political leaders have now saddled Americans with the burden of two number one enemies, both well equipped with armies and nuclear weapons? Only Iran can be happy about this as it moves Iran off the front burner.
Washington is putting its forward military bases in place, and the propaganda war is being cranked up. The subservient British press was quick to fall in line with Washington. A British reader of my column reports that the Guardian/Observer and New Statesman are at Putin’s throat: “Every day this week we’ve had Russia/Putin hate stories. Headlines such as ‘medieval dictatorship’ as we saw in last Sunday’s Observer [August 26] are common. In this week’s New Statesman we have a front page picture of Putin with the headline ‘Putin’s reign of terror.’ They’ve got Putin with a crown on his head and dressed as a Tsar-like figure. It’s a relentless information battlefield assault on Russia.”
Another line of Washington’s attack on Russia is Washington’s covert backing of Chechnya terrorist groups in the Caucasus and funding of front groups in Russia for protest and terrorist organizations. Allegations of corruption and stolen elections come primarily from Washington-funded groups operating in Russia. See http://www.globalresearch.ca/al-qaeda-blitzkrieg-wests-terror-battalions-eye-russia-next/ and http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2012/08/bombshell-us-neo-cons-state-department.html Through these methods, Washington hopes to destabilize the Russian government and to isolate it internationally in order to remove a barrier to Washington’s hegemony.
Two of Romney’s right-wing neoconservative advisors said that Romney as president would “confront Moscow on its poor record on democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.” The western media will not comment on the irony of these propagandistic allegations against Russia issuing from the US, the country that has destroyed habeas corpus and due process protections of the accused, tortured detainees in violation of the Geneva Conventions and its own statutory law, kidnaps, tortures, and assassinates foreign nationals as well as its own citizens, supports terrorism against Libya, Syria, Iran, and Russia, runs roughshod over international law, never submitting to law itself but using law as a weapon against governments that it has demonized, while it carries on military operations against seven Muslim countries without a declaration of war.
The Nuremberg Trials of Germans after World War II established that naked aggression is a war crime. Naked aggression, renamed by Washington, “preemptive war,” has become the operative principle of US foreign policy.
As Putin remarked, Washington is guilty of the crimes of which it accuses others, but Washington permits all things to “the indispensable nation.”
The Republicans Cross The Rubicon
Does anyone remember when National Public Radio was an independent voice?
During the 1980s NPR was continually on the case of the Reagan administration. NPR certainly had a Democratic slant, and a lot of its reporting about the Reagan administration was one-sided. Yet, NPR was an independent voice, and it sometimes got things correct.
In the 21st century that voice has disappeared, which was the intention of the George W. Bush regime. Bush put a Republican woman in charge who made it clear to NPR producers and show hosts that the federal part of their funding was at risk.
Money often over-rules principle, and when corporations added their really big money NPR collapsed. Today the local stations still pretend to be funded by listeners, but if you have noticed, as I have, there are now a large number of corporate advertisements, disguised in the traditional terms “with support from . . .” If you are not listening to classical music, you are listening to corporate advertisements.
Today the entire “mainstream media” is closed to truth-tellers. The US media is Washington’s propaganda ministry. The US media has only one function–to lie for Washington.
What reminded me of NPR’s surrender was NPR’s August 31 report with its two regular talking voice political pundits discussing the Republican Convention and Romney’s speech. After witnessing the Republicans at their nominating convention at Tampa violate all their own rules and ride roughshod over the Ron Paul delegates, one expected some discussion of the Republican Party’s refusal to allow Ron Paul to be placed in nomination or his delegate account to be announced.
The operative question was obvious: How can the American people trust the Republicans with the awesome power of the executive branch when the Republican Party just finished demonstrating for all to see its Stalinist qualities by crushing the anti-war, anti-police state wing of its party?
The authoritarianism was gratuitous. Romney had a sufficient number of delegates to be nominated. It would have cost Romney nothing to follow the rules and allow Ron Paul to be placed in nomination and his delegate numbers to be reported. Instead, Romney wrote off the liberty contingent of the Republican Party. The Brown shirts demonstrated their power.
The last Republican who wrote off a chunk of his own party was Barry Goldwater, and he went down to crushing defeat. Makes one wonder if the Republicans are relying on those electronic voting machines programed with proprietary Republican software that leave no paper trail. The Democrats have acquiesced to Republican election theft. There have been numerous cases where exit polls indicate that voters chose a different candidate than the one chosen by the Republican programmed voting machines.
One would have thought that NPR and its pundits would have found the parallel with Goldwater worth comment, but the suppression of the Ron Paul delegates was already down the memory hole.
One would also have thought that NPR and its pundits would have found Clint Eastwood’s speech a fascinating topic of discussion. Eastwood had a Republican National Committee approved speech, but discarded it. Instead, Eastwood stood beside an empty chair and pretended to be talking to Obama, but it could just as well have been Romney in the chair. By pretending to be talking to Obama, Eastwood made his points without eliciting boos from the Republican audience.
Not many in the Republican audience caught on, but there were some stony faces when Eastwood said “I haven’t cried that hard since I found out that there are 23 million unemployed people in this country.” More stony Republican faces when Eastwood showed his opposition to the Iraq and Afghan wars and asks the chair, “why don’t you just bring them [the troops] home tomorrow morning?” Those who thought he was digging at Obama cheered; those who realized he was criticizing hardline Republican positions were displeased.
But NPR and the US media in general are uncomfortable with such real news as a political party being told off by one of its heroes and a political party sufficiently stupid to repeat Barry Goldwater’s mistake. The establishment might complain. The money might dry up or employees be fired for permitting such a story to be aired. The Democrats lost their independent financing when jobs offshoring destroyed the unions. There are no longer countervailing powers to Wall Street and the corporations, which have been endowed by the Republican US Supreme Court with First Amendment rights to purchase US elections and placed in charge of the US Treasury, the regulatory agencies and the Federal Reserve.
In Tampa the Republicans wrote off the Ron Paul vote, because they are enamored of power and its gratuitous demonstration. Can people so desirous of power and the thrill of its use be trusted to let go of power when they lose the next election? There are enough presidential executive orders and national security orders, even some signed by the Democrat Obama, that any president can assert them and refuse to face election.
Once Rome accepted Julius Caesar’s coup, the Roman Republic was gone. Those who tried to save the Roman Republic by assassinating Caesar failed, because the majority of the legions had gone over to the dictatorship, which promised them more money than the Republic had. Caesar’s name became the title for Rome’s dictators.
In the US, even your friendly local police have gone over to dictatorship. And they are armed with its tools. A friend, a competitive shooter for accuracy, told me that as he left his gun club on August 27, a local sheriff department entered in a military armored vehicle, something one would expect to see on a battlefield, followed by a large sheriff’s department truck full of military equipment. He says that the gun club allows local police to use the club’s facilities so that club members are not stopped and harassed about their firearms as they go to and from the club. He reports that the police will line up 30 abreast, with automatic weapons, not allowed to club members, and fire at one target, with 30 police emptying 30-round magazines at the same target.
He once asked our protectors if they were practicing for some competition. The answer was, “No, we are preparing to control the outcome when there is trouble.”
Control is the operative word. We have seen for a number of years now that the Republican Party is power-addicted. Remember when the Bush administration fired the US Attorneys who refused the order to indict only Democrats? Remember the Republican Party’s transparent frame-up of popular Alabama Democratic governor Don Siegelman? Evidence indicates that the Republican operative Karl Rove took advantage of a Republican federal judge, vulnerable according to news reports to corruption charges, and a compliant Republican US attorney in Alabama to railroad Governor Siegelman. The message to Democrats was: if you get elected in our Southern Territory, we will get you.
But never fear, we have “freedom and democracy.” George W. Bush told us so himself.
The weak, chicken-hearted Obama administration has not commuted Siegelman’s outrageous sentence. The inability of the Democrats to stand up for their own members and their own principles is the best indication we have that Republican tyranny will prevail.
It didn’t take Caesar George W. Bush 10 minutes to wipe out the prison sentence of vice president Dick Cheney’s chief aid for revealing the identity of a CIA operative, a felony under US law. But the Obama Justice (sic) Department supports Karl Rove’s destruction of one of its most popular governors.
It was the German left-wing’s weak opposition to the National Socialists that gave the world Hitler.
The Republican Party has become the Party of Hate. Decades of frustration have made Republicans mean. They object to everything that has happened since the Great Depression in the 1930s to make the US a more just and humane society.
The Republican Party wants power so that it can smash all vestiges of regulation and welfare and all those of whom Republicans disapprove: the poor, the minorities, liberals, the imagined “foreign enemies,” war protestors and others who challenge authority, those American weaklings who have compassion for the unfortunate, the US Constitution, that pinko-liberal-commie document that coddles criminals, illegal aliens, and terrorists, and all dissenters from the policy of enriching the one percent at the expense of the 99 percent.
Above all else, the Republicans want to turn Social Security and Medicare into profit centers for private corporations.
Would the world be surprised if Republicans donned brown shirts? America has declared itself to be “the indispensable nation,” justifying its hegemony over the world. Any country that does not submit to Washington is “a foe.” The neoconservative propaganda that America is the indispensable nation with a right to world hegemony sounds a lot like “Deutschland uber alles.”
A decade ago the Bush regime demonstrated that it could over-ride US statutory law, the US Constitution, and the constitutional separation of powers in order to concentrate unaccountable power in the office of the president.
The Democrats, when they gained control of Congress in the mid-term elections, did nothing about the unprecedented legal and constitutional crimes of George W. Bush. The Democratic Speaker of the US House of Representatives, who could easily have impeached George W. Bush for his obvious crimes against US law and the US Constitution, announced that “impeachment is off the table.” Money was more important to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi than the rule of law.
When a people have no political party that represents them, they are doomed to tyranny.
And to war.
Russia and China are in the way of Washington’s hegemony. Romney, the Republican presidential candidate, has declared Russia to be “our number one geopolitical foe” for opposing Washington’s plans to overthrow by violence the Syrian government. Why is overthrowing the Syrian government so advantageous to Washington that Romney in a fit of pique recklessly brought the United States into direct confrontation with Russia?
Arrogance and hubris lead to wars. Do Americans really want a person as president who is so reckless as to gratuitously declare a large nuclear-armed country to be our number one enemy? The American and Israeli trained Georgian army did not last an hour when the former Soviet republic foolishly, on Washington’s encouragement, provoked the Russian bear.
Meanwhile the Obama regime, concerned with China’s rapid economic rise, has indicated that it thinks China is the number one enemy. The Obama regime has forgot that China, when a primitive, backward country, fought the US to a stalemate in Korea more than a half century ago.
The Obama regime has announced that the US Navy is being repositioned to the Eastern Pacific, that the US regards the South China Sea as America’s national interest, and that new naval, air, and troop bases are being established in the Philippines, South Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere in the region. The purpose of these bases is to block China’s access to energy and raw materials, which is what Washington did to Japan in the 1930s.
Are Americans aware that the hubris and idiocy of their political leaders have now saddled Americans with the burden of two number one enemies, both well equipped with armies and nuclear weapons? Only Iran can be happy about this as it moves Iran off the front burner.
Washington is putting its forward military bases in place, and the propaganda war is being cranked up. The subservient British press was quick to fall in line with Washington. A British reader of my column reports that the Guardian/Observer and New Statesman are at Putin’s throat: “Every day this week we’ve had Russia/Putin hate stories. Headlines such as ‘medieval dictatorship’ as we saw in last Sunday’s Observer [August 26] are common. In this week’s New Statesman we have a front page picture of Putin with the headline ‘Putin’s reign of terror.’ They’ve got Putin with a crown on his head and dressed as a Tsar-like figure. It’s a relentless information battlefield assault on Russia.”
Another line of Washington’s attack on Russia is Washington’s covert backing of Chechnya terrorist groups in the Caucasus and funding of front groups in Russia for protest and terrorist organizations. Allegations of corruption and stolen elections come primarily from Washington-funded groups operating in Russia. See http://www.globalresearch.ca/al-qaeda-blitzkrieg-wests-terror-battalions-eye-russia-next/ and http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2012/08/bombshell-us-neo-cons-state-department.html Through these methods, Washington hopes to destabilize the Russian government and to isolate it internationally in order to remove a barrier to Washington’s hegemony.
Two of Romney’s right-wing neoconservative advisors said that Romney as president would “confront Moscow on its poor record on democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.” The western media will not comment on the irony of these propagandistic allegations against Russia issuing from the US, the country that has destroyed habeas corpus and due process protections of the accused, tortured detainees in violation of the Geneva Conventions and its own statutory law, kidnaps, tortures, and assassinates foreign nationals as well as its own citizens, supports terrorism against Libya, Syria, Iran, and Russia, runs roughshod over international law, never submitting to law itself but using law as a weapon against governments that it has demonized, while it carries on military operations against seven Muslim countries without a declaration of war.
The Nuremberg Trials of Germans after World War II established that naked aggression is a war crime. Naked aggression, renamed by Washington, “preemptive war,” has become the operative principle of US foreign policy.
As Putin remarked, Washington is guilty of the crimes of which it accuses others, but Washington permits all things to “the indispensable nation.”
Friday, September 7, 2012
SC112-11
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32383.htm
The Message From Both Parties Is That Americans Are Disposable
If political conventions are ranked on a one to ten scale for intelligence, I give the Republican Convention zero and the Democrats one.
How can the United States be a superpower when both political parties are unaware of everything that is happening at home and abroad?
The Republicans are relying for victory on four years of anti-Obama propaganda and their proprietary programed electronic voting machines. For nearly four years Republican operatives have flooded the Internet with portraits of Obama as a non-US citizen, as a Muslim (even while Obama was murdering Muslims in seven countries), and as a Marxist (put in power by the Israel Lobby, Wall Street, and the military/security complex).
Most Republican voters will vote against Obama based on these charges despite the curious fact that no committee in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives held a hearing to determine if Obama is a citizen. If Obama were not a citizen, why would the very aggressive House Republicans not capitalize on it. It would be easy for a Congressional committee to determine if Obama were a citizen. Despite the propaganda, the Republicans in office have shown no interest in the propaganda charges spread by Republican operatives over the Internet.
Either Republicans have no confidence in the charges and do not want to end up proving with Congressional hearings that Obama is a citizen, or the Republicans, having destroyed every other aspect of the US Constitution, reducing it to “a scrap of paper,” feel that making an issue of the last remaining Constitutional provision other than the Second Amendment would be the height of hypocrisy and don’t want to risk opening the constitutional issues that Republicans have run roughshod over.
If the Republicans can destroy habeas corpus, due process, violate both US statutory and international law, ignore the separation of powers, and create a Caesar, why can’t the Democrats run a non-citizen?
Why didn’t the Republican convention raise the issue about the Obama regime’s claim that the executive branch has the power to assassinate US citizens without due process of law? No such power exists in the US Constitution or in US statutory law. This gestapo police state claim exists only as an assertion. Republicans ignored this most important of all issues, because they support it.
Why didn’t the Democrat convention raise the issue that the Republicans took us to wars based on 9/11 assertions without ever conducting an investigation of 9/11? No qualified high-rise architect, structural engineer, physicist, chemist, or national security expert believes a word of the US government’s 9/11 story. Neither do the first responders who were on the scene and witnessed and experienced the event.
Many experts keep their opinions to themselves, because otherwise the federal grants to their universities are over and done with or their architectural and engineering businesses are boycotted by patriotic former clients.
Regardless of these risks, there are 1,700 architects and engineers who have sent a petition to Congress that they do not believe one word of the official explanation and who demand a real investigation.
Why did not either party raise the question of how can the US economy recover when corporations have offshored millions of US middle class jobs, both manufacturing jobs and professional service jobs. For at least a decade, the US economy has been able to create only lowly paid domestic non-tradable (not exportable) service jobs, such as waitresses, bartenders, and hospital orderlies.
Both parties talk total nonsense about jobs. The Republicans say they can create jobs by not taxing the rich. The Democrats say they can create jobs by financing jobs programs. The Republicans say that the Democrats’ jobs programs simply take money from business investments and give it to those who patronize bars and the drug trade. The Democrats say that the low taxes of the Republicans just subsidize yachts, exotic cars, private aircraft, and $800,000 wrist watches for the one percent, most of which is produced abroad.
Neither political party will admit that when US corporations offshore their production for US markets, Americans are removed from the incomes associated with the production of the goods and services that they consume. Offshoring is defended by both moronic political parties as “free trade.” In fact, offshoring is the gift of what was US GDP to China, India, and the other countries to which US corporations locate their production that they sell to Americans. US GDP goes down, the GDP of the countries who make the American goods sold to Americans goes up. The idiot free market economists call the de-industrializing of America “free trade.”
As an intelligent economist--an oxymoron-- would know, destroying consumer incomes by moving their jobs to other countries, leaves consumers without incomes to purchase the imported offshored goods.
Neither American political party recognizes this disconnect. Neither party can afford to recognize it, as both parties are dependent on corporate campaign financing, and offshoring boosts executive bonuses and share prices. A political party that opposes offshoring of US jobs simply does not get financed.
So, the great “superpower,” the “indispensable nation,” the world hegemon, is going into an election, and no one knows what are the stakes.
Why did not either political party ask: if Washington has demonized Iran, why did the 120 countries that comprise the non-aligned movement convene in Iran last week?
Is Washington’s propaganda failing? Can Washington no longer convince the world that the countries that Washington wants to destroy are evil and must be destroyed?
If Washington’s propaganda is failing, the world rule of the hegemonic power will not succeed. As world rule is Washington’s goal in keeping with the neoconservative ideology, then Washington is failing and is not the superpower it pretends to be.
Most credible foreign policy experts, none of which either political party has, believe that Washington has thrown away US “soft power” by its obvious lies and unjustified military attacks on seven Muslim countries, its encirclement of Russia with missile bases, and its encirclement of China with air, naval, and troop bases.
In other words, Washington’s moral force no longer exists. All that exists is financial and military force, and both will fail as they are insufficient.
Neither party asked why the US is at wars with Muslims for Israel. Why should Americans be losing lives and limbs for Israel while going broke and running up enormous war debts for our children and grandchildren? The answer from both parties is to blame the country’s bankruptcy on what Washington does for its own economically disenfranchised citizens. America’s financial problems are all the fault of Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, housing subsidies, Pell grants--any and every thing that gives a leg up to the non-one percent.
In short, the attitude of both parties is: if you are not the one percent, you are disposable.
Both Obamacare and the alternative Republican voucher program dispose of ill Americans who confront potentially terminal diseases. The American people and the ill no longer count; only the budget counts. Letting the elderly die sooner is cheaper. We can therefore afford more wars for hegemony and more tax cuts for the one percent.
Have any peoples in human history ever been less represented by their government and political parties than Americans?
The US government represents Israel and the one to ten percent. Everyone else is disposable.
Regardless of the political party whose lever is pulled in November, every American who votes will be voting for Israel and for their own demise.
The Message From Both Parties Is That Americans Are Disposable
If political conventions are ranked on a one to ten scale for intelligence, I give the Republican Convention zero and the Democrats one.
How can the United States be a superpower when both political parties are unaware of everything that is happening at home and abroad?
The Republicans are relying for victory on four years of anti-Obama propaganda and their proprietary programed electronic voting machines. For nearly four years Republican operatives have flooded the Internet with portraits of Obama as a non-US citizen, as a Muslim (even while Obama was murdering Muslims in seven countries), and as a Marxist (put in power by the Israel Lobby, Wall Street, and the military/security complex).
Most Republican voters will vote against Obama based on these charges despite the curious fact that no committee in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives held a hearing to determine if Obama is a citizen. If Obama were not a citizen, why would the very aggressive House Republicans not capitalize on it. It would be easy for a Congressional committee to determine if Obama were a citizen. Despite the propaganda, the Republicans in office have shown no interest in the propaganda charges spread by Republican operatives over the Internet.
Either Republicans have no confidence in the charges and do not want to end up proving with Congressional hearings that Obama is a citizen, or the Republicans, having destroyed every other aspect of the US Constitution, reducing it to “a scrap of paper,” feel that making an issue of the last remaining Constitutional provision other than the Second Amendment would be the height of hypocrisy and don’t want to risk opening the constitutional issues that Republicans have run roughshod over.
If the Republicans can destroy habeas corpus, due process, violate both US statutory and international law, ignore the separation of powers, and create a Caesar, why can’t the Democrats run a non-citizen?
Why didn’t the Republican convention raise the issue about the Obama regime’s claim that the executive branch has the power to assassinate US citizens without due process of law? No such power exists in the US Constitution or in US statutory law. This gestapo police state claim exists only as an assertion. Republicans ignored this most important of all issues, because they support it.
Why didn’t the Democrat convention raise the issue that the Republicans took us to wars based on 9/11 assertions without ever conducting an investigation of 9/11? No qualified high-rise architect, structural engineer, physicist, chemist, or national security expert believes a word of the US government’s 9/11 story. Neither do the first responders who were on the scene and witnessed and experienced the event.
Many experts keep their opinions to themselves, because otherwise the federal grants to their universities are over and done with or their architectural and engineering businesses are boycotted by patriotic former clients.
Regardless of these risks, there are 1,700 architects and engineers who have sent a petition to Congress that they do not believe one word of the official explanation and who demand a real investigation.
Why did not either party raise the question of how can the US economy recover when corporations have offshored millions of US middle class jobs, both manufacturing jobs and professional service jobs. For at least a decade, the US economy has been able to create only lowly paid domestic non-tradable (not exportable) service jobs, such as waitresses, bartenders, and hospital orderlies.
Both parties talk total nonsense about jobs. The Republicans say they can create jobs by not taxing the rich. The Democrats say they can create jobs by financing jobs programs. The Republicans say that the Democrats’ jobs programs simply take money from business investments and give it to those who patronize bars and the drug trade. The Democrats say that the low taxes of the Republicans just subsidize yachts, exotic cars, private aircraft, and $800,000 wrist watches for the one percent, most of which is produced abroad.
Neither political party will admit that when US corporations offshore their production for US markets, Americans are removed from the incomes associated with the production of the goods and services that they consume. Offshoring is defended by both moronic political parties as “free trade.” In fact, offshoring is the gift of what was US GDP to China, India, and the other countries to which US corporations locate their production that they sell to Americans. US GDP goes down, the GDP of the countries who make the American goods sold to Americans goes up. The idiot free market economists call the de-industrializing of America “free trade.”
As an intelligent economist--an oxymoron-- would know, destroying consumer incomes by moving their jobs to other countries, leaves consumers without incomes to purchase the imported offshored goods.
Neither American political party recognizes this disconnect. Neither party can afford to recognize it, as both parties are dependent on corporate campaign financing, and offshoring boosts executive bonuses and share prices. A political party that opposes offshoring of US jobs simply does not get financed.
So, the great “superpower,” the “indispensable nation,” the world hegemon, is going into an election, and no one knows what are the stakes.
Why did not either political party ask: if Washington has demonized Iran, why did the 120 countries that comprise the non-aligned movement convene in Iran last week?
Is Washington’s propaganda failing? Can Washington no longer convince the world that the countries that Washington wants to destroy are evil and must be destroyed?
If Washington’s propaganda is failing, the world rule of the hegemonic power will not succeed. As world rule is Washington’s goal in keeping with the neoconservative ideology, then Washington is failing and is not the superpower it pretends to be.
Most credible foreign policy experts, none of which either political party has, believe that Washington has thrown away US “soft power” by its obvious lies and unjustified military attacks on seven Muslim countries, its encirclement of Russia with missile bases, and its encirclement of China with air, naval, and troop bases.
In other words, Washington’s moral force no longer exists. All that exists is financial and military force, and both will fail as they are insufficient.
Neither party asked why the US is at wars with Muslims for Israel. Why should Americans be losing lives and limbs for Israel while going broke and running up enormous war debts for our children and grandchildren? The answer from both parties is to blame the country’s bankruptcy on what Washington does for its own economically disenfranchised citizens. America’s financial problems are all the fault of Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, housing subsidies, Pell grants--any and every thing that gives a leg up to the non-one percent.
In short, the attitude of both parties is: if you are not the one percent, you are disposable.
Both Obamacare and the alternative Republican voucher program dispose of ill Americans who confront potentially terminal diseases. The American people and the ill no longer count; only the budget counts. Letting the elderly die sooner is cheaper. We can therefore afford more wars for hegemony and more tax cuts for the one percent.
Have any peoples in human history ever been less represented by their government and political parties than Americans?
The US government represents Israel and the one to ten percent. Everyone else is disposable.
Regardless of the political party whose lever is pulled in November, every American who votes will be voting for Israel and for their own demise.
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
SC112-10
http://kunstler.com/blog/2012/09/join-up.html
Join Up!
Meet the new third party in national politics: Reality.
Reality is the only party with an agenda consistent with what is actually happening in the world. Reality doesn't need to drum up dollar donations from anyone. Reality doesn't have to pander to any interest group or subscribe to any inane belief system. Reality doesn't even need your vote. Reality will be the winner of the 2012 election no matter what the ballot returns appear to say about the bids of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to lead the executive branch of the government.
In the vicious vacuum that national party politics has become, the Republicans and Democrats are already dead. They choked to death on the toxic fumes of their own excreta. They are empty, hollow institutions animated only by the parasites that feed on and squirm over the residue of decomposing tissue within the dissolving membranes of their legitimacy. Think of the fabled Koch brothers as botfly larvae and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association PAC (SIFMA PAC) as a mass of writhing maggots.
These are desperate days in the republic. Between the two empty spectacles of the official party nominating conventions, a terrible nausea rises in the collective gorge of the swindled body politic. The putative contest of ideas is a dumbshow in a hall of mirrors. None of it avails to reduce, mitigate, or even acknowledge, the tensions that may tear this country apart, in particular the web of fraud that shrouds all the operations of money and banking - which is to say: the fate of everything the nation thinks it has invested in itself and its future. In the USA of 2012, anything goes and nothing matters. Reality has a different view of where this all ends and how it will work out.
Compare and contrast the platforms of the Republicans and Democrats with the Reality Party:
The two major parties both propose that the colossal machine of everyday life in America can not only run indefinitely, but continue expanding, and include ever more member people who trade ever more schwag. All that is required, they say, is twiddling the settings of the machine, to get it back to running smoothly as it did in the good old days before the mystifying crash of 2008. They disagree slightly on which dials to twiddle. Reality knows we have entered along-term compressive economic contraction; that there is no way we can persist in the current living arrangement; and that the necessary outcome to avoid immense human suffering can be described as the downscaling and re-localizing of everything we do.
The two major parties regard the rule of law as optional, especially in money matters. Neither party has any will to interfere with a broad array of financial rackets that range from the blatant manipulation of markets, interest rates, and currencies to computerized front-running thievery, traffic in booby-trapped derivatives and counterfeit shorts, pervasive accounting fraud, channel stuffing, irregularities in central bank bullion leasing, flagrant confiscation of private accounts, municipal bond-rigging flimflams, "private equity" looting operations, offshore banking dodges, and untold other scams, rip-offs, and cons that have crippled the basic functions of finance, namely: price discovery, currency as a reliable store of value, and the allocation of surplus wealth for productive purpose. Reality knows that the absence of the rule of law is suicidal. Reality is incapable of pretending that it doesn't matter. Reality provides work-arounds for intractably dishonest political arrangements: civil war and revolution. Both are invoked out of extreme desperation and have unpredictable outcomes. Like Reality itself, they are what they are.
The two major parties pretend that so-called "entitlement" programs can be simultaneously reformed, improved, and abolished - that is, you can have your cake and eat it (with ice cream) at the same time you throw it in the garbage. Reality rejects this incoherent juggling act and proposes that Americans better just make other arrangements for old age, routine medical care, and daily bread. This implies cultural as much as economic transformation and it will occur emergently no matter what empty promises anyone makes. People who want to get food at regular intervals will have to find some way to make themselves useful to others. Medicine will return to the local clinic model and doctors will have to find another motivation for practice besides the acquisition of German automobiles. Old people will have to prevail upon their offspring for care and protection, and they will be expected to play a useful role in the household or community in return if they are able-bodied.
The two major parties both proclaim that the USA is verging on "energy independence." Both parties are lying. Reality knows that the shale oil "game changer" is a mirage. By 2014, the "sweet spots" of the Bakken will deplete faster than new wells can be drilled, and the impairments of banking will constrict the supply of capital investment for that hypothetical future drilling. All the deregulation in the world will not alter the fact that future oil is expensive, exists in places where it is hard to work, and entails unappetizing geopolitical contingencies. Reality favors letting go of automobile-based living and the adoption of walkable communities connected by inland waterways and railroads.
The two major parties believe that the foreign wars are good for business as long as you can minimize the casualties on our side and keep war news off the TV. Reality knows that war as currently practiced by the US Military is a failure if 1.) you can't control the terrain in the foreign theater of operations, and 2.) you can't control the behavior of the foreign population. Notice that we can't do either of those things in Afghanistan or the sundry other places where the US military might be found today. The two major parties also favor the application of war-time "security" operations on the US public inside our borders - i.e. spying, data harvesting, monitoring of cell phone and bank records., et cetera - contrary to what US law and the constitution says. Reality believes that, if the rule of law remains optional, the time will come when American government officials who authorized these activities may be dragged from their command centers and hanged from traffic signals by a citizenry pushed too far.
Mitt Romney and Barack Obama would label Reality a "terrorist movement" if they could and seek to blow it up with predator drones. But Reality is harder to stamp out than truth, which can be shouted down, papered over, fudged, outlawed, etch-a-sketched, exiled, and reviled. Reality is everywhere. It lurks inside and outside the doors of the phony-baloney convention vaudeville shows in its cloak of invisibility, ready to work its hoodoo on the feckless, the fatuous, and the wicked. Reality is America's last best hope. Join the Reality Party.
Join Up!
Meet the new third party in national politics: Reality.
Reality is the only party with an agenda consistent with what is actually happening in the world. Reality doesn't need to drum up dollar donations from anyone. Reality doesn't have to pander to any interest group or subscribe to any inane belief system. Reality doesn't even need your vote. Reality will be the winner of the 2012 election no matter what the ballot returns appear to say about the bids of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to lead the executive branch of the government.
In the vicious vacuum that national party politics has become, the Republicans and Democrats are already dead. They choked to death on the toxic fumes of their own excreta. They are empty, hollow institutions animated only by the parasites that feed on and squirm over the residue of decomposing tissue within the dissolving membranes of their legitimacy. Think of the fabled Koch brothers as botfly larvae and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association PAC (SIFMA PAC) as a mass of writhing maggots.
These are desperate days in the republic. Between the two empty spectacles of the official party nominating conventions, a terrible nausea rises in the collective gorge of the swindled body politic. The putative contest of ideas is a dumbshow in a hall of mirrors. None of it avails to reduce, mitigate, or even acknowledge, the tensions that may tear this country apart, in particular the web of fraud that shrouds all the operations of money and banking - which is to say: the fate of everything the nation thinks it has invested in itself and its future. In the USA of 2012, anything goes and nothing matters. Reality has a different view of where this all ends and how it will work out.
Compare and contrast the platforms of the Republicans and Democrats with the Reality Party:
The two major parties both propose that the colossal machine of everyday life in America can not only run indefinitely, but continue expanding, and include ever more member people who trade ever more schwag. All that is required, they say, is twiddling the settings of the machine, to get it back to running smoothly as it did in the good old days before the mystifying crash of 2008. They disagree slightly on which dials to twiddle. Reality knows we have entered along-term compressive economic contraction; that there is no way we can persist in the current living arrangement; and that the necessary outcome to avoid immense human suffering can be described as the downscaling and re-localizing of everything we do.
The two major parties regard the rule of law as optional, especially in money matters. Neither party has any will to interfere with a broad array of financial rackets that range from the blatant manipulation of markets, interest rates, and currencies to computerized front-running thievery, traffic in booby-trapped derivatives and counterfeit shorts, pervasive accounting fraud, channel stuffing, irregularities in central bank bullion leasing, flagrant confiscation of private accounts, municipal bond-rigging flimflams, "private equity" looting operations, offshore banking dodges, and untold other scams, rip-offs, and cons that have crippled the basic functions of finance, namely: price discovery, currency as a reliable store of value, and the allocation of surplus wealth for productive purpose. Reality knows that the absence of the rule of law is suicidal. Reality is incapable of pretending that it doesn't matter. Reality provides work-arounds for intractably dishonest political arrangements: civil war and revolution. Both are invoked out of extreme desperation and have unpredictable outcomes. Like Reality itself, they are what they are.
The two major parties pretend that so-called "entitlement" programs can be simultaneously reformed, improved, and abolished - that is, you can have your cake and eat it (with ice cream) at the same time you throw it in the garbage. Reality rejects this incoherent juggling act and proposes that Americans better just make other arrangements for old age, routine medical care, and daily bread. This implies cultural as much as economic transformation and it will occur emergently no matter what empty promises anyone makes. People who want to get food at regular intervals will have to find some way to make themselves useful to others. Medicine will return to the local clinic model and doctors will have to find another motivation for practice besides the acquisition of German automobiles. Old people will have to prevail upon their offspring for care and protection, and they will be expected to play a useful role in the household or community in return if they are able-bodied.
The two major parties both proclaim that the USA is verging on "energy independence." Both parties are lying. Reality knows that the shale oil "game changer" is a mirage. By 2014, the "sweet spots" of the Bakken will deplete faster than new wells can be drilled, and the impairments of banking will constrict the supply of capital investment for that hypothetical future drilling. All the deregulation in the world will not alter the fact that future oil is expensive, exists in places where it is hard to work, and entails unappetizing geopolitical contingencies. Reality favors letting go of automobile-based living and the adoption of walkable communities connected by inland waterways and railroads.
The two major parties believe that the foreign wars are good for business as long as you can minimize the casualties on our side and keep war news off the TV. Reality knows that war as currently practiced by the US Military is a failure if 1.) you can't control the terrain in the foreign theater of operations, and 2.) you can't control the behavior of the foreign population. Notice that we can't do either of those things in Afghanistan or the sundry other places where the US military might be found today. The two major parties also favor the application of war-time "security" operations on the US public inside our borders - i.e. spying, data harvesting, monitoring of cell phone and bank records., et cetera - contrary to what US law and the constitution says. Reality believes that, if the rule of law remains optional, the time will come when American government officials who authorized these activities may be dragged from their command centers and hanged from traffic signals by a citizenry pushed too far.
Mitt Romney and Barack Obama would label Reality a "terrorist movement" if they could and seek to blow it up with predator drones. But Reality is harder to stamp out than truth, which can be shouted down, papered over, fudged, outlawed, etch-a-sketched, exiled, and reviled. Reality is everywhere. It lurks inside and outside the doors of the phony-baloney convention vaudeville shows in its cloak of invisibility, ready to work its hoodoo on the feckless, the fatuous, and the wicked. Reality is America's last best hope. Join the Reality Party.
Tuesday, September 4, 2012
SC112-9
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/mckibben_summer_of_weather_extremes_signifies_new_climate_normal/2568/
A Summer of Extremes
Signifies the New Normal
Just as the baseball season now stretches nearly into November, and the National Football League keeps adding games, so the summer season is in danger of extending on both ends, a kind of megalomaniac power grab fueled by the carbon pouring into the atmosphere.
In fact, you could argue that the North American summer actually started two days before the official end of winter this year, when the town of Winner, South Dakota turned in a 94-degree temperature reading. It was part of that wild July-in-March heat wave that stretched across two-thirds of the country, a stretch of weather so bizarre that historian Christopher Burt called it “probably the most extraordinary anomalous heat event” that the nation has ever seen. International Falls, “the icebox of the nation,” broke its heat records 10 straight days, and Chicago nine. In Traverse City, Michigan, on March 21, the record high was 87 degrees. But the low was 62 degrees, which was 4 degrees higher than the previous record high. The technical word for that is, insane.
And it wasn’t just the U.S. — new March records were set everywhere from Perth to Reykjavik, not to mention (this is the gun on the wall in Act One) Summit Station at the top of the Greenland Ice Cap.
Plants, responding in their plantlike ways, blossomed. And so, though April was warmer than normal, the expected frosts killed an awful lot of fruit before it could ever get started. Traverse City, for instance, sits at the heart of the U.S. cherry crop — but not this year. Still, April was a warmish pause, and May warm as well, with the heat gathering. And then right around the solstice in June, all hell broke loose — or at least something of a similar
In Dodge City, Kansas, the temperature reached 111 degrees for the first time since record keeping began in 1874.
temperature.
While Tropical Storm Debby, the earliest fourth-named storm ever, was drenching Florida, fires were breaking out in New Mexico and Colorado that would become the largest and most expensive in those states’ histories. As the Front Range of the Rockies set all-time temperature records, horrible wild fires obliterated homes in Colorado Springs and Fort Collins. (They also chased the world’s premier climate researchers from their offices in Boulder, though that didn’t stop them from explaining to reporters that global warming was “setting the table” for these blazes.)
And then the heat started moving east. They’ve been taking the temperature in Dodge City, Kansas since 1874 (one of the longest continuous readings in the country), and June 27 was the very first time it had reached 111 degrees. And it just kept getting hotter as the high pressure slid east — Tennessee, Georgia, Kentucky, Illinois, the Carolinas, Virginia were all in the triple digits day after day after day. Some “relief” came in the form of a derecho (new occasions teach new words), a “straight line wind” that blew from Indiana to the Atlantic Ocean in a matter of hours, knocking out power for 5 million people, many of whom sweltered for days since the heat simply picked back up where it had left off. Things got so bad in Washington, D.C., where the longest heat wave ever recorded stretched into July, that one TV weatherman simply asked “Do you have a walk-in freezer you can move into for the weekend?”
And almost unnoticed, a young ice researcher named Jason Box published a paper predicting that sometime soon the top of the entire Greenland ice sheet would get warm enough to melt. “We’re near a tipping point,” he said.
As Americans sweltered through the record temperatures, and as the wildfires sent plumes of smoke across the continent, and as utilities tried to patch up the storm-damaged grid, a new specter started stalking the nation. As usual, the money guys noticed first: the price of corn spiked 12 percent in two days right at the end of June, as fear began to build that the heat was damaging crops across the Midwest. And not just the heat — the same high pressure that was letting temperatures soar also blocked storms from watering the country’s midsection. (July, it would turn out, saw the lowest number of tornadoes in history, which was about the only good news.)
Soon the story was relentless drought. Farmers reported that corn plants were going into “defensive mode,” rolling their leaves to prevent water loss. Experts on the evening news were explaining corn sex — how it could simply get too hot and dry for the plants to fertilize. (As one agronomist put it, “we’re in uncharted water, except there is no water.”) Shots of cracked earth and stunted ears of corn were the new commonplace, as the size of the drought matched the worst of the 1980s, and then the 1950s, and then had the meteorologists pulling out their charts to see what the Dust Bowl had looked like. (A lot like this, as it turned out.) July turned out to be the warmest month ever recorded in the United States, any month, any year.
State fairs reported small pigs (“they don’t have their virility in this heat”), and ranchers reported that bulls were, well, uninterested once the heat topped 105. Agribusiness had federal crop insurance to turn to — the big
Much of India’s grain belt has been in drought, while the U.K. endured the worst flooding in modern history.
losers were, as usual, people in poor countries around the world. Because it wasn’t just the U.S. grain harvest that was failing — drought across Russia was tempting the Kremlin to shut down grain exports for the second time in three years, and the Indian monsoon was fitful at best, with large parts of the subcontinent’s grain belt in official drought. Corn and soybeans were fetching 30 percent and then 40 percent more then they had just weeks before. Where it wasn’t drought, it was deluge — the U.K. was enduring the wettest weather in its history, and Beijing the worst flooding in its modern history.
And Greenland? In Greenland in July they set a new all-time temperature record on the top of the glacier. Which is pretty much exactly where you’d least want to set a new record, considering that’s there’s 20 feet of sea level in that block of ice. Just as researcher Jason Box had predicted six weeks before, satellites showed a day when the top of the entire ice sheet turned to liquid.
Meanwhile, the surrounding Arctic Ocean spent all summer melting ahead even of 2007’s record pace — at first it was out front just by a nose, but then as August came on, the melt accelerated, until an area the size of South Carolina was vanishing daily. On August 26, with almost a month left in the melt season, the old record low for summer sea ice extent disappeared beneath the waves.
I could go on and on with accounts of this wildest of summers: “refugee camps” for livestock in arid India; the warmest rainstorm ever recorded in Mecca in early summer (109 degrees), a mark that lasted about six weeks until it was broken in the California desert in August (115 degrees); traffic on the Mississippi grinding to a halt as the water level fell and fell and fell; a record area of the continental U.S. burned by wildfires before the summer was even over. Ad infinitum.
Scientists say this year’s record declines in Arctic sea ice extent and volume are powerful evidence that the giant cap of ice at the top of the planet is on a trajectory to largely disappear in summer within a decade or two, with profound global consequences.
But best to end with the words of our leading climatologist, James Hansen, who in August published a peer-reviewed paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. As he had at every stage of the global warming saga, Hansen laid out what was happening with devastating clarity. There’s always been extreme heat, he showed — but the one-degree increase in global temperature we’ve seen so far has been enough to shift the bell curve sharply to the left. In the old summer, the one most of us grew up in, 0.1 to 0.2 percent of the surface area of the planet was dealing with “extreme heat anomalies” at any given moment. Now it was approaching 10 percent. The math, he said, was clear: It “allows us to infer that the area covered by extreme hot anomalies will continue to increase in coming decades and that even more extreme outliers will occur.”
In other words, this is no freak summer. This is how the earth works now.
A Summer of Extremes
Signifies the New Normal
Just as the baseball season now stretches nearly into November, and the National Football League keeps adding games, so the summer season is in danger of extending on both ends, a kind of megalomaniac power grab fueled by the carbon pouring into the atmosphere.
In fact, you could argue that the North American summer actually started two days before the official end of winter this year, when the town of Winner, South Dakota turned in a 94-degree temperature reading. It was part of that wild July-in-March heat wave that stretched across two-thirds of the country, a stretch of weather so bizarre that historian Christopher Burt called it “probably the most extraordinary anomalous heat event” that the nation has ever seen. International Falls, “the icebox of the nation,” broke its heat records 10 straight days, and Chicago nine. In Traverse City, Michigan, on March 21, the record high was 87 degrees. But the low was 62 degrees, which was 4 degrees higher than the previous record high. The technical word for that is, insane.
And it wasn’t just the U.S. — new March records were set everywhere from Perth to Reykjavik, not to mention (this is the gun on the wall in Act One) Summit Station at the top of the Greenland Ice Cap.
Plants, responding in their plantlike ways, blossomed. And so, though April was warmer than normal, the expected frosts killed an awful lot of fruit before it could ever get started. Traverse City, for instance, sits at the heart of the U.S. cherry crop — but not this year. Still, April was a warmish pause, and May warm as well, with the heat gathering. And then right around the solstice in June, all hell broke loose — or at least something of a similar
In Dodge City, Kansas, the temperature reached 111 degrees for the first time since record keeping began in 1874.
temperature.
While Tropical Storm Debby, the earliest fourth-named storm ever, was drenching Florida, fires were breaking out in New Mexico and Colorado that would become the largest and most expensive in those states’ histories. As the Front Range of the Rockies set all-time temperature records, horrible wild fires obliterated homes in Colorado Springs and Fort Collins. (They also chased the world’s premier climate researchers from their offices in Boulder, though that didn’t stop them from explaining to reporters that global warming was “setting the table” for these blazes.)
And then the heat started moving east. They’ve been taking the temperature in Dodge City, Kansas since 1874 (one of the longest continuous readings in the country), and June 27 was the very first time it had reached 111 degrees. And it just kept getting hotter as the high pressure slid east — Tennessee, Georgia, Kentucky, Illinois, the Carolinas, Virginia were all in the triple digits day after day after day. Some “relief” came in the form of a derecho (new occasions teach new words), a “straight line wind” that blew from Indiana to the Atlantic Ocean in a matter of hours, knocking out power for 5 million people, many of whom sweltered for days since the heat simply picked back up where it had left off. Things got so bad in Washington, D.C., where the longest heat wave ever recorded stretched into July, that one TV weatherman simply asked “Do you have a walk-in freezer you can move into for the weekend?”
And almost unnoticed, a young ice researcher named Jason Box published a paper predicting that sometime soon the top of the entire Greenland ice sheet would get warm enough to melt. “We’re near a tipping point,” he said.
As Americans sweltered through the record temperatures, and as the wildfires sent plumes of smoke across the continent, and as utilities tried to patch up the storm-damaged grid, a new specter started stalking the nation. As usual, the money guys noticed first: the price of corn spiked 12 percent in two days right at the end of June, as fear began to build that the heat was damaging crops across the Midwest. And not just the heat — the same high pressure that was letting temperatures soar also blocked storms from watering the country’s midsection. (July, it would turn out, saw the lowest number of tornadoes in history, which was about the only good news.)
Soon the story was relentless drought. Farmers reported that corn plants were going into “defensive mode,” rolling their leaves to prevent water loss. Experts on the evening news were explaining corn sex — how it could simply get too hot and dry for the plants to fertilize. (As one agronomist put it, “we’re in uncharted water, except there is no water.”) Shots of cracked earth and stunted ears of corn were the new commonplace, as the size of the drought matched the worst of the 1980s, and then the 1950s, and then had the meteorologists pulling out their charts to see what the Dust Bowl had looked like. (A lot like this, as it turned out.) July turned out to be the warmest month ever recorded in the United States, any month, any year.
State fairs reported small pigs (“they don’t have their virility in this heat”), and ranchers reported that bulls were, well, uninterested once the heat topped 105. Agribusiness had federal crop insurance to turn to — the big
Much of India’s grain belt has been in drought, while the U.K. endured the worst flooding in modern history.
losers were, as usual, people in poor countries around the world. Because it wasn’t just the U.S. grain harvest that was failing — drought across Russia was tempting the Kremlin to shut down grain exports for the second time in three years, and the Indian monsoon was fitful at best, with large parts of the subcontinent’s grain belt in official drought. Corn and soybeans were fetching 30 percent and then 40 percent more then they had just weeks before. Where it wasn’t drought, it was deluge — the U.K. was enduring the wettest weather in its history, and Beijing the worst flooding in its modern history.
And Greenland? In Greenland in July they set a new all-time temperature record on the top of the glacier. Which is pretty much exactly where you’d least want to set a new record, considering that’s there’s 20 feet of sea level in that block of ice. Just as researcher Jason Box had predicted six weeks before, satellites showed a day when the top of the entire ice sheet turned to liquid.
Meanwhile, the surrounding Arctic Ocean spent all summer melting ahead even of 2007’s record pace — at first it was out front just by a nose, but then as August came on, the melt accelerated, until an area the size of South Carolina was vanishing daily. On August 26, with almost a month left in the melt season, the old record low for summer sea ice extent disappeared beneath the waves.
I could go on and on with accounts of this wildest of summers: “refugee camps” for livestock in arid India; the warmest rainstorm ever recorded in Mecca in early summer (109 degrees), a mark that lasted about six weeks until it was broken in the California desert in August (115 degrees); traffic on the Mississippi grinding to a halt as the water level fell and fell and fell; a record area of the continental U.S. burned by wildfires before the summer was even over. Ad infinitum.
Scientists say this year’s record declines in Arctic sea ice extent and volume are powerful evidence that the giant cap of ice at the top of the planet is on a trajectory to largely disappear in summer within a decade or two, with profound global consequences.
But best to end with the words of our leading climatologist, James Hansen, who in August published a peer-reviewed paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. As he had at every stage of the global warming saga, Hansen laid out what was happening with devastating clarity. There’s always been extreme heat, he showed — but the one-degree increase in global temperature we’ve seen so far has been enough to shift the bell curve sharply to the left. In the old summer, the one most of us grew up in, 0.1 to 0.2 percent of the surface area of the planet was dealing with “extreme heat anomalies” at any given moment. Now it was approaching 10 percent. The math, he said, was clear: It “allows us to infer that the area covered by extreme hot anomalies will continue to increase in coming decades and that even more extreme outliers will occur.”
In other words, this is no freak summer. This is how the earth works now.
SC112-8
http://carolynbaker.net/2012/09/03/life-is-sacred-by-chris-hedges/
Life Is Sacred
I retreat in the summer to the mountains and coasts of Maine and New Hampshire to sever myself from the intrusion of the industrial world. It is in the woods and along the rugged Atlantic coastline, the surf thundering into the jagged rocks, that I am reminded of our insignificance before the universe and the brevity of human life. The stars, thousands visible in the night canopy above me, mock human pretensions of grandeur. They whisper the biblical reminder that we are dust and to dust we shall return. Love now, they tell us urgently, protect what is sacred, while there is still time. But now I go there also to mourn. I mourn for our future, for the fading majesty of the natural world, for the folly of the human species. The planet is dying. And we will die with it.
The giddy, money-drenched, choreographed carnival in Tampa and the one coming up in Charlotte divert us from the real world—the one steadily collapsing around us. The glitz and propaganda, the ridiculous obsessions imparted by our electronic hallucinations, and the spectacles that pass for political participation mask the deadly ecological assault by the corporate state. The worse it gets the more we retreat into self-delusion. We convince ourselves that global warming does not exist. Or we concede that it exists but insist that we can adapt. Both responses satisfy our mania for eternal optimism and our reckless pursuit of personal comfort. In America, when reality is distasteful we ignore it. But reality will soon descend like the Furies to shatter our complacency and finally our lives. We, as a species, may be doomed. And this is a bitter, bitter fact for a father to digest.
My family and I hike along the desolate coastline of an island in Maine that is accessible only by boat. We stop in the afternoons on remote inlets and look out across the Atlantic Ocean or toward the shoreline and the faint outline of the Camden hills. My youngest son throws pebbles into the surf. My daughter toddles over the rounded beach stones holding her mother’s hand. The gray and white seagulls chatter loudly overhead. The scent of salt is carried by the wind. Life, the life of my family, the life around me, is exposed at once as fragile and sacred. And it is worth fighting to save.
When I was a boy and came to this coast on duck hunting trips with my uncle, fishing communities were vibrant. The fleets caught haddock, cod, herring, hake, halibut, swordfish, pollock and flounder. All these fish have vanished from the area, victims of commercial fishing that saw huge trawlers rip up the seafloor and kill the corals, bryozoans, tubeworms and other species that nurtured new schools of fish. The trawlers left behind barren underwater wastelands of mud and debris. It is like this across the planet. Forests are cut down. Water is contaminated. Air is saturated with carbon emissions. Soil is depleted. Acidity levels in the oceans skyrocket. Atmospheric temperatures soar. And someone, somewhere, makes obscene sums of money from it. Corporations, indifferent to what is sacred, see the death of the planet as another investment opportunity. They are scurrying to mine the exposed polar waters for the last vestiges of oil, gas, minerals and fish. And since the corporations dictate our relationship to the ecosystem on which we depend for life, the chances of our survival look bleaker and bleaker. The final phase of 5,000 years of settled human activity ends with collective insanity.
“All my means are sane,” Captain Ahab says of his suicidal pursuit of Moby-Dick, “my motive and my object mad.”
The ocean floor off the coast of Maine, which this summer has seen a staggering five-degree rise in water temperature, is now covered in crustaceans—lobsters and crabs—that no longer have any predators. The fish stocks have been killed for profit. This crustacean monoculture carries with it the fragility of all monocultures, a fragility that corn farmers in the Midwest also have experienced. Lobsters provide 80 percent of Maine’s seafood income. But how much longer will they last? When a diverse and intricately balanced biosystem is wiped out, what future is there? After you dismantle nature and throw away the parts, what happens when you desperately need to put them back together? And even if you can nurture back to life the fish stocks decimated by the commercial fleets, as valiant organizations such as Penobscot East Resource Center are attempting to do, what happens when sea temperatures and acidity levels continue to rise amid global warming, dooming most life in the oceans?
The warmer water this year caused lobsters to shed six weeks earlier than usual. What happened to the sea further south is now happening off New England. Long Island Sound, two decades ago, had an abundance of lobsters. Then as the water heated up they disappeared. They fell prey to parasite infestations and shell disease, and the survivors migrated to colder water.
All natural resources are being exploited until exhaustion. They will diminish and soon vanish. Droughts are affecting forests in the Northeast as well as the Northwest. The wintertime die-off of pine beetles and other pests—a reduction vital for the health of the forests—is no longer happening as the planet steadily warms. The traditional hardwoods of the northern forests and the great conifer trees are dying. They are being replaced by oak-hickory forests, dooming the biodiversity, eradicating the habitat of a variety of songbirds and other wildlife and ending the maple syrup industry. Maple syrup was produced a few decades ago in Connecticut and Massachusetts. As a child I would hike in snowshoes to the farmers’ sheds deep in the woods containing vats of boiling syrup. We would pour syrup on the blanket of snow outside to make brittle winter candy. But production in the southern New England states has been largely extinguished and shifted to northern Maine and Canada. These are the small natural indicators that something is terribly wrong.
The daily loss of Arctic sea ice this summer is the most severe on record. The amount of sea ice has fallen by 40 percent since satellite tracking began in the late 1970s. The complete disappearance of summer Arctic sea ice may be no more than a decade or two away. And with the disappearance of the summer ice our planet’s weather patterns will become dominated by freakishly powerful and sudden storms and other violent natural disturbances. Droughts will devastate some parts of the Earth, and in others there will be unrelenting rainfall. It will be a world of extremes. Hurricanes. Tornadoes. Floods. Dust bowls. Fire and water.
Our political leaders, Democrat and Republican, are complicit in our demise. Our political system, like that in the declining days of ancient Rome, is one of legalized bribery. Politicians, including Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, serve the demented ends of corporations that will, until the final flicker of life, attempt to profit from our death spiral. Civil disobedience, including the recent decision by Greenpeace activists to chain themselves to a Gazprom supply vessel and obstruct a Russian oil rig, is the only meaningful form of resistance. Voting is useless. But while I support these heroic acts of resistance I increasingly fear they may have little effect. This does not mean we should not resist. Resistance is a moral imperative. We cannot use the word “hope” if we do not fight back. But the corporations will employ deadly force to protect their drive to extract the last bit of profit from life. We can expect only mounting hostility from the corporate state. Its internal and external security apparatus, as the heedless exploitation and its fatal consequences become more apparent, will seek to silence and crush all dissidents. Corporations care nothing for democracy, the rule of law, human rights or the sanctity of life. They are determined to be the last predator standing. And then they too will be snuffed out. Unrestrained hubris always leads to self-immolation.
Life Is Sacred
I retreat in the summer to the mountains and coasts of Maine and New Hampshire to sever myself from the intrusion of the industrial world. It is in the woods and along the rugged Atlantic coastline, the surf thundering into the jagged rocks, that I am reminded of our insignificance before the universe and the brevity of human life. The stars, thousands visible in the night canopy above me, mock human pretensions of grandeur. They whisper the biblical reminder that we are dust and to dust we shall return. Love now, they tell us urgently, protect what is sacred, while there is still time. But now I go there also to mourn. I mourn for our future, for the fading majesty of the natural world, for the folly of the human species. The planet is dying. And we will die with it.
The giddy, money-drenched, choreographed carnival in Tampa and the one coming up in Charlotte divert us from the real world—the one steadily collapsing around us. The glitz and propaganda, the ridiculous obsessions imparted by our electronic hallucinations, and the spectacles that pass for political participation mask the deadly ecological assault by the corporate state. The worse it gets the more we retreat into self-delusion. We convince ourselves that global warming does not exist. Or we concede that it exists but insist that we can adapt. Both responses satisfy our mania for eternal optimism and our reckless pursuit of personal comfort. In America, when reality is distasteful we ignore it. But reality will soon descend like the Furies to shatter our complacency and finally our lives. We, as a species, may be doomed. And this is a bitter, bitter fact for a father to digest.
My family and I hike along the desolate coastline of an island in Maine that is accessible only by boat. We stop in the afternoons on remote inlets and look out across the Atlantic Ocean or toward the shoreline and the faint outline of the Camden hills. My youngest son throws pebbles into the surf. My daughter toddles over the rounded beach stones holding her mother’s hand. The gray and white seagulls chatter loudly overhead. The scent of salt is carried by the wind. Life, the life of my family, the life around me, is exposed at once as fragile and sacred. And it is worth fighting to save.
When I was a boy and came to this coast on duck hunting trips with my uncle, fishing communities were vibrant. The fleets caught haddock, cod, herring, hake, halibut, swordfish, pollock and flounder. All these fish have vanished from the area, victims of commercial fishing that saw huge trawlers rip up the seafloor and kill the corals, bryozoans, tubeworms and other species that nurtured new schools of fish. The trawlers left behind barren underwater wastelands of mud and debris. It is like this across the planet. Forests are cut down. Water is contaminated. Air is saturated with carbon emissions. Soil is depleted. Acidity levels in the oceans skyrocket. Atmospheric temperatures soar. And someone, somewhere, makes obscene sums of money from it. Corporations, indifferent to what is sacred, see the death of the planet as another investment opportunity. They are scurrying to mine the exposed polar waters for the last vestiges of oil, gas, minerals and fish. And since the corporations dictate our relationship to the ecosystem on which we depend for life, the chances of our survival look bleaker and bleaker. The final phase of 5,000 years of settled human activity ends with collective insanity.
“All my means are sane,” Captain Ahab says of his suicidal pursuit of Moby-Dick, “my motive and my object mad.”
The ocean floor off the coast of Maine, which this summer has seen a staggering five-degree rise in water temperature, is now covered in crustaceans—lobsters and crabs—that no longer have any predators. The fish stocks have been killed for profit. This crustacean monoculture carries with it the fragility of all monocultures, a fragility that corn farmers in the Midwest also have experienced. Lobsters provide 80 percent of Maine’s seafood income. But how much longer will they last? When a diverse and intricately balanced biosystem is wiped out, what future is there? After you dismantle nature and throw away the parts, what happens when you desperately need to put them back together? And even if you can nurture back to life the fish stocks decimated by the commercial fleets, as valiant organizations such as Penobscot East Resource Center are attempting to do, what happens when sea temperatures and acidity levels continue to rise amid global warming, dooming most life in the oceans?
The warmer water this year caused lobsters to shed six weeks earlier than usual. What happened to the sea further south is now happening off New England. Long Island Sound, two decades ago, had an abundance of lobsters. Then as the water heated up they disappeared. They fell prey to parasite infestations and shell disease, and the survivors migrated to colder water.
All natural resources are being exploited until exhaustion. They will diminish and soon vanish. Droughts are affecting forests in the Northeast as well as the Northwest. The wintertime die-off of pine beetles and other pests—a reduction vital for the health of the forests—is no longer happening as the planet steadily warms. The traditional hardwoods of the northern forests and the great conifer trees are dying. They are being replaced by oak-hickory forests, dooming the biodiversity, eradicating the habitat of a variety of songbirds and other wildlife and ending the maple syrup industry. Maple syrup was produced a few decades ago in Connecticut and Massachusetts. As a child I would hike in snowshoes to the farmers’ sheds deep in the woods containing vats of boiling syrup. We would pour syrup on the blanket of snow outside to make brittle winter candy. But production in the southern New England states has been largely extinguished and shifted to northern Maine and Canada. These are the small natural indicators that something is terribly wrong.
The daily loss of Arctic sea ice this summer is the most severe on record. The amount of sea ice has fallen by 40 percent since satellite tracking began in the late 1970s. The complete disappearance of summer Arctic sea ice may be no more than a decade or two away. And with the disappearance of the summer ice our planet’s weather patterns will become dominated by freakishly powerful and sudden storms and other violent natural disturbances. Droughts will devastate some parts of the Earth, and in others there will be unrelenting rainfall. It will be a world of extremes. Hurricanes. Tornadoes. Floods. Dust bowls. Fire and water.
Our political leaders, Democrat and Republican, are complicit in our demise. Our political system, like that in the declining days of ancient Rome, is one of legalized bribery. Politicians, including Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, serve the demented ends of corporations that will, until the final flicker of life, attempt to profit from our death spiral. Civil disobedience, including the recent decision by Greenpeace activists to chain themselves to a Gazprom supply vessel and obstruct a Russian oil rig, is the only meaningful form of resistance. Voting is useless. But while I support these heroic acts of resistance I increasingly fear they may have little effect. This does not mean we should not resist. Resistance is a moral imperative. We cannot use the word “hope” if we do not fight back. But the corporations will employ deadly force to protect their drive to extract the last bit of profit from life. We can expect only mounting hostility from the corporate state. Its internal and external security apparatus, as the heedless exploitation and its fatal consequences become more apparent, will seek to silence and crush all dissidents. Corporations care nothing for democracy, the rule of law, human rights or the sanctity of life. They are determined to be the last predator standing. And then they too will be snuffed out. Unrestrained hubris always leads to self-immolation.
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