http://survivalacres.com/blog/time-cry/
A Time To Cry
Malcom Light has published a paper, “The Non-Disclosed Extreme Arctic Methane Threat“. Special thanks to Lonewolf for sending this along.
This is perhaps one of the most sobering reads you will ever lay your hands on in the scientific literature. At least, for the moment.
I suspect, as I have already published, that the days, weeks and months ahead, we will see much more of this sort of thing. The scientific reticence of the past is evaporating away, all too slowly, but nonetheless, it is happening.
Light’s paper contains extreme words of warning to the global community of humanity. In short, a major extinction event of all life on Earth within just 30 – 40 years is now occurring.
Citing numerous scientific research papers and authorities, Light presents a convincing case: humanity is on the verge of a catastrophic event; an Anthropocene extinction caused by abrupt Arctic methane release.
This is far too serious to simply dismiss. The works cited by other scientists are summarized in Light’s paper.
•Carbon dioxide pollution has caused a massive atmospheric temperature rise since at least 1960.
•This has caused a “delayed temperature anomaly of more then 12C” and is causing an increase in the severity of storm systems as evaporation puts more energy into the atmosphere.
•There is uncertainty about when this sudden delayed temperature anomaly will occur; but new calculations show this can happen quite soon – in just 10 – 20 years.
•The IPCC has elected to not raise the alarm about a sudden large methane release, or how this could lead to abrupt climate change.
•The current best estimates of a major methane release in the Arctic with a global mean average temperature increase of 8C leading to the major extinction of all life on Earth is 2050, with a range of 2042 to 2050.
•The mean time of extinction of the Northern Hemisphere was previously fixed between 2024 and 2039 (Light, 2012). The best estimate of final extinction (2050) is 3 years later than the mean estimate for the Southern Hemisphere of 2047.
•A giant pall of methane covers the Northern Hemisphere (Figures 9a,b)) and massive amounts methane have been erupting along the entire length of the Eurasian basin and the Laptev Sea from October to December, 2013 (Figures 10, 11, 12)....
Go to the website link to see relevant graphs missing here
....Light proposes using radio – laser transmissions, operating on a 13.56 mhz frequency to “zap” the atmosphere and destroy as much of the methane as possible. Three ships are proposed to work together.
This won’t stop the loss of the Arctic ice cap however, this is still expected to occur in the new few years, exposing even more dark ocean water to solar energy absorption.
•Methane emissions are now appearing strongly over the East Cost of Greenland, confirming the Gulf Stream (Atlantic) waters have got so hot that they are now destabilizing methane hydrates throughout the entire Arctic Ocean.
•In only two years, East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS) methane emissions rates have risen from 8 million tons to 17 million tons.
•2007 was the main atmospheric tipping for for methane emissions. Atmospheric methane is increasing much faster then carbon dioxide emissions due to destabilized subsea Arctic methane hydrates. “We are now power diving towards extinction”.
•A fast-approaching extinction event is now a reality and can only be averted through swift and immediate action.
•Gigantic zones of circulating warm air (20C anomaly) have been measured, indicating significantly increasing atmospheric methane buildup and feedback (Fig 14).
•Rising Arctic methane emissions are creating a continuous, thickening global warming ‘veil’ encompassing the entire Earth. (Fig 15).
•The delayed carbon dioxide and methane temperature anomaly is 12C to 20C. The stage is therefore set for giant firestorms, catastrophic weather systems, drought and sea level rise caused mostly by the uncontrolled build up of methane in the atmosphere due to the destabilization of the Arctic permafrost and subsea methane hydrates by carbon dioxide induced global warming. This will cause the total global extinction of all life on Earth.
•The area of the Eurasian Basin is similar to that of the East Siberian Shelf where Shakova et al. (1999) indicate that some 50 billion tons of methane could be released at any moment over the next 50 years from destabilization of subsea methane hydrates, producing catastrophic consequences for the global climate system.
•Consequently global warming is probably now also destabilizing methane hydrates in the Eurasian Basin, (Figures 10 and 11) starting the release of an additional 50 billion tons of methane which will further compound the catastrophe represented by the destabilization of methane hydrates on the East Siberian Arctic Shelf (Shakova et al. 1999).
•Essentially we have passed the methane hydrate tipping point and are now accelerating into extinction as the methane hydrate “Clathrate Gun” has begun firing volleys of methane into the Arctic atmosphere (Figure 13).
Words really cannot describe the seriousness of the situation. Humans have triggered catastrophe on a global scale. Light’s proposal to ionize the atmosphere with radio waves is a “Hail Mary” pass to save humanity from extinction.
I don’t know if it will work. What I note is how late the hour has become for all of us. If we have reached the point where we must take this desperate gamble – while the world blithely goes on stupidly ignoring the causes – then it doesn’t bode well at all for our long-term survival.
There are many who now believe that near-term extinction is not only likely, but a growing reality. Light’s paper adds emphasis to this perspective. His proposal to “save ourselves” is an indication that our situation is already very, very desperate.
Rising temperatures will lead to widespread crop losses and famine; gigantic fires and firestorms; severe drought the likes we’ve never before experienced; and the exact opposite – storms of such ferocity and intensity, causing infrastructure damage and flooding, that it becomes EXTREMELY questionable how long we can “endure”.
My best guess – not long. There is a very limited window of “survival” built in to industrialized civilization. Just-in-time delivery systems must work regularly and incessantly, without fail, around the clock to provide everything that everybody needs to survive. Only 3 days worth of food can be found in any supermarket. Increasing crop failures due to disease, drought, and changes in seasonal cycles will immediately be ‘felt’ with higher prices and then shortages and then … nothing at all, as widespread farm failures spiral out of control. Then starvation sets in.
This is what a lot of people completely fail to realize. We will starve long before we overheat. We can temporarily shield ourselves from the scorching sun – but we cannot do this for our crops on a wide-enough scale to make a difference. We cannot grow everything we need indoors, or underground, or in vertical greenhouses either. The simple fact is once we lose industrialized agriculture due to temperature extremes – we’re going to starve to death. By the hundreds of millions – then by the billions.
The planet will continue to heat up and experience extreme temperature anomalies. Light’s paper indicates we could see over 20C temperature increases, which would literally boil off the oceans into space. This is not a joke – this is deadly serious.
It’s also the reason I’m posting very little. The world isn’t listening, does not care and continues to pretend all is well. This is the exact opposite of reality. I find myself in direct opposition to the widespread ignorance and denial that continues to govern the thoughts of other men. The world they live in in is pure fantasy; an illusionary make-believe that humans really aren’t going to screw things up ‘that badly’.
It’s very clear now that we indeed have; and that we’ve very little time left to screw around. This weekend is stupid-bowl time again, where millions of Americans get to be distracted by another gladiator game while Rome burns to the ground.
Good luck with that. If that’s how you want to spend your last days on Earth watching overpaid lumbering humans beat each other up, go for it. Why anybody would be a ‘fan’ of such brutality is beyond my comprehension. Know this – none of the players, promoters, advertisers or corporate sponsors give a flying fuck about you at all. All they want from you is your support through patronage, ticket sales, televisions broadcast and advertising. They’re playing every one of you for a fool, economic units to be exploited for their profit.
Personally, I’ve got a lot better things to do, like take care of my family and do everything I can to try and spend as much real time with them as possible. Wasting my life sitting in front of a flickering screen is simply stupid beyond belief. So instead, here I sit – in front of yet another screen, pounding away, begging, pleading, hoping against hope that these words will reach someone.
I could just cry, at all of this. We all just want to live. To experience the sheer joy of being alive, to breathe deep of the fresh air, to marvel at the skies and the nature that is all around us. To revel in each day with each breath, hearts beating and eyes clear with the anticipation of simply being.
The experience of being alive is taken for granted. But if you have never experienced the risk of death, or come close through injury, sickness or circumstance, then it is too easy to dismiss. You come to take it for granted, until you get old or something happens to you. Then you begin to truly realize how precious it really is, and not just for your own self, but for every living being.
The opportunity to even be alive is actually a rare gift. Not everyone or everything which could actually live gets that chance. Many are robbed of their lives early on. Eaten for food, or simply killed, the life that we who live and take for granted, is denied to billions, trillions of creatures, all of whom very much would enjoy life, however brief, as much as we have.
But we and every other living thing are being robbed, every single one of us, in the cruelest, most inhumane way possible. I cannot imagine a worst outcome. We are self-destructing, with a vicious, rapid abandon, swiftly eradicating all the pretty places, all the pristine, sacred and marvelous natural existence that once covered this Earth and what we’ve called progress. Civilization is our cancer, corrupting everything it touched. And now we’re going to pay, very, very dearly for what we’ve done.
The time to cry is upon us. I cannot believe we’re going to stupidly stand around and let this happen. Let it all just die while watching another stupid-bowl.
This is unbelievable. A tragedy doesn’t even begin to describe it. How do you enunciate the words that we killed an entire planet through sheer arrogance and hubris? All the beauty – gone. All the pretty places – disappeared. Forever. Along with all of us, and every other living thing on the entire planet. Extinction literally means forever.
Because we could NOT get our act together. Instead, we entertained ourselves to death. Our blood-lust was limitless, we perfected the art of murder, assassination and genocide. Anything that stood before us was simply wiped out. We didn’t care how we did it. We didn’t care about any of the consequences either. All we care about was the immediate results and our gratification.
No species has the right to do that.
We obviously don’t care about our children either. The growing alarm from the scientific community absolutely, positively proves this fact. I find this absolutely and completely unacceptable. I’m a father, and I cannot accept that all you other humans don’t give a flying fuck about the future of your own damned children. But that’s exactly what I see happening. Nobody even cares. They simply do not give a shit. everybody is so damn busy being distracted with stupid shit that they’re willing to destroy it all for momentary pleasures.
Goddamn it all, this make me angrier then shit. You’re killing my children, did you know that? Of course I’m angry! I’m not going to stop being angry either. No loving father would.
Definitely a time to cry at the sheer stupidity of the human race. The increasing arrogance and ignorance that permeates our species. What a waste. What an incredible waste. The whole of human history, hundreds of thousands of years, the long, long struggle for life, for joy, for discovery, for existence – to be tossed away, discarded like refuse.
How in God’s name can we do such a thing?
I simply can’t, can’t, can’t believe it. But obviously, I should, because it is clearly happening. So I guess this means that I simply cannot accept it, even if I’m gasping my last breath of air, I refuse to accept this outcome. This should not be allowed to happen if we care even a tiny bit about anything.
It didn’t have to be this way. We could have rebuilt our society; our civilization. We could have created a entirely new culture, whereby we could have truly learned to live and be free while not wasting the planet and screwing everything up. The biosphere was not ‘for sale’ and this should have never been allowed or permitted.
Life has value. The experience of being alive, to embrace the joy, the meaning, the whole range of human experience… this is what life offers us. But we will have no more of this. The events now unfolding are so monumental and so catastrophic that we can now number the days we’ve left.
Count the days. Give it a good, long heart-felt cry if you can. Make your time left count for something. Embrace fully what remains. Weep for what is already gone and what comes our way. At least show your family that you really did care, even it is already too late for all of us.
Hug each other while you still can. Turn off the incessant squawk box and get outside and breathe deep. Now you know what it is to truly be alive. You’re holding it in your arms and in your lungs. This is the joy that life brings. This is what really matters and the only thing that ever really did. To be alive and to experience the sheer joy of it all and all that it contains.
Life – it’s what we are, please, please do not waste any more if it.
Sunday, December 29, 2013
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
SC120-13
http://kulturcritic.wordpress.com/posts/the-heat-is-on/
The Heat Is On!
The forces of command and control that underpin and reinforce the corporate state are more evident daily across the globe and across the nation. Eric Snowden’s retreat to the protective umbrella of Moscow, Julian Assange’s forced confinement in Ecuador’s London Embassy, trumped-up charges of bio-terror in Oklahoma, and now these pathetic-looking students from Arapahoe High School evacuating their building after a non-fatal shooting on campus with only the suspect shooter dead by his own hand. Hands raised high like suspected perps guarded closely by up-armored and well-armed militarized riot police. Well, certainly we understand the need for control, because the citizenry has gone beserk, buckling under the mounting constraints of a system designed to make them stand and deliver or die trying. What happens in a pressure cooker?
As the earth heats up through Anthropogenically-induced climate change, as habitats become less habitable and hospitable, as the oceans continue to acidify and ecological crises mount, as the air becomes thinner and harder to breathe for lack of oxygen, and clean drinking water more expensive to purchase, so too the human inhabitants will begin to chafe, buckle and resist the systems and controls designed to enforce a legalistic-syllogistic ordering so precariously placed onto a deconstructed organic world long ago re-ordered according to the needs of hierarchy.
We are living the apocalyptic moment, my friends. But it has crept up on us slowly and stealthily, covertly and without much fanfare. It has surrounded us, engulfed us, and is swallowing us within itself. It is Leviathan. And the ‘war of all against all’ is now in full battle mode and charging forward.
The guys with the most advanced weaponry and the coolest armor will do whatever it takes, whatever is necessary, to win, to keep the chattel under control as the pressure cooker heats up. That is the way of progress, advancement, of competition, of domination, the capitalist way; the way of this world we have willingly or not created with one another.
Is it possible that this garment of civilization fits just a ‘scoch’ too tight? Perhaps the pilgrim’s progress has just led him down the wrong road; a road to perdition. And it seems as though there is no turning back now. Perhaps we can incentivize a slowdown, but a downright about face is inconceivable at this juncture…. the show must go on! and on, and on!
It is strange, nay! sick, how we have been told that children should not watch violent movies because it just makes them violent… teaching them to accept it as a condition of ‘life.’ Yet we spread violence systematically around the world, recruiting our very youth to dish it out; and further, we provide them with video games of destruction and death-dealing in preparation for the same video-stick controlled death-dealing they deliver on our behalf from their hidden military and CIA consoles via drone and missile deployment.
The more we compete for scarce resources within a finite environment in a zero-sum game of winner take all, the more brutal we become individually and collectively as a people. Just look around you folks, the signs are written even on the subway walls and tenement halls. Progress, expansion, acquisitiveness, accumulation, the society of the Spectacle, these are the conditions underlying and aggravating our entrance into this brave new world of perpetual violence. We have not only left the garden; we’ve torched the whole damn thing and adamantly believe it was our god-given right, our destiny, to do so. And so we limp along with an absurd Darwinian faith that the strongest among us will somehow survive while the Others, the weak ones will perish. But, so much for such evolutionary thinking. The survival of the fittest, my ass! It is not the fittest that survive, but the sickest, those who cunningly hijacked the planet, claimed divine right and manifest destiny over the beasts of field and sea.
Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends
We’re so glad you could attend
Come inside! Come inside!
There behind a glass is a real blade of grass
be careful as you pass.
Move along! Move along!
Come inside, the show’s about to start
guaranteed to blow your head apart
Rest assured you’ll get your money’s worth
The greatest show in Heaven, Hell or Earth.
You’ve got to see the show, it’s a dynamo.
You’ve got to see the show, it’s rock and roll ….
Right before your eyes we pull laughter from the skies
And he laughs until he cries then he dies then he dies
It’s only the beginning, my friends! Only the beginning!
The Heat Is On!
The forces of command and control that underpin and reinforce the corporate state are more evident daily across the globe and across the nation. Eric Snowden’s retreat to the protective umbrella of Moscow, Julian Assange’s forced confinement in Ecuador’s London Embassy, trumped-up charges of bio-terror in Oklahoma, and now these pathetic-looking students from Arapahoe High School evacuating their building after a non-fatal shooting on campus with only the suspect shooter dead by his own hand. Hands raised high like suspected perps guarded closely by up-armored and well-armed militarized riot police. Well, certainly we understand the need for control, because the citizenry has gone beserk, buckling under the mounting constraints of a system designed to make them stand and deliver or die trying. What happens in a pressure cooker?
As the earth heats up through Anthropogenically-induced climate change, as habitats become less habitable and hospitable, as the oceans continue to acidify and ecological crises mount, as the air becomes thinner and harder to breathe for lack of oxygen, and clean drinking water more expensive to purchase, so too the human inhabitants will begin to chafe, buckle and resist the systems and controls designed to enforce a legalistic-syllogistic ordering so precariously placed onto a deconstructed organic world long ago re-ordered according to the needs of hierarchy.
We are living the apocalyptic moment, my friends. But it has crept up on us slowly and stealthily, covertly and without much fanfare. It has surrounded us, engulfed us, and is swallowing us within itself. It is Leviathan. And the ‘war of all against all’ is now in full battle mode and charging forward.
The guys with the most advanced weaponry and the coolest armor will do whatever it takes, whatever is necessary, to win, to keep the chattel under control as the pressure cooker heats up. That is the way of progress, advancement, of competition, of domination, the capitalist way; the way of this world we have willingly or not created with one another.
Is it possible that this garment of civilization fits just a ‘scoch’ too tight? Perhaps the pilgrim’s progress has just led him down the wrong road; a road to perdition. And it seems as though there is no turning back now. Perhaps we can incentivize a slowdown, but a downright about face is inconceivable at this juncture…. the show must go on! and on, and on!
It is strange, nay! sick, how we have been told that children should not watch violent movies because it just makes them violent… teaching them to accept it as a condition of ‘life.’ Yet we spread violence systematically around the world, recruiting our very youth to dish it out; and further, we provide them with video games of destruction and death-dealing in preparation for the same video-stick controlled death-dealing they deliver on our behalf from their hidden military and CIA consoles via drone and missile deployment.
The more we compete for scarce resources within a finite environment in a zero-sum game of winner take all, the more brutal we become individually and collectively as a people. Just look around you folks, the signs are written even on the subway walls and tenement halls. Progress, expansion, acquisitiveness, accumulation, the society of the Spectacle, these are the conditions underlying and aggravating our entrance into this brave new world of perpetual violence. We have not only left the garden; we’ve torched the whole damn thing and adamantly believe it was our god-given right, our destiny, to do so. And so we limp along with an absurd Darwinian faith that the strongest among us will somehow survive while the Others, the weak ones will perish. But, so much for such evolutionary thinking. The survival of the fittest, my ass! It is not the fittest that survive, but the sickest, those who cunningly hijacked the planet, claimed divine right and manifest destiny over the beasts of field and sea.
Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends
We’re so glad you could attend
Come inside! Come inside!
There behind a glass is a real blade of grass
be careful as you pass.
Move along! Move along!
Come inside, the show’s about to start
guaranteed to blow your head apart
Rest assured you’ll get your money’s worth
The greatest show in Heaven, Hell or Earth.
You’ve got to see the show, it’s a dynamo.
You’ve got to see the show, it’s rock and roll ….
Right before your eyes we pull laughter from the skies
And he laughs until he cries then he dies then he dies
It’s only the beginning, my friends! Only the beginning!
Monday, December 16, 2013
SC120-12
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/punking-ourselves-to-death/
Punking Ourselves to Death
The so-called Volker Rule for policing (ha!) banking practices, approved by a huddle of federal regulating agency chiefs last week, is the latest joke that America has played on itself in what is becoming the greatest national self-punking exercise in world history.
First of all (and there’s a lot of all), this rule comes in the form of nearly 1,000 pages of incomprehensible legalese embedded in what was already a morbidly obese Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform (ha!) and Consumer Protection (ha!) Act of 2012 that clocked in at 2000 pages, not counting the immense rafts of mandated interpretations and adumbrations, of which the new Volker Rule is but one. These additions were required because the Dodd-Frank Act itself did not really spell out the particulars of enforcement but rather left it to the regulatory agencies to construct the rules — which they did with “help” of lobbyist-lawyers furnished by the banks themselves. That is, the lobbyists actually wrote the rules for Dodd-Frank and everything in it, which means the banks wrote the rules. Does this strain your credulity? Well, this is the kind of nation we have become: anything goes and nothing matters. There really is no rule of law, just pretense.
The Volker Rule was a lame gesture toward restoring the heart of the Glass-Steagall provisions of the Banking Act of 1933, which were repealed in 1999 in a cynical effort led by Wall Street uber-grifter Robert Rubin and his sidekick Larry Summers, who served serially as US Treasury Secretaries under Bill Clinton. Glass Steagall was passed in Congress following revelations of gross misconduct among bankers leading up to the stock market crash of 1929. The main thrust of Glass Steagall was to mandate the separation of commercial banking (deposit accounts + lending) from investment banking (underwriting and trading in securities). The idea was to prevent banks from using money in customer deposit accounts to gamble in stocks and other speculative instruments. This rule was designed to work hand-in-hand with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), also created in 1933, to backstop the accounts of ordinary citizens in commercial banks. The initial backstop limits were very modest: $2,500 at inception, and didn’t rise above $40,000 until 1980. Investment banks, on the other hand, were not backstopped at all under Glass-Steagall, since their activities were construed as a form of high-toned gambling.
The Glass Steagall Act of 1933 was about 35 pages long, written in language that was precise, clear, and succinct. It worked for 66 years. Banking during those years was a pretty boring business, commercial banking especially. It operated on the 3-6-3 principle — pay 3 percent interest on deposits, lend at 6 percent, and be out on the golf course at 3 p.m. Bankers made a nice living but nothing like the obscene racketeering profits engineered by the looting operations of today. Before 1980, the finance sector of the economy was about 5 percent of all activity. Its purpose was to allocate precious capital to new productive ventures.
As American manufacturing was surrendered to other countries, there were fewer productive ventures for capital to be directed into. What remained was real estate development (a.k.a. suburban sprawl) and finance, which was the enabler of it. Finance ballooned to 40 percent of the US economy and the American landscape got trashed. The computer revolution of the 1990s stimulated tremendous “innovation” in financial activities. Much of that innovation turned out to be new species of swindles and frauds. Now you understand the history of the so-called “housing bubble” and the crash of 2008. The US never recovered from it, and all the rescue attempts in the form of bail-outs, quantitative easing, zero interest rates, have turned into rackets aimed at papering-over this national failure to thrive. It is all ultimately linked to the larger story of industrialism and its relationship with the unique, finite, fossil fuel resources that the human race got cheaply for a few hundred years. That story is now winding down and we refuse to pay attention to the reality of it.
The absurdity of Dodd-Frank and the Volker Rule in the face of that is just another symptom of that tragic inattention. The baroque prolixity of these statutes must have been fun for the lawyers to construct — thousands of pages of incantatory nonsense aimed at confounding any attempt to enforce decent conduct among bankers and their supposed regulators — but it does nothing to really help us move into the next phase of history.
Punking Ourselves to Death
The so-called Volker Rule for policing (ha!) banking practices, approved by a huddle of federal regulating agency chiefs last week, is the latest joke that America has played on itself in what is becoming the greatest national self-punking exercise in world history.
First of all (and there’s a lot of all), this rule comes in the form of nearly 1,000 pages of incomprehensible legalese embedded in what was already a morbidly obese Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform (ha!) and Consumer Protection (ha!) Act of 2012 that clocked in at 2000 pages, not counting the immense rafts of mandated interpretations and adumbrations, of which the new Volker Rule is but one. These additions were required because the Dodd-Frank Act itself did not really spell out the particulars of enforcement but rather left it to the regulatory agencies to construct the rules — which they did with “help” of lobbyist-lawyers furnished by the banks themselves. That is, the lobbyists actually wrote the rules for Dodd-Frank and everything in it, which means the banks wrote the rules. Does this strain your credulity? Well, this is the kind of nation we have become: anything goes and nothing matters. There really is no rule of law, just pretense.
The Volker Rule was a lame gesture toward restoring the heart of the Glass-Steagall provisions of the Banking Act of 1933, which were repealed in 1999 in a cynical effort led by Wall Street uber-grifter Robert Rubin and his sidekick Larry Summers, who served serially as US Treasury Secretaries under Bill Clinton. Glass Steagall was passed in Congress following revelations of gross misconduct among bankers leading up to the stock market crash of 1929. The main thrust of Glass Steagall was to mandate the separation of commercial banking (deposit accounts + lending) from investment banking (underwriting and trading in securities). The idea was to prevent banks from using money in customer deposit accounts to gamble in stocks and other speculative instruments. This rule was designed to work hand-in-hand with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), also created in 1933, to backstop the accounts of ordinary citizens in commercial banks. The initial backstop limits were very modest: $2,500 at inception, and didn’t rise above $40,000 until 1980. Investment banks, on the other hand, were not backstopped at all under Glass-Steagall, since their activities were construed as a form of high-toned gambling.
The Glass Steagall Act of 1933 was about 35 pages long, written in language that was precise, clear, and succinct. It worked for 66 years. Banking during those years was a pretty boring business, commercial banking especially. It operated on the 3-6-3 principle — pay 3 percent interest on deposits, lend at 6 percent, and be out on the golf course at 3 p.m. Bankers made a nice living but nothing like the obscene racketeering profits engineered by the looting operations of today. Before 1980, the finance sector of the economy was about 5 percent of all activity. Its purpose was to allocate precious capital to new productive ventures.
As American manufacturing was surrendered to other countries, there were fewer productive ventures for capital to be directed into. What remained was real estate development (a.k.a. suburban sprawl) and finance, which was the enabler of it. Finance ballooned to 40 percent of the US economy and the American landscape got trashed. The computer revolution of the 1990s stimulated tremendous “innovation” in financial activities. Much of that innovation turned out to be new species of swindles and frauds. Now you understand the history of the so-called “housing bubble” and the crash of 2008. The US never recovered from it, and all the rescue attempts in the form of bail-outs, quantitative easing, zero interest rates, have turned into rackets aimed at papering-over this national failure to thrive. It is all ultimately linked to the larger story of industrialism and its relationship with the unique, finite, fossil fuel resources that the human race got cheaply for a few hundred years. That story is now winding down and we refuse to pay attention to the reality of it.
The absurdity of Dodd-Frank and the Volker Rule in the face of that is just another symptom of that tragic inattention. The baroque prolixity of these statutes must have been fun for the lawyers to construct — thousands of pages of incantatory nonsense aimed at confounding any attempt to enforce decent conduct among bankers and their supposed regulators — but it does nothing to really help us move into the next phase of history.
Monday, December 9, 2013
SC120-11
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/shooting_the_messenger_20131208
Shooting the Messenger
There is a deeply misguided attempt to sacrifice Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, Chelsea Manning and Jeremy Hammond on the altar of the security and surveillance state to justify the leaks made by Edward Snowden. It is argued that Snowden, in exposing the National Security Agency’s global spying operation, judiciously and carefully leaked his information through the media, whereas WikiLeaks, Assange, Manning and Hammond provided troves of raw material to the public with no editing and little redaction and assessment. Thus, Snowden is somehow legitimate while WikiLeaks, Assange, Manning and Hammond are not.
“I have never understood it,” said Michael Ratner, who is the U.S. lawyer for WikiLeaks and Assange and who I spoke with Saturday in New York City. “Why is Snowden looked at by some as the white hat while Manning, Hammond, WikiLeaks and Julian Assange as black hats? One explanation is that much of the mainstream media has tried to pin a dumping charge on the latter group, as if somehow giving the public and journalists open access to the raw documents is irresponsible and not journalism. It sounds to me like the so-called Fourth Estate protecting its jobs and ‘legitimacy.’ There is a need for both. All of us should see the raw documents. We also need journalists to write about them. Raw documents open to the world give journalists in other countries the chance to examine them in their own context and write from their perspectives. We are still seeing many stories based on the WikiLeaks documents. We should not have it any other way. Perhaps another factor may be that Snowden’s revelations concern the surveillance of us. The WikiLeaks/Assange/Manning disclosures tell us more about our war crimes against others. And many Americans do not seem to care about that.”
The charge that the WikiLeaks dump was somehow more damaging to the security and surveillance state because it was unedited, however, is false. Snowden’s revelations to the journalist Glenn Greenwald, which are ongoing, have been far more devastating to the security apparatus than the material provided by Manning. Among the four larger data sets released by Manning—collectively 735,614 documents—only 223 documents were charged against the Army private first class under “reason to believe such information could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation,” as stated in the Espionage Act. Specifically there were 116 diplomatic cables, 102 Army field reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, and five Guantanamo Bay detainee assessment briefs, as the journalist Alexa O’Brien has reported.
As O’Brien points out, many of the individual documents that resulted in charges have not been identified and those that have been are turning out to be very, very benign. For example, the government prosecuted the soldier, then known as Bradley Manning, for three detainee assessment briefs from Guantanamo Bay that were nothing more than profiles of the “Tipton 3,” British citizens who were held for years without trial or charges before finally being released. The information Manning made public was not top secret. There was much in the WikiLeaks release that was already public or unclassified. All the leaked material had been widely circulated to at least half a million military and government officials as well as private contractors. It had no serious impact on U.S. operations at home or abroad. Even then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, in a letter to the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, admitted that a Department of Defense review of the leaked Manning documents had “not revealed any sensitive intelligence source and methods.” But what the leaks did do was expose the deep cynicism of U.S. policy, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the plethora of government lies about what was happening under U.S. occupation. The WikiLeaks material documented several important war crimes that the government had covered up. Manning wrote, correctly, in a letter last October to The Guardian newspaper: ” ... [T]he public cannot decide what actions and policies are or are not justified if they don’t even know the most rudimentary details about them and their effects.”
Manning, whose material was published by WikiLeaks as the Iraq War Logs and the Afghan War Diary, was sentenced to 35 years in prison in his court-martial at Fort Meade, Md., on 22 charges, including espionage, exceeding authorized access, stealing U.S. government property and wanton publication.
The Snowden case differs substantially from Manning’s. The Snowden leaks are top secret. They expose the National Security Agency’s wholesale abuse of privacy across the world and repeated lies told by senior officials, including President Barack Obama, to cover up the massive capture, monitoring and storage of electronic communications of Americans and others. Snowden’s revelations, unlike most of the revelations from Manning and WikiLeaks, detail current, ongoing operations. And these violations are being committed not only against foreigners but against us. Snowden is hated as much as any of the other leakers by the security and surveillance apparatus. He has done, arguably, far more damage than WikiLeaks by exposing the illegality of our surveillance state. It will not assist him if he or his supporters try to parse his way out of his legal problem—some of the charges against him are under the Espionage Act, which was used to charge Manning—by attempting to differentiate himself from other courageous whistle-blowers. The government propaganda machine, working feverishly to discredit Snowden, as well as Greenwald, the reporter who made public the Snowden documents, considers all leakers and their allies to be traitors. It doesn’t make distinctions among them. And we shouldn’t either.
The attempt to paint Snowden as prudent in his disclosures and Manning, Assange, WikiLeaks and Hammond as reckless will not protect Snowden. It myopically lends credibility to the relentless attacks by the government against Manning, Assange, WikiLeaks and others, such as Hammond, who has courageously and at great personal sacrifice opened a window into the nefarious world of the power elite.
If the corporate state were legitimate it would be worthy of more judicious and careful consideration. If the corporate state truly cared about the common good it would have to be treated with more deference. If the war on terror was, in actuality, a war to protect us rather than an excuse to enslave us we could take as serious our leaders’ warnings about loss of secrecy. But our corporate overlords are gangsters in pinstriped suits. They care nothing for the rule of law. They have put into place the most sophisticated system of internal security in human history. They have shredded our most basic constitutional rights and civil liberties. They have turned the three branches of government into wholly owned subsidiaries of the corporate state. They have seized control of the systems of information to saturate the airwaves with lies. They distort the law and government regulations to advance their own pillage and exploitation of us, as well as the ecosystem, which now totters toward global collapse. They have arrogated the right to assassinate U.S. citizens and to rain terror and death from the skies across the planet even though we have not declared war on any state that is being attacked by drone aircraft. There is no internal mechanism left, whether the courts, electoral politics, the executive branch of government or the traditional press, by which these corporate elites can be reigned in or held accountable. The corporate state, in theological terms, is about unchecked exploitation and death. And if the corporate state is not vanquished, and vanquished soon, the human species will not survive.
The most crucial point about the leaks from Assange, Manning, Hammond and Snowden is that they expose egregious crimes by the state and a concerted attempt by the government to mask and lie about its criminal activity. We have a legitimate right to be informed about these crimes. And those who live in foreign countries have a legitimate right to know about the crimes we have carried out and are carrying out against them. But we live in a state where the rule of law no longer functions. We live in a state where those who commit crimes are the persecutors and those who expose them are the persecuted. This is the nature of all totalitarian states. Manning, Assange, Snowden and Hammond, whatever their differences, function as our prophets. They are the voices crying out in the wilderness. And they are the ones the state intends to martyr. Just as the differences between Jeremiah and Amos in the Hebrew Bible did not diminish their courage and their voices, the differences among Snowden, Manning, Assange and Hammond should not be permitted to diminish the vital importance of all their acts.
Shooting the Messenger
There is a deeply misguided attempt to sacrifice Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, Chelsea Manning and Jeremy Hammond on the altar of the security and surveillance state to justify the leaks made by Edward Snowden. It is argued that Snowden, in exposing the National Security Agency’s global spying operation, judiciously and carefully leaked his information through the media, whereas WikiLeaks, Assange, Manning and Hammond provided troves of raw material to the public with no editing and little redaction and assessment. Thus, Snowden is somehow legitimate while WikiLeaks, Assange, Manning and Hammond are not.
“I have never understood it,” said Michael Ratner, who is the U.S. lawyer for WikiLeaks and Assange and who I spoke with Saturday in New York City. “Why is Snowden looked at by some as the white hat while Manning, Hammond, WikiLeaks and Julian Assange as black hats? One explanation is that much of the mainstream media has tried to pin a dumping charge on the latter group, as if somehow giving the public and journalists open access to the raw documents is irresponsible and not journalism. It sounds to me like the so-called Fourth Estate protecting its jobs and ‘legitimacy.’ There is a need for both. All of us should see the raw documents. We also need journalists to write about them. Raw documents open to the world give journalists in other countries the chance to examine them in their own context and write from their perspectives. We are still seeing many stories based on the WikiLeaks documents. We should not have it any other way. Perhaps another factor may be that Snowden’s revelations concern the surveillance of us. The WikiLeaks/Assange/Manning disclosures tell us more about our war crimes against others. And many Americans do not seem to care about that.”
The charge that the WikiLeaks dump was somehow more damaging to the security and surveillance state because it was unedited, however, is false. Snowden’s revelations to the journalist Glenn Greenwald, which are ongoing, have been far more devastating to the security apparatus than the material provided by Manning. Among the four larger data sets released by Manning—collectively 735,614 documents—only 223 documents were charged against the Army private first class under “reason to believe such information could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation,” as stated in the Espionage Act. Specifically there were 116 diplomatic cables, 102 Army field reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, and five Guantanamo Bay detainee assessment briefs, as the journalist Alexa O’Brien has reported.
As O’Brien points out, many of the individual documents that resulted in charges have not been identified and those that have been are turning out to be very, very benign. For example, the government prosecuted the soldier, then known as Bradley Manning, for three detainee assessment briefs from Guantanamo Bay that were nothing more than profiles of the “Tipton 3,” British citizens who were held for years without trial or charges before finally being released. The information Manning made public was not top secret. There was much in the WikiLeaks release that was already public or unclassified. All the leaked material had been widely circulated to at least half a million military and government officials as well as private contractors. It had no serious impact on U.S. operations at home or abroad. Even then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, in a letter to the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, admitted that a Department of Defense review of the leaked Manning documents had “not revealed any sensitive intelligence source and methods.” But what the leaks did do was expose the deep cynicism of U.S. policy, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the plethora of government lies about what was happening under U.S. occupation. The WikiLeaks material documented several important war crimes that the government had covered up. Manning wrote, correctly, in a letter last October to The Guardian newspaper: ” ... [T]he public cannot decide what actions and policies are or are not justified if they don’t even know the most rudimentary details about them and their effects.”
Manning, whose material was published by WikiLeaks as the Iraq War Logs and the Afghan War Diary, was sentenced to 35 years in prison in his court-martial at Fort Meade, Md., on 22 charges, including espionage, exceeding authorized access, stealing U.S. government property and wanton publication.
The Snowden case differs substantially from Manning’s. The Snowden leaks are top secret. They expose the National Security Agency’s wholesale abuse of privacy across the world and repeated lies told by senior officials, including President Barack Obama, to cover up the massive capture, monitoring and storage of electronic communications of Americans and others. Snowden’s revelations, unlike most of the revelations from Manning and WikiLeaks, detail current, ongoing operations. And these violations are being committed not only against foreigners but against us. Snowden is hated as much as any of the other leakers by the security and surveillance apparatus. He has done, arguably, far more damage than WikiLeaks by exposing the illegality of our surveillance state. It will not assist him if he or his supporters try to parse his way out of his legal problem—some of the charges against him are under the Espionage Act, which was used to charge Manning—by attempting to differentiate himself from other courageous whistle-blowers. The government propaganda machine, working feverishly to discredit Snowden, as well as Greenwald, the reporter who made public the Snowden documents, considers all leakers and their allies to be traitors. It doesn’t make distinctions among them. And we shouldn’t either.
The attempt to paint Snowden as prudent in his disclosures and Manning, Assange, WikiLeaks and Hammond as reckless will not protect Snowden. It myopically lends credibility to the relentless attacks by the government against Manning, Assange, WikiLeaks and others, such as Hammond, who has courageously and at great personal sacrifice opened a window into the nefarious world of the power elite.
If the corporate state were legitimate it would be worthy of more judicious and careful consideration. If the corporate state truly cared about the common good it would have to be treated with more deference. If the war on terror was, in actuality, a war to protect us rather than an excuse to enslave us we could take as serious our leaders’ warnings about loss of secrecy. But our corporate overlords are gangsters in pinstriped suits. They care nothing for the rule of law. They have put into place the most sophisticated system of internal security in human history. They have shredded our most basic constitutional rights and civil liberties. They have turned the three branches of government into wholly owned subsidiaries of the corporate state. They have seized control of the systems of information to saturate the airwaves with lies. They distort the law and government regulations to advance their own pillage and exploitation of us, as well as the ecosystem, which now totters toward global collapse. They have arrogated the right to assassinate U.S. citizens and to rain terror and death from the skies across the planet even though we have not declared war on any state that is being attacked by drone aircraft. There is no internal mechanism left, whether the courts, electoral politics, the executive branch of government or the traditional press, by which these corporate elites can be reigned in or held accountable. The corporate state, in theological terms, is about unchecked exploitation and death. And if the corporate state is not vanquished, and vanquished soon, the human species will not survive.
The most crucial point about the leaks from Assange, Manning, Hammond and Snowden is that they expose egregious crimes by the state and a concerted attempt by the government to mask and lie about its criminal activity. We have a legitimate right to be informed about these crimes. And those who live in foreign countries have a legitimate right to know about the crimes we have carried out and are carrying out against them. But we live in a state where the rule of law no longer functions. We live in a state where those who commit crimes are the persecutors and those who expose them are the persecuted. This is the nature of all totalitarian states. Manning, Assange, Snowden and Hammond, whatever their differences, function as our prophets. They are the voices crying out in the wilderness. And they are the ones the state intends to martyr. Just as the differences between Jeremiah and Amos in the Hebrew Bible did not diminish their courage and their voices, the differences among Snowden, Manning, Assange and Hammond should not be permitted to diminish the vital importance of all their acts.
Friday, November 29, 2013
SC120-10
http://kulturcritic.wordpress.com/posts/a-thanksgiving-prayer-give-me-liberty-give-me-security-or-just-gimme-more/
A Thanksgiving Prayer: Give Me Liberty, Give Me Security, Or Just Gim’me More
It is long passed the time for our many-tentacled and exploding Republic of Fear to return Lady Liberty to those squishy French people who loaned us the statue so many moons ago.
You see, I’ve been back here in the United Security State Republic of America (USSR-a) over three weeks now, and while I haven’t seen security forces amassed and marching in the streets of our cities yet, their numbers in the airports seem to have quadrupled since my last visit back in July. And by the looks of it they have settled into their posts quite nicely and rather permanently. I think it will not be much longer before we may see tanks in the streets on routine patrol, especially in those abandoned inner cities and outer-loop suburbs that could not keep up with the shell game called US finance and zero-sum game casino capitalism, as resources become increasingly scarce and distribution systems falter and breakdown.
And do not try to delude yourselves for a minute; this up-armoring of the USSR-a directly correlates to the decreasing availability of global resources to feed the imperial beast, and the concurrent negative impact of climate change. These are the three legs of the stool that has come to define our world and quietly determine our collective representations… our worldview.
We, the people, must be increasingly vigilant about the inter-relationship between these three world-altering facts, for they are inextricably linked. There is no getting around the conclusion that the up-armoring of the State is a direct, unabashed, but unannounced response to the other two legs… It is just that the State tells us it is to protect us from terror. When, in fact, they are getting prepared for the blowback that is surely brewing as a response to the growing awareness of the other two factors. And if you still believe that marshal law is not the law of the land, just look again; and take another real close look at the US marshal service.
But all this security is not my real concern during this thankless holiday season, Black Friday not withstanding. I have myself become accustom to the myriad intrusions when back on the sacred soils. And, while I have made the choice to call it like I see it, there are still many, so many citizen-deniers here. They wish to remain ignorant and recite the official narrative about security and freedom: the freedom to buy, to spend, to gorge themselves until it all goes up in flames. But, they deny that possibility as well. For, most citizens believe we are just going through a small blip in the screen that will soon pass. They say, we will be saved by more open markets, cleaner technology, and the domestication of outer space (DOS). Just as long as we can keep those ‘fucking’ Arabs, Chinese, or Iranians from raining on our parade… after all, this is the New American Century, and they need to respect it.
We still manage our lives and seek to manage the lives of those around the globe by this myth of our own righteousness, of our own special status, just like we did with the American Indian. It is a myth handed down to us as far back as Abraham and his original disciples, and it goes something like this: “We are a special, chosen people! And if THEY are not utilizing resources efficiently and most effectively (according to our standards), then we have a justifiable right, indeed, we have a moral imperative, to take it from them, even if by force.
So, let us not forget on this uniquely ‘whiteman’ American holiday exactly what it is we are commemorating. We hereby commemorate our complicity in theft of lands, destruction of cultures, and decimation of indigenous populations. And we are continuing our legacy with every passing day, whether by military force or through capital market exploitation, or by both working hand-in-glove the good ole’ American way in the USSR-a.
A Thanksgiving Prayer: Give Me Liberty, Give Me Security, Or Just Gim’me More
It is long passed the time for our many-tentacled and exploding Republic of Fear to return Lady Liberty to those squishy French people who loaned us the statue so many moons ago.
You see, I’ve been back here in the United Security State Republic of America (USSR-a) over three weeks now, and while I haven’t seen security forces amassed and marching in the streets of our cities yet, their numbers in the airports seem to have quadrupled since my last visit back in July. And by the looks of it they have settled into their posts quite nicely and rather permanently. I think it will not be much longer before we may see tanks in the streets on routine patrol, especially in those abandoned inner cities and outer-loop suburbs that could not keep up with the shell game called US finance and zero-sum game casino capitalism, as resources become increasingly scarce and distribution systems falter and breakdown.
And do not try to delude yourselves for a minute; this up-armoring of the USSR-a directly correlates to the decreasing availability of global resources to feed the imperial beast, and the concurrent negative impact of climate change. These are the three legs of the stool that has come to define our world and quietly determine our collective representations… our worldview.
We, the people, must be increasingly vigilant about the inter-relationship between these three world-altering facts, for they are inextricably linked. There is no getting around the conclusion that the up-armoring of the State is a direct, unabashed, but unannounced response to the other two legs… It is just that the State tells us it is to protect us from terror. When, in fact, they are getting prepared for the blowback that is surely brewing as a response to the growing awareness of the other two factors. And if you still believe that marshal law is not the law of the land, just look again; and take another real close look at the US marshal service.
But all this security is not my real concern during this thankless holiday season, Black Friday not withstanding. I have myself become accustom to the myriad intrusions when back on the sacred soils. And, while I have made the choice to call it like I see it, there are still many, so many citizen-deniers here. They wish to remain ignorant and recite the official narrative about security and freedom: the freedom to buy, to spend, to gorge themselves until it all goes up in flames. But, they deny that possibility as well. For, most citizens believe we are just going through a small blip in the screen that will soon pass. They say, we will be saved by more open markets, cleaner technology, and the domestication of outer space (DOS). Just as long as we can keep those ‘fucking’ Arabs, Chinese, or Iranians from raining on our parade… after all, this is the New American Century, and they need to respect it.
We still manage our lives and seek to manage the lives of those around the globe by this myth of our own righteousness, of our own special status, just like we did with the American Indian. It is a myth handed down to us as far back as Abraham and his original disciples, and it goes something like this: “We are a special, chosen people! And if THEY are not utilizing resources efficiently and most effectively (according to our standards), then we have a justifiable right, indeed, we have a moral imperative, to take it from them, even if by force.
So, let us not forget on this uniquely ‘whiteman’ American holiday exactly what it is we are commemorating. We hereby commemorate our complicity in theft of lands, destruction of cultures, and decimation of indigenous populations. And we are continuing our legacy with every passing day, whether by military force or through capital market exploitation, or by both working hand-in-glove the good ole’ American way in the USSR-a.
Monday, November 25, 2013
SC120-9
http://carolynbaker.net/2013/11/24/the-sky-is-falling-chicken-little-was-right-all-along-by-don-wilkin/
The Sky Is Falling: Chicken Little Was Right All Along
My obsession with sustainability dates back to 1969, the year I started my doctoral dissertation on human carrying capacity. I became aware that there was real danger of overshooting that capacity and that if we consumed enough of our ecological capital, we risked a population crash and even possible human extinction. In the meantime, I warned, we could expect a long, bumpy slide into poverty as resources were used up. Colleagues accused me of sounding like Chicken Little.
Since then, our exploding consumption, while causing a modest (but temporary) reduction in poverty, has been confused with real prosperity despite global resources having been ravaged and inequality having ballooned to record heights. I was guilty of underestimating our greed and overestimating the time we had left. It wasn’t until this last decade that ecological footprint analysis confirmed we had already overshot Earth’s carrying capacity back in the early ‘70s.
The overshoot is now in its fifth decade and continues to gather momentum as the ultimate human ecological disaster: mass extinction, fisheries depletion, aquifer overpumping, nonrenewable natural resource depletion, soil erosion, glacial melting, ocean acidification, nuclear waste accumulation, more violent storms, rising sea levels, skyrocketing food prices, plummeting energy return on energy invested, growing numbers of permanently displaced environmental refugees, and growing global financial instability. Regrettably, 79 million net new people join the global mayhem each year, yet we don’t seem particularly concerned about it, assuming, I suppose, it will take care of itself. It will. No one will want to be around when that happens, though.
I am well aware, after nearly a half century of trying, that my sense of impending doom is not widely shared. The sun still shines, gas tanks are full of ethanol, fridges are fully stocked with thousand-mile salads and 3000-mile bananas, and we are warm and cozy. Few can even conceive of the possibility of an impending collapse of human civilization, but there are notable exceptions. My angst is shared by those who, like myself, have studied critical resources in detail and have come to similarly dark conclusions about our future possibilities: James Hansen, climate; Lester Brown, food production; Craig Dilworth, technology; Chris Clugston, nonrenewable natural resources; Paul Ehrlich, population; Richard Heinberg, fossil fuels; Julian Cribb, agriculture; Paul Farrell, global capital; and Jared Diamond, eco-social collapse, to name a few. Regrettably, putting lipstick on the pig, their warnings are too often couched in false hope – or as a friend of mine calls it – hopium. “We can avoid the breakdown of human civilization if only we will work together to (fill in the blank,) if we do it quickly enough.” One or two of them have likened our situation to being of the same urgency with which we mobilized for World War II. I’m afraid it is at least that compelling and even that may not prove enough.
In a recent analysis of the world’s nonrenewable natural resources (NNRs), author Chris Clugston found that, as of the economic collapse of 2008, 63 of our 89 most critical NNRs were globally scarce. In a private conversation, he believed that 2008 was the peak of human material well-being and he expected, after plateauing for maybe a decade, it would be sharply downhill from there. In 2012, he stated his belief that global economic/societal collapse was “possible within the next 5 years, probable within 15, and all but certain within 25.” The year 2017 struck an ominous note because that was the deadline the International Energy Agency gave us for substantially reducing carbon emissions or risking runaway global climate change. We’ve made virtually no progress since their warning. Quite the contrary. A highly fracked economy (no pun intended) has more than fully “recovered” from its 2008 meltdown and we’re off to the GDP races once again, setting new records for energy consumption every year. Though economists rejoice, climate scientists and ecologists shudder.
The Global Footprint Network has been refining their methods for several decades now. Their analyses are solid. When they say we are consuming 50% more than Earth’s annual ecological restorative capacity, you can be sure it’s at least that, and such profligacy has to have consequences. Their analysis shows that, since 1970, Earth’s overall restorative capacity has declined by almost half while the human population has more than doubled and overall resource consumption has increased even more. This suggests that, by 2060, it could all be over – no more reserve bio-capacity left anywhere. That’s when human death rates must necessarily skyrocket, if they haven’t already.
Deny-ers insist we’re doing just fine. As technologically gifted as we are and with God on our side wanting us all to be rich, we will work it out with little personal discomfort or sacrifice. The world’s plummeting ecological capacity puts the lie to such Pollyannish delusions. By the time reality sets in, our global ecological accounts will be all but empty and there won’t be anything left to restore.
The physical impossibility of continuing as we presently are for more than another few decades seems lost on the vast majority, despite the clarity and preponderance of all monitored trends now. If only a handful of us and practically no public officials really believe such a meltdown is coming, what can realistically be done to prepare for it? Can we avoid having to reduce our population? Couldn’t we all just live more sustainably? Fat chance. It isn’t reasonable to expect the third-world, now experiencing for the first time the goodies they have watched middle class Americans enjoy for generations, to voluntarily cut back on their newly acquired tastes for personal vehicles, computers, cell phones, meat, milk, and eggs. Nor, in truth, are formerly-middle-class Americans likely to give up too much more than they already have. People don’t commonly volunteer to live in deeper poverty, no matter how worthy the cause, having once experienced the benefits of wealth, privilege, and relative immunity from disease, crime, and violence. Typical half-hearted attempts at sustainable lifestyles in the western world won’t forestall global economic collapse anyway and they could even trigger it. The optimum time for funding alternative energy with a good stiff carbon tax was about twenty years ago.
Despite well-meaning attempts by many of my friends to live more sustainably, I am convinced the only equitable, humane, and effective way to pull our fat out of the fire at this late date, if it could be done at all, would be to immediately and dramatically reduce human fertility worldwide to half of replacement for the next three to four generations, somewhere between “one or none” and “one will do, stop at two.” All other attempts to live more sustainably would be – in fact are being – entirely undone by our huge and growing numbers. Such restraint would have to continue until we got our numbers WAY down, certainly below a billion, and possibly below half a billion depending on how long it took. That level of voluntary reproductive restraint, I don’t need to tell you, would be unprecedented in human history. Economic collapse is a far more probable resolution to our overshoot problem.
Realistically, most of us won’t survive global economic collapse. The vast majority of us have neither the skills nor the resources to survive in a purely local economy. Despite the earnest efforts of groups like Sierra Club and the Transitions network, it is unlikely that anything can now stop the global economy – and human civilization with it – from collapsing around our heads sometime in the next two to four decades. Most will apparently blithely continue to enjoy our final faux prosperity while it lasts. By the time the meltdown gets their full and undivided attention, it will be too late. The only question then will be how many, if any, will survive to start the insanity all over again? God forbid.
I take little comfort in being old enough to be cashing in my chips before the most serious stages of civilization’s decline and collapse. That doesn’t make it any better for my kids and grandkids. I feel we owe them a realistic assessment of the predicament we have left them. My heartfelt warning to them is that children born today are probably being sentenced, should they survive to adulthood, to living through the darkest period of human history. The decision to bring a child into the world today is – or should be – an excruciating one, a choice between small hope for a survivable future with starkly limited opportunities versus a far higher probability of a much more debased, dispiriting one.
I personally would choose not to reproduce now even if I could (my vasectomy has sealed that path.) If this past century represents the pinnacle of human ability to sustainably manage and equitably share our global commons, and if, despite our (apparently benumbed) big brains and digital libraries overflowing with the accumulated wisdom of all human history, we can aspire to no higher economic goals than ever-greater material consumption, constant growth, and perpetual crowding at the expense of all other species on this planet, including other humans, it might be better if human reproduction were put on the evolutionary back burner for a very long while. Only a radical pruning provides any hope for a post-human “founder” population sometime in the future with substantially more reverent attitudes toward Earth and more caring and social responsibility toward one another.
A final point – one can guarantee an argument merely by suggesting the need to stabilize, let alone reduce, human numbers. After worshiping at the altar of perpetual growth for 200 years, that’s pure sacrilege. One can elicit even greater anger by pointing out that what evolutionary success we have had to this point has been a result of inborn proto-socialist tendencies in all human beings. We are a modestly evolved social mammal, and socialist (small “s”) – or mutualistic – or cooperative – communities have been central to whatever evolutionary success we have enjoyed as a species. This fact suggests the best and possibly only way forward from here, at least for an insightful few. To wit:
If we do manage to pull back from the abyss, or if enough of us survive the plunge, it will surely be because small groups of us have formed mutualistic communities for the express purpose of helping one another eke out a largely local living from a depleted planet Earth. We will be painfully aware, by then, that a sustainable lifestyle must involve subordinating our reproductive inclinations to the long-term well-being, not just of our own community, but of the larger ecological community on which our well-being depends. We will certainly understand that a global ecosystem is a sacred trust that demands our respect and, yes, our reverence. Finally, we will need the humility to understand that we need a healthy global ecosystem far more than it needs us, and that we need to invest at least as much of our treasure in husbanding that priceless natural legacy as in pursuing our own material well-being.
The Sky Is Falling: Chicken Little Was Right All Along
My obsession with sustainability dates back to 1969, the year I started my doctoral dissertation on human carrying capacity. I became aware that there was real danger of overshooting that capacity and that if we consumed enough of our ecological capital, we risked a population crash and even possible human extinction. In the meantime, I warned, we could expect a long, bumpy slide into poverty as resources were used up. Colleagues accused me of sounding like Chicken Little.
Since then, our exploding consumption, while causing a modest (but temporary) reduction in poverty, has been confused with real prosperity despite global resources having been ravaged and inequality having ballooned to record heights. I was guilty of underestimating our greed and overestimating the time we had left. It wasn’t until this last decade that ecological footprint analysis confirmed we had already overshot Earth’s carrying capacity back in the early ‘70s.
The overshoot is now in its fifth decade and continues to gather momentum as the ultimate human ecological disaster: mass extinction, fisheries depletion, aquifer overpumping, nonrenewable natural resource depletion, soil erosion, glacial melting, ocean acidification, nuclear waste accumulation, more violent storms, rising sea levels, skyrocketing food prices, plummeting energy return on energy invested, growing numbers of permanently displaced environmental refugees, and growing global financial instability. Regrettably, 79 million net new people join the global mayhem each year, yet we don’t seem particularly concerned about it, assuming, I suppose, it will take care of itself. It will. No one will want to be around when that happens, though.
I am well aware, after nearly a half century of trying, that my sense of impending doom is not widely shared. The sun still shines, gas tanks are full of ethanol, fridges are fully stocked with thousand-mile salads and 3000-mile bananas, and we are warm and cozy. Few can even conceive of the possibility of an impending collapse of human civilization, but there are notable exceptions. My angst is shared by those who, like myself, have studied critical resources in detail and have come to similarly dark conclusions about our future possibilities: James Hansen, climate; Lester Brown, food production; Craig Dilworth, technology; Chris Clugston, nonrenewable natural resources; Paul Ehrlich, population; Richard Heinberg, fossil fuels; Julian Cribb, agriculture; Paul Farrell, global capital; and Jared Diamond, eco-social collapse, to name a few. Regrettably, putting lipstick on the pig, their warnings are too often couched in false hope – or as a friend of mine calls it – hopium. “We can avoid the breakdown of human civilization if only we will work together to (fill in the blank,) if we do it quickly enough.” One or two of them have likened our situation to being of the same urgency with which we mobilized for World War II. I’m afraid it is at least that compelling and even that may not prove enough.
In a recent analysis of the world’s nonrenewable natural resources (NNRs), author Chris Clugston found that, as of the economic collapse of 2008, 63 of our 89 most critical NNRs were globally scarce. In a private conversation, he believed that 2008 was the peak of human material well-being and he expected, after plateauing for maybe a decade, it would be sharply downhill from there. In 2012, he stated his belief that global economic/societal collapse was “possible within the next 5 years, probable within 15, and all but certain within 25.” The year 2017 struck an ominous note because that was the deadline the International Energy Agency gave us for substantially reducing carbon emissions or risking runaway global climate change. We’ve made virtually no progress since their warning. Quite the contrary. A highly fracked economy (no pun intended) has more than fully “recovered” from its 2008 meltdown and we’re off to the GDP races once again, setting new records for energy consumption every year. Though economists rejoice, climate scientists and ecologists shudder.
The Global Footprint Network has been refining their methods for several decades now. Their analyses are solid. When they say we are consuming 50% more than Earth’s annual ecological restorative capacity, you can be sure it’s at least that, and such profligacy has to have consequences. Their analysis shows that, since 1970, Earth’s overall restorative capacity has declined by almost half while the human population has more than doubled and overall resource consumption has increased even more. This suggests that, by 2060, it could all be over – no more reserve bio-capacity left anywhere. That’s when human death rates must necessarily skyrocket, if they haven’t already.
Deny-ers insist we’re doing just fine. As technologically gifted as we are and with God on our side wanting us all to be rich, we will work it out with little personal discomfort or sacrifice. The world’s plummeting ecological capacity puts the lie to such Pollyannish delusions. By the time reality sets in, our global ecological accounts will be all but empty and there won’t be anything left to restore.
The physical impossibility of continuing as we presently are for more than another few decades seems lost on the vast majority, despite the clarity and preponderance of all monitored trends now. If only a handful of us and practically no public officials really believe such a meltdown is coming, what can realistically be done to prepare for it? Can we avoid having to reduce our population? Couldn’t we all just live more sustainably? Fat chance. It isn’t reasonable to expect the third-world, now experiencing for the first time the goodies they have watched middle class Americans enjoy for generations, to voluntarily cut back on their newly acquired tastes for personal vehicles, computers, cell phones, meat, milk, and eggs. Nor, in truth, are formerly-middle-class Americans likely to give up too much more than they already have. People don’t commonly volunteer to live in deeper poverty, no matter how worthy the cause, having once experienced the benefits of wealth, privilege, and relative immunity from disease, crime, and violence. Typical half-hearted attempts at sustainable lifestyles in the western world won’t forestall global economic collapse anyway and they could even trigger it. The optimum time for funding alternative energy with a good stiff carbon tax was about twenty years ago.
Despite well-meaning attempts by many of my friends to live more sustainably, I am convinced the only equitable, humane, and effective way to pull our fat out of the fire at this late date, if it could be done at all, would be to immediately and dramatically reduce human fertility worldwide to half of replacement for the next three to four generations, somewhere between “one or none” and “one will do, stop at two.” All other attempts to live more sustainably would be – in fact are being – entirely undone by our huge and growing numbers. Such restraint would have to continue until we got our numbers WAY down, certainly below a billion, and possibly below half a billion depending on how long it took. That level of voluntary reproductive restraint, I don’t need to tell you, would be unprecedented in human history. Economic collapse is a far more probable resolution to our overshoot problem.
Realistically, most of us won’t survive global economic collapse. The vast majority of us have neither the skills nor the resources to survive in a purely local economy. Despite the earnest efforts of groups like Sierra Club and the Transitions network, it is unlikely that anything can now stop the global economy – and human civilization with it – from collapsing around our heads sometime in the next two to four decades. Most will apparently blithely continue to enjoy our final faux prosperity while it lasts. By the time the meltdown gets their full and undivided attention, it will be too late. The only question then will be how many, if any, will survive to start the insanity all over again? God forbid.
I take little comfort in being old enough to be cashing in my chips before the most serious stages of civilization’s decline and collapse. That doesn’t make it any better for my kids and grandkids. I feel we owe them a realistic assessment of the predicament we have left them. My heartfelt warning to them is that children born today are probably being sentenced, should they survive to adulthood, to living through the darkest period of human history. The decision to bring a child into the world today is – or should be – an excruciating one, a choice between small hope for a survivable future with starkly limited opportunities versus a far higher probability of a much more debased, dispiriting one.
I personally would choose not to reproduce now even if I could (my vasectomy has sealed that path.) If this past century represents the pinnacle of human ability to sustainably manage and equitably share our global commons, and if, despite our (apparently benumbed) big brains and digital libraries overflowing with the accumulated wisdom of all human history, we can aspire to no higher economic goals than ever-greater material consumption, constant growth, and perpetual crowding at the expense of all other species on this planet, including other humans, it might be better if human reproduction were put on the evolutionary back burner for a very long while. Only a radical pruning provides any hope for a post-human “founder” population sometime in the future with substantially more reverent attitudes toward Earth and more caring and social responsibility toward one another.
A final point – one can guarantee an argument merely by suggesting the need to stabilize, let alone reduce, human numbers. After worshiping at the altar of perpetual growth for 200 years, that’s pure sacrilege. One can elicit even greater anger by pointing out that what evolutionary success we have had to this point has been a result of inborn proto-socialist tendencies in all human beings. We are a modestly evolved social mammal, and socialist (small “s”) – or mutualistic – or cooperative – communities have been central to whatever evolutionary success we have enjoyed as a species. This fact suggests the best and possibly only way forward from here, at least for an insightful few. To wit:
If we do manage to pull back from the abyss, or if enough of us survive the plunge, it will surely be because small groups of us have formed mutualistic communities for the express purpose of helping one another eke out a largely local living from a depleted planet Earth. We will be painfully aware, by then, that a sustainable lifestyle must involve subordinating our reproductive inclinations to the long-term well-being, not just of our own community, but of the larger ecological community on which our well-being depends. We will certainly understand that a global ecosystem is a sacred trust that demands our respect and, yes, our reverence. Finally, we will need the humility to understand that we need a healthy global ecosystem far more than it needs us, and that we need to invest at least as much of our treasure in husbanding that priceless natural legacy as in pursuing our own material well-being.
Tuesday, November 19, 2013
SC120-8
http://guymcpherson.com/2013/11/required-awareness-to-handle-climate-change-is-impossible/
Required awareness to handle climate change is impossible
Seems to me that all efforts to create awareness about climate change will be useless. Any effort to make the average individual understand the problem we are facing today, will be useless. “Limits to growth” is a good example of failed efforts. The message has been there for 40 years. The required awareness, at a global scale, a necessity to handle the current situation, is something that seems to me impossible, because we are, as specie, not smart enough to handle our own power.
Based on my experience, average human has, let´s say, a six-dimensional perception of the world. Own body, family, house, job, grocery store (stores in general) and neighborhood. Anything beyond this limits, it is outside of a truly understanding (something happens out there, but nobody dares to find out what and how). Nation is a distant concept understood only because our job and family require some security provided by the concept of nation. Most people do not understand how the nation-system works. Water and electricity are there, always available. Food, at the grocery store. Job, a place to go and do something for what we receive some fiat money. Garbage, is taken by the garbage truck, to who knows where. Dirty water goes somewhere. Smoke vanishes into the air. Outside these limits, nobody knows what is really going on. Nobody knows how things happen.The mechanisms.We are unable to connect the dots. Concurrently, nobody knows their footprint and the effects of it to the rest of this world (present and future). Nobody cares.
But the world, the biosphere, mankind activity included, is a thousand times more complex (ten thousand dimensions?). Average people can handle only six …. We have not been able to model climate. We have not been able to model the behavior of the ocean (I work with it). We have not been able to make a robot like in “I robot” (the movie), that is still Sci-Fi, even though we have been trying for more than 50 years. We have not been even close to make an organic part of a human body. Our so respected medical doctors can just help to repair it. The truth is that the final repair is done by the body itself. We know that gravity exists, but we do not know what it is. And so on. There are so many things we do not know how they work. The reality of the average human is so basic.
Nature is so complex, and its understanding is so far away from our current knowledge. We are full of experts, that know little about things outside their technical knowledge boundaries. The average personal knowledge has an ultra-narrow bandwidth. I am an engineer and can see how ignorant we are even designing simple things like a ship or a car. The ignorance factor is always present, in any design (30-40% margin sometimes). Testing of models, in real conditions, is the only way to assure reliable functioning, by trial and error. The failures of the Challenger and the Columbia are good examples of our lack of knowledge of the complexities of the real world.
Our society has become a heavier load to the biosphere, and what did not matter 100 years ago, now it does matter. Our footprint as society, the result of the aggregated footprint of all individuals (including babies), is something that today matters. It has a visible effect. But is beyond average people (the 99.9% of us), to understand how their own individual actions affect somebody in the other side of the world, or 20-50 years ahead from now.
If we as society have already failed to understand the consequences to people and nature of our personal and family footprint, I see it as impossible to understand on time how we contribute to climate change, oil depletion, and all other calamities ahead, and how they will affect us. And take action on time to avoid disaster. So if we talk about climate change, a very-very complex relation between several factors, is impossible to expect that the process will be fully understood by average people, to make it a personal issue. Until it becomes something understandable because affects one of their six basic dimensions. By that time, it will be too late. The average human does not have the necessary brain capacity (and required knowledge) to handle the power we have as species. Give somebody a chainsaw, and enough fuel and food, and can spent his life chopping down trees without any question about consequences (the boss must know …).
We are just like those young sicarios (hired killers) that we see in Mexico, young boys (16-17 years old) with a gun, that can kill anybody without any remorse. Totally unaware of the consequences of their acts. Too immature. As our society today. Too much power, too immature to handle it.
Then, we have to add the trap of the system itself. We have been raised among the system, we need the system to live. The same system that we can´t handle properly. We do not understand how it really works, but we need it, and we use it (like a car). There are some people who can handle more than six dimensions, and potentially act accordingly. But even knowing, it is almost impossible to live outside the system. We are not prepared, the system does not offer alternatives.
So, total lack of understanding of the system, that implies total lack of understanding of the system footprint (us included), and total lack of understanding of the mechanism of the biosphere and environment. Plus, the fact that we are totally dependent of the system, and do not know another way of living. We have the recipe for disaster.
In conclusion, I see no way to change our current path. We are doomed. We have total failure of the system.
Required awareness to handle climate change is impossible
Seems to me that all efforts to create awareness about climate change will be useless. Any effort to make the average individual understand the problem we are facing today, will be useless. “Limits to growth” is a good example of failed efforts. The message has been there for 40 years. The required awareness, at a global scale, a necessity to handle the current situation, is something that seems to me impossible, because we are, as specie, not smart enough to handle our own power.
Based on my experience, average human has, let´s say, a six-dimensional perception of the world. Own body, family, house, job, grocery store (stores in general) and neighborhood. Anything beyond this limits, it is outside of a truly understanding (something happens out there, but nobody dares to find out what and how). Nation is a distant concept understood only because our job and family require some security provided by the concept of nation. Most people do not understand how the nation-system works. Water and electricity are there, always available. Food, at the grocery store. Job, a place to go and do something for what we receive some fiat money. Garbage, is taken by the garbage truck, to who knows where. Dirty water goes somewhere. Smoke vanishes into the air. Outside these limits, nobody knows what is really going on. Nobody knows how things happen.The mechanisms.We are unable to connect the dots. Concurrently, nobody knows their footprint and the effects of it to the rest of this world (present and future). Nobody cares.
But the world, the biosphere, mankind activity included, is a thousand times more complex (ten thousand dimensions?). Average people can handle only six …. We have not been able to model climate. We have not been able to model the behavior of the ocean (I work with it). We have not been able to make a robot like in “I robot” (the movie), that is still Sci-Fi, even though we have been trying for more than 50 years. We have not been even close to make an organic part of a human body. Our so respected medical doctors can just help to repair it. The truth is that the final repair is done by the body itself. We know that gravity exists, but we do not know what it is. And so on. There are so many things we do not know how they work. The reality of the average human is so basic.
Nature is so complex, and its understanding is so far away from our current knowledge. We are full of experts, that know little about things outside their technical knowledge boundaries. The average personal knowledge has an ultra-narrow bandwidth. I am an engineer and can see how ignorant we are even designing simple things like a ship or a car. The ignorance factor is always present, in any design (30-40% margin sometimes). Testing of models, in real conditions, is the only way to assure reliable functioning, by trial and error. The failures of the Challenger and the Columbia are good examples of our lack of knowledge of the complexities of the real world.
Our society has become a heavier load to the biosphere, and what did not matter 100 years ago, now it does matter. Our footprint as society, the result of the aggregated footprint of all individuals (including babies), is something that today matters. It has a visible effect. But is beyond average people (the 99.9% of us), to understand how their own individual actions affect somebody in the other side of the world, or 20-50 years ahead from now.
If we as society have already failed to understand the consequences to people and nature of our personal and family footprint, I see it as impossible to understand on time how we contribute to climate change, oil depletion, and all other calamities ahead, and how they will affect us. And take action on time to avoid disaster. So if we talk about climate change, a very-very complex relation between several factors, is impossible to expect that the process will be fully understood by average people, to make it a personal issue. Until it becomes something understandable because affects one of their six basic dimensions. By that time, it will be too late. The average human does not have the necessary brain capacity (and required knowledge) to handle the power we have as species. Give somebody a chainsaw, and enough fuel and food, and can spent his life chopping down trees without any question about consequences (the boss must know …).
We are just like those young sicarios (hired killers) that we see in Mexico, young boys (16-17 years old) with a gun, that can kill anybody without any remorse. Totally unaware of the consequences of their acts. Too immature. As our society today. Too much power, too immature to handle it.
Then, we have to add the trap of the system itself. We have been raised among the system, we need the system to live. The same system that we can´t handle properly. We do not understand how it really works, but we need it, and we use it (like a car). There are some people who can handle more than six dimensions, and potentially act accordingly. But even knowing, it is almost impossible to live outside the system. We are not prepared, the system does not offer alternatives.
So, total lack of understanding of the system, that implies total lack of understanding of the system footprint (us included), and total lack of understanding of the mechanism of the biosphere and environment. Plus, the fact that we are totally dependent of the system, and do not know another way of living. We have the recipe for disaster.
In conclusion, I see no way to change our current path. We are doomed. We have total failure of the system.
Monday, November 18, 2013
SC120-7
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/feeding_the_flame_of_revolt_20131117
Feeding the Flame of Revolt
I was in federal court here Friday for the sentencing of Jeremy Hammond to 10 years in prison for hacking into the computers of a private security firm that works on behalf of the government, including the Department of Homeland Security, and corporations such as Dow Chemical. In 2011 Hammond, now 28, released to the website WikiLeaks and Rolling Stone and other publications some 3 million emails from the Texas-based company Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor.
The sentence was one of the longest in U.S. history for hacking and the maximum the judge could impose under a plea agreement in the case. It was wildly disproportionate to the crime—an act of nonviolent civil disobedience that championed the public good by exposing abuses of power by the government and a security firm. But the excessive sentence was the point. The corporate state, rapidly losing credibility and legitimacy, is lashing out like a wounded animal. It is frightened. It feels the heat from a rising flame of revolt. It is especially afraid of those such as Hammond who have the technical skills to break down electronic walls and expose the corrupt workings of power.
“People have a right to know what governments and corporations are doing behind closed doors,” Hammond told me when we met in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan about a week and a half before his sentencing.
I did not hope for justice from the court. Judge Loretta A. Preska is a member of the right-wing Federalist Society. And the hack into Stratfor gave the email address and disclosed the password of an account used for business by Preska’s husband, Thomas Kavaler, a partner at the law firm Cahill Gordon & Reindel. Some emails of the firm’s corporate clients, including Merrill Lynch, also were exposed. The National Lawyers Guild, because the judge’s husband was a victim of the hack, filed a recusal motion that Preska, as chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, was able to deny. Her refusal to recuse herself allowed her to oversee a trial in which she had a huge conflict of interest.
The judge, who herself once was employed at Cahill Gordon & Reindel, fulminated from the bench about Hammond’s “total lack of respect for the law.” She read a laundry list of his arrests for acts of civil disobedience. She damned what she called his “unrepentant recidivism.” She said: “These are not the actions of Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela … or even Daniel Ellsberg; there’s nothing high-minded or public-spirited about causing mayhem”—an odd analogy given that Mandela founded the armed wing of the African National Congress, was considered by South Africa’s apartheid government and the United States government to be a terrorist and was vilified, along with King and Ellsberg, by the U.S. government. She said there was a “desperate need to promote respect for the law” and a “need for adequate public deterrence.” She read from transcripts of Hammond’s conversations in Anonymous chat rooms in which he described the goal of hacking into Stratfor as “destroying the target, hoping for bankruptcy, collapse” and called for “maximum mayhem.” She admonished him for releasing the unlisted phone number of a retired Arizona police official who allegedly received threatening phone calls afterward.
The judge imposed equally harsh measures that will take effect after Hammond’s release from prison. She ordered that he be placed under three years of supervised control, be forbidden to use encryption or aliases online and submit to random searches of his computer equipment, person and home by police and any internal security agency without the necessity of a warrant. The judge said he was legally banned from having any contact with “electronic civil disobedience websites or organizations.” By the time she had finished she had shredded all pretense of the rule of law.
The severe sentence—Hammond will serve more time than the combined sentences of four men who were convicted in Britain for hacking related to the U.S. case—was monumentally stupid for a judge seeking to protect the interest of the ruling class. The judicial lynching of Hammond required her to demonstrate a callous disregard for transparency and our right to privacy. It required her to ignore the disturbing information Hammond released showing that the government and Stratfor attempted to link nonviolent dissident groups, including some within Occupy, to terrorist organizations so peaceful dissidents could be prosecuted as terrorists. It required her to accept the frightening fact that intelligence agencies now work on behalf of corporations as well as the state. She also had to sidestep the fact that Hammond made no financial gain from the leak.
The sentencing converges with the state’s persecution of Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Barrett Brown, along with Glenn Greenwald, Jacob Appelbaum, Laura Poitras and Sarah Harrison, four investigative journalists who are now in self-imposed exile from the United States. And as the numbers of our political prisoners and exiled dissidents mount, there is the unmistakable stench of tyranny.
This draconian sentence, like the draconian sentences of other whistle-blowers, will fan revolt. History bears this out. It will solidify the growing understanding that we must resort, if we want to effect real change, to unconventional tactics to thwart the mounting abuses by the corporate state. There is no hope, this sentencing shows, for redress from the judicial system, elected officials or the executive branch. Why should we respect a court system, or a governmental system, that shows no respect to us? Why should we abide by laws that serve only to protect criminals such as Wall Street thieves while leaving the rest of us exposed to abuse? Why should we continue to have faith in structures of power that deny us our most basic rights and civil liberties? Why should we be impoverished so the profits of big banks, corporations and hedge funds can swell?
No one will save us but ourselves. That was the real message sent out by the sentencing of Jeremy Hammond. And just as Hammond was inspired to act by the arrest of Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning, others will be inspired to act by Hammond and the actions taken against him. And we can thank Judge Preska for that.
Hammond is rooted in the Black Bloc. As he was escorted out of the courtroom on the ninth floor of the federal courthouse at 500 Pearl St. on Friday he shouted to roughly 100 people—including a class of prim West Point cadets in their blue uniforms—gathered there: “Long live Anonymous! Hurrah for anarchy!” In a statement he read in court he thanked “Free Anons, the Anonymous Solidarity Network [and] Anarchist Black Cross” for their roles in the fight against oppression.
Hammond has abandoned faith not only in traditional institutions, such as the courts, but nonviolent mass protest and civil disobedience, a point on which he and I diverge. But his analysis of corporate tyranny is correct. And the longer the state ruthlessly persecutes dissidents, the more the state ensures that those who oppose it will resort to radical responses including violence. “Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable,” John F. Kennedy said. And the corporate state is not only making peaceful change impossible but condemning it as terrorism.
In late October I spent an afternoon with Hammond in New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he had been held for 20 months. He said during our conversation, parts of which his lawyer requested be published only after his sentencing, that he believed that the sole way the people will now have any power is to rise up physically and seize it. My column last week was about that interview, and now I am including previously withheld parts of the conversation.
Hammond defines himself as “an anarchist communist.” He seeks to destroy capitalism and the centralized power of the corporate state. His revolutionary vision is “leaderless collectives based on free association, consensus, mutual aid, self-sufficiency and harmony with the environment.” He embraces the classic tools of revolt, including mass protests, general strikes and boycotts. And he sees hacking and leaking as part of this resistance, tools not only to reveal the truths about these systems of corporate power but to “disrupt/destroy these systems entirely.”
He participated in the Occupy movement in Chicago but found the politics of Occupy too vague and amorphous, a point on which I concur. He said Occupy lacked revolutionary vigor. He told me he did not support what he called the “dogmatic nonviolence doctrine” of many in the Occupy movement, calling it “needlessly limited and divisive.” He rejects the idea of acts of civil disobedience that protesters know will lead to their arrest. “The point,” he said, “is to carry out acts of resistance and not get caught.” He condemns “peace patrols,” units formed within the Occupy movement that sought to prohibit acts of vandalism and violence by other protesters—most often members of the Black Bloc—as “a secondary police force.” And he spurns the calls by many in Occupy not to antagonize the police, calling the police “the boot boys of the 1 percent, paid to protect the rich and powerful.” He said such a tactic of non-confrontation with the police ignored the long history of repression the police have carried out against popular movements, as well as the “profiling and imprisonment of our comrades.”
Because we were unprepared, or perhaps unwilling, to defend our occupations, police and mayors launched coordinated attacks, driving us out of our own parks,” he said of the state’s closure of the Occupy encampments.
“I fully support and have participated in Black Bloc and other forms of militant direct action,” he said. “I do not believe that the ruling powers listen to the people’s peaceful protests. Black Bloc is an effective, fluid and dynamic form of protest. It causes disruption outside of predictable/controllable mass demonstrations through ‘unarrests,’ holding streets, barricades and property destruction. Smashing corporate windows is not violence, especially when compared to the everyday economic violence of sweatshops and ‘free trade.’ Black Bloc seeks to hit them where it hurts, through economic damage. But more than smashing windows they seek to break the spell of ‘law and order’ and the artificial limitations we impose on ourselves.”
I disagree with Hammond over tactics, but in the end this disagreement is moot. It will be the ruling elites who finally determine our response. If the corporate elites employ the full force of the security and surveillance state against us, if corporate totalitarian rule is one of naked, escalating and brutal physical repression, then the violence of the state will spawn a counter-violence. Judge Preska’s decision to judicially lynch Hammond has only added to the fury she and the state are trying to stamp out. An astute ruling class, one aware of the rage rippling across the American landscape, would have released Hammond on Friday and begun to address the crimes he exposed. But our ruling class, while adept at theft, looting, propaganda and repression, is blind to the growing discontent caused by the power imbalance and economic inequality that plague ordinary Americans at a time when half of the country lives in poverty or “near poverty.”
“The acts of civil disobedience and direct action that I am being sentenced for today are in line with the principles of community and equality that have guided my life,” Hammond told the courtroom. “I hacked into dozens of high-profile corporations and government institutions, understanding very clearly that what I was doing was against the law, and that my actions could land me back in federal prison. But I felt that I had an obligation to use my skills to expose and confront injustice—and to bring the truth to light.”
“Could I have achieved the same goals through legal means?” he said. “I have tried everything from voting petitions to peaceful protest and have found that those in power do not want the truth to be exposed. When we speak truth to power we are ignored at best and brutally suppressed at worst. We are confronting a power structure that does not respect its own system of checks and balances, never mind the rights of its own citizens or the international community.”
“My first memories of American politics was when Bush stole the election in 2000,” he told me at a metal table as we met at the prison in a small room reserved for attorney visits, “and then how Bush used the wave of nationalism after 9/11 to launch unprovoked pre-emptive wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. In high school I was involved in publishing ‘underground’ newsletters criticizing the Patriot Act, the wars, and other Bush-era policies. I attended many anti-war protests in the city [Chicago] and was introduced to other local struggles and the larger anti-corporate globalization movement. I began identifying as an anarchist, started to travel around the country to various mobilizations and conferences, and began getting arrested for various acts.”
He said that his experience of street protest, especially against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, was seminal, for he saw that the state had little interest in heeding the voices of protesters and others in the public. “Instead, we were labeled as traitors, beaten and arrested.”
“I targeted law enforcement systems because of the racism and inequality with which the criminal law is enforced,” he admitted in court. “I targeted the manufacturers and distributors of military and police equipment who profit from weaponry used to advance U.S. political and economic interests abroad and to repress people at home. I targeted information security firms because they work in secret to protect government and corporate interests at the expense of individual rights, undermining and discrediting activists, journalists and other truth seekers, and spreading disinformation.”
An FBI informant, Hector Xavier Monsegur, posing as an Anonymous member and using the online name “Sabu,” prodded Hammond to break into Stratfor and informed him of technical vulnerabilities in websites of the company.
“Why the FBI would introduce us to the hacker who found the initial vulnerability and allow this hack to continue remains a mystery,” Hammond said as he faced the judge.
“As a result of the Stratfor hack, some of the dangers of the unregulated private intelligence industry are now known,” he said. “It has been revealed through WikiLeaks and other journalists around the world that Stratfor maintained a worldwide network of informants that they used to engage in intrusive and possibly illegal surveillance activities on behalf of large multinational corporations.”
At Sabu’s urging, Hammond broke into other websites, too. Hammond, at Sabu’s request, provided information to hackers enabling them to break into and deface official foreign government websites, including some of Turkey, Iran and Brazil. The names of these three countries are technically under a protective court order but have been reported widely in the press.
“I broke into numerous sites and handed over passwords and backdoors that enabled Sabu—and by extension his FBI handlers—to control these targets,” Hammond said.
“I don’t know how other information I provided to him may have been used, but I think the government’s collection and use of this data needs to be investigated,” he went on. “The government celebrates my conviction and imprisonment, hoping that it will close the door on the full story. I took responsibility for my actions, by pleading guilty, but when will the government be made to answer for its crimes?”
“The hypocrisy of ‘law and order’ and the injustices caused by capitalism cannot be cured by institutional reform but through civil disobedience and direct action,” Hammond told the court. “Yes, I broke the law, but I believe that sometimes laws must be broken in order to make room for change.”
Feeding the Flame of Revolt
I was in federal court here Friday for the sentencing of Jeremy Hammond to 10 years in prison for hacking into the computers of a private security firm that works on behalf of the government, including the Department of Homeland Security, and corporations such as Dow Chemical. In 2011 Hammond, now 28, released to the website WikiLeaks and Rolling Stone and other publications some 3 million emails from the Texas-based company Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor.
The sentence was one of the longest in U.S. history for hacking and the maximum the judge could impose under a plea agreement in the case. It was wildly disproportionate to the crime—an act of nonviolent civil disobedience that championed the public good by exposing abuses of power by the government and a security firm. But the excessive sentence was the point. The corporate state, rapidly losing credibility and legitimacy, is lashing out like a wounded animal. It is frightened. It feels the heat from a rising flame of revolt. It is especially afraid of those such as Hammond who have the technical skills to break down electronic walls and expose the corrupt workings of power.
“People have a right to know what governments and corporations are doing behind closed doors,” Hammond told me when we met in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan about a week and a half before his sentencing.
I did not hope for justice from the court. Judge Loretta A. Preska is a member of the right-wing Federalist Society. And the hack into Stratfor gave the email address and disclosed the password of an account used for business by Preska’s husband, Thomas Kavaler, a partner at the law firm Cahill Gordon & Reindel. Some emails of the firm’s corporate clients, including Merrill Lynch, also were exposed. The National Lawyers Guild, because the judge’s husband was a victim of the hack, filed a recusal motion that Preska, as chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, was able to deny. Her refusal to recuse herself allowed her to oversee a trial in which she had a huge conflict of interest.
The judge, who herself once was employed at Cahill Gordon & Reindel, fulminated from the bench about Hammond’s “total lack of respect for the law.” She read a laundry list of his arrests for acts of civil disobedience. She damned what she called his “unrepentant recidivism.” She said: “These are not the actions of Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela … or even Daniel Ellsberg; there’s nothing high-minded or public-spirited about causing mayhem”—an odd analogy given that Mandela founded the armed wing of the African National Congress, was considered by South Africa’s apartheid government and the United States government to be a terrorist and was vilified, along with King and Ellsberg, by the U.S. government. She said there was a “desperate need to promote respect for the law” and a “need for adequate public deterrence.” She read from transcripts of Hammond’s conversations in Anonymous chat rooms in which he described the goal of hacking into Stratfor as “destroying the target, hoping for bankruptcy, collapse” and called for “maximum mayhem.” She admonished him for releasing the unlisted phone number of a retired Arizona police official who allegedly received threatening phone calls afterward.
The judge imposed equally harsh measures that will take effect after Hammond’s release from prison. She ordered that he be placed under three years of supervised control, be forbidden to use encryption or aliases online and submit to random searches of his computer equipment, person and home by police and any internal security agency without the necessity of a warrant. The judge said he was legally banned from having any contact with “electronic civil disobedience websites or organizations.” By the time she had finished she had shredded all pretense of the rule of law.
The severe sentence—Hammond will serve more time than the combined sentences of four men who were convicted in Britain for hacking related to the U.S. case—was monumentally stupid for a judge seeking to protect the interest of the ruling class. The judicial lynching of Hammond required her to demonstrate a callous disregard for transparency and our right to privacy. It required her to ignore the disturbing information Hammond released showing that the government and Stratfor attempted to link nonviolent dissident groups, including some within Occupy, to terrorist organizations so peaceful dissidents could be prosecuted as terrorists. It required her to accept the frightening fact that intelligence agencies now work on behalf of corporations as well as the state. She also had to sidestep the fact that Hammond made no financial gain from the leak.
The sentencing converges with the state’s persecution of Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Barrett Brown, along with Glenn Greenwald, Jacob Appelbaum, Laura Poitras and Sarah Harrison, four investigative journalists who are now in self-imposed exile from the United States. And as the numbers of our political prisoners and exiled dissidents mount, there is the unmistakable stench of tyranny.
This draconian sentence, like the draconian sentences of other whistle-blowers, will fan revolt. History bears this out. It will solidify the growing understanding that we must resort, if we want to effect real change, to unconventional tactics to thwart the mounting abuses by the corporate state. There is no hope, this sentencing shows, for redress from the judicial system, elected officials or the executive branch. Why should we respect a court system, or a governmental system, that shows no respect to us? Why should we abide by laws that serve only to protect criminals such as Wall Street thieves while leaving the rest of us exposed to abuse? Why should we continue to have faith in structures of power that deny us our most basic rights and civil liberties? Why should we be impoverished so the profits of big banks, corporations and hedge funds can swell?
No one will save us but ourselves. That was the real message sent out by the sentencing of Jeremy Hammond. And just as Hammond was inspired to act by the arrest of Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning, others will be inspired to act by Hammond and the actions taken against him. And we can thank Judge Preska for that.
Hammond is rooted in the Black Bloc. As he was escorted out of the courtroom on the ninth floor of the federal courthouse at 500 Pearl St. on Friday he shouted to roughly 100 people—including a class of prim West Point cadets in their blue uniforms—gathered there: “Long live Anonymous! Hurrah for anarchy!” In a statement he read in court he thanked “Free Anons, the Anonymous Solidarity Network [and] Anarchist Black Cross” for their roles in the fight against oppression.
Hammond has abandoned faith not only in traditional institutions, such as the courts, but nonviolent mass protest and civil disobedience, a point on which he and I diverge. But his analysis of corporate tyranny is correct. And the longer the state ruthlessly persecutes dissidents, the more the state ensures that those who oppose it will resort to radical responses including violence. “Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable,” John F. Kennedy said. And the corporate state is not only making peaceful change impossible but condemning it as terrorism.
In late October I spent an afternoon with Hammond in New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he had been held for 20 months. He said during our conversation, parts of which his lawyer requested be published only after his sentencing, that he believed that the sole way the people will now have any power is to rise up physically and seize it. My column last week was about that interview, and now I am including previously withheld parts of the conversation.
Hammond defines himself as “an anarchist communist.” He seeks to destroy capitalism and the centralized power of the corporate state. His revolutionary vision is “leaderless collectives based on free association, consensus, mutual aid, self-sufficiency and harmony with the environment.” He embraces the classic tools of revolt, including mass protests, general strikes and boycotts. And he sees hacking and leaking as part of this resistance, tools not only to reveal the truths about these systems of corporate power but to “disrupt/destroy these systems entirely.”
He participated in the Occupy movement in Chicago but found the politics of Occupy too vague and amorphous, a point on which I concur. He said Occupy lacked revolutionary vigor. He told me he did not support what he called the “dogmatic nonviolence doctrine” of many in the Occupy movement, calling it “needlessly limited and divisive.” He rejects the idea of acts of civil disobedience that protesters know will lead to their arrest. “The point,” he said, “is to carry out acts of resistance and not get caught.” He condemns “peace patrols,” units formed within the Occupy movement that sought to prohibit acts of vandalism and violence by other protesters—most often members of the Black Bloc—as “a secondary police force.” And he spurns the calls by many in Occupy not to antagonize the police, calling the police “the boot boys of the 1 percent, paid to protect the rich and powerful.” He said such a tactic of non-confrontation with the police ignored the long history of repression the police have carried out against popular movements, as well as the “profiling and imprisonment of our comrades.”
Because we were unprepared, or perhaps unwilling, to defend our occupations, police and mayors launched coordinated attacks, driving us out of our own parks,” he said of the state’s closure of the Occupy encampments.
“I fully support and have participated in Black Bloc and other forms of militant direct action,” he said. “I do not believe that the ruling powers listen to the people’s peaceful protests. Black Bloc is an effective, fluid and dynamic form of protest. It causes disruption outside of predictable/controllable mass demonstrations through ‘unarrests,’ holding streets, barricades and property destruction. Smashing corporate windows is not violence, especially when compared to the everyday economic violence of sweatshops and ‘free trade.’ Black Bloc seeks to hit them where it hurts, through economic damage. But more than smashing windows they seek to break the spell of ‘law and order’ and the artificial limitations we impose on ourselves.”
I disagree with Hammond over tactics, but in the end this disagreement is moot. It will be the ruling elites who finally determine our response. If the corporate elites employ the full force of the security and surveillance state against us, if corporate totalitarian rule is one of naked, escalating and brutal physical repression, then the violence of the state will spawn a counter-violence. Judge Preska’s decision to judicially lynch Hammond has only added to the fury she and the state are trying to stamp out. An astute ruling class, one aware of the rage rippling across the American landscape, would have released Hammond on Friday and begun to address the crimes he exposed. But our ruling class, while adept at theft, looting, propaganda and repression, is blind to the growing discontent caused by the power imbalance and economic inequality that plague ordinary Americans at a time when half of the country lives in poverty or “near poverty.”
“The acts of civil disobedience and direct action that I am being sentenced for today are in line with the principles of community and equality that have guided my life,” Hammond told the courtroom. “I hacked into dozens of high-profile corporations and government institutions, understanding very clearly that what I was doing was against the law, and that my actions could land me back in federal prison. But I felt that I had an obligation to use my skills to expose and confront injustice—and to bring the truth to light.”
“Could I have achieved the same goals through legal means?” he said. “I have tried everything from voting petitions to peaceful protest and have found that those in power do not want the truth to be exposed. When we speak truth to power we are ignored at best and brutally suppressed at worst. We are confronting a power structure that does not respect its own system of checks and balances, never mind the rights of its own citizens or the international community.”
“My first memories of American politics was when Bush stole the election in 2000,” he told me at a metal table as we met at the prison in a small room reserved for attorney visits, “and then how Bush used the wave of nationalism after 9/11 to launch unprovoked pre-emptive wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. In high school I was involved in publishing ‘underground’ newsletters criticizing the Patriot Act, the wars, and other Bush-era policies. I attended many anti-war protests in the city [Chicago] and was introduced to other local struggles and the larger anti-corporate globalization movement. I began identifying as an anarchist, started to travel around the country to various mobilizations and conferences, and began getting arrested for various acts.”
He said that his experience of street protest, especially against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, was seminal, for he saw that the state had little interest in heeding the voices of protesters and others in the public. “Instead, we were labeled as traitors, beaten and arrested.”
“I targeted law enforcement systems because of the racism and inequality with which the criminal law is enforced,” he admitted in court. “I targeted the manufacturers and distributors of military and police equipment who profit from weaponry used to advance U.S. political and economic interests abroad and to repress people at home. I targeted information security firms because they work in secret to protect government and corporate interests at the expense of individual rights, undermining and discrediting activists, journalists and other truth seekers, and spreading disinformation.”
An FBI informant, Hector Xavier Monsegur, posing as an Anonymous member and using the online name “Sabu,” prodded Hammond to break into Stratfor and informed him of technical vulnerabilities in websites of the company.
“Why the FBI would introduce us to the hacker who found the initial vulnerability and allow this hack to continue remains a mystery,” Hammond said as he faced the judge.
“As a result of the Stratfor hack, some of the dangers of the unregulated private intelligence industry are now known,” he said. “It has been revealed through WikiLeaks and other journalists around the world that Stratfor maintained a worldwide network of informants that they used to engage in intrusive and possibly illegal surveillance activities on behalf of large multinational corporations.”
At Sabu’s urging, Hammond broke into other websites, too. Hammond, at Sabu’s request, provided information to hackers enabling them to break into and deface official foreign government websites, including some of Turkey, Iran and Brazil. The names of these three countries are technically under a protective court order but have been reported widely in the press.
“I broke into numerous sites and handed over passwords and backdoors that enabled Sabu—and by extension his FBI handlers—to control these targets,” Hammond said.
“I don’t know how other information I provided to him may have been used, but I think the government’s collection and use of this data needs to be investigated,” he went on. “The government celebrates my conviction and imprisonment, hoping that it will close the door on the full story. I took responsibility for my actions, by pleading guilty, but when will the government be made to answer for its crimes?”
“The hypocrisy of ‘law and order’ and the injustices caused by capitalism cannot be cured by institutional reform but through civil disobedience and direct action,” Hammond told the court. “Yes, I broke the law, but I believe that sometimes laws must be broken in order to make room for change.”
SC120-6
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/schilling-shilling/
Schilling Shilling
Such is the power of wishful thinking that a set of fool-making memes now pulses through the word-clouds of financial chatter in America spreading the false good cheer that our economic troubles are behind us and pimping for perpetual motion in wealth expansion. A poster boy for this bundle of falsehoods is financial analyst A. Gary Schilling. Just last week, he was talking out of his cloacal vent about US “energy independence” and “the manufacturing renaissance” that will allow this country to magically decouple from the compressive contraction driving the rest of the world.
Shilling is among the growing chorus of cheerleaders who believe that the shale oil and gas boom will make it possible for so-called “consumers” (what we foolishly call ourselves) to keep driving to Wal-Mart forever — which is the master wish behind all the current fantasies of endless expansion. That idea is going to leave a lot of people disappointed and put the nation further behind in the necessary reorganization of all the key systems that support everyday civilized life, namely: food production, commerce, transport, and the management of capital.
Here’s what’s actually going to happen with shale oil and gas. Best case scenario: shale oil production rises for three more years to about 2.3 million barrels a day and then crashes so quickly that in 10 years the shale oil industry ceases to exist. A less rosy forecast would admit that the exorbitant costs of drilling-and-fracking will not find the necessary capital to even take the industry that far. Rather, dwindling capital will see the shocking decline rates of shale wells (commonly 50 percent the first year and double digits the following) and will run shrieking for other places to hide.
Contrary to Gary Schilling’s blather, America is not practicing “energy conservation.” Rather, an economy engineered strictly to run on cheap oil has gotten crushed by oil that is not cheap. Does Schilling believe, for example, that American suburbia works just as well on $90-a-barrel oil as it did on $11-a-barrel oil, or that it has a future as the basic armature of daily life, or that we are doing anything meaningful to alter the burdens of living this way? My guess is that he has never thought about it.
Likewise, as the American economy got crushed by no-longer-cheap oil, all the working classes in this country below the one-percenters got crushed, hammered, and trashed. Among other things they can no longer afford is gasoline. Total vehicle miles driven has gone down by almost 3 percent since 2007. It will keep going down, and the Happy Motoring matrix will collapse for another reason: capital scarcity will translate into fewer available car loans for Americans, and fewer qualified borrowers, and Americans are used to buying their cars on installment loans.
The shale gas situation is also not the “energy savior” it’s cracked up to be. Because it costs so much to export the stuff, and we don’t have the export infrastructure in place — ocean terminals, fleets of special (expensive!) tanker ships — shale gas is hostage to the US domestic market. The initial boom was so extravagant that it produced a gas glut, which drove the price way below the level that makes it economically rational to drill for the stuff. Now, a lot of those drilling rigs are migrating to North Dakota, where the Bakken shale oil fields require perpetual increases in rig-counts to offset the rapid decline of existing wells.
The shale gas regions of Barnett (Fort Worth), Haynesville (Louisiana), and Fayetteville, Arkansas, are already dwindling. The “sweet spots” turned out to be smaller than the hype suggested. The Marcellus (Pennsylvania and New York) is next. Several of the other hyped shale gas “plays” — the Antrim and the Utica — proved too unpromising to even bother with and never made it out of the wish bag.
The problems with fracking and groundwater pollution are secondary to the economic quandaries as far as the fate of the industry is concerned. At under $8 a unit (1000 cubic feet), shale gas is not worth drilling-and-fracking for. It’s currently around $4. Above $8, Americans are going to have a hard time paying for it. So, enjoy the temporary glut and now stand back and watch the industry begin to dry up and blow away.
As for the “industrial renaissance,” clowns like Gary Shilling can’t put together the obvious trends. The talked-about new factories will be operated by robots, so there would be no employment renaissance to go along with them. Then there is the question of who might the products be sold to? To Americans who have no jobs and no money? To Europeans who are also going broke and also have the ability to roboticize industrial production and impoverish their own working people? To Asia, which is already at industrial over-capacity — and which will only grow worse as Americans and Europeans buy less stuff? I guess that leaves South America and Africa. Well, good luck with that.
Schilling is really only shilling for delusional stock market psychology, which tends to be a self-reinforcing racket until it reaches a threshold of credulity criticality and then implodes from a sudden loss of faith, ruining even a great many one percenters. Money may indeed keep pouring into the US stock markets, especially from other countries, where the money is frightened. I’ll tell you what it ought to be really frightened about: that it doesn’t represent genuine capital, i.e. has no real value. One day not distant, all the nations will discover that their money is only notional and that notions have a way of going up in a vapor. Foolish ideas, though, appear more durable and plentiful. They just keep coming, no matter what’s going on in reality.
My basic wish is that we would quit all our wishing in America and get on with the job of transforming our economic arrangements to a scale and mode that are consistent with the resource and capital realities of these times — before they whap us upside the head and put and end to the project of remaining civilized.
Schilling Shilling
Such is the power of wishful thinking that a set of fool-making memes now pulses through the word-clouds of financial chatter in America spreading the false good cheer that our economic troubles are behind us and pimping for perpetual motion in wealth expansion. A poster boy for this bundle of falsehoods is financial analyst A. Gary Schilling. Just last week, he was talking out of his cloacal vent about US “energy independence” and “the manufacturing renaissance” that will allow this country to magically decouple from the compressive contraction driving the rest of the world.
Shilling is among the growing chorus of cheerleaders who believe that the shale oil and gas boom will make it possible for so-called “consumers” (what we foolishly call ourselves) to keep driving to Wal-Mart forever — which is the master wish behind all the current fantasies of endless expansion. That idea is going to leave a lot of people disappointed and put the nation further behind in the necessary reorganization of all the key systems that support everyday civilized life, namely: food production, commerce, transport, and the management of capital.
Here’s what’s actually going to happen with shale oil and gas. Best case scenario: shale oil production rises for three more years to about 2.3 million barrels a day and then crashes so quickly that in 10 years the shale oil industry ceases to exist. A less rosy forecast would admit that the exorbitant costs of drilling-and-fracking will not find the necessary capital to even take the industry that far. Rather, dwindling capital will see the shocking decline rates of shale wells (commonly 50 percent the first year and double digits the following) and will run shrieking for other places to hide.
Contrary to Gary Schilling’s blather, America is not practicing “energy conservation.” Rather, an economy engineered strictly to run on cheap oil has gotten crushed by oil that is not cheap. Does Schilling believe, for example, that American suburbia works just as well on $90-a-barrel oil as it did on $11-a-barrel oil, or that it has a future as the basic armature of daily life, or that we are doing anything meaningful to alter the burdens of living this way? My guess is that he has never thought about it.
Likewise, as the American economy got crushed by no-longer-cheap oil, all the working classes in this country below the one-percenters got crushed, hammered, and trashed. Among other things they can no longer afford is gasoline. Total vehicle miles driven has gone down by almost 3 percent since 2007. It will keep going down, and the Happy Motoring matrix will collapse for another reason: capital scarcity will translate into fewer available car loans for Americans, and fewer qualified borrowers, and Americans are used to buying their cars on installment loans.
The shale gas situation is also not the “energy savior” it’s cracked up to be. Because it costs so much to export the stuff, and we don’t have the export infrastructure in place — ocean terminals, fleets of special (expensive!) tanker ships — shale gas is hostage to the US domestic market. The initial boom was so extravagant that it produced a gas glut, which drove the price way below the level that makes it economically rational to drill for the stuff. Now, a lot of those drilling rigs are migrating to North Dakota, where the Bakken shale oil fields require perpetual increases in rig-counts to offset the rapid decline of existing wells.
The shale gas regions of Barnett (Fort Worth), Haynesville (Louisiana), and Fayetteville, Arkansas, are already dwindling. The “sweet spots” turned out to be smaller than the hype suggested. The Marcellus (Pennsylvania and New York) is next. Several of the other hyped shale gas “plays” — the Antrim and the Utica — proved too unpromising to even bother with and never made it out of the wish bag.
The problems with fracking and groundwater pollution are secondary to the economic quandaries as far as the fate of the industry is concerned. At under $8 a unit (1000 cubic feet), shale gas is not worth drilling-and-fracking for. It’s currently around $4. Above $8, Americans are going to have a hard time paying for it. So, enjoy the temporary glut and now stand back and watch the industry begin to dry up and blow away.
As for the “industrial renaissance,” clowns like Gary Shilling can’t put together the obvious trends. The talked-about new factories will be operated by robots, so there would be no employment renaissance to go along with them. Then there is the question of who might the products be sold to? To Americans who have no jobs and no money? To Europeans who are also going broke and also have the ability to roboticize industrial production and impoverish their own working people? To Asia, which is already at industrial over-capacity — and which will only grow worse as Americans and Europeans buy less stuff? I guess that leaves South America and Africa. Well, good luck with that.
Schilling is really only shilling for delusional stock market psychology, which tends to be a self-reinforcing racket until it reaches a threshold of credulity criticality and then implodes from a sudden loss of faith, ruining even a great many one percenters. Money may indeed keep pouring into the US stock markets, especially from other countries, where the money is frightened. I’ll tell you what it ought to be really frightened about: that it doesn’t represent genuine capital, i.e. has no real value. One day not distant, all the nations will discover that their money is only notional and that notions have a way of going up in a vapor. Foolish ideas, though, appear more durable and plentiful. They just keep coming, no matter what’s going on in reality.
My basic wish is that we would quit all our wishing in America and get on with the job of transforming our economic arrangements to a scale and mode that are consistent with the resource and capital realities of these times — before they whap us upside the head and put and end to the project of remaining civilized.
Monday, November 11, 2013
SC120-5
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-turning/
The Turning
In these northern climes, this turning into the year’s final quarter feels written in the blood, or at least into the legacy code of culture. The leaves skitter across the streets in an early twilight, chill winds daunt man and dog, the landscape buttons itself up for the long sleep, and human activity moves indoors — including the arduous festivities around the spooky solstice. We take the comfort that we can in all that. But a strange torpor of event attends this year’s turning. In the year’s final happenings, nothing seems to happen, and what little does happen seems not to matter. The world sits with frayed nerves and hears a distant noise, which is the cosmic screw of history turning.
The nation gets over everything without resolving anything — fiscal cliffs, debt ceilings, health care implosions, domestic spying outrages, taper talk jukes, banking turpitudes, the Syria bluster, the Iran nuke deal fake-out. It’s dangerous to live as though there was no such thing as consequence. Societies have a way of reaching a consensus about something without ever stating it outright. The American public has silently agreed to sit on its hands though one more Christmas and after that things shake loose.
What happens, for instance, in the limbo months of ObamaCare ahead, when people either won’t sign in for health insurance, or can’t because of the stupidity of the website design, and the failure of its work-arounds, and the number rises of people falling seriously ill without insurance, and the ludicrously extortionate hospital bills start rolling in and the machinery of bankruptcy and re-po turns the screws on tens of thousands of families — while the insurance company executives spend their 2013 bonus money on Beemers and McMansion additions? There must be some threshold for criticality there, some breaking point that prompts a swindled population to break out its fabled arsenals. Say, somewhere in America a child tragically dies after being hit by a car and three unsuccessful surgeries to try to fix the damage, and thirty days after the funeral, the uninsured dad gets a bill for $416,000? I doubt a society can withstand many insults like that.
Above all, this big nation has failed to reckon the central quandary of our time: the fatal hypertrophy of finance. This ghastly engine of rackets and swindles is the enlarged heart of a dying body politic, and all we know how to do is feed it more monetary Cheez Doodles. This has been going on far longer than the doctors and the witch doctors thought possible, and there is a foolish hope among the credulous that the larger organism of the economy must therefore be immortal. But the reality-based minority stoically awaits the final congestive infarction.
Everything points to 2014 as the moment the pretending stops and things get real. Nobody believes anymore that the Federal Reserve can replace an economy of authentic transactions with promissory notes. There is only one final thing that can happen with the Fed, and that is losing all control over rising interest rates. Janet Yellen is being set up as one of the epic chumps of history, and proof of her academic fecklessness is the mere fact that she accepted the post as Fed chair. She will preside over a fabulous disappearance of wealth in America. The blame for it will be epic, too, but it will not represent any genuine understanding of what happened.
Much is being made of the loneliness of Barack Obama these days. He also occupies a rather tragic niche in history — or the arc of his story at least points that way these days. Right now, it is very hard to tell whether he has been a hostage or a fool. He could have moved to break up the big banks in January of 2009, and any time since then he could have sent a memo to the Department of Justice instructing the prosecutions of financial crime to begin in earnest (or replaced the Attorney General). Didn’t happen. Was he being blackmailed by the likes of Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein, or did he just not know what was at stake?
The history of Barack Obama will be one long record of omissions to act, not just overt failures. He is the Bartleby the Scrivener of our politics. He “prefers not to….” Hence, the powerful lure of the charismatic figure who is sure to act. Adolf Hitler was very clear about his proposed program in the early 1920s, a decade before he came to power. He spelled it out unmistakably in his speeches and his political testament, Mein Kampf: do away with pain-in-the-ass democracy and destroy the Jews. He couldn’t have put it more plainly. The residual admiration for Hitler among the extreme right-wingers of today derives mainly from the simple fact that the man actually did what he said he would do. You can’t overstate the potential hunger for that sort of thing. The current climate of US politics being Weimar-on-steroids, I’m sure that an American corn-pone Hitler would have huge appeal for a beaten-down citizenry.
The means for such a coup of the zeitgeist are rather frightful now: drone aircraft, computer surveillance, militarized police, a puppet press. It makes thoughtful folks queasy. My bet, though, is that a fascist takeover of the US would end up being as inept and ineffectual as ObamaCare. It is one of the great hidden blessings of our time, actually, that anything organized on the massive scale is doomed to failure. But it is likewise the great mission of our time to prepare to get local and smaller, something we’re not really ready for and certainly not interested in. The intertwining of these dynamics will be the story in the year to come.
The Turning
In these northern climes, this turning into the year’s final quarter feels written in the blood, or at least into the legacy code of culture. The leaves skitter across the streets in an early twilight, chill winds daunt man and dog, the landscape buttons itself up for the long sleep, and human activity moves indoors — including the arduous festivities around the spooky solstice. We take the comfort that we can in all that. But a strange torpor of event attends this year’s turning. In the year’s final happenings, nothing seems to happen, and what little does happen seems not to matter. The world sits with frayed nerves and hears a distant noise, which is the cosmic screw of history turning.
The nation gets over everything without resolving anything — fiscal cliffs, debt ceilings, health care implosions, domestic spying outrages, taper talk jukes, banking turpitudes, the Syria bluster, the Iran nuke deal fake-out. It’s dangerous to live as though there was no such thing as consequence. Societies have a way of reaching a consensus about something without ever stating it outright. The American public has silently agreed to sit on its hands though one more Christmas and after that things shake loose.
What happens, for instance, in the limbo months of ObamaCare ahead, when people either won’t sign in for health insurance, or can’t because of the stupidity of the website design, and the failure of its work-arounds, and the number rises of people falling seriously ill without insurance, and the ludicrously extortionate hospital bills start rolling in and the machinery of bankruptcy and re-po turns the screws on tens of thousands of families — while the insurance company executives spend their 2013 bonus money on Beemers and McMansion additions? There must be some threshold for criticality there, some breaking point that prompts a swindled population to break out its fabled arsenals. Say, somewhere in America a child tragically dies after being hit by a car and three unsuccessful surgeries to try to fix the damage, and thirty days after the funeral, the uninsured dad gets a bill for $416,000? I doubt a society can withstand many insults like that.
Above all, this big nation has failed to reckon the central quandary of our time: the fatal hypertrophy of finance. This ghastly engine of rackets and swindles is the enlarged heart of a dying body politic, and all we know how to do is feed it more monetary Cheez Doodles. This has been going on far longer than the doctors and the witch doctors thought possible, and there is a foolish hope among the credulous that the larger organism of the economy must therefore be immortal. But the reality-based minority stoically awaits the final congestive infarction.
Everything points to 2014 as the moment the pretending stops and things get real. Nobody believes anymore that the Federal Reserve can replace an economy of authentic transactions with promissory notes. There is only one final thing that can happen with the Fed, and that is losing all control over rising interest rates. Janet Yellen is being set up as one of the epic chumps of history, and proof of her academic fecklessness is the mere fact that she accepted the post as Fed chair. She will preside over a fabulous disappearance of wealth in America. The blame for it will be epic, too, but it will not represent any genuine understanding of what happened.
Much is being made of the loneliness of Barack Obama these days. He also occupies a rather tragic niche in history — or the arc of his story at least points that way these days. Right now, it is very hard to tell whether he has been a hostage or a fool. He could have moved to break up the big banks in January of 2009, and any time since then he could have sent a memo to the Department of Justice instructing the prosecutions of financial crime to begin in earnest (or replaced the Attorney General). Didn’t happen. Was he being blackmailed by the likes of Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein, or did he just not know what was at stake?
The history of Barack Obama will be one long record of omissions to act, not just overt failures. He is the Bartleby the Scrivener of our politics. He “prefers not to….” Hence, the powerful lure of the charismatic figure who is sure to act. Adolf Hitler was very clear about his proposed program in the early 1920s, a decade before he came to power. He spelled it out unmistakably in his speeches and his political testament, Mein Kampf: do away with pain-in-the-ass democracy and destroy the Jews. He couldn’t have put it more plainly. The residual admiration for Hitler among the extreme right-wingers of today derives mainly from the simple fact that the man actually did what he said he would do. You can’t overstate the potential hunger for that sort of thing. The current climate of US politics being Weimar-on-steroids, I’m sure that an American corn-pone Hitler would have huge appeal for a beaten-down citizenry.
The means for such a coup of the zeitgeist are rather frightful now: drone aircraft, computer surveillance, militarized police, a puppet press. It makes thoughtful folks queasy. My bet, though, is that a fascist takeover of the US would end up being as inept and ineffectual as ObamaCare. It is one of the great hidden blessings of our time, actually, that anything organized on the massive scale is doomed to failure. But it is likewise the great mission of our time to prepare to get local and smaller, something we’re not really ready for and certainly not interested in. The intertwining of these dynamics will be the story in the year to come.
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
SC120-4
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/duct-tape-politics/
Duct Tape Politics
The ObamaCare website rollout fiasco, joined by the bait-and-switch “You can keep your current insurance (not)” tempest, obscure the fundamental quandary about so-called health-care in America: that it is a gigantic racket structured to allow countless layers of grift and counter-grift. The end product of all that artifice is that medical care costs twice as much in America as any other civilized country, and that it has to be operated by a cruel and despotic matrix of poorly coordinated bureaucracies that commonly leave people more disabled financially than the diseases that brought them into the system.
ObamaCare was designed to work like a giant roll of duct tape that would allow the current cast of characters in charge (Democratic Progressives) to pretend that the system could keep going a few years longer. But it looks like it has already blown out the patch on the manifold and is getting ready to throw a rod — which duct tape will not avail to fix.
I had three major surgeries (hip, open heart, spine) the past year and paid attention to the statements that rolled in from my then-insurer, Blue Shield (the policy was cancelled in October). These documents were always advertised as “this is not a bill” and that was technically true, but it deflected attention from what it really was, a record of negotiated scams between the “providers” (doctors and hospitals) and the insurance company.
There was never any discussion (or offer of discussion) of the cost of care before a procedure. When asked, doctors commonly pretend not to know what their work costs. Why is that? It’s not to spare the patient’s feelings. It’s because sick people are hostages and both the doctors and the hospital management know they will agree to anything that will get them through the crisis of illness. This sets up a situation that allows the “providers” to blindside the patient with charges after the fact.
My hip “revision” operation was necessary because my original implant was a defective (“innovative” circa 2003) metal-on-metal joint that released metal fragments into my system and it had to be removed. The stated charge for replacement part — a simple two piece bearing made of metal and plastic, about the size of tangerine — was $14,000. Blue Shield “negotiated” the price down to about $7,000. If you go to the websites of any of the manufacturers of these things, you will not see any suggested retail or wholesale price. The markup on these things must be out of this world. Cars come with four ball joints that carry roughly the same time warrantee, and they come with a staggering array of “extras”— engines, transmissions, air-conditioning, seats, air-bags, and radios. The pattern was similar for the other surgeries and what they entailed. I ended up paying five-figures out-of-pocket. Lucky for me that I saved some money before this all happened. I don’t have kids so I haven’t been paying extortionate college tuitions during my peak income years.
All the surgeries I had required hospital stays. For the hip op, I was in for a day and a half in a non-special bed (no fancy hookups). The charge was $23,000 per day. For what? They took my blood pressure nine times. I got about six bad meals. The line charge on the Blue Shield statement said “room and board.” It would be a joke if this extortion wasn’t multiplied millions of times a day across the nation. Citizen-hostages obviously don’t know where to begin to unravel this skein of dreadful rackets. If you think it’s possible to have a productive conversation with an insurance company rep at the other end of the phone line, then you’re going to be disappointed. You might as well be talking to a third-sub-deputy under-commissar in the Soviet motor vehicle bureau.
This ghastly matrix of corruption really only has two ways to go. It can completely implode in a fairly short time frame (say, five years, tops), or we can, by some miracle of political will, get our priorities straight and sweep away all the layers of racketeering with a single-payer system. The evidence in other civilized countries is not so encouraging. England’s National Health Service has degenerated into a two layer system of half-assed soviet-style medicine for the proles and concierge service for the rich. France’s system works more democratically, but the nation is going bankrupt and eventually their health care network will fall apart. The Scandinavian countries have relatively tiny populations. I don’t know, frankly, how the Germans are doing.
Here in the USA, you can make arguments for putting a greater share of public money into a single-payer system. For instance, if we redirected the money spent on our stupid military adventures and closed some of the countless redundant bases we run overseas. That would be a biggie. Given the current choke-hold of the military-industrial complex on our politicians, I wouldn’t expect much traction there.
You can argue that nobody complains about government spending on the highway system, so why should “the people” complain about organizing a medical system that really works? Obviously, there’s no consensus to make that happen. Too many doctors want to drive BMWs. Too many insurance executives and hospital administrators want to make multi-million dollar salaries. Too many lobbyist parasites and lawyers are feeding off that revenue stream. Too many politicians with gold-plated health insurance coverage don’t want to change the current distribution of goodies. End-of-story, as the late Tony Soprano used to say.
It’s the old quandary of fire or ice… which way do you want to go? Since I’m interested in reality-based outcomes, my bet would be on implosion. In any case, several of the other systems that currently support the activities of our society are scheduled for near-term implosion, too. That would be the banking-finance system, the energy supply system, and the industrial agriculture system. As those things wind down or crash, you can be sure that everything connected with them will be affected, so the chance that we could mount a real national health care system is, in my opinion, zero.
The ObamaCare duct-taped system will go down. The big hospitals, HMOs, insurers, pharma companies will all starve and shrivel. Like all things in the emergent new paradigm, they will reorganize on a small and much simpler basis. Everyone will make less money and high-tech medicine will probably dwindle for all but a very few… and for them, only for a while. Eventually, we’ll re-set to local clinic style medicine with far fewer resources, specialties, and miracle cures. There will be a whole lot less aggravation, though, and people may die more peacefully.
Finally, there’s the pathetic American lumpen-public of our day itself, steadily committing suicide en masse by corn byproducts, the three-hundred pounders lumbering down the Wal-Mart aisles in search of the latest designer nacho. What can you do about such a people, except let fate take them where it will?
Duct Tape Politics
The ObamaCare website rollout fiasco, joined by the bait-and-switch “You can keep your current insurance (not)” tempest, obscure the fundamental quandary about so-called health-care in America: that it is a gigantic racket structured to allow countless layers of grift and counter-grift. The end product of all that artifice is that medical care costs twice as much in America as any other civilized country, and that it has to be operated by a cruel and despotic matrix of poorly coordinated bureaucracies that commonly leave people more disabled financially than the diseases that brought them into the system.
ObamaCare was designed to work like a giant roll of duct tape that would allow the current cast of characters in charge (Democratic Progressives) to pretend that the system could keep going a few years longer. But it looks like it has already blown out the patch on the manifold and is getting ready to throw a rod — which duct tape will not avail to fix.
I had three major surgeries (hip, open heart, spine) the past year and paid attention to the statements that rolled in from my then-insurer, Blue Shield (the policy was cancelled in October). These documents were always advertised as “this is not a bill” and that was technically true, but it deflected attention from what it really was, a record of negotiated scams between the “providers” (doctors and hospitals) and the insurance company.
There was never any discussion (or offer of discussion) of the cost of care before a procedure. When asked, doctors commonly pretend not to know what their work costs. Why is that? It’s not to spare the patient’s feelings. It’s because sick people are hostages and both the doctors and the hospital management know they will agree to anything that will get them through the crisis of illness. This sets up a situation that allows the “providers” to blindside the patient with charges after the fact.
My hip “revision” operation was necessary because my original implant was a defective (“innovative” circa 2003) metal-on-metal joint that released metal fragments into my system and it had to be removed. The stated charge for replacement part — a simple two piece bearing made of metal and plastic, about the size of tangerine — was $14,000. Blue Shield “negotiated” the price down to about $7,000. If you go to the websites of any of the manufacturers of these things, you will not see any suggested retail or wholesale price. The markup on these things must be out of this world. Cars come with four ball joints that carry roughly the same time warrantee, and they come with a staggering array of “extras”— engines, transmissions, air-conditioning, seats, air-bags, and radios. The pattern was similar for the other surgeries and what they entailed. I ended up paying five-figures out-of-pocket. Lucky for me that I saved some money before this all happened. I don’t have kids so I haven’t been paying extortionate college tuitions during my peak income years.
All the surgeries I had required hospital stays. For the hip op, I was in for a day and a half in a non-special bed (no fancy hookups). The charge was $23,000 per day. For what? They took my blood pressure nine times. I got about six bad meals. The line charge on the Blue Shield statement said “room and board.” It would be a joke if this extortion wasn’t multiplied millions of times a day across the nation. Citizen-hostages obviously don’t know where to begin to unravel this skein of dreadful rackets. If you think it’s possible to have a productive conversation with an insurance company rep at the other end of the phone line, then you’re going to be disappointed. You might as well be talking to a third-sub-deputy under-commissar in the Soviet motor vehicle bureau.
This ghastly matrix of corruption really only has two ways to go. It can completely implode in a fairly short time frame (say, five years, tops), or we can, by some miracle of political will, get our priorities straight and sweep away all the layers of racketeering with a single-payer system. The evidence in other civilized countries is not so encouraging. England’s National Health Service has degenerated into a two layer system of half-assed soviet-style medicine for the proles and concierge service for the rich. France’s system works more democratically, but the nation is going bankrupt and eventually their health care network will fall apart. The Scandinavian countries have relatively tiny populations. I don’t know, frankly, how the Germans are doing.
Here in the USA, you can make arguments for putting a greater share of public money into a single-payer system. For instance, if we redirected the money spent on our stupid military adventures and closed some of the countless redundant bases we run overseas. That would be a biggie. Given the current choke-hold of the military-industrial complex on our politicians, I wouldn’t expect much traction there.
You can argue that nobody complains about government spending on the highway system, so why should “the people” complain about organizing a medical system that really works? Obviously, there’s no consensus to make that happen. Too many doctors want to drive BMWs. Too many insurance executives and hospital administrators want to make multi-million dollar salaries. Too many lobbyist parasites and lawyers are feeding off that revenue stream. Too many politicians with gold-plated health insurance coverage don’t want to change the current distribution of goodies. End-of-story, as the late Tony Soprano used to say.
It’s the old quandary of fire or ice… which way do you want to go? Since I’m interested in reality-based outcomes, my bet would be on implosion. In any case, several of the other systems that currently support the activities of our society are scheduled for near-term implosion, too. That would be the banking-finance system, the energy supply system, and the industrial agriculture system. As those things wind down or crash, you can be sure that everything connected with them will be affected, so the chance that we could mount a real national health care system is, in my opinion, zero.
The ObamaCare duct-taped system will go down. The big hospitals, HMOs, insurers, pharma companies will all starve and shrivel. Like all things in the emergent new paradigm, they will reorganize on a small and much simpler basis. Everyone will make less money and high-tech medicine will probably dwindle for all but a very few… and for them, only for a while. Eventually, we’ll re-set to local clinic style medicine with far fewer resources, specialties, and miracle cures. There will be a whole lot less aggravation, though, and people may die more peacefully.
Finally, there’s the pathetic American lumpen-public of our day itself, steadily committing suicide en masse by corn byproducts, the three-hundred pounders lumbering down the Wal-Mart aisles in search of the latest designer nacho. What can you do about such a people, except let fate take them where it will?
Monday, October 28, 2013
SC120-3
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/our_invisible_revolution_20131028
Our Invisible Revolution
“Did you ever ask yourself how it happens that government and capitalism continue to exist in spite of all the evil and trouble they are causing in the world?” the anarchist Alexander Berkman wrote in his essay “The Idea Is the Thing.” “If you did, then your answer must have been that it is because the people support those institutions, and that they support them because they believe in them.”
Berkman was right. As long as most citizens believe in the ideas that justify global capitalism, the private and state institutions that serve our corporate masters are unassailable. When these ideas are shattered, the institutions that buttress the ruling class deflate and collapse. The battle of ideas is percolating below the surface. It is a battle the corporate state is steadily losing. An increasing number of Americans are getting it. They know that we have been stripped of political power. They recognize that we have been shorn of our most basic and cherished civil liberties, and live under the gaze of the most intrusive security and surveillance apparatus in human history. Half the country lives in poverty. Many of the rest of us, if the corporate state is not overthrown, will join them. These truths are no longer hidden.
It appears that political ferment is dormant in the United States. This is incorrect. The ideas that sustain the corporate state are swiftly losing their efficacy across the political spectrum. The ideas that are rising to take their place, however, are inchoate. The right has retreated into Christian fascism and a celebration of the gun culture. The left, knocked off balance by decades of fierce state repression in the name of anti-communism, is struggling to rebuild and define itself. Popular revulsion for the ruling elite, however, is nearly universal. It is a question of which ideas will capture the public’s imagination.
Revolution usually erupts over events that would, in normal circumstances, be considered meaningless or minor acts of injustice by the state. But once the tinder of revolt has piled up, as it has in the United States, an insignificant spark easily ignites popular rebellion. No person or movement can ignite this tinder. No one knows where or when the eruption will take place. No one knows the form it will take. But it is certain now that a popular revolt is coming. The refusal by the corporate state to address even the minimal grievances of the citizenry, along with the abject failure to remedy the mounting state repression, the chronic unemployment and underemployment, the massive debt peonage that is crippling more than half of Americans, and the loss of hope and widespread despair, means that blowback is inevitable.
“Because revolution is evolution at its boiling point you cannot ‘make’ a real revolution any more than you can hasten the boiling of a tea kettle,” Berkman wrote. “It is the fire underneath that makes it boil: how quickly it will come to the boiling point will depend on how strong the fire is.”
Revolutions, when they erupt, appear to the elites and the establishment to be sudden and unexpected. This is because the real work of revolutionary ferment and consciousness is unseen by the mainstream society, noticed only after it has largely been completed. Throughout history, those who have sought radical change have always had to first discredit the ideas used to prop up ruling elites and construct alternative ideas for society, ideas often embodied in a utopian revolutionary myth. The articulation of a viable socialism as an alternative to corporate tyranny—as attempted by the book “Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA” and the website Popular Resistance—is, for me, paramount. Once ideas shift for a large portion of a population, once the vision of a new society grips the popular imagination, the old regime is finished.
An uprising that is devoid of ideas and vision is never a threat to ruling elites. Social upheaval without clear definition and direction, without ideas behind it, descends into nihilism, random violence and chaos. It consumes itself. This, at its core, is why I disagree with some elements of the Black Bloc anarchists. I believe in strategy. And so did many anarchists, including Berkman, Emma Goldman, Pyotr Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin.
By the time ruling elites are openly defied, there has already been a nearly total loss of faith in the ideas—in our case free market capitalism and globalization—that sustain the structures of the ruling elites. And once enough people get it, a process that can take years, “the slow, quiet, and peaceful social evolution becomes quick, militant, and violent,” as Berkman wrote. “Evolution becomes revolution.”
This is where we are headed. I do not say this because I am a supporter of revolution. I am not. I prefer the piecemeal and incremental reforms of a functioning democracy. I prefer a system in which our social institutions permit the citizenry to nonviolently dismiss those in authority. I prefer a system in which institutions are independent and not captive to corporate power. But we do not live in such a system. Revolt is the only option left. Ruling elites, once the ideas that justify their existence are dead, resort to force. It is their final clutch at power. If a nonviolent popular movement is able to ideologically disarm the bureaucrats, civil servants and police—to get them, in essence, to defect—nonviolent revolution is possible. But if the state can organize effective and prolonged violence against dissent, it spawns reactive revolutionary violence, or what the state calls terrorism. Violent revolutions usually give rise to revolutionaries as ruthless as their adversaries. “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster,” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote. “And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
Violent revolutions are always tragic. I, and many other activists, seek to keep our uprising nonviolent. We seek to spare the country the savagery of domestic violence by both the state and its opponents. There is no guarantee that we will succeed, especially with the corporate state controlling a vast internal security apparatus and militarized police forces. But we must try.
Corporations, freed from all laws, government regulations and internal constraints, are stealing as much as they can, as fast as they can, on the way down. The managers of corporations no longer care about the effects of their pillage. Many expect the systems they are looting to fall apart. They are blinded by personal greed and hubris. They believe their obscene wealth can buy them security and protection. They should have spent a little less time studying management in business school and a little more time studying human nature and human history. They are digging their own graves.
Our shift to corporate totalitarianism, like the shift to all forms of totalitarianism, is incremental. Totalitarian systems ebb and flow, sometimes taking one step back before taking two steps forward, as they erode democratic liberalism. This process is now complete. The “consent of the governed” is a cruel joke. Barack Obama cannot defy corporate power any more than George W. Bush or Bill Clinton could. Unlike his two immediate predecessors, Bush, who is intellectually and probably emotionally impaired, did not understand the totalitarian process abetted by the presidency. Because Clinton and Obama, and their Democratic Party, understand the destructive roles they played and are playing, they must be seen as far more cynical and far more complicit in the ruination of the country. Democratic politicians speak in the familiar “I-feel-your-pain” language of the liberal class while allowing corporations to strip us of personal wealth and power. They are effective masks for corporate power.
The corporate state seeks to maintain the fiction of our personal agency in the political and economic process. As long as we believe we are participants, a lie sustained through massive propaganda campaigns, endless and absurd election cycles and the pageantry of empty political theater, our corporate oligarchs rest easy in their private jets, boardrooms, penthouses and mansions. As the bankruptcy of corporate capitalism and globalization is exposed, the ruling elite are increasingly nervous. They know that if the ideas that justify their power die, they are finished. This is why voices of dissent—as well as spontaneous uprisings such as the Occupy movement—are ruthlessly crushed by the corporate state.
“... [M]any ideas, once held to be true, have come to be regarded as wrong and evil,” Berkman wrote in his essay. “Thus the ideas of the divine right of kings, of slavery and serfdom. There was a time when the whole world believed those institutions to be right, just, and unchangeable. In the measure that those superstitions and false beliefs were fought by advanced thinkers, they became discredited and lost their hold upon the people, and finally the institutions that incorporated those ideas were abolished. Highbrows will tell you that they had ‘outlived’ their ‘usefulness’ and therefore they ‘died.’ But how did they ‘outlive’ their ‘usefulness’? To whom were they useful, and how did they ‘die’? We know already that they were useful only to the master class, and they were done away with by popular uprisings and revolutions.”
Our Invisible Revolution
“Did you ever ask yourself how it happens that government and capitalism continue to exist in spite of all the evil and trouble they are causing in the world?” the anarchist Alexander Berkman wrote in his essay “The Idea Is the Thing.” “If you did, then your answer must have been that it is because the people support those institutions, and that they support them because they believe in them.”
Berkman was right. As long as most citizens believe in the ideas that justify global capitalism, the private and state institutions that serve our corporate masters are unassailable. When these ideas are shattered, the institutions that buttress the ruling class deflate and collapse. The battle of ideas is percolating below the surface. It is a battle the corporate state is steadily losing. An increasing number of Americans are getting it. They know that we have been stripped of political power. They recognize that we have been shorn of our most basic and cherished civil liberties, and live under the gaze of the most intrusive security and surveillance apparatus in human history. Half the country lives in poverty. Many of the rest of us, if the corporate state is not overthrown, will join them. These truths are no longer hidden.
It appears that political ferment is dormant in the United States. This is incorrect. The ideas that sustain the corporate state are swiftly losing their efficacy across the political spectrum. The ideas that are rising to take their place, however, are inchoate. The right has retreated into Christian fascism and a celebration of the gun culture. The left, knocked off balance by decades of fierce state repression in the name of anti-communism, is struggling to rebuild and define itself. Popular revulsion for the ruling elite, however, is nearly universal. It is a question of which ideas will capture the public’s imagination.
Revolution usually erupts over events that would, in normal circumstances, be considered meaningless or minor acts of injustice by the state. But once the tinder of revolt has piled up, as it has in the United States, an insignificant spark easily ignites popular rebellion. No person or movement can ignite this tinder. No one knows where or when the eruption will take place. No one knows the form it will take. But it is certain now that a popular revolt is coming. The refusal by the corporate state to address even the minimal grievances of the citizenry, along with the abject failure to remedy the mounting state repression, the chronic unemployment and underemployment, the massive debt peonage that is crippling more than half of Americans, and the loss of hope and widespread despair, means that blowback is inevitable.
“Because revolution is evolution at its boiling point you cannot ‘make’ a real revolution any more than you can hasten the boiling of a tea kettle,” Berkman wrote. “It is the fire underneath that makes it boil: how quickly it will come to the boiling point will depend on how strong the fire is.”
Revolutions, when they erupt, appear to the elites and the establishment to be sudden and unexpected. This is because the real work of revolutionary ferment and consciousness is unseen by the mainstream society, noticed only after it has largely been completed. Throughout history, those who have sought radical change have always had to first discredit the ideas used to prop up ruling elites and construct alternative ideas for society, ideas often embodied in a utopian revolutionary myth. The articulation of a viable socialism as an alternative to corporate tyranny—as attempted by the book “Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA” and the website Popular Resistance—is, for me, paramount. Once ideas shift for a large portion of a population, once the vision of a new society grips the popular imagination, the old regime is finished.
An uprising that is devoid of ideas and vision is never a threat to ruling elites. Social upheaval without clear definition and direction, without ideas behind it, descends into nihilism, random violence and chaos. It consumes itself. This, at its core, is why I disagree with some elements of the Black Bloc anarchists. I believe in strategy. And so did many anarchists, including Berkman, Emma Goldman, Pyotr Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin.
By the time ruling elites are openly defied, there has already been a nearly total loss of faith in the ideas—in our case free market capitalism and globalization—that sustain the structures of the ruling elites. And once enough people get it, a process that can take years, “the slow, quiet, and peaceful social evolution becomes quick, militant, and violent,” as Berkman wrote. “Evolution becomes revolution.”
This is where we are headed. I do not say this because I am a supporter of revolution. I am not. I prefer the piecemeal and incremental reforms of a functioning democracy. I prefer a system in which our social institutions permit the citizenry to nonviolently dismiss those in authority. I prefer a system in which institutions are independent and not captive to corporate power. But we do not live in such a system. Revolt is the only option left. Ruling elites, once the ideas that justify their existence are dead, resort to force. It is their final clutch at power. If a nonviolent popular movement is able to ideologically disarm the bureaucrats, civil servants and police—to get them, in essence, to defect—nonviolent revolution is possible. But if the state can organize effective and prolonged violence against dissent, it spawns reactive revolutionary violence, or what the state calls terrorism. Violent revolutions usually give rise to revolutionaries as ruthless as their adversaries. “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster,” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote. “And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
Violent revolutions are always tragic. I, and many other activists, seek to keep our uprising nonviolent. We seek to spare the country the savagery of domestic violence by both the state and its opponents. There is no guarantee that we will succeed, especially with the corporate state controlling a vast internal security apparatus and militarized police forces. But we must try.
Corporations, freed from all laws, government regulations and internal constraints, are stealing as much as they can, as fast as they can, on the way down. The managers of corporations no longer care about the effects of their pillage. Many expect the systems they are looting to fall apart. They are blinded by personal greed and hubris. They believe their obscene wealth can buy them security and protection. They should have spent a little less time studying management in business school and a little more time studying human nature and human history. They are digging their own graves.
Our shift to corporate totalitarianism, like the shift to all forms of totalitarianism, is incremental. Totalitarian systems ebb and flow, sometimes taking one step back before taking two steps forward, as they erode democratic liberalism. This process is now complete. The “consent of the governed” is a cruel joke. Barack Obama cannot defy corporate power any more than George W. Bush or Bill Clinton could. Unlike his two immediate predecessors, Bush, who is intellectually and probably emotionally impaired, did not understand the totalitarian process abetted by the presidency. Because Clinton and Obama, and their Democratic Party, understand the destructive roles they played and are playing, they must be seen as far more cynical and far more complicit in the ruination of the country. Democratic politicians speak in the familiar “I-feel-your-pain” language of the liberal class while allowing corporations to strip us of personal wealth and power. They are effective masks for corporate power.
The corporate state seeks to maintain the fiction of our personal agency in the political and economic process. As long as we believe we are participants, a lie sustained through massive propaganda campaigns, endless and absurd election cycles and the pageantry of empty political theater, our corporate oligarchs rest easy in their private jets, boardrooms, penthouses and mansions. As the bankruptcy of corporate capitalism and globalization is exposed, the ruling elite are increasingly nervous. They know that if the ideas that justify their power die, they are finished. This is why voices of dissent—as well as spontaneous uprisings such as the Occupy movement—are ruthlessly crushed by the corporate state.
“... [M]any ideas, once held to be true, have come to be regarded as wrong and evil,” Berkman wrote in his essay. “Thus the ideas of the divine right of kings, of slavery and serfdom. There was a time when the whole world believed those institutions to be right, just, and unchangeable. In the measure that those superstitions and false beliefs were fought by advanced thinkers, they became discredited and lost their hold upon the people, and finally the institutions that incorporated those ideas were abolished. Highbrows will tell you that they had ‘outlived’ their ‘usefulness’ and therefore they ‘died.’ But how did they ‘outlive’ their ‘usefulness’? To whom were they useful, and how did they ‘die’? We know already that they were useful only to the master class, and they were done away with by popular uprisings and revolutions.”
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