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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
