http://kulturcritic.wordpress.com/posts/dear-president-obama/
Dear President Obama:
I think you can now be let in on a little secret. The American people are no longer fooled so readily by the rhetoric, the deception, the vague obfuscations, and the false narratives. We no longer believe you, your office, or the media pundits who willingly prostitute themselves, genuflecting before you and your anointed members, as you work relentlessly to paint the rest of the world as Evil. We almost believed ‘Dubya’ when he talked about the Axis of Evil, but things were still fairly comfy then in the homeland, with marginal material pleasures and distractions, and Uncle Sam’s snow-job still awaiting the Snowden revelations. And of course, there was that mysterious crater in the bottom of Manhattan Island as apparent justification of the lies. But now the increasingly negative return on investment in this culture of the Spectacle is finally getting on our nerves, even for those among us who were so long asleep, lulled by the unyielding bombardment of novelty, fanciful marketing promotion (propaganda), and false flag warnings. But now our eyes have been opened.
Yet, the most interesting curiosity concerning our current predicament is that it is not really new. I mean the ideology and the policies you now pursue go back to the very foundations of the American Republic. After all, it was established on the ideology of expansion, of might makes right, and consequently it was built upon the accursed blood of ignorant and evil savages, ‘heathens’ – the indigenous peoples who were found here already by our ‘revered’ forefathers and exterminated or placed into internment camps (a.k.a., Indian Reservations). And we have continued to paint the Other as evil for generations since then. But, like today, the stories we told ourselves and our children were only justifications for the land grab. This ‘great nation’ was cobbled together through a series of wars, invasions and expeditionary acts. Just ask the indigenous population of Hawaii. To this day, we maintain nine hundred military bases in one hundred and thirty foreign countries across the globe. Furthermore, this nation constantly puts other global leaders in play, just so we can continue to grab more and more… more than enough to keep up this extravagant lifestyle, even if only for a little while longer. From broken promises (treaties), to dictators installed and then toppled… we do it all. We are a one-stop-chop-shop. And we will make friend out of foe, or foe out of friend whenever it suits our greed or our fancy: the Right Sektor, Al Qaeda, Islamic Jihadists, African War Lords, Latin Dictators, Mercenaries, or Anarchistic Insurgents, … it does not matter to us, so long as they accept our terms of payment, and for as long as they accept them.
So, now you wish yet again to paint Vladimir Putin (Uncle Vovik) as the Evil One, the unrepentant and unsubmissive Other. I understand. But this tendency is not yours alone; it really goes back millennia, back to the origins of our current civilization. Just as the creeping imperial ambitions of Xerxes, the apparently hospitable but psychopathic Persian god-king, threw his entire army against an un-submissive Greek king Leonidas and his three hundred militaristic Spartan soldiers. So the narrative of the Persian Immortals justified Xerxes aggressions, much as your narrative justifies unchecked American (although largely covert) aggressions against Islam, Russia, Iran, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the rest of MENA.
But, Mr. President, perhaps the evil you see in the Other is merely a reflection of the evil inhabiting you, your team, and the hierarchy they represent. Yet, you prefer to objectify that evil, to make it Other, turning it into something or someone confronting you. Yet, it might help if you could acknowledge that the evil you see around you is the very evil you yourself commit and are complicit in. If it is not resident in one leader, you find it resident in another. Why is that? And why does this country have NGOs and military bases peopling the entire globe? And why do you personally pursue anyone who wishes to disclose the truth concerning the evils you endorse or encourage? Why do you secretly spy on all your countrymen and women, as well as your partners and challengers? Are we all evil in your eyes, or do we merely represent potential evil? If you see evil or its potentiality all around you, then this may only be a reflection of your own enslavement to the false symbolism of evil projected by your evil soul. A projection of some disconcerting, nay malignant pathology. All the while, your paid news crews and talking heads keep the good citizens of this land glued to the spectacle of a lost Malaysian jetliner. What a pity, sir!
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
Sunday, March 16, 2014
SC122-3
http://scgnews.com/the-ukraine-crisis-what-youre-not-being-told
The European and American public are being systematically lied to about the Ukraine crisis
In this video we're going to provide you with compelling evidence that the crimes against humanity committed in Kiev earlier this year were in fact committed by the new coalition government and that officials in the E.U. and the United States knew full well who committed these crimes and that they are protecting and financially supporting the real criminals.
On February 20th of 2013 the world was shocked by video footage of snipers firing on protesters in Kiev Ukraine. Twenty one people were murdered, and it was widely assumed that President Victor Yanukovich and his supporters were behind the attacks. However a phone conversation between EU foreign policy chief Cathy Ashton and Estonia's foreign minister Urmas Paet leaked to the public on March 5th reveals that the snipers in were actually from the new coalition government, and that Western diplomats knew this and covered it up.
Urmas Paet: "All the evidence shows that the people who were killed by snipers from both sides, among police men and people in the street, that they were the same snipers killing people from both sides."
Cathy Ashton: "Well that's, yeah..."
Urmas Paet: "And she also showed me some photos and she said that has medical doctor, she can say that it is the same handwriting..."
Cathy Ashton: "Yeah..."
Urmas Paet: "Same type of bullets... and it's really disturbing that now the new coalition, that they don't want to investigate what exactly happened. So that there is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers, it was not Yanukovich, but it was somebody from the new coalition."
The Ukraine Crisis - What You're Not Being Told
12.Mar.2014 | SCG The European and American public are being systematically lied to about the Ukraine crisis. .In this video we're going to provide you with compelling evidence that the crimes against humanity committed in Kiev earlier this year were in fact committed by the new coalition government and that officials in the E.U. and the United States knew full well who committed these crimes and that they are protecting and financially supporting the real criminals.
On February 20th of 2013 the world was shocked by video footage of snipers firing on protesters in Kiev Ukraine. Twenty one people were murdered, and it was widely assumed that President Victor Yanukovich and his supporters were behind the attacks. However a phone conversation between EU foreign policy chief Cathy Ashton and Estonia's foreign minister Urmas Paet leaked to the public on March 5th reveals that the snipers in were actually from the new coalition government, and that Western diplomats knew this and covered it up.
The short version of the leaked call:
Urmas Paet: "All the evidence shows that the people who were killed by snipers from both sides, among police men and people in the street, that they were the same snipers killing people from both sides."
Cathy Ashton: "Well that's, yeah..."
Urmas Paet: "And she also showed me some photos and she said that has medical doctor, she can say that it is the same handwriting..."
Cathy Ashton: "Yeah..."
Urmas Paet: "Same type of bullets... and it's really disturbing that now the new coalition, that they don't want to investigate what exactly happened. So that there is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers, it was not Yanukovich, but it was somebody from the new coalition."
The long version of the leaked call:
For some reason the U.S. media didn't think that little detail was worth covering.
Related: The Lines of Economic Warfare Are Being Drawn & The U.S. Is Not Going to Win
But wait… I thought the opposition were peaceful activists who just wanted a chance to join the European Union.
Well yeah, that's the official narrative that the U.S. media outlets are peddling, but real story is much more ominous. It turns out that the most powerful and influential contingent in the opposition is a coalition of literal fascists and Neo-Nazis, and they aren't peaceful. In fact they are extremely brutal.
The most prominent among these groups is an organization called Svoboda. The Svoboda party which traces its roots to the Ukrainian partisan army of World War II, was loosely allied with Nazi Germany. Until 2004, Svoboda had been called the Social-Nationalist Party, a deliberate reference to the National Socialism of the Nazis.
We're not throwing the term Neo-Nazi around as an empty slur here. The leader of Svoboda, Oleh Tyahnybok, has openly targeted Jews and ethnic Russians in Ukraine for many years. In 2004 he was kicked out of Viktor Yushenko's government for a speech calling for Ukrainians to fight against a "Muscovite-Jewish mafia", and in 2005 he signed his name to an open letter to the leadership of Ukraine entitled "Stop the Criminal Activities of Organised Jewry".
Related: BREAKING: Leaked Phone Call Reveals New Coalition Government Was Behind Sniper Shootings in Ukraine
And none of this was a secret. The BBC was already reporting on the danger that Svoboda's rise posed back in 2012, and the EU passed a resolution that same year condemning Svoboda, as "racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic". Yet somehow the U.S. government thought it was appropriate to back these extremists.
This is a picture of Victoria Nuland from the U.S. State Department meeting with Oleh Tyahnybok in February, and this is a picture of Senator John McCain sharing a stage with Tyahnybok in December.
Related: Ukraine: Armed Men Seize Crimean Parliament Building & Raise Russian Flag - Russia Scrambles Fighter Jets At Border
Why would the U.S. government work with Neo-Nazis?
Because they thought they could control the situation. They thought they could install their puppets behind the scenes and manipulate the situation in their favor. This isn't a theory. That same Victoria Nulland who met with Svoboda in February was caught in another leaked phone call discussing who would they would put in power.
The mainstream media tried to draw your attention away from the important part of this conversation by focusing on the fact that she used a cuss word when referring to the E.U.
The U.S. government thought they could control this beast. But they were wrong. Svoboda and the Right Sektor are not toys to be played with. These groups are armed, they're forceful, and they view this crisis as an opportunity to reshape Ukraine in their own image.
This video shows a prominent leader from the Right Sektor, Alexander Muzychko, brandishing an Ak-47 in parliament letting them know who is in charge.
This is the same Alexander Muzychko who publicly vowed to fight "against Jews communists, and Russian scum" for as long as he lives.
Apparently the U.S. government has been a little slow to catch on to the fact that their hand has been exposed. In March a senior U.S. official told Reuters that "Since entering the Ukrainian Parliament in October 2012, the Svoboda leadership has been working to take their party in a more moderate direction and to become a modern, European mainstream political party, The leadership has been much more vigilant about expelling or otherwise punishing individual members who engage in xenophobic behavior or rhetoric."
Related: Ukrainian War: Russian Council Unanimously Approves Military Deployment - Seizes Two Airports
So it's ok to use known Neo-Nazi groups to topple a government as long as their leaders keep their people from saying anything stupid in front of cameras for a few months? The reality of the matter is that as ridiculous as this assertion makes Washington look, they are trapped. They can't deny that Svoboda and the Right Sektor are running the coalition government when Svoboda holds five senior posts including the deputy prime minister position and the Right Sektor's Dmytro Yarosh is now the country's Deputy Secretary of National Security.
But what about that dramatic video "I am a Ukrainian" that went viral as this crisis was unfolding. It was so compelling, so heart wrenching. Yeah, but who made it? Did you notice the link in the description? Awhispertoaroar... who are these people? Oh look, a link in the description. Let's click it. They have a website and a behind the scenes section. Oh it list the film makers. Who's this here? Larry Diamond, inspiration and executive producer. He's also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the National Endowment for Democracy and an advisor for the U.S. State Department. You know the funny thing about the National Endowment for Regime Change Democracy is that even though they call themselves an NGO they get virtually all of it's money from the U.S. federal government. You can verify this by downloading their annual financial disclosures. I'm sure it's just a coincidence that the NED has been pouring massive amounts of money into Ukraine to "strengthen democracy and civil society"?
Related: Russia Threatens to Drop The Dollar and Crash The U.S. Economy if Sanctions Are Imposed - Obama Signs Sanctions Anyway
That sound nice doesn't it? Democracy... civil society. Of course by now you've realized that when they talk about spreading democracy what they really mean is regime change, and they are willing to work with the most despicable elements when it's expedient.
It's exactly the same game they played in Syria. The U.S. government funded known extremists, literal terrorist organizations who have been documented massacring whole towns. They gave them money, they gave them weapons, and even after those extremists used sarin gas on thousands of civilians and got caught by the U.N., Washington still covered for them. Even to this day they are still funding those murderers, they are still training them, and they are still sending them weapons. There's a word for this kind of activity: state backed terrorism.
Related: Crimean Parliament Votes to Secede from Ukraine - U.S. Officials Preach about Constitutionality
But the situation in Ukraine didn't unfold as planned. The parliament of Crimea, in the South of Ukraine voted to secede, and they are putting the decision up for a public referendum. The U.S. claims that this referendum is "unconstitutional" and says they won't recognize Crimea's decision as legitimate regardless of the outcome. So a foreign backed Neo-Nazi coup is constitutional, but a declaration of independence placed to a general vote is not? Seriously? That's the best you guys can do? Who writes these scripts?
Take a step back and look at the pattern.
Related: China Warns West that Sanctions on Russia Could Spiral into Chaos - U.S. & E.U. Indicate Sanctions to Begin Monday
The real stakes of this drama are much bigger than Ukraine or Syria and these are not random and isolated events. We are witnessing the final stages of a geopolitical chess game that is designed to end in war. But in order to succeed they need to convince you, the public, that they didn't see this coming. They need you to believe that the other side was the aggressor. They are counting on you not paying attention to the fact that Obama signed an order targeting Russia with sanctions this past week and revoking the visas of a number of Russian diplomats. They are counting on you not noticing that Russia had warned that such a move would result in Russia dropping the dollar and encouraging others to do so as well. They're counting on you being too naive to realize that economic warfare invites physical warfare. They think you're too stupid to connect the dots.
Prove them wrong.
The European and American public are being systematically lied to about the Ukraine crisis
In this video we're going to provide you with compelling evidence that the crimes against humanity committed in Kiev earlier this year were in fact committed by the new coalition government and that officials in the E.U. and the United States knew full well who committed these crimes and that they are protecting and financially supporting the real criminals.
On February 20th of 2013 the world was shocked by video footage of snipers firing on protesters in Kiev Ukraine. Twenty one people were murdered, and it was widely assumed that President Victor Yanukovich and his supporters were behind the attacks. However a phone conversation between EU foreign policy chief Cathy Ashton and Estonia's foreign minister Urmas Paet leaked to the public on March 5th reveals that the snipers in were actually from the new coalition government, and that Western diplomats knew this and covered it up.
Urmas Paet: "All the evidence shows that the people who were killed by snipers from both sides, among police men and people in the street, that they were the same snipers killing people from both sides."
Cathy Ashton: "Well that's, yeah..."
Urmas Paet: "And she also showed me some photos and she said that has medical doctor, she can say that it is the same handwriting..."
Cathy Ashton: "Yeah..."
Urmas Paet: "Same type of bullets... and it's really disturbing that now the new coalition, that they don't want to investigate what exactly happened. So that there is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers, it was not Yanukovich, but it was somebody from the new coalition."
The Ukraine Crisis - What You're Not Being Told
12.Mar.2014 | SCG The European and American public are being systematically lied to about the Ukraine crisis. .In this video we're going to provide you with compelling evidence that the crimes against humanity committed in Kiev earlier this year were in fact committed by the new coalition government and that officials in the E.U. and the United States knew full well who committed these crimes and that they are protecting and financially supporting the real criminals.
On February 20th of 2013 the world was shocked by video footage of snipers firing on protesters in Kiev Ukraine. Twenty one people were murdered, and it was widely assumed that President Victor Yanukovich and his supporters were behind the attacks. However a phone conversation between EU foreign policy chief Cathy Ashton and Estonia's foreign minister Urmas Paet leaked to the public on March 5th reveals that the snipers in were actually from the new coalition government, and that Western diplomats knew this and covered it up.
The short version of the leaked call:
Urmas Paet: "All the evidence shows that the people who were killed by snipers from both sides, among police men and people in the street, that they were the same snipers killing people from both sides."
Cathy Ashton: "Well that's, yeah..."
Urmas Paet: "And she also showed me some photos and she said that has medical doctor, she can say that it is the same handwriting..."
Cathy Ashton: "Yeah..."
Urmas Paet: "Same type of bullets... and it's really disturbing that now the new coalition, that they don't want to investigate what exactly happened. So that there is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers, it was not Yanukovich, but it was somebody from the new coalition."
The long version of the leaked call:
For some reason the U.S. media didn't think that little detail was worth covering.
Related: The Lines of Economic Warfare Are Being Drawn & The U.S. Is Not Going to Win
But wait… I thought the opposition were peaceful activists who just wanted a chance to join the European Union.
Well yeah, that's the official narrative that the U.S. media outlets are peddling, but real story is much more ominous. It turns out that the most powerful and influential contingent in the opposition is a coalition of literal fascists and Neo-Nazis, and they aren't peaceful. In fact they are extremely brutal.
The most prominent among these groups is an organization called Svoboda. The Svoboda party which traces its roots to the Ukrainian partisan army of World War II, was loosely allied with Nazi Germany. Until 2004, Svoboda had been called the Social-Nationalist Party, a deliberate reference to the National Socialism of the Nazis.
We're not throwing the term Neo-Nazi around as an empty slur here. The leader of Svoboda, Oleh Tyahnybok, has openly targeted Jews and ethnic Russians in Ukraine for many years. In 2004 he was kicked out of Viktor Yushenko's government for a speech calling for Ukrainians to fight against a "Muscovite-Jewish mafia", and in 2005 he signed his name to an open letter to the leadership of Ukraine entitled "Stop the Criminal Activities of Organised Jewry".
Related: BREAKING: Leaked Phone Call Reveals New Coalition Government Was Behind Sniper Shootings in Ukraine
And none of this was a secret. The BBC was already reporting on the danger that Svoboda's rise posed back in 2012, and the EU passed a resolution that same year condemning Svoboda, as "racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic". Yet somehow the U.S. government thought it was appropriate to back these extremists.
This is a picture of Victoria Nuland from the U.S. State Department meeting with Oleh Tyahnybok in February, and this is a picture of Senator John McCain sharing a stage with Tyahnybok in December.
Related: Ukraine: Armed Men Seize Crimean Parliament Building & Raise Russian Flag - Russia Scrambles Fighter Jets At Border
Why would the U.S. government work with Neo-Nazis?
Because they thought they could control the situation. They thought they could install their puppets behind the scenes and manipulate the situation in their favor. This isn't a theory. That same Victoria Nulland who met with Svoboda in February was caught in another leaked phone call discussing who would they would put in power.
The mainstream media tried to draw your attention away from the important part of this conversation by focusing on the fact that she used a cuss word when referring to the E.U.
The U.S. government thought they could control this beast. But they were wrong. Svoboda and the Right Sektor are not toys to be played with. These groups are armed, they're forceful, and they view this crisis as an opportunity to reshape Ukraine in their own image.
This video shows a prominent leader from the Right Sektor, Alexander Muzychko, brandishing an Ak-47 in parliament letting them know who is in charge.
This is the same Alexander Muzychko who publicly vowed to fight "against Jews communists, and Russian scum" for as long as he lives.
Apparently the U.S. government has been a little slow to catch on to the fact that their hand has been exposed. In March a senior U.S. official told Reuters that "Since entering the Ukrainian Parliament in October 2012, the Svoboda leadership has been working to take their party in a more moderate direction and to become a modern, European mainstream political party, The leadership has been much more vigilant about expelling or otherwise punishing individual members who engage in xenophobic behavior or rhetoric."
Related: Ukrainian War: Russian Council Unanimously Approves Military Deployment - Seizes Two Airports
So it's ok to use known Neo-Nazi groups to topple a government as long as their leaders keep their people from saying anything stupid in front of cameras for a few months? The reality of the matter is that as ridiculous as this assertion makes Washington look, they are trapped. They can't deny that Svoboda and the Right Sektor are running the coalition government when Svoboda holds five senior posts including the deputy prime minister position and the Right Sektor's Dmytro Yarosh is now the country's Deputy Secretary of National Security.
But what about that dramatic video "I am a Ukrainian" that went viral as this crisis was unfolding. It was so compelling, so heart wrenching. Yeah, but who made it? Did you notice the link in the description? Awhispertoaroar... who are these people? Oh look, a link in the description. Let's click it. They have a website and a behind the scenes section. Oh it list the film makers. Who's this here? Larry Diamond, inspiration and executive producer. He's also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the National Endowment for Democracy and an advisor for the U.S. State Department. You know the funny thing about the National Endowment for Regime Change Democracy is that even though they call themselves an NGO they get virtually all of it's money from the U.S. federal government. You can verify this by downloading their annual financial disclosures. I'm sure it's just a coincidence that the NED has been pouring massive amounts of money into Ukraine to "strengthen democracy and civil society"?
Related: Russia Threatens to Drop The Dollar and Crash The U.S. Economy if Sanctions Are Imposed - Obama Signs Sanctions Anyway
That sound nice doesn't it? Democracy... civil society. Of course by now you've realized that when they talk about spreading democracy what they really mean is regime change, and they are willing to work with the most despicable elements when it's expedient.
It's exactly the same game they played in Syria. The U.S. government funded known extremists, literal terrorist organizations who have been documented massacring whole towns. They gave them money, they gave them weapons, and even after those extremists used sarin gas on thousands of civilians and got caught by the U.N., Washington still covered for them. Even to this day they are still funding those murderers, they are still training them, and they are still sending them weapons. There's a word for this kind of activity: state backed terrorism.
Related: Crimean Parliament Votes to Secede from Ukraine - U.S. Officials Preach about Constitutionality
But the situation in Ukraine didn't unfold as planned. The parliament of Crimea, in the South of Ukraine voted to secede, and they are putting the decision up for a public referendum. The U.S. claims that this referendum is "unconstitutional" and says they won't recognize Crimea's decision as legitimate regardless of the outcome. So a foreign backed Neo-Nazi coup is constitutional, but a declaration of independence placed to a general vote is not? Seriously? That's the best you guys can do? Who writes these scripts?
Take a step back and look at the pattern.
Related: China Warns West that Sanctions on Russia Could Spiral into Chaos - U.S. & E.U. Indicate Sanctions to Begin Monday
The real stakes of this drama are much bigger than Ukraine or Syria and these are not random and isolated events. We are witnessing the final stages of a geopolitical chess game that is designed to end in war. But in order to succeed they need to convince you, the public, that they didn't see this coming. They need you to believe that the other side was the aggressor. They are counting on you not paying attention to the fact that Obama signed an order targeting Russia with sanctions this past week and revoking the visas of a number of Russian diplomats. They are counting on you not noticing that Russia had warned that such a move would result in Russia dropping the dollar and encouraging others to do so as well. They're counting on you being too naive to realize that economic warfare invites physical warfare. They think you're too stupid to connect the dots.
Prove them wrong.
Friday, March 14, 2014
SC122-2
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/
The Crocodiles of Reality
I've suggested in several previous posts that the peak oil debate may be approaching a turning point—one of those shifts in the collective conversation in which topics that have been shut out for years or decades finally succeed in crashing the party, and other topics that have gotten more than their quota of attention during that time get put out to pasture or sent to the glue factory. I’d like to talk for a moment about some of the reasons I think that’s about to happen, and in the process, give a name to one of the common but generally unmentionable features of contemporary economic life.
We can begin with the fracking bubble, that misbegotten brat fathered by Wall Street’s love of Ponzi schemes on Main Street’s stark terror of facing up to the end of the age of cheap abundant energy. That bubble has at least two significant functions in today’s world. The first function, as discussed in these essays already, is to fill an otherwise vacant niche in the string of giddy speculative delusions that began with the stock market boom and bust of 1987 and is still going strong today. As with previous examples, the promoters of the fracking bubble dangled the prospect of what used to be normal returns on investment in front of the eager and clueless investors with which America seems to be so richly stocked these days. These then leapt at the bait, and handed their money over to the tender mercies of the same Wall Street investment firms who gave us Pets.com and zero-doc mortgages.
You might think, dear reader, that after a quarter century of this, there might be a shortage of chumps willing to fall for such schemes. Whatever else might be depleting, though, the supply of lambs eager to be led to that particular slaughter seems to be keeping up handily with the demand. We live in what will doubtless be remembered as the Golden Age of financial fraud, an era of stunning fiscal idiocy in which even the most blatant swindles can count on drawing a crowd of suckers begging to have their money taken from them. Millennia from now, the grifters, con men, and bunco artists of civilizations yet unborn will look back in awe at our time, and wish that they, too, might be fortunate enough to live in an era when tens of millions of investors passionately wanted to believe that the laws of economics, thermodynamics, and plain common sense must surely be suspended for their benefit.
To some extent, in other words, the fracking bubble is simply one more reminder that Ben Franklin’s adage about a fool and his money has not lost any of its relevance since the old rascal slipped it into the pages of Poor Richard’s Almanac. Still, there’s more going on here than the ruthless fleecing of the unwary that’s the lifeblood of every healthy market economy. The fracking bubble, as most of my readers will be well aware, has not only served as an excuse for ordinary speculative larceny; it’s also provided a very large number of people with an excuse to scrunch up their eyes, stuff their fingers in their ears, shout "La, la, la, I can’t hear you," and thus keep clinging to the absurd faith that limitless resources really can be extracted from a finite planet.
For the last three or four years, accordingly, the fracking bubble has been the most common item brandished by practitioners of peak oil denial as evidence that petroleum production can too keep on increasing forever, so there! The very modest additions to global petroleum production that resulted from hydrofracturing shales in North Dakota and Texas got talked up into an imaginary tidal wave of crude oil that would supposedly sweep all before it, and not incidentally restore the United States to its long-vanished status as the world’s premier oil producer. All that made good copy for the bunco artists mentioned earlier, to be sure, but it also fed into the futile attempts at denial that have taken the place of a sane energy policy in most industrial societies.
The problem with this fond fantasy is that the numbers don’t even begin to add up. The latest figures, neatly summarized by Ron Patterson in a recent post, show just how bad the situation has become. Each year, on average, the oil industry has had had to increase its investments by 10% over the previous year to get the same amount of oil out of the ground. Even $100-a-barrel oil prices won’t support that kind of soaring overhead cost for long, and the problem has been made worse by the belated discovery that many of the shale beds ballyhooed in recent years don’t have anything like as much oil as their promoters claimed. As a result, oil companies around the world are cutting back on capital investment and selling off assets. That’s not the behavior of an industry poised on the brink of a new age of abundance; it’s the behavior of an industry that has just slammed face first into hard supply limits and is backing away groggily from the impact site while trying to stanch the bleeding from deep fiscal cuts.
As a result, with mathematical certainty, a great many overpriced assets are going to lose most of their paper value in the years ahead of us, a great many businesses that have made their money providing goods and services to the drilling industry are going to downsize sharply or simply go bankrupt, a great many wells that can’t make money even at exorbitant oil prices are going to be shut in or go undrilled in the first place, and a very, very great many people who convinced themselves that they were going to get rich by investing in fracking are going to end up poor. It’s not going to be pretty. Exactly what effect this is going to have on the price of oil is an interesting question; my guess, though it’s only a guess, is that a couple of years from now the price of oil will spike, possibly to the $250-$300 a barrel range, then crash to $60 a barrel, and slowly recover to $175 or so over a period of several years.
This has a great deal of relevance to the project of this blog. The last time petroleum production failed to keep pace with potential demand, and the price of oil spiked accordingly, peak oil came in from the fringes and got discussed publicly in the pages of newspapers of record. That window of opportunity gaped open from 2004 to 2010, roughly speaking, and during that period a great deal got accomplished. That was when peak oil stopped being a concern of the furthest fringe and found an audience in many corners of contemporary alternative culture, when local groups—some under the Transition Town banner, others outside it—began to organize around the imminence of peak oil, and when books on resource depletion and its consequences found a market for the first time since the early 1980s.
Those are significant gains. It’s true, of course, that these achievements didn’t make peak oil go away, or find some gimmick that will keep the lifestyles of the industrial world’s more privileged inmates rolling merrily along for the foreseeable future. What sometimes gets forgotten is that neither of those things was ever possible in the first place. The hard facts of our predicament have not changed a bit: the age of cheap abundant energy is ending; the economic systems, social structures, and lifestyle habits that were made possible by that temporary condition are accordingly going away, and nothing anyone can do will bring them back again, not now, not ever.
It’s worth being precise here: for the rest of the time our species endures, we will have to deal with much more sharply constrained energy supplies than we’ve had handy over the last few centuries. That doesn’t mean that our descendants will be condemned to huddle in caves until the jaws of extinction close around them; I’ve argued at quite some length in one of my books that the endpoint of the mess we’re currently in, centuries from now, will most likely be the emergence of ecotechnic societies—societies that maintain relatively high technology on the modest energy and resource inputs that can be provided by renewable sources. I’ve suggested, there and elsewhere, that there’s quite a bit that can be done here and now to lay the foundations for the ecotechnic societies of the far future. I’ve also tried to point out that there’s quite a bit that can be done here and now to make the unraveling of the age of abundance less traumatic than it will otherwise be.
To my mind, those are worthwhile goals. What makes them difficult is simply that any meaningful attempt to pursue them has to start by accepting that the age of cheap abundant energy is ending, that the lifestyles that age made possible are ending with it, and that wasting all those fossil fuels on what amounts to a drunken binge three centuries long might not have been a very smart idea in the first place. Any one of those would be a bitter pill to take; all three of them together are far more than most people nowadays are willing to swallow, and so it’s not surprising that so much effort over the last few decades have gone into pretending that the squalid excesses of contemporary culture can somehow keep rolling along in the teeth of all the evidence to the contrary.
The frantic attempts to sustain the unsustainable driven by this pretense have done much to make the present day such a halcyon time for swindles of every description. Not all of those, however, have taken aim at the wallets of what we might as well call the lumpen-investmentariat, that class of people who have money to invest and not a clue in their heads that Wall Street might not have their best interests at heart. Some of the most colorful flops of recent years have instead attracted money from a different though equally gullible source: government subsidies for new energy technologies.
Those of my readers who were part of the peak oil scene a decade ago, for example, may remember the days when ethanol made from American corn was going to save us all. Many of the same claims more recently deployed to inflate the fracking bubble were used to justify what was described, at the time, as America’s burgeoning new ethanol industry, but the target for these exercises was somewhat different. A certain amount of investment money from the clueless did find its way into the hands of ethanol-plant promoters, to be sure, but the financial core of the new industry was a flurry of federal mandates and federal and state subsidies, which in theory existed to lead America to a bright new energy future, and in practice existed to convince the voters that politicians really were doing something about gasoline prices that had just risen to the unheard-of level of $2 a gallon.
You won’t hear much about America’s burgeoning new ethanol industry these days. A substantial fraction of the ethanol plants that were subsidized by governments and lavishly praised by politicians a decade ago are bankrupt and shuttered today, having failed to turn a profit or, in some cases, cover the costs of construction. The critics who pointed out that the burgeoning new industry made no economic sense, and that making ethanol from corn uses more energy than you get from burning the ethanol, turned out to be dead right, and the critics who dismissed them as naysayers turned out to be dead wrong. Still, the ethanol plants had accomplished the same two functions as the fracking bubble did later: it sucked a great deal of money into the hands of its promoters, and it helped everyone else pretend for a while that the end of the age of cheap abundant energy wasn’t going to happen after all.
It’s hardly the only example of the phenomenon. Since I don’t want green-energy proponents to feel unduly picked on, let’s turn to the other side of the energy picture and take a look at nuclear fusion. Since the 1950s, a sizeable body of nuclear physicists have kept themselves gainfully employed and their laboratories stocked and staffed by proclaiming nuclear fusion as the wave of the future. In just another twenty years, we’ve repeatedly been told, clean, safe nuclear fusion plants will be churning out endless supplies of energy, if only the government subsidies keep pouring in. After sixty years of unbroken failure, even politicians are starting to have second thoughts, but the fusion-power industry keeps at it, pursuing a project that, as respected science writer Charles Seife pointed out trenchantly in Sun In A Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking, has more in common with the quest for perpetual motion than its overeager fans like to think.
Every few years the media carries yet another enthusiastic announcement that some new breakthrough has happened in the quest for fusion power. Now of course it’s worth noting that none of these widely ballyhooed breakthroughs ever amount to a working fusion reactor capable of putting power into the grid, but let’s let that pass for now, because the point I want to make is a different one. As I pointed out in a post here last year, the question that matters about fusion is not whether fusion power is technically feasible, but whether it’s economically viable. That’s not a question anyone in the fusion research industry wants to discuss, and there are good reasons for that.
The ITER project in Europe offers a glimpse at the answer. ITER is the most complex and also the most expensive machine ever built by human beings—the latest estimate of the total cost has recently gone up from $14 billion to $17 billion, and if past performance is anything to go by, it will have gone up a good deal more before the scheduled completion in 2020. That stratospheric price tag results from the simple fact that six decades of hard work by physicists around the world, exploring scores of different approaches to fusion, have shown that any less expensive approach won’t produce a sustained fusion reaction. While commercial fusion reactors would doubtless cost less than ITER, it’s already clear that they won’t cost enough less to make fusion power economically viable. Even if ITER succeeds in creating its "sun in a bottle," in other words, that fact will be an expensive laboratory curiosity, not a solution to the world’s energy needs.
My more attentive readers will doubtless have noticed that the flaw in the current round of glowing prophecies of a future powered by fusion plants is the same as the flaw in the equally glowing sales pitches for corn-based ethanol fuel plants a decade ago. Turning corn into ethanol, and using the ethanol to fuel cars and trucks, is technically feasible; it just doesn’t happen to be economically viable. In the same way, whether fusion power is technically feasible or not may still be up in the air, but the question of its economic viability is not. The gap between technical capacity and economic reality provides the ecological niche in which both these projects make their home, and a great many other alleged solutions to the energy crisis of our time inhabit that same niche.
I’d like to suggest that it’s high time to put a name to the technological fauna that fill this role in our social ecology, and I even have a name to propose. I think we should call them "subsidy dumpsters."
A subsidy dumpster, if I may venture on a definition, is an energy technology that looks like a viable option so long as nobody pays attention to the economic realities. Because it’s technically feasible, or at least hasn’t yet been proven to be unfeasible, promoters can brandish enthusiastic estimates of how much energy it will yield if only the government provides adequate funding, and point to laboratory tests of technical feasibility as evidence that so tempting a bait is within reach. The promoters of such schemes can also rely on the foam-flecked ravings of economists, who have proven to be so stunningly clueless about energy in recent years, and they can also count on one of the pervasive blind spots in modern thinking: the almost visceral inability of most people these days to think in terms of whole systems. Armed with these advantages, they descend upon politicians, and if energy costs are an irritation to the public—and these days, energy costs are always an irritation to the public—the politicians duly cough up a subsidy so they can claim to be doing something about the energy problem.
Once the subsidy dumpster gets its funding, it goes through however many twists and turns its promoters can manage before economic realities take their inevitable toll. If the dumpster in question has to compete in the marketplace, as fuel ethanol plants did, the normal result is a series of messy bankruptcies as soon as the government money runs short. If it can be shielded from the market, preferably by always being almost ready for commercial deployment but never actually quite getting there—the fusion-research industry has this one down pat, though it’s fair to say that the laws of nature seem to be giving them a great deal of help—the dumpster can keep on being filled with subsidies for as long as the prospect of an imminent breakthrough can be dangled in front of politicians and the public. Since most people these days consistently mistake technical feasibility for economic viability, there’s no shortage of easy marks for this sort of sales pitch.
There are plenty of subsidy dumpsters in the energy field just now. What makes this all the more unfortunate is that quite a few of them are based on technologies that could be used in less self-defeating ways. Solar power, to name only one example, could make a huge dent in America’s energy needs, if the available resources focused on proven technologies such as solar water heaters; once this sensible approach is replaced by attempts to claim that we can keep the grid powered by paving some substantial fraction of Nevada with solar PV cells, though, we’re in subsidy-dumpster territory, as a recent study of Spain’s much-lauded solar program has shown. Renewable energy is a viable option so long as its sharp limits of concentration and intermittency are kept in mind; ignore those, and pretend that we can keep on living today’s extravagant lifestyles on a basis that won’t support them, and you’ve got a perfect recipe for a subsidy dumpster.
Now it’s only fair to point out that the energy issue is far from the only dimension of modern life that attracts subsidy dumpsters. Name a current crisis here in America—joblessness, urban blight, decaying infrastructure, and the list goes on—and there are plenty of subsidy dumpsters to be found, some empty and rusting like yesterday’s ethanol plants, some soaking up government funds like the ITER project, and many more that are still only a twinkle in the eyes of their eager promoters. Still, I’d like to suggest that subsidy dumpsters in the energy field have a particular importance just now.
The end of the age of cheap abundant energy requires that we stop using anything like as much energy as we’ve been using in recent decades. Any approach to dealing with the crisis of our age that doesn’t start by using much less energy, in other words, simply isn’t serious. The parade of subsidy dumpsters being hawked to politicians these days is merely one more attempt to refuse to take our predicament as seriously as it deserves, and thus serves mostly as a way to make that predicament even worse than it has to be. By and large, to borrow a neatly Pharaonic turn of phrase from one of my longtime readers—tip of the archdruidical hat to Robin Datta—that’s the trouble with spending all your time splashing around in the waters of denial; all that happens, in the final analysis, is that you attract the attention of the crocodiles of reality.
The Crocodiles of Reality
I've suggested in several previous posts that the peak oil debate may be approaching a turning point—one of those shifts in the collective conversation in which topics that have been shut out for years or decades finally succeed in crashing the party, and other topics that have gotten more than their quota of attention during that time get put out to pasture or sent to the glue factory. I’d like to talk for a moment about some of the reasons I think that’s about to happen, and in the process, give a name to one of the common but generally unmentionable features of contemporary economic life.
We can begin with the fracking bubble, that misbegotten brat fathered by Wall Street’s love of Ponzi schemes on Main Street’s stark terror of facing up to the end of the age of cheap abundant energy. That bubble has at least two significant functions in today’s world. The first function, as discussed in these essays already, is to fill an otherwise vacant niche in the string of giddy speculative delusions that began with the stock market boom and bust of 1987 and is still going strong today. As with previous examples, the promoters of the fracking bubble dangled the prospect of what used to be normal returns on investment in front of the eager and clueless investors with which America seems to be so richly stocked these days. These then leapt at the bait, and handed their money over to the tender mercies of the same Wall Street investment firms who gave us Pets.com and zero-doc mortgages.
You might think, dear reader, that after a quarter century of this, there might be a shortage of chumps willing to fall for such schemes. Whatever else might be depleting, though, the supply of lambs eager to be led to that particular slaughter seems to be keeping up handily with the demand. We live in what will doubtless be remembered as the Golden Age of financial fraud, an era of stunning fiscal idiocy in which even the most blatant swindles can count on drawing a crowd of suckers begging to have their money taken from them. Millennia from now, the grifters, con men, and bunco artists of civilizations yet unborn will look back in awe at our time, and wish that they, too, might be fortunate enough to live in an era when tens of millions of investors passionately wanted to believe that the laws of economics, thermodynamics, and plain common sense must surely be suspended for their benefit.
To some extent, in other words, the fracking bubble is simply one more reminder that Ben Franklin’s adage about a fool and his money has not lost any of its relevance since the old rascal slipped it into the pages of Poor Richard’s Almanac. Still, there’s more going on here than the ruthless fleecing of the unwary that’s the lifeblood of every healthy market economy. The fracking bubble, as most of my readers will be well aware, has not only served as an excuse for ordinary speculative larceny; it’s also provided a very large number of people with an excuse to scrunch up their eyes, stuff their fingers in their ears, shout "La, la, la, I can’t hear you," and thus keep clinging to the absurd faith that limitless resources really can be extracted from a finite planet.
For the last three or four years, accordingly, the fracking bubble has been the most common item brandished by practitioners of peak oil denial as evidence that petroleum production can too keep on increasing forever, so there! The very modest additions to global petroleum production that resulted from hydrofracturing shales in North Dakota and Texas got talked up into an imaginary tidal wave of crude oil that would supposedly sweep all before it, and not incidentally restore the United States to its long-vanished status as the world’s premier oil producer. All that made good copy for the bunco artists mentioned earlier, to be sure, but it also fed into the futile attempts at denial that have taken the place of a sane energy policy in most industrial societies.
The problem with this fond fantasy is that the numbers don’t even begin to add up. The latest figures, neatly summarized by Ron Patterson in a recent post, show just how bad the situation has become. Each year, on average, the oil industry has had had to increase its investments by 10% over the previous year to get the same amount of oil out of the ground. Even $100-a-barrel oil prices won’t support that kind of soaring overhead cost for long, and the problem has been made worse by the belated discovery that many of the shale beds ballyhooed in recent years don’t have anything like as much oil as their promoters claimed. As a result, oil companies around the world are cutting back on capital investment and selling off assets. That’s not the behavior of an industry poised on the brink of a new age of abundance; it’s the behavior of an industry that has just slammed face first into hard supply limits and is backing away groggily from the impact site while trying to stanch the bleeding from deep fiscal cuts.
As a result, with mathematical certainty, a great many overpriced assets are going to lose most of their paper value in the years ahead of us, a great many businesses that have made their money providing goods and services to the drilling industry are going to downsize sharply or simply go bankrupt, a great many wells that can’t make money even at exorbitant oil prices are going to be shut in or go undrilled in the first place, and a very, very great many people who convinced themselves that they were going to get rich by investing in fracking are going to end up poor. It’s not going to be pretty. Exactly what effect this is going to have on the price of oil is an interesting question; my guess, though it’s only a guess, is that a couple of years from now the price of oil will spike, possibly to the $250-$300 a barrel range, then crash to $60 a barrel, and slowly recover to $175 or so over a period of several years.
This has a great deal of relevance to the project of this blog. The last time petroleum production failed to keep pace with potential demand, and the price of oil spiked accordingly, peak oil came in from the fringes and got discussed publicly in the pages of newspapers of record. That window of opportunity gaped open from 2004 to 2010, roughly speaking, and during that period a great deal got accomplished. That was when peak oil stopped being a concern of the furthest fringe and found an audience in many corners of contemporary alternative culture, when local groups—some under the Transition Town banner, others outside it—began to organize around the imminence of peak oil, and when books on resource depletion and its consequences found a market for the first time since the early 1980s.
Those are significant gains. It’s true, of course, that these achievements didn’t make peak oil go away, or find some gimmick that will keep the lifestyles of the industrial world’s more privileged inmates rolling merrily along for the foreseeable future. What sometimes gets forgotten is that neither of those things was ever possible in the first place. The hard facts of our predicament have not changed a bit: the age of cheap abundant energy is ending; the economic systems, social structures, and lifestyle habits that were made possible by that temporary condition are accordingly going away, and nothing anyone can do will bring them back again, not now, not ever.
It’s worth being precise here: for the rest of the time our species endures, we will have to deal with much more sharply constrained energy supplies than we’ve had handy over the last few centuries. That doesn’t mean that our descendants will be condemned to huddle in caves until the jaws of extinction close around them; I’ve argued at quite some length in one of my books that the endpoint of the mess we’re currently in, centuries from now, will most likely be the emergence of ecotechnic societies—societies that maintain relatively high technology on the modest energy and resource inputs that can be provided by renewable sources. I’ve suggested, there and elsewhere, that there’s quite a bit that can be done here and now to lay the foundations for the ecotechnic societies of the far future. I’ve also tried to point out that there’s quite a bit that can be done here and now to make the unraveling of the age of abundance less traumatic than it will otherwise be.
To my mind, those are worthwhile goals. What makes them difficult is simply that any meaningful attempt to pursue them has to start by accepting that the age of cheap abundant energy is ending, that the lifestyles that age made possible are ending with it, and that wasting all those fossil fuels on what amounts to a drunken binge three centuries long might not have been a very smart idea in the first place. Any one of those would be a bitter pill to take; all three of them together are far more than most people nowadays are willing to swallow, and so it’s not surprising that so much effort over the last few decades have gone into pretending that the squalid excesses of contemporary culture can somehow keep rolling along in the teeth of all the evidence to the contrary.
The frantic attempts to sustain the unsustainable driven by this pretense have done much to make the present day such a halcyon time for swindles of every description. Not all of those, however, have taken aim at the wallets of what we might as well call the lumpen-investmentariat, that class of people who have money to invest and not a clue in their heads that Wall Street might not have their best interests at heart. Some of the most colorful flops of recent years have instead attracted money from a different though equally gullible source: government subsidies for new energy technologies.
Those of my readers who were part of the peak oil scene a decade ago, for example, may remember the days when ethanol made from American corn was going to save us all. Many of the same claims more recently deployed to inflate the fracking bubble were used to justify what was described, at the time, as America’s burgeoning new ethanol industry, but the target for these exercises was somewhat different. A certain amount of investment money from the clueless did find its way into the hands of ethanol-plant promoters, to be sure, but the financial core of the new industry was a flurry of federal mandates and federal and state subsidies, which in theory existed to lead America to a bright new energy future, and in practice existed to convince the voters that politicians really were doing something about gasoline prices that had just risen to the unheard-of level of $2 a gallon.
You won’t hear much about America’s burgeoning new ethanol industry these days. A substantial fraction of the ethanol plants that were subsidized by governments and lavishly praised by politicians a decade ago are bankrupt and shuttered today, having failed to turn a profit or, in some cases, cover the costs of construction. The critics who pointed out that the burgeoning new industry made no economic sense, and that making ethanol from corn uses more energy than you get from burning the ethanol, turned out to be dead right, and the critics who dismissed them as naysayers turned out to be dead wrong. Still, the ethanol plants had accomplished the same two functions as the fracking bubble did later: it sucked a great deal of money into the hands of its promoters, and it helped everyone else pretend for a while that the end of the age of cheap abundant energy wasn’t going to happen after all.
It’s hardly the only example of the phenomenon. Since I don’t want green-energy proponents to feel unduly picked on, let’s turn to the other side of the energy picture and take a look at nuclear fusion. Since the 1950s, a sizeable body of nuclear physicists have kept themselves gainfully employed and their laboratories stocked and staffed by proclaiming nuclear fusion as the wave of the future. In just another twenty years, we’ve repeatedly been told, clean, safe nuclear fusion plants will be churning out endless supplies of energy, if only the government subsidies keep pouring in. After sixty years of unbroken failure, even politicians are starting to have second thoughts, but the fusion-power industry keeps at it, pursuing a project that, as respected science writer Charles Seife pointed out trenchantly in Sun In A Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking, has more in common with the quest for perpetual motion than its overeager fans like to think.
Every few years the media carries yet another enthusiastic announcement that some new breakthrough has happened in the quest for fusion power. Now of course it’s worth noting that none of these widely ballyhooed breakthroughs ever amount to a working fusion reactor capable of putting power into the grid, but let’s let that pass for now, because the point I want to make is a different one. As I pointed out in a post here last year, the question that matters about fusion is not whether fusion power is technically feasible, but whether it’s economically viable. That’s not a question anyone in the fusion research industry wants to discuss, and there are good reasons for that.
The ITER project in Europe offers a glimpse at the answer. ITER is the most complex and also the most expensive machine ever built by human beings—the latest estimate of the total cost has recently gone up from $14 billion to $17 billion, and if past performance is anything to go by, it will have gone up a good deal more before the scheduled completion in 2020. That stratospheric price tag results from the simple fact that six decades of hard work by physicists around the world, exploring scores of different approaches to fusion, have shown that any less expensive approach won’t produce a sustained fusion reaction. While commercial fusion reactors would doubtless cost less than ITER, it’s already clear that they won’t cost enough less to make fusion power economically viable. Even if ITER succeeds in creating its "sun in a bottle," in other words, that fact will be an expensive laboratory curiosity, not a solution to the world’s energy needs.
My more attentive readers will doubtless have noticed that the flaw in the current round of glowing prophecies of a future powered by fusion plants is the same as the flaw in the equally glowing sales pitches for corn-based ethanol fuel plants a decade ago. Turning corn into ethanol, and using the ethanol to fuel cars and trucks, is technically feasible; it just doesn’t happen to be economically viable. In the same way, whether fusion power is technically feasible or not may still be up in the air, but the question of its economic viability is not. The gap between technical capacity and economic reality provides the ecological niche in which both these projects make their home, and a great many other alleged solutions to the energy crisis of our time inhabit that same niche.
I’d like to suggest that it’s high time to put a name to the technological fauna that fill this role in our social ecology, and I even have a name to propose. I think we should call them "subsidy dumpsters."
A subsidy dumpster, if I may venture on a definition, is an energy technology that looks like a viable option so long as nobody pays attention to the economic realities. Because it’s technically feasible, or at least hasn’t yet been proven to be unfeasible, promoters can brandish enthusiastic estimates of how much energy it will yield if only the government provides adequate funding, and point to laboratory tests of technical feasibility as evidence that so tempting a bait is within reach. The promoters of such schemes can also rely on the foam-flecked ravings of economists, who have proven to be so stunningly clueless about energy in recent years, and they can also count on one of the pervasive blind spots in modern thinking: the almost visceral inability of most people these days to think in terms of whole systems. Armed with these advantages, they descend upon politicians, and if energy costs are an irritation to the public—and these days, energy costs are always an irritation to the public—the politicians duly cough up a subsidy so they can claim to be doing something about the energy problem.
Once the subsidy dumpster gets its funding, it goes through however many twists and turns its promoters can manage before economic realities take their inevitable toll. If the dumpster in question has to compete in the marketplace, as fuel ethanol plants did, the normal result is a series of messy bankruptcies as soon as the government money runs short. If it can be shielded from the market, preferably by always being almost ready for commercial deployment but never actually quite getting there—the fusion-research industry has this one down pat, though it’s fair to say that the laws of nature seem to be giving them a great deal of help—the dumpster can keep on being filled with subsidies for as long as the prospect of an imminent breakthrough can be dangled in front of politicians and the public. Since most people these days consistently mistake technical feasibility for economic viability, there’s no shortage of easy marks for this sort of sales pitch.
There are plenty of subsidy dumpsters in the energy field just now. What makes this all the more unfortunate is that quite a few of them are based on technologies that could be used in less self-defeating ways. Solar power, to name only one example, could make a huge dent in America’s energy needs, if the available resources focused on proven technologies such as solar water heaters; once this sensible approach is replaced by attempts to claim that we can keep the grid powered by paving some substantial fraction of Nevada with solar PV cells, though, we’re in subsidy-dumpster territory, as a recent study of Spain’s much-lauded solar program has shown. Renewable energy is a viable option so long as its sharp limits of concentration and intermittency are kept in mind; ignore those, and pretend that we can keep on living today’s extravagant lifestyles on a basis that won’t support them, and you’ve got a perfect recipe for a subsidy dumpster.
Now it’s only fair to point out that the energy issue is far from the only dimension of modern life that attracts subsidy dumpsters. Name a current crisis here in America—joblessness, urban blight, decaying infrastructure, and the list goes on—and there are plenty of subsidy dumpsters to be found, some empty and rusting like yesterday’s ethanol plants, some soaking up government funds like the ITER project, and many more that are still only a twinkle in the eyes of their eager promoters. Still, I’d like to suggest that subsidy dumpsters in the energy field have a particular importance just now.
The end of the age of cheap abundant energy requires that we stop using anything like as much energy as we’ve been using in recent decades. Any approach to dealing with the crisis of our age that doesn’t start by using much less energy, in other words, simply isn’t serious. The parade of subsidy dumpsters being hawked to politicians these days is merely one more attempt to refuse to take our predicament as seriously as it deserves, and thus serves mostly as a way to make that predicament even worse than it has to be. By and large, to borrow a neatly Pharaonic turn of phrase from one of my longtime readers—tip of the archdruidical hat to Robin Datta—that’s the trouble with spending all your time splashing around in the waters of denial; all that happens, in the final analysis, is that you attract the attention of the crocodiles of reality.
Sunday, March 2, 2014
SC122-1
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article37787.htm
The Greatest Propaganda Coup of Our Time?
There’s good propaganda and bad propaganda. Bad propaganda is generally crude, amateurish Judy Miller “mobile weapons lab-type” nonsense that figures that people are so stupid they’ll believe anything that appears in “the paper of record.” Good propaganda, on the other hand, uses factual, sometimes documented material in a coordinated campaign with the other major media to cobble-together a narrative that is credible, but false.
The so called Fed’s transcripts, which were released last week, fall into the latter category. The transcripts (1,865 pages) reveal the details of 14 emergency meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) in 2008, when the financial crisis was at its peak and the Fed braintrust was deliberating on how best to prevent a full-blown meltdown. But while the conversations between the members are accurately recorded, they don’t tell the gist of the story or provide the context that’s needed to grasp the bigger picture. Instead, they’re used to portray the members of the Fed as affable, well-meaning bunglers who did the best they could in ‘very trying circumstances’. While this is effective propaganda, it’s basically a lie, mainly because it diverts attention from the Fed’s role in crashing the financial system, preventing the remedies that were needed from being implemented (nationalizing the giant Wall Street banks), and coercing Congress into approving gigantic, economy-killing bailouts which shifted trillions of dollars to insolvent financial institutions that should have been euthanized.
What I’m saying is that the Fed’s transcripts are, perhaps, the greatest propaganda coup of our time. They take advantage of the fact that people simply forget a lot of what happened during the crisis and, as a result, absolve the Fed of any accountability for what is likely the crime of the century. It’s an accomplishment that PR-pioneer Edward Bernays would have applauded. After all, it was Bernays who argued that the sheeple need to be constantly bamboozled to keep them in line. Here’s a clip from his magnum opus “Propaganda”:
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”
Sound familiar? My guess is that Bernays’ maxim probably features prominently in editors offices across the country where “manufacturing consent” is Job 1 and where no story so trivial that it can’t be spun in a way that serves the financial interests of the MSM’s constituents. (Should I say “clients”?) The Fed’s transcripts are just a particularly egregious example. Just look at the coverage in the New York Times and judge for yourself. Here’s an excerpt from an article titled “Fed Misread Crisis in 2008, Records Show”:
“The hundreds of pages of transcripts, based on recordings made at the time, reveal the ignorance of Fed officials about economic conditions during the climactic months of the financial crisis. Officials repeatedly fretted about overstimulating the economy, only to realize time and again that they needed to redouble efforts to contain the crisis.” (“Fed Misread Crisis in 2008, Records Show”, New York Times)
This quote is so misleading on so many levels it’s hard to know where to begin.
First of all, the New York Times is the ideological wellspring of elite propaganda in the US. They set the tone and the others follow. That’s the way the system works. So it always pays to go to the source and try to figure out what really lies behind the words, that is, the motive behind the smokescreen of half-truths, distortions, and lies. How is the Times trying to bend perceptions and steer the public in their corporate-friendly direction, that’s the question. In this case, the Times wants its readers to believe that the Fed members “misread the crisis”; that they were ‘behind the curve’ and stressed-out, but–dad-gum-it–they were trying their level-best to make things work out for everybody.
How believable is that? Not very believable at all.
Keep in mind, the crisis had been going on for a full year before the discussions in these transcripts took place, so it’s not like the members were plopped in a room the day before Lehman blew up and had to decide what to do. No. They had plenty of time to figure out the lay of the land, get their bearings and do what was in the best interests of the country. Here’s more from the Times:
”My initial takeaway from these voluminous transcripts is that they paint a disturbing picture of a central bank that was in the dark about each looming disaster throughout 2008. That meant that the nation’s top bank regulators were unprepared to deal with the consequences of each new event.”
Have you ever read such nonsense in your life? Of course, the Fed knew what was going on. How could they NOT know? Their buddies on Wall Street were taking it in the stern sheets every time their dingy asset pile was downgraded which was every damn day. It was costing them a bundle which means they were probably on the phone 24-7 to (Treasury Secretary) Henry Paulson whining for help. “You gotta give us a hand here, Hank. The whole Street is going toes-up. Please.”
Here’s more from the NYT:
“Some Fed officials have argued that the Fed was blind in 2008 because it relied, like everyone else, on a standard set of economic indicators. As late as August 2008, “there were no clear signs that many financial firms were about to fail catastrophically,” Mr. Bullard said in a November presentation in Arkansas that the St. Louis Fed recirculated on Friday. “There was a reasonable case that the U.S. could continue to ‘muddle through.’ (“Fed Misread Crisis in 2008, Records Show”, New York Times)
There’s that same refrain again, “Blind”, “In the dark”, “Behind the curve”, “Misread the crisis”.
Notice how the Times only invokes terminology that implies the Fed is blameless. But it’s all baloney. Everyone knew what was going on. Check out this excerpt from a post by Nouriel Roubini that was written nearly a full year before Lehman failed:
“The United States has now effectively entered into a serious and painful recession. The debate is not anymore on whether the economy will experience a soft landing or a hard landing; it is rather on how hard the hard landing recession will be. The factors that make the recession inevitable include the nation’s worst-ever housing recession, which is still getting worse; a severe liquidity and credit crunch in financial markets that is getting worse than when it started last summer; high oil and gasoline prices; falling capital spending by the corporate sector; a slackening labor market where few jobs are being created and the unemployment rate is sharply up; and shopped-out, savings-less and debt-burdened American consumers who — thanks to falling home prices — can no longer use their homes as ATM machines to allow them to spend more than their income. As private consumption in the US is over 70% of GDP the US consumer now retrenching and cutting spending ensures that a recession is now underway.
On top of this recession there are now serious risks of a systemic financial crisis in the US as the financial losses are spreading from subprime to near prime and prime mortgages, consumer debt (credit cards, auto loans, student loans), commercial real estate loans, leveraged loans and postponed/restructured/canceled LBO and, soon enough, sharply rising default rates on corporate bonds that will lead to a second round of large losses in credit default swaps. The total of all of these financial losses could be above $1 trillion thus triggering a massive credit crunch and a systemic financial sector crisis.” ( Nouriel Roubini Global EconoMonitor)
Roubini didn’t have some secret source for data that wasn’t available to the Fed. The financial system was collapsing and it had been collapsing for a full year. Everyone who followed the markets knew it. Hell, the Fed had already opened its Discount Window and the Term Auction Facility (TAF) in 2007 to prop up the ailing banks–something they’d never done before– so they certainly knew the system was cratering. So, why’s the Times prattling this silly fairytale that “the Fed was in the dark” in 2008?
I’ll tell you why: It’s because this whole transcript business is a big, freaking whitewash to absolve the shysters at the Fed of any legal accountability, that’s why. That’s why they’re stitching together this comical fable that the Fed was simply an innocent victim of circumstances beyond its control. And that’s why they want to focus attention on the members of the FOMC quibbling over meaningless technicalities –like non-existent inflation or interest rates–so people think they’re just kind-hearted buffoons who bumbled-along as best as they could. It’s all designed to deflect blame.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying these conversations didn’t happen. They did, at least I think they did. I just think that the revisionist media is being employed to spin the facts in a way that minimizes the culpability of the central bank in its dodgy, collaborationist engineering of the bailouts. (You don’t hear the Times talking about Hank Paulson’s 50 or 60 phone calls to G-Sax headquarters in the week before Lehman kicked the bucket, do you? But, that’s where a real reporter would look for the truth.)
The purpose of the NYT article is to create plausible deniability for the perpetrators of the biggest ripoff in world history, a ripoff which continues to this very day since the same policies are in place, the same thieving fraudsters are being protected from prosecution, and the same boundless chasm of private debt is being concealed through accounting flim-flam to prevent losses to the insatiable bondholders who have the country by the balls and who set policy on everything from capital requirements on complex derivatives to toppling democratically-elected governments in Ukraine. These are the big money guys behind the vacillating-hologram poseurs like Obama and Bernanke, who are nothing more than kowtowing sock puppets who jump whenever they’re told. Here’s more bunkum from the Gray Lady:
”By early March, the Fed was moving to replace investors as a source of funding for Wall Street.
Financial firms, particularly in the mortgage business, were beginning to fail because they could not borrow money. Investors had lost confidence in their ability to predict which loans would be repaid. Countrywide Financial, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, sold itself for a relative pittance to Bank of America. Bear Stearns, one of the largest packagers and sellers of mortgage-backed securities, was teetering toward collapse.
On March 7, the Fed offered companies up to $200 billion in funding. Three days later, Mr. Bernanke secured the Fed policy-making committee’s approval to double that amount to $400 billion, telling his colleagues, “We live in a very special time.”
Finally, on March 16, the Fed effectively removed any limit on Wall Street funding even as it arranged the Bear Stearns rescue.” (“Fed Misread Crisis in 2008, Records Show”, New York Times)
This part deserves a little more explanation. The author says “the Fed was moving to replace investors as a source of funding for Wall Street.” Uh, yeah; because the whole flimsy house of cards came crashing down when investors figured out Wall Street was peddling toxic assets. So the money dried up. No one buys crap assets after they find out they’re crap; it’s a simple fact of life. The Times makes this sound like this was some kind of unavoidable natural disaster, like an earthquake or a tornado. It wasn’t. It was a crime, a crime for which no one has been indicted or sent to prison. That might have been worth mentioning, don’t you think?
More from the NYT: “…on March 16, the Fed effectively removed any limit on Wall Street funding even as it arranged the Bear Stearns rescue.”
Yipee! Free money for all the crooks who blew up the financial system and plunged the economy into recession. The Fed assumed blatantly-illegal powers it was never provided under its charter and used them to reward the people who were responsible for the crash, namely, the Fed’s moneybags constituents on Wall Street. It was a straightforward transfer of wealth to the Bank Mafia. Don’t you think the author should have mentioned something about that, just for the sake of context, maybe?
Again, the Times wants us to believe that the men who made these extraordinary decisions were just ordinary guys like you and me trying to muddle through a rough patch doing the best they could.
Right. I mean, c’mon, this is some pretty impressive propaganda, don’t you think? It takes a real talent to come up with this stuff, which is why most of these NYT guys probably got their sheepskin at Harvard or Yale, the establishment’s petri-dish for serial liars.
By September 2008, Bernanke and Paulson knew the game was over. The crisis had been raging for more than a year and the nation’s biggest banks were broke. (Bernanke even admitted as much in testimony before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in 2011 when he said “only one ….out of maybe the 13 of the most important financial institutions in the United States…was not at serious risk of failure within a period of a week or two.” He knew the banks were busted, and so did Paulson.) Their only chance to save their buddies was a Hail Mary pass in the form of Lehman Brothers. In other words, they had to create a “Financial 9-11″, a big enough crisis to blackmail congress into $700 no-strings-attached bailout called the TARP. And it worked too. They pushed Lehman to its death, scared the bejesus out of congress, and walked away with 700 billion smackers for their shifty gangster friends on Wall Street. Chalk up one for Hank and Bennie.
The only good thing to emerge from the Fed’s transcripts is that it proves that the people who’ve been saying all along that Lehman was deliberately snuffed-out in order to swindle money out of congress were right. Here’s how economist Dean Baker summed it up the other day on his blog:
“Gretchen Morgensen (NYT financial reporter) picks up an important point in the Fed transcripts from 2008. The discussion around the decision to allow Lehman to go bankrupt makes it very clear that it was a decision. In other words the Fed did not rescue Lehman because it chose not to.
This is important because the key regulators involved in this decision, Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson, and Timothy Geithner, have been allowed to rewrite history and claim that they didn’t rescue Lehman because they lacked the legal authority to rescue it. This is transparent tripe, which should be evident to any knowledgeable observer.” (“The Decision to Let Lehman Fail”, Dean Baker, CEPR)
Here’s the quote from Morgenson’s piece to which Baker is alluding:
“In public statements since that time, the Fed has maintained that the government didn’t have the tools to save Lehman. These documents appear to tell a different story. Some comments made at the Sept. 16 meeting, directly after Lehman filed for bankruptcy, indicate that letting Lehman fail was more of a policy decision than a passive one.” (“A New Light on Regulators in the Dark”, Gretchen Morgenson, New York Times)
Ah ha! So it was a planned demolition after all. At least that’s settled.
Here’s something else you’ll want to know: It was always within Bernanke’s power to stop the bank run and end to the panic, but if he relieved the pressure in the markets too soon (he figured), then Congress wouldn’t cave in to his demands and approve the TARP. Because, at the time, a solid majority of Republicans and Democrats in congress were adamantly opposed to the TARP and even voted it down on the first ballot. Here’s a clip from a speech by, Rep Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) in September 2008 which sums up the grassroots opposition to the bailouts:
“The $700 bailout bill is being driven by fear not fact. This is too much money, in too short of time, going to too few people, while too many questions remain unanswered. Why aren’t we having hearings…Why aren’t we considering any other alternatives other than giving $700 billion to Wall Street? Why aren’t we passing new laws to stop the speculation which triggered this? Why aren’t we putting up new regulatory structures to protect the investors? Why aren’t we directly helping homeowners with their debt burdens? Why aren’t we helping American families faced with bankruptcy? Isn’t time for fundamental change to our debt-based monetary system so we can free ourselves from the manipulation of the Federal Reserve and the banks? Is this the US Congress or the Board of Directors of Goldman Sachs?”
But despite overwhelming public resistance, the TARP was pushed through and Wall Street prevailed. mainly by sabotaging the democratic process the way they always do when it doesn’t suit their objectives.)
Of course, as we said earlier, Bernanke never really needed the money from TARP to stop the panic anyway. (Not one penny of the $700 bil was used to shore up the money markets or commercial paper markets where the bank run took place.) All Bernanke needed to do was to provide backstops for those two markets and, Voila, the problem was solved. Here’s Dean Baker with the details:
“Bernanke deliberately misled Congress to help pass the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). He told them that the commercial paper market was shutting down, raising the prospect that most of corporate America would be unable to get the short-term credit needed to meet its payroll and pay other bills. Bernanke neglected to mention that he could singlehandedly keep the commercial paper market operating by setting up a special Fed lending facility for this purpose. He announced the establishment of a lending facility to buy commercial paper the weekend after Congress approved TARP.” (“Ben Bernanke; Wall Street’s Servant”, Dean Baker, Guardian)
So, there you have it. The American people were fleeced in broad daylight by the same dissembling cutthroats the NYT is now trying to characterize as well-meaning bunglers who were just trying to save the country from another Great Depression.
I could be wrong, but I think we’ve reached Peak Propaganda on this one.
The Greatest Propaganda Coup of Our Time?
There’s good propaganda and bad propaganda. Bad propaganda is generally crude, amateurish Judy Miller “mobile weapons lab-type” nonsense that figures that people are so stupid they’ll believe anything that appears in “the paper of record.” Good propaganda, on the other hand, uses factual, sometimes documented material in a coordinated campaign with the other major media to cobble-together a narrative that is credible, but false.
The so called Fed’s transcripts, which were released last week, fall into the latter category. The transcripts (1,865 pages) reveal the details of 14 emergency meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) in 2008, when the financial crisis was at its peak and the Fed braintrust was deliberating on how best to prevent a full-blown meltdown. But while the conversations between the members are accurately recorded, they don’t tell the gist of the story or provide the context that’s needed to grasp the bigger picture. Instead, they’re used to portray the members of the Fed as affable, well-meaning bunglers who did the best they could in ‘very trying circumstances’. While this is effective propaganda, it’s basically a lie, mainly because it diverts attention from the Fed’s role in crashing the financial system, preventing the remedies that were needed from being implemented (nationalizing the giant Wall Street banks), and coercing Congress into approving gigantic, economy-killing bailouts which shifted trillions of dollars to insolvent financial institutions that should have been euthanized.
What I’m saying is that the Fed’s transcripts are, perhaps, the greatest propaganda coup of our time. They take advantage of the fact that people simply forget a lot of what happened during the crisis and, as a result, absolve the Fed of any accountability for what is likely the crime of the century. It’s an accomplishment that PR-pioneer Edward Bernays would have applauded. After all, it was Bernays who argued that the sheeple need to be constantly bamboozled to keep them in line. Here’s a clip from his magnum opus “Propaganda”:
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”
Sound familiar? My guess is that Bernays’ maxim probably features prominently in editors offices across the country where “manufacturing consent” is Job 1 and where no story so trivial that it can’t be spun in a way that serves the financial interests of the MSM’s constituents. (Should I say “clients”?) The Fed’s transcripts are just a particularly egregious example. Just look at the coverage in the New York Times and judge for yourself. Here’s an excerpt from an article titled “Fed Misread Crisis in 2008, Records Show”:
“The hundreds of pages of transcripts, based on recordings made at the time, reveal the ignorance of Fed officials about economic conditions during the climactic months of the financial crisis. Officials repeatedly fretted about overstimulating the economy, only to realize time and again that they needed to redouble efforts to contain the crisis.” (“Fed Misread Crisis in 2008, Records Show”, New York Times)
This quote is so misleading on so many levels it’s hard to know where to begin.
First of all, the New York Times is the ideological wellspring of elite propaganda in the US. They set the tone and the others follow. That’s the way the system works. So it always pays to go to the source and try to figure out what really lies behind the words, that is, the motive behind the smokescreen of half-truths, distortions, and lies. How is the Times trying to bend perceptions and steer the public in their corporate-friendly direction, that’s the question. In this case, the Times wants its readers to believe that the Fed members “misread the crisis”; that they were ‘behind the curve’ and stressed-out, but–dad-gum-it–they were trying their level-best to make things work out for everybody.
How believable is that? Not very believable at all.
Keep in mind, the crisis had been going on for a full year before the discussions in these transcripts took place, so it’s not like the members were plopped in a room the day before Lehman blew up and had to decide what to do. No. They had plenty of time to figure out the lay of the land, get their bearings and do what was in the best interests of the country. Here’s more from the Times:
”My initial takeaway from these voluminous transcripts is that they paint a disturbing picture of a central bank that was in the dark about each looming disaster throughout 2008. That meant that the nation’s top bank regulators were unprepared to deal with the consequences of each new event.”
Have you ever read such nonsense in your life? Of course, the Fed knew what was going on. How could they NOT know? Their buddies on Wall Street were taking it in the stern sheets every time their dingy asset pile was downgraded which was every damn day. It was costing them a bundle which means they were probably on the phone 24-7 to (Treasury Secretary) Henry Paulson whining for help. “You gotta give us a hand here, Hank. The whole Street is going toes-up. Please.”
Here’s more from the NYT:
“Some Fed officials have argued that the Fed was blind in 2008 because it relied, like everyone else, on a standard set of economic indicators. As late as August 2008, “there were no clear signs that many financial firms were about to fail catastrophically,” Mr. Bullard said in a November presentation in Arkansas that the St. Louis Fed recirculated on Friday. “There was a reasonable case that the U.S. could continue to ‘muddle through.’ (“Fed Misread Crisis in 2008, Records Show”, New York Times)
There’s that same refrain again, “Blind”, “In the dark”, “Behind the curve”, “Misread the crisis”.
Notice how the Times only invokes terminology that implies the Fed is blameless. But it’s all baloney. Everyone knew what was going on. Check out this excerpt from a post by Nouriel Roubini that was written nearly a full year before Lehman failed:
“The United States has now effectively entered into a serious and painful recession. The debate is not anymore on whether the economy will experience a soft landing or a hard landing; it is rather on how hard the hard landing recession will be. The factors that make the recession inevitable include the nation’s worst-ever housing recession, which is still getting worse; a severe liquidity and credit crunch in financial markets that is getting worse than when it started last summer; high oil and gasoline prices; falling capital spending by the corporate sector; a slackening labor market where few jobs are being created and the unemployment rate is sharply up; and shopped-out, savings-less and debt-burdened American consumers who — thanks to falling home prices — can no longer use their homes as ATM machines to allow them to spend more than their income. As private consumption in the US is over 70% of GDP the US consumer now retrenching and cutting spending ensures that a recession is now underway.
On top of this recession there are now serious risks of a systemic financial crisis in the US as the financial losses are spreading from subprime to near prime and prime mortgages, consumer debt (credit cards, auto loans, student loans), commercial real estate loans, leveraged loans and postponed/restructured/canceled LBO and, soon enough, sharply rising default rates on corporate bonds that will lead to a second round of large losses in credit default swaps. The total of all of these financial losses could be above $1 trillion thus triggering a massive credit crunch and a systemic financial sector crisis.” ( Nouriel Roubini Global EconoMonitor)
Roubini didn’t have some secret source for data that wasn’t available to the Fed. The financial system was collapsing and it had been collapsing for a full year. Everyone who followed the markets knew it. Hell, the Fed had already opened its Discount Window and the Term Auction Facility (TAF) in 2007 to prop up the ailing banks–something they’d never done before– so they certainly knew the system was cratering. So, why’s the Times prattling this silly fairytale that “the Fed was in the dark” in 2008?
I’ll tell you why: It’s because this whole transcript business is a big, freaking whitewash to absolve the shysters at the Fed of any legal accountability, that’s why. That’s why they’re stitching together this comical fable that the Fed was simply an innocent victim of circumstances beyond its control. And that’s why they want to focus attention on the members of the FOMC quibbling over meaningless technicalities –like non-existent inflation or interest rates–so people think they’re just kind-hearted buffoons who bumbled-along as best as they could. It’s all designed to deflect blame.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying these conversations didn’t happen. They did, at least I think they did. I just think that the revisionist media is being employed to spin the facts in a way that minimizes the culpability of the central bank in its dodgy, collaborationist engineering of the bailouts. (You don’t hear the Times talking about Hank Paulson’s 50 or 60 phone calls to G-Sax headquarters in the week before Lehman kicked the bucket, do you? But, that’s where a real reporter would look for the truth.)
The purpose of the NYT article is to create plausible deniability for the perpetrators of the biggest ripoff in world history, a ripoff which continues to this very day since the same policies are in place, the same thieving fraudsters are being protected from prosecution, and the same boundless chasm of private debt is being concealed through accounting flim-flam to prevent losses to the insatiable bondholders who have the country by the balls and who set policy on everything from capital requirements on complex derivatives to toppling democratically-elected governments in Ukraine. These are the big money guys behind the vacillating-hologram poseurs like Obama and Bernanke, who are nothing more than kowtowing sock puppets who jump whenever they’re told. Here’s more bunkum from the Gray Lady:
”By early March, the Fed was moving to replace investors as a source of funding for Wall Street.
Financial firms, particularly in the mortgage business, were beginning to fail because they could not borrow money. Investors had lost confidence in their ability to predict which loans would be repaid. Countrywide Financial, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, sold itself for a relative pittance to Bank of America. Bear Stearns, one of the largest packagers and sellers of mortgage-backed securities, was teetering toward collapse.
On March 7, the Fed offered companies up to $200 billion in funding. Three days later, Mr. Bernanke secured the Fed policy-making committee’s approval to double that amount to $400 billion, telling his colleagues, “We live in a very special time.”
Finally, on March 16, the Fed effectively removed any limit on Wall Street funding even as it arranged the Bear Stearns rescue.” (“Fed Misread Crisis in 2008, Records Show”, New York Times)
This part deserves a little more explanation. The author says “the Fed was moving to replace investors as a source of funding for Wall Street.” Uh, yeah; because the whole flimsy house of cards came crashing down when investors figured out Wall Street was peddling toxic assets. So the money dried up. No one buys crap assets after they find out they’re crap; it’s a simple fact of life. The Times makes this sound like this was some kind of unavoidable natural disaster, like an earthquake or a tornado. It wasn’t. It was a crime, a crime for which no one has been indicted or sent to prison. That might have been worth mentioning, don’t you think?
More from the NYT: “…on March 16, the Fed effectively removed any limit on Wall Street funding even as it arranged the Bear Stearns rescue.”
Yipee! Free money for all the crooks who blew up the financial system and plunged the economy into recession. The Fed assumed blatantly-illegal powers it was never provided under its charter and used them to reward the people who were responsible for the crash, namely, the Fed’s moneybags constituents on Wall Street. It was a straightforward transfer of wealth to the Bank Mafia. Don’t you think the author should have mentioned something about that, just for the sake of context, maybe?
Again, the Times wants us to believe that the men who made these extraordinary decisions were just ordinary guys like you and me trying to muddle through a rough patch doing the best they could.
Right. I mean, c’mon, this is some pretty impressive propaganda, don’t you think? It takes a real talent to come up with this stuff, which is why most of these NYT guys probably got their sheepskin at Harvard or Yale, the establishment’s petri-dish for serial liars.
By September 2008, Bernanke and Paulson knew the game was over. The crisis had been raging for more than a year and the nation’s biggest banks were broke. (Bernanke even admitted as much in testimony before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in 2011 when he said “only one ….out of maybe the 13 of the most important financial institutions in the United States…was not at serious risk of failure within a period of a week or two.” He knew the banks were busted, and so did Paulson.) Their only chance to save their buddies was a Hail Mary pass in the form of Lehman Brothers. In other words, they had to create a “Financial 9-11″, a big enough crisis to blackmail congress into $700 no-strings-attached bailout called the TARP. And it worked too. They pushed Lehman to its death, scared the bejesus out of congress, and walked away with 700 billion smackers for their shifty gangster friends on Wall Street. Chalk up one for Hank and Bennie.
The only good thing to emerge from the Fed’s transcripts is that it proves that the people who’ve been saying all along that Lehman was deliberately snuffed-out in order to swindle money out of congress were right. Here’s how economist Dean Baker summed it up the other day on his blog:
“Gretchen Morgensen (NYT financial reporter) picks up an important point in the Fed transcripts from 2008. The discussion around the decision to allow Lehman to go bankrupt makes it very clear that it was a decision. In other words the Fed did not rescue Lehman because it chose not to.
This is important because the key regulators involved in this decision, Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson, and Timothy Geithner, have been allowed to rewrite history and claim that they didn’t rescue Lehman because they lacked the legal authority to rescue it. This is transparent tripe, which should be evident to any knowledgeable observer.” (“The Decision to Let Lehman Fail”, Dean Baker, CEPR)
Here’s the quote from Morgenson’s piece to which Baker is alluding:
“In public statements since that time, the Fed has maintained that the government didn’t have the tools to save Lehman. These documents appear to tell a different story. Some comments made at the Sept. 16 meeting, directly after Lehman filed for bankruptcy, indicate that letting Lehman fail was more of a policy decision than a passive one.” (“A New Light on Regulators in the Dark”, Gretchen Morgenson, New York Times)
Ah ha! So it was a planned demolition after all. At least that’s settled.
Here’s something else you’ll want to know: It was always within Bernanke’s power to stop the bank run and end to the panic, but if he relieved the pressure in the markets too soon (he figured), then Congress wouldn’t cave in to his demands and approve the TARP. Because, at the time, a solid majority of Republicans and Democrats in congress were adamantly opposed to the TARP and even voted it down on the first ballot. Here’s a clip from a speech by, Rep Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) in September 2008 which sums up the grassroots opposition to the bailouts:
“The $700 bailout bill is being driven by fear not fact. This is too much money, in too short of time, going to too few people, while too many questions remain unanswered. Why aren’t we having hearings…Why aren’t we considering any other alternatives other than giving $700 billion to Wall Street? Why aren’t we passing new laws to stop the speculation which triggered this? Why aren’t we putting up new regulatory structures to protect the investors? Why aren’t we directly helping homeowners with their debt burdens? Why aren’t we helping American families faced with bankruptcy? Isn’t time for fundamental change to our debt-based monetary system so we can free ourselves from the manipulation of the Federal Reserve and the banks? Is this the US Congress or the Board of Directors of Goldman Sachs?”
But despite overwhelming public resistance, the TARP was pushed through and Wall Street prevailed. mainly by sabotaging the democratic process the way they always do when it doesn’t suit their objectives.)
Of course, as we said earlier, Bernanke never really needed the money from TARP to stop the panic anyway. (Not one penny of the $700 bil was used to shore up the money markets or commercial paper markets where the bank run took place.) All Bernanke needed to do was to provide backstops for those two markets and, Voila, the problem was solved. Here’s Dean Baker with the details:
“Bernanke deliberately misled Congress to help pass the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). He told them that the commercial paper market was shutting down, raising the prospect that most of corporate America would be unable to get the short-term credit needed to meet its payroll and pay other bills. Bernanke neglected to mention that he could singlehandedly keep the commercial paper market operating by setting up a special Fed lending facility for this purpose. He announced the establishment of a lending facility to buy commercial paper the weekend after Congress approved TARP.” (“Ben Bernanke; Wall Street’s Servant”, Dean Baker, Guardian)
So, there you have it. The American people were fleeced in broad daylight by the same dissembling cutthroats the NYT is now trying to characterize as well-meaning bunglers who were just trying to save the country from another Great Depression.
I could be wrong, but I think we’ve reached Peak Propaganda on this one.
SC121-15
http://www.globalresearch.ca/america-vs-the-world-invasion-occupation-disruption-u-s-imperialism-is-alive-and-well/5370906
America vs. the World – Invasion, Occupation, Disruption: U.S. Imperialism is Alive and Well
President Obama has placed whole nations on his Kill List. Syria and Venezuela are to join Libya and Iraq as states that have been made to fail, while Ukraine is snatched into the NATO-EU orbit. “The neo-conservative project for a new American century has reached full fruition under a Democratic president, who now has many notches on his gun.”
The word imperialism fell into disuse in recent decades. If it seems slightly retro, that is only because there aren’t enough Americans committed to telling the ugly truth about their government.
During the cold war era we were told that communism increased in influence via a domino effect, knocking down nations one by one and forcing them into Moscow’s or Beijing’s orbit. In the 21st century there is a new domino theory which puts every part of the world into America’s cross hairs.
Barack Obama has succeeded in expanding America’s influence in ways that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney could only dream about. The neo-conservative project for a new American century has reached full fruition under a Democratic president, who now has many notches on his gun. He and the rest of the NATO leaders began the trail of destruction with Libya, tearing that country asunder under the guise of saving it.
Using lies and their servants in the corporate media, they constructed a tale of a tyrant and a people yearning for protection. That evil success emboldened them and their gulf monarchy allies further and they decided that Syria would be the next domino.
That plan didn’t work quite as well as Obama and the rest of murder incorporated team thought it would. When the British parliament said no to new military adventures Obama was left sputtering on national television. He was forced to back down from an adamant position he had taken just days earlier.
The semi-comedic setback was only temporary because the monster must be fed at all cost. The system can no longer sustain itself and brute force is the only out. There is nothing old fashioned about imperialism. This malevolent force is still alive and well.
George W. Bush made efforts to overthrow the democratically elected Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela when he plotted with the opposition against the late Hugo Chavez. Obama is clearly more committed to violence than his predecessor and has helped to stir up right wing Venezuelans who want to rid themselves of Nicolas Maduro. Maduro has been weakened by the ginned up protests and is now forced into talks with an opposition that won’t be satisfied until he is dead and gone too.
The Venezuelan people have voted for their revolution numerous times. The U.S., a country that never ceases to call itself a democracy, has thwarted their clearly expressed will time and time again. But that is the essence of empire after all.
While armed force against Syria was temporarily blocked, the West, the Persian gulf monarchies, Israel, and jihadists have not given up their effort to topple the Bashar al-Assad government in Syria. The savage war has made thousands of Syrians homeless and starving refugees, all because the empire needs its next domino.
Not only does United States meddles in its own backyard, it also relentlessly interferes on the other side of the world in far away Ukraine. Popular discontent against that country’s president became a successful effort to bring that country into the western sphere of economic influence but with the awful strings of austerity attached. Ukraine has the choice of going bankrupt or being bailed out and dying a slow death a la Greece.
While the machinations were afoot, president Obama warned Vladimir Putin away with threats of sanctions. The scenes of sometimes violent street protests in Ukraine made a fortuitous tableau for the United States which claimed the infamous “responsibility to protect” which never protects anyone who actually needs help and which has brought so much suffering to people around the world. Every invasion, occupation and disruption in recent years can be laid at the feet of the United States and its allies. Iraq has been destroyed quite literally, Iran has been destroyed economically. Libya was taken out and Syria is on the brink.
The United States quite openly makes it clear that it wants to have its way in the world. If Russia attempts to use its influence then it is vilified and caricatured as a cruel dictatorship controlled by a tyrant. No matter how many elections Chavez and now Maduro won, they are called dictators by American talking heads.
A superpower can foment conflict anywhere it wants to at anytime it chooses. Venezuelans must knuckle under or face the prospect of more turmoil and violence. Ukraine must sign onto economic policies which have already proven disastrous. The United States leaves its fingerprints in these and many other places and that is the essence of imperialism. It is all about control with the rawest brute force available.
The United States hasn’t officially made Venezuela or any other a colony but it doesn’t have to do that. It just has to show that it is boss and the dominos will fall wherever it chooses.
America vs. the World – Invasion, Occupation, Disruption: U.S. Imperialism is Alive and Well
President Obama has placed whole nations on his Kill List. Syria and Venezuela are to join Libya and Iraq as states that have been made to fail, while Ukraine is snatched into the NATO-EU orbit. “The neo-conservative project for a new American century has reached full fruition under a Democratic president, who now has many notches on his gun.”
The word imperialism fell into disuse in recent decades. If it seems slightly retro, that is only because there aren’t enough Americans committed to telling the ugly truth about their government.
During the cold war era we were told that communism increased in influence via a domino effect, knocking down nations one by one and forcing them into Moscow’s or Beijing’s orbit. In the 21st century there is a new domino theory which puts every part of the world into America’s cross hairs.
Barack Obama has succeeded in expanding America’s influence in ways that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney could only dream about. The neo-conservative project for a new American century has reached full fruition under a Democratic president, who now has many notches on his gun. He and the rest of the NATO leaders began the trail of destruction with Libya, tearing that country asunder under the guise of saving it.
Using lies and their servants in the corporate media, they constructed a tale of a tyrant and a people yearning for protection. That evil success emboldened them and their gulf monarchy allies further and they decided that Syria would be the next domino.
That plan didn’t work quite as well as Obama and the rest of murder incorporated team thought it would. When the British parliament said no to new military adventures Obama was left sputtering on national television. He was forced to back down from an adamant position he had taken just days earlier.
The semi-comedic setback was only temporary because the monster must be fed at all cost. The system can no longer sustain itself and brute force is the only out. There is nothing old fashioned about imperialism. This malevolent force is still alive and well.
George W. Bush made efforts to overthrow the democratically elected Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela when he plotted with the opposition against the late Hugo Chavez. Obama is clearly more committed to violence than his predecessor and has helped to stir up right wing Venezuelans who want to rid themselves of Nicolas Maduro. Maduro has been weakened by the ginned up protests and is now forced into talks with an opposition that won’t be satisfied until he is dead and gone too.
The Venezuelan people have voted for their revolution numerous times. The U.S., a country that never ceases to call itself a democracy, has thwarted their clearly expressed will time and time again. But that is the essence of empire after all.
While armed force against Syria was temporarily blocked, the West, the Persian gulf monarchies, Israel, and jihadists have not given up their effort to topple the Bashar al-Assad government in Syria. The savage war has made thousands of Syrians homeless and starving refugees, all because the empire needs its next domino.
Not only does United States meddles in its own backyard, it also relentlessly interferes on the other side of the world in far away Ukraine. Popular discontent against that country’s president became a successful effort to bring that country into the western sphere of economic influence but with the awful strings of austerity attached. Ukraine has the choice of going bankrupt or being bailed out and dying a slow death a la Greece.
While the machinations were afoot, president Obama warned Vladimir Putin away with threats of sanctions. The scenes of sometimes violent street protests in Ukraine made a fortuitous tableau for the United States which claimed the infamous “responsibility to protect” which never protects anyone who actually needs help and which has brought so much suffering to people around the world. Every invasion, occupation and disruption in recent years can be laid at the feet of the United States and its allies. Iraq has been destroyed quite literally, Iran has been destroyed economically. Libya was taken out and Syria is on the brink.
The United States quite openly makes it clear that it wants to have its way in the world. If Russia attempts to use its influence then it is vilified and caricatured as a cruel dictatorship controlled by a tyrant. No matter how many elections Chavez and now Maduro won, they are called dictators by American talking heads.
A superpower can foment conflict anywhere it wants to at anytime it chooses. Venezuelans must knuckle under or face the prospect of more turmoil and violence. Ukraine must sign onto economic policies which have already proven disastrous. The United States leaves its fingerprints in these and many other places and that is the essence of imperialism. It is all about control with the rawest brute force available.
The United States hasn’t officially made Venezuela or any other a colony but it doesn’t have to do that. It just has to show that it is boss and the dominos will fall wherever it chooses.
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