http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_illusion_of_freedom_20151227
The Illusion of Freedom
The seizure of political and economic power by corporations is unassailable. Who funds and manages our elections? Who writes our legislation and laws? Who determines our defense policies and vast military expenditures? Who is in charge of the Department of the Interior? The Department of Homeland Security? Our intelligence agencies? The Department of Agriculture? The Food and Drug Administration? The Department of Labor? The Federal Reserve? The mass media? Our systems of entertainment? Our prisons and schools? Who determines our trade and environmental policies? Who imposes austerity on the public while enabling the looting of the U.S. Treasury and the tax boycott by Wall Street? Who criminalizes dissent?
A disenfranchised white working class vents its lust for fascism at Trump campaign rallies. Naive liberals, who think they can mount effective resistance within the embrace of the Democratic Party, rally around the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders, who knows that the military-industrial complex is sacrosanct. Both the working class and the liberals will be sold out. Our rights and opinions do not matter. We have surrendered to our own form of wehrwirtschaft. We do not count within the political process.
This truth, emotionally difficult to accept, violates our conception of ourselves as a free, democratic people. It shatters our vision of ourselves as a nation embodying superior virtues and endowed with the responsibility to serve as a beacon of light to the world. It takes from us the “right” to impose our fictitious virtues on others by violence. It forces us into a new political radicalism. This truth reveals, incontrovertibly, that if real change is to be achieved, if our voices are to be heard, corporate systems of power have to be destroyed. This realization engenders an existential and political crisis. The inability to confront this crisis, to accept this truth, leaves us appealing to centers of power that will never respond and ensures we are crippled by self-delusion.
The longer fantasy is substituted for reality, the faster we sleepwalk toward oblivion. There is no guarantee we will wake up. Magical thinking has gripped societies in the past. Those civilizations believed that fate, history, superior virtues or a divine force guaranteed their eternal triumph. As they collapsed, they constructed repressive dystopias. They imposed censorship and forced the unreal to be accepted as real. Those who did not conform were disappeared linguistically and then literally.
The vast disconnect between the official narrative of reality and reality itself creates an Alice-in-Wonderland experience. Propaganda is so pervasive, and truth is so rarely heard, that people do not trust their own senses. We are currently being assaulted by political campaigning that resembles the constant crusading by fascists and communists in past totalitarian societies. This campaigning, devoid of substance and subservient to the mirage of a free society, is anti-politics.
No vote we cast will alter the configurations of the corporate state. The wars will go on. Our national resources will continue to be diverted to militarism. The corporate fleecing of the country will get worse. Poor people of color will still be gunned down by militarized police in our streets. The eradication of our civil liberties will accelerate. The economic misery inflicted on over half the population will expand. Our environment will be ruthlessly exploited by fossil fuel and animal agriculture corporations and we will careen toward ecological collapse. We are “free” only as long as we play our assigned parts. Once we call out power for what it is, once we assert our rights and resist, the chimera of freedom will vanish. The iron fist of the most sophisticated security and surveillance apparatus in human history will assert itself with a terrifying fury.
The powerful web of interlocking corporate entities is beyond our control. Our priorities are not corporate priorities. The corporate state, whose sole aim is exploitation and imperial expansion for increased profit, sinks money into research and development of weapons and state surveillance systems while it starves technologies that address global warming and renewable energy. Universities are awash in defense money but cannot find funds for environmental studies. Our bridges, roads and levees are crumbling from neglect. Our schools are overcrowded, decaying and being transformed into for-profit vocational centers. Our elderly and poor are abandoned and impoverished. Young men and women are crippled by unemployment or underemployment and debt peonage. Our for-profit health care drives the sick into bankruptcy. Our wages are being suppressed and the power of government to regulate corporations is dramatically diminished by a triad of new trade agreements—the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and the Trade in Services Agreement. Government utilities and services, with the implementation of the Trade in Services Agreement, will see whole departments and services, from education to the Postal Service, dismantled and privatized. Our manufacturing jobs, sent overseas, are not coming back. And a corporate media ignores the decay to perpetuate the fiction of a functioning democracy, a reviving economy and a glorious empire.
The essential component of totalitarian propaganda is artifice. The ruling elites, like celebrities, use propaganda to create false personae and a false sense of intimacy with the public.
The emotional power of this narrative is paramount. Issues do not matter. Competency and honesty do not matter. Past political stances or positions do not matter. What is important is how we are made to feel. Those who are skilled at deception succeed. Those who have not mastered the art of deception become “unreal.” Politics in totalitarian societies are entertainment. Reality, because it is complicated, messy and confusing, is banished from the world of mass entertainment. Clichés, stereotypes and uplifting messages that are comforting and self-congratulatory, along with elaborate spectacles, replace fact-based discourse.
“Entertainment was an expression of democracy, throwing off the chains of alleged cultural repression,” Neal Gabler wrote in “Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality.” “So too was consumption, throwing off the chains of the old production-oriented culture and allowing anyone to buy his way into his fantasy. And, in the end, both entertainment and consumption often provided the same intoxication: the sheer, endless pleasure of emancipation from reason, from responsibility, from tradition, from class and from all the other bonds that restrained the self.”
The more communities break down and poverty expands, the more anxious and frightened people will retreat into self-delusion. Those who speak the truth—whether about climate change or our system of inverted totalitarianism—will be branded as seditious and unpatriotic. They will be hated for destroying the illusion. This, as Gabler noted, is the danger of a society dominated by entertainment. Such a society, he wrote, “… took dead aim at the intellectuals’ most cherished values. That theme was the triumph of the senses over the mind, of emotion over reason, of chaos over order, or the id over the superego. … Entertainment was Plato’s worst nightmare. It deposed the rational and enthroned the sensational and in so doing deposed the intellectual minority and enthroned the unrefined majority.”
Despair, powerlessness and hopelessness diminish the emotional and intellectual resilience needed to confront reality. Those cast aside cling to the entertaining forms of self-delusion offered by the ruling elites. This segment of the population is easily mobilized to “purge” the nation of dissenters and human “contaminants.” Totalitarian systems, including our own, never lack for willing executioners.
Many people, maybe even most people, will not wake up. Those rebels who rise up to try to wrest back power from despotic forces will endure not only the violence of the state, but the hatred and vigilante violence meted out by the self-deluded victims of exploitation. The systems of propaganda will relentlessly demonize those who resist, along with Muslims, undocumented workers, environmentalists, African-Americans, homosexuals, feminists, intellectuals and artists. The utopia will arrive, the state systems of propaganda will assure its followers, once those who obstruct or poison it are removed. Donald Trump is following this script.
The German psychoanalyst and sociologist Erich Fromm in his book “Escape From Freedom” explained the yearning of those who are rendered insignificant to “surrender their freedom.” Totalitarian systems, he pointed out, function like messianic religious cults.
“The frightened individual,” Fromm wrote, “seeks for somebody or something to tie his self to; he cannot bear to be his own individual self any longer, and he tries frantically to get rid of it and to feel security again by the elimination of this burden: the self.”
This is the world we live in. The totalitarian systems of the past used different symbols, different iconography and different fears. They rose up out of a different historical context. But they too demonized the weak and persecuted the strong. They too promised the dispossessed that by subsuming their selves into that of demagogues, or parties or other organizations that promised unrivaled power, they would become powerful. It never works. The growing frustration, the ongoing powerlessness, the mounting repression, leads these betrayed individuals to lash out violently, first at the weak and the demonized, and then at those among them who lack sufficient ideological purity. There is, in the end, an orgy of self-immolation. The death instinct, as Sigmund Freud understood, has a seductive allure.
History may not repeat itself. But it echoes itself. Human nature, after all, is constant. We will react no differently from those who went before us. This should not dissuade us from resisting, but the struggle will be long and difficult. Before it is over there will be blood in the streets.
Tuesday, December 29, 2015
Thursday, December 24, 2015
SC132-10
http://www.blacklistednews.com/58_Facts_About_The_U.S._Economy_From_2015_That_Are_Almost_Too_Crazy_To_Believe/47987/0/38/38/Y/M.html
58 Facts About The U.S. Economy From 2015 That Are Almost Too Crazy To Believe
This year the middle class continued to deteriorate, more Americans than ever found themselves living in poverty, and the debt bubble that we are living in expanded to absolutely ridiculous proportions. Toward the end of the year, a new global financial crisis erupted, and it threatens to completely spiral out of control as we enter 2016. Over the past six months, I have been repeatedly stressing to my readers that so many of the exact same patterns that immediately preceded the financial crisis of 2008 are happening once again, and trillions of dollars of stock market wealth has already been wiped out globally. Some of the largest economies on the entire planet such as Brazil and Canada have already plunged into deep recessions, and just about every leading indicator that you can think of is screaming that the U.S. is heading into one. So don’t be fooled by all the happy talk coming from Barack Obama and the mainstream media. When you look at the cold, hard numbers, they tell a completely different story. The following are 58 facts about the U.S. economy from 2015 that are almost too crazy to believe…
#1 These days, most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. At this point 62 percent of all Americans have less than 1,000 dollars in their savings accounts, and 21 percent of all Americans do not have a savings account at all.
#2 The lack of saving is especially dramatic when you look at Americans under the age of 55. Incredibly, fewer than 10 percent of all Millennials and only about 16 percent of those that belong to Generation X have 10,000 dollars or more saved up.
#3 It has been estimated that 43 percent of all American households spend more money than they make each month.
#4 For the first time ever, middle class Americans now make up a minority of the population. But back in 1971, 61 percent of all Americans lived in middle class households.
#5 According to the Pew Research Center, the median income of middle class households declined by 4 percent from 2000 to 2014.
#6 The Pew Research Center has also found that median wealth for middle class households dropped by an astounding 28 percent between 2001 and 2013.
#7 In 1970, the middle class took home approximately 62 percent of all income. Today, that number has plummeted to just 43 percent.
#8 There are still 900,000 fewer middle class jobs in America than there were when the last recession began, but our population has gotten significantly larger since that time.
#9 According to the Social Security Administration, 51 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year.
#10 For the poorest 20 percent of all Americans, median household wealth declined from negative 905 dollars in 2000 to negative 6,029 dollars in 2011.
#11 A recent nationwide survey discovered that 48 percent of all U.S. adults under the age of 30 believe that “the American Dream is dead”.
#12 Since hitting a peak of 69.2 percent in 2004, the rate of homeownership in the United States has been steadily declining every single year.
#13 At this point, the U.S. only ranks 19th in the world when it comes to median wealth per adult.
#14 Traditionally, entrepreneurship has been one of the primary engines that has fueled the growth of the middle class in the United States, but today the level of entrepreneurship in this country is sitting at an all-time low.
#15 For each of the past six years, more businesses have closed in the United States than have opened. Prior to 2008, this had never happened before in all of U.S. history.
#16 If you can believe it, the 20 wealthiest people in this country now have more money than the poorest 152 million Americans combined.
#17 The top 0.1 percent of all American families have about as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent of all American families combined.
#18 If you have no debt and you also have ten dollars in your pocket, that gives you a greater net worth than about 25 percent of all Americans.
#19 The number of Americans that are living in concentrated areas of high povertyhas doubled since the year 2000.
#20 An astounding 48.8 percent of all 25-year-old Americans still live at home with their parents.
#21 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 49 percent of all Americans now live in a home that receives money from the government each month, and nearly 47 million Americans are living in poverty right now.
#22 In 2007, about one out of every eight children in America was on food stamps. Today, that number is one out of every five.
#23 According to Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer, the authors of a new book entitled “$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America“, there are 1.5 million “ultrapoor” households in the United States that live on less than two dollars a day. That number has doubled since 1996.
#24 46 million Americans use food banks each year, and lines start forming at some U.S. food banks as early as 6:30 in the morning because people want to get something before the food supplies run out.
#25 The number of homeless children in the U.S. has increased by 60 percentover the past six years.
#26 According to Poverty USA, 1.6 million American children slept in a homeless shelter or some other form of emergency housing last year.
#27 Police in New York City have identified 80 separate homeless encampments in the city, and the homeless crisis there has gotten so bad that it is being described as an “epidemic”.
#28 If you can believe it, more than half of all students in our public schools are poor enough to qualify for school lunch subsidies.
#29 According to a Census Bureau report that was released a while back, 65 percent of all children in the U.S. are living in a home that receives some form of aid from the federal government.
#30 According to a report that was published by UNICEF, almost one-third of all children in this country “live in households with an income below 60 percent of the national median income”.
#31 When it comes to child poverty, the United States ranks 36th out of the 41 “wealthy nations” that UNICEF looked at.
#32 An astounding 45 percent of all African-American children in the United States live in areas of “concentrated poverty”.
#33 40.9 percent of all children in the United States that are being raised by a single parent are living in poverty.
#34 There are 7.9 million working age Americans that are “officially unemployed” right now and another 94.4 million working age Americans that are considered to be “not in the labor force”. When you add those two numbers together, you get a grand total of 102.3 million working age Americans that do not have a job right now.
#35 According to a recent Pew survey, approximately 70 percent of all Americans believe that “debt is a necessity in their lives”.
#36 53 percent of all Americans do not even have a minimum three-day supply of nonperishable food and water at home.
#37 According to John Williams of shadowstats.com, if the U.S. government was actually using honest numbers the unemployment rate in this nation would be 22.9 percent.
#38 Back in 1950, more than 80 percent of all men in the United States had jobs. Today, only about 65 percent of all men in the United States have jobs.
#39 The labor force participation rate for men has plunged to the lowest level ever recorded.
#40 Wholesale sales in the U.S. have fallen to the lowest level since the last recession.
#41 The inventory to sales ratio has risen to the highest level since the last recession. This means that there is a whole lot of unsold inventory that is just sitting around out there and not selling.
#42 The ISM manufacturing index has fallen for five months in a row.
#43 Orders for “core” durable goods have fallen for ten months in a row.
#44 Since March, the amount of stuff being shipped by truck, rail and air inside the United States has been falling every single month on a year over year basis.
#45 Wal-Mart is projecting that its earnings may fall by as much as 12 percentduring the next fiscal year.
#46 The Business Roundtable’s forecast for business investment in 2016 has dropped to the lowest level that we have seen since the last recession.
#47 Corporate debt defaults have risen to the highest level that we have seensince the last recession. This is a huge problem because corporate debt in the U.S. has approximately doubled since just before the last financial crisis.
#48 Holiday sales have gone negative for the first time since the last recession.
#49 The velocity of money in the United States has dropped to the lowest level ever recorded. Not even during the depths of the last recession was it ever this low.
#50 Barack Obama promised that his program would result in a decline in health insurance premiums by as much as $2,500 per family, but in reality average family premiums have increased by a total of $4,865 since 2008.
#51 Today, the average U.S. household that has at least one credit card has approximately $15,950 in credit card debt.
#52 The number of auto loans that exceed 72 months has hit at an all-time high of 29.5 percent.
#53 According to Dr. Housing Bubble, there have been “nearly 8 million homes lost to foreclosure since the homeownership rate peaked in 2004″.
#54 One very disturbing study found that approximately 41 percent of all working age Americans either currently have medical bill problems or are paying off medical debt. And collection agencies seek to collect unpaid medical bills from about 30 million of us each and every year.
#55 The total amount of student loan debt in the United States has risen to a whopping 1.2 trillion dollars. If you can believe it, that total has more than doubled over the past decade.
#56 Right now, there are approximately 40 million Americans that are paying off student loan debt. For many of them, they will keep making payments on this debt until they are senior citizens.
#57 When you do the math, the federal government is stealing more than 100 million dollars from future generations of Americans every single hour of every single day.
#58 An astounding 8.16 trillion dollars has already been added to the U.S. national debt while Barack Obama has been in the White House. That means that it is already guaranteed that we will add an average of more than a trillion dollars a year to the debt during his presidency, and we still have more than a year left to go.
What we have seen so far is just the very small tip of a very large iceberg. About six months ago, I stated that “our problems will only be just beginning as we enter 2016″, and I stand by that prediction.
We are in the midst of a long-term economic collapse that is beginning to accelerate once again. Our economic infrastructure has been gutted, our middle class is being destroyed, Wall Street has been transformed into the biggest casino in the history of the planet, and our reckless politicians have piled up the biggest mountain of debt the world has ever seen.
Anyone that believes that everything is “perfectly fine” and that we are going to come out of this “stronger than ever” is just being delusional. This generation was handed the keys to the finest economic machine of all time, and we wrecked it. Decades of incredibly foolish decisions have culminated in a crisis that is now reaching a crescendo, and this nation is in for a shaking unlike anything that it has ever seen before.
So enjoy the rest of 2015 while you still can.
2016 is almost here, and it is going to be quite a year…
58 Facts About The U.S. Economy From 2015 That Are Almost Too Crazy To Believe
This year the middle class continued to deteriorate, more Americans than ever found themselves living in poverty, and the debt bubble that we are living in expanded to absolutely ridiculous proportions. Toward the end of the year, a new global financial crisis erupted, and it threatens to completely spiral out of control as we enter 2016. Over the past six months, I have been repeatedly stressing to my readers that so many of the exact same patterns that immediately preceded the financial crisis of 2008 are happening once again, and trillions of dollars of stock market wealth has already been wiped out globally. Some of the largest economies on the entire planet such as Brazil and Canada have already plunged into deep recessions, and just about every leading indicator that you can think of is screaming that the U.S. is heading into one. So don’t be fooled by all the happy talk coming from Barack Obama and the mainstream media. When you look at the cold, hard numbers, they tell a completely different story. The following are 58 facts about the U.S. economy from 2015 that are almost too crazy to believe…
#1 These days, most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. At this point 62 percent of all Americans have less than 1,000 dollars in their savings accounts, and 21 percent of all Americans do not have a savings account at all.
#2 The lack of saving is especially dramatic when you look at Americans under the age of 55. Incredibly, fewer than 10 percent of all Millennials and only about 16 percent of those that belong to Generation X have 10,000 dollars or more saved up.
#3 It has been estimated that 43 percent of all American households spend more money than they make each month.
#4 For the first time ever, middle class Americans now make up a minority of the population. But back in 1971, 61 percent of all Americans lived in middle class households.
#5 According to the Pew Research Center, the median income of middle class households declined by 4 percent from 2000 to 2014.
#6 The Pew Research Center has also found that median wealth for middle class households dropped by an astounding 28 percent between 2001 and 2013.
#7 In 1970, the middle class took home approximately 62 percent of all income. Today, that number has plummeted to just 43 percent.
#8 There are still 900,000 fewer middle class jobs in America than there were when the last recession began, but our population has gotten significantly larger since that time.
#9 According to the Social Security Administration, 51 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year.
#10 For the poorest 20 percent of all Americans, median household wealth declined from negative 905 dollars in 2000 to negative 6,029 dollars in 2011.
#11 A recent nationwide survey discovered that 48 percent of all U.S. adults under the age of 30 believe that “the American Dream is dead”.
#12 Since hitting a peak of 69.2 percent in 2004, the rate of homeownership in the United States has been steadily declining every single year.
#13 At this point, the U.S. only ranks 19th in the world when it comes to median wealth per adult.
#14 Traditionally, entrepreneurship has been one of the primary engines that has fueled the growth of the middle class in the United States, but today the level of entrepreneurship in this country is sitting at an all-time low.
#15 For each of the past six years, more businesses have closed in the United States than have opened. Prior to 2008, this had never happened before in all of U.S. history.
#16 If you can believe it, the 20 wealthiest people in this country now have more money than the poorest 152 million Americans combined.
#17 The top 0.1 percent of all American families have about as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent of all American families combined.
#18 If you have no debt and you also have ten dollars in your pocket, that gives you a greater net worth than about 25 percent of all Americans.
#19 The number of Americans that are living in concentrated areas of high povertyhas doubled since the year 2000.
#20 An astounding 48.8 percent of all 25-year-old Americans still live at home with their parents.
#21 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 49 percent of all Americans now live in a home that receives money from the government each month, and nearly 47 million Americans are living in poverty right now.
#22 In 2007, about one out of every eight children in America was on food stamps. Today, that number is one out of every five.
#23 According to Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer, the authors of a new book entitled “$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America“, there are 1.5 million “ultrapoor” households in the United States that live on less than two dollars a day. That number has doubled since 1996.
#24 46 million Americans use food banks each year, and lines start forming at some U.S. food banks as early as 6:30 in the morning because people want to get something before the food supplies run out.
#25 The number of homeless children in the U.S. has increased by 60 percentover the past six years.
#26 According to Poverty USA, 1.6 million American children slept in a homeless shelter or some other form of emergency housing last year.
#27 Police in New York City have identified 80 separate homeless encampments in the city, and the homeless crisis there has gotten so bad that it is being described as an “epidemic”.
#28 If you can believe it, more than half of all students in our public schools are poor enough to qualify for school lunch subsidies.
#29 According to a Census Bureau report that was released a while back, 65 percent of all children in the U.S. are living in a home that receives some form of aid from the federal government.
#30 According to a report that was published by UNICEF, almost one-third of all children in this country “live in households with an income below 60 percent of the national median income”.
#31 When it comes to child poverty, the United States ranks 36th out of the 41 “wealthy nations” that UNICEF looked at.
#32 An astounding 45 percent of all African-American children in the United States live in areas of “concentrated poverty”.
#33 40.9 percent of all children in the United States that are being raised by a single parent are living in poverty.
#34 There are 7.9 million working age Americans that are “officially unemployed” right now and another 94.4 million working age Americans that are considered to be “not in the labor force”. When you add those two numbers together, you get a grand total of 102.3 million working age Americans that do not have a job right now.
#35 According to a recent Pew survey, approximately 70 percent of all Americans believe that “debt is a necessity in their lives”.
#36 53 percent of all Americans do not even have a minimum three-day supply of nonperishable food and water at home.
#37 According to John Williams of shadowstats.com, if the U.S. government was actually using honest numbers the unemployment rate in this nation would be 22.9 percent.
#38 Back in 1950, more than 80 percent of all men in the United States had jobs. Today, only about 65 percent of all men in the United States have jobs.
#39 The labor force participation rate for men has plunged to the lowest level ever recorded.
#40 Wholesale sales in the U.S. have fallen to the lowest level since the last recession.
#41 The inventory to sales ratio has risen to the highest level since the last recession. This means that there is a whole lot of unsold inventory that is just sitting around out there and not selling.
#42 The ISM manufacturing index has fallen for five months in a row.
#43 Orders for “core” durable goods have fallen for ten months in a row.
#44 Since March, the amount of stuff being shipped by truck, rail and air inside the United States has been falling every single month on a year over year basis.
#45 Wal-Mart is projecting that its earnings may fall by as much as 12 percentduring the next fiscal year.
#46 The Business Roundtable’s forecast for business investment in 2016 has dropped to the lowest level that we have seen since the last recession.
#47 Corporate debt defaults have risen to the highest level that we have seensince the last recession. This is a huge problem because corporate debt in the U.S. has approximately doubled since just before the last financial crisis.
#48 Holiday sales have gone negative for the first time since the last recession.
#49 The velocity of money in the United States has dropped to the lowest level ever recorded. Not even during the depths of the last recession was it ever this low.
#50 Barack Obama promised that his program would result in a decline in health insurance premiums by as much as $2,500 per family, but in reality average family premiums have increased by a total of $4,865 since 2008.
#51 Today, the average U.S. household that has at least one credit card has approximately $15,950 in credit card debt.
#52 The number of auto loans that exceed 72 months has hit at an all-time high of 29.5 percent.
#53 According to Dr. Housing Bubble, there have been “nearly 8 million homes lost to foreclosure since the homeownership rate peaked in 2004″.
#54 One very disturbing study found that approximately 41 percent of all working age Americans either currently have medical bill problems or are paying off medical debt. And collection agencies seek to collect unpaid medical bills from about 30 million of us each and every year.
#55 The total amount of student loan debt in the United States has risen to a whopping 1.2 trillion dollars. If you can believe it, that total has more than doubled over the past decade.
#56 Right now, there are approximately 40 million Americans that are paying off student loan debt. For many of them, they will keep making payments on this debt until they are senior citizens.
#57 When you do the math, the federal government is stealing more than 100 million dollars from future generations of Americans every single hour of every single day.
#58 An astounding 8.16 trillion dollars has already been added to the U.S. national debt while Barack Obama has been in the White House. That means that it is already guaranteed that we will add an average of more than a trillion dollars a year to the debt during his presidency, and we still have more than a year left to go.
What we have seen so far is just the very small tip of a very large iceberg. About six months ago, I stated that “our problems will only be just beginning as we enter 2016″, and I stand by that prediction.
We are in the midst of a long-term economic collapse that is beginning to accelerate once again. Our economic infrastructure has been gutted, our middle class is being destroyed, Wall Street has been transformed into the biggest casino in the history of the planet, and our reckless politicians have piled up the biggest mountain of debt the world has ever seen.
Anyone that believes that everything is “perfectly fine” and that we are going to come out of this “stronger than ever” is just being delusional. This generation was handed the keys to the finest economic machine of all time, and we wrecked it. Decades of incredibly foolish decisions have culminated in a crisis that is now reaching a crescendo, and this nation is in for a shaking unlike anything that it has ever seen before.
So enjoy the rest of 2015 while you still can.
2016 is almost here, and it is going to be quite a year…
SC132-9
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/
Too Little, Too Late
Last week, after a great deal of debate, the passengers aboard the Titanic voted to impose modest limits sometime soon on the rate at which water is pouring into the doomed ship’s hull. Despite the torrents of self-congratulatory rhetoric currently flooding into the media from the White House and an assortment of groups on the domesticated end of the environmental movement, that’s the sum of what happened at the COP-21 conference in Paris. It’s a spectacle worth observing, and not only for those of us who are connoisseurs of irony; the factors that drove COP-21 to the latest round of nonsolutions are among the most potent forces shoving industrial civilization on its one-way trip to history’s compost bin.
The core issues up for debate at the Paris meeting were the same that have been rehashed endlessly at previous climate conferences. The consequences of continuing to treat the atmosphere as a gaseous sewer for humanity’s pollutants are becoming increasingly hard to ignore, but nearly everything that defines a modern industrial economy as “modern” and “industrial” produces greenhouse gases, and the continued growth of the world’s modern industrial economies remains the keystone of economic policy around the world. The goal pursued by negotiators at this and previous climate conferences, then, is to find some way to do something about anthropogenic global warming that won’t place any kind of restrictions on economic growth.
What that means in practice is that the world’s nations have more or less committed themselves to limit the rate at which the dumping of greenhouse gases will increase over the next fifteen years. I’d encourage those of my readers who think anything important was accomplished at the Paris conference to read that sentence again, and think about what it implies. The agreement that came out of COP-21 doesn’t commit anybody to stop dumping carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, now or at any point in the future. It doesn’t even commit anybody to set a fixed annual output that will not be exceeded. It simply commits the world’s nations to slow down the rate at which they’re increasing their dumping of greenhouse gases. If this doesn’t sound to you like a recipe for saving the world, let’s just say you’re not alone.
It wasn’t exactly encouraging that the immediate aftermath of the COP-21 agreement was a feeding frenzy among those industries most likely to profit from modest cuts in greenhouse gas consumption—yes, those would be the renewable-energy and nuclear industries, with some efforts to get scraps from the table by proponents of “clean coal,” geoengineering, fusion-power research, and a few other subsidy dumpsters of the same sort. Naomi Oreskes, a writer for whom I used to have a certain degree of respect, published a crassly manipulative screed insisting that anybody who questioned the claim that renewable-energy technologies could keep industrial society powered forever was engaged in, ahem, “a new form of climate denialism.” She was more than matched, to be fair, by a chorus of meretricious shills for the nuclear industry, who were just as quick to insist that renewables couldn’t be scaled up fast enough and nuclear power was the only alternative.
The shills in question are quite correct, as it happens, that renewable energy can’t be scaled up fast enough to replace fossil fuels; they could have said with equal truth that renewable energy can’t be scaled up far enough to accomplish that daunting task. The little detail they’re evading is that nuclear power can’t be scaled up far enough or fast enough, either. What’s more, however great they look on paper or PowerPoint, neither nuclear power nor grid-scale renewable power are economically viable in the real world. The evidence for this is as simple as it is conclusive: no nation anywhere on the planet has managed either one without vast and continuing government subsidies. Lacking those, neither one makes enough economic sense to be worth building, because neither one can provide the kind of cheap abundant electrical power that makes a modern industrial society possible.
Say this in the kind of company that takes global climate change seriously, of course, and if you aren’t simply shouted down by those present—and of course this is the most common response—you can expect to hear someone say, “Well, something has to do it.” Right there you can see the lethal blindness that pervades nearly all contemporary debates about the future, because it’s simply not true that something has to do it. No divine providence nor any law of nature guarantees that human beings must have access to as much cheap abundant electricity as they happen to want.
Stated thus baldly, that may seem like common sense, but that sort of sense is far from common these days, even—or especially—among those people who think they’re grappling with the hard realities of the future. Here’s a useful example. One of this blog’s readers—tip of the archdruidical hat to Antroposcen—made an elegant short film that was shown at a climate-themed film festival in Paris while the COP-21 meeting was slouching toward its pointless end. The film is titled A Message from the Past, and as the title suggests, it portrays an incident from a future on the far side of global climate change. I encourage my readers to click through and watch it now; it’s only a few minutes long, and its point will be perfectly clear to any regular reader of this blog.
The audience at the film festival, though, found it incomprehensible. The nearest they came to making sense of it was to guess that, despite the title, it was about a message from our time that had somehow found its way to the distant past. The thought that the future on the far side of global climate change might have some resemblance to the preindustrial past—that people in that future, in the wake of the immense collective catastrophes our actions are busy creating for them, might wear handmade clothing of primitive cut and find surviving scraps of our technologies baffling relics of a bygone time—seems to have been wholly beyond the grasp of their imaginations.
Two factors make this blindness to an entire spectrum of probable futures astonishing. The first is that not that long ago, plenty of people in the climate change activism scene were talking openly about the possibility that uncontrolled climate change could stomp industrial society with the inevitability of a boot descending on an eggshell. I’m thinking here, among other examples, of the much-repeated claim by James Lovelock a few years back that the likely outcome of global climate change, if nothing was done, was heat so severe that the only human survivors a few centuries from now would be “a few hundred breeding pairs” huddled around the shores of the Arctic Ocean.
It used to be all the rage in climate change literature to go on at length about the ghastly future that would be ours if global temperatures warmed far enough to trigger serious methane releases from northern permafrost, tip one or more of the planet’s remaining ice sheets into rapid collapse, and send sea water rising to drown low-lying regions. Lurid scenarios of civilizational collapse and mass dieoff appeared in book after lavishly marketed book. Of late, though, that entire theme seems to have dropped out of the collective imagination of the activist community, to be replaced by strident claims that everything will be just fine if we ignore the hard lessons of the last thirty years of attempted renewable-energy buildouts and fling every available dollar, euro, yuan, etc. into subsidies for an even more grandiose wave of uneconomical renewable-energy powerplants.
The second factor is even more remarkable, and it’s the existence of that first factor that makes it so. Those methane releases, rising seas, and collapsing ice sheets? They’re no longer confined to the pages of remaindered global warming books. They’re happening in the real world, right now.
Methane releases? Check out the massive craters blown out of Siberian permafrost in the last few years by huge methane burps, or the way the Arctic Ocean fizzes every summer like a freshly poured soda as underwater methane deposits get destabilized by rising temperatures. Methane isn’t the world-wrecking ultrapollutant that a certain class of apocalyptic fantasy likes to imagine, mostly because it doesn’t last long in the atmosphere—the average lifespan of a methane molecule once it seeps out of the permafrost is about ten years—but while it’s there, it traps heat much more effectively than carbon dioxide. The Arctic is already warming far more drastically than any other region of the planet, and the nice thick blanket of methane with which it’s wrapped itself is an important part of the reason why.
Those methane releases make a great example of the sudden stop that overtook discussions of the harsh future ahead of us, once that future started to arrive. Before they began to occur, methane releases played a huge role in climate change literature—Mark Lynas’ colorful and heavily marketed book Six Degrees is only one of many examples. Once the methane releases actually got under way, as I noted in a post here some years ago, most activists abruptly stopped talking about it, and references to methane on the doomward end of the blogosphere started fielding dismissive comments by climate-change mavens insisting that methane doesn’t matter and carbon dioxide is the thing to watch.
Rising seas? You can watch that in action in low-lying coastal regions anywhere in the world, but for a convenient close-up, pay a visit to Miami Beach, Florida. You’ll want to do that quickly, though, while it’s still there. Sea levels off Florida have been rising about an inch a year, and southern Florida, Miami Beach included, is built on porous limestone. These days, as a result, whenever an unusually high tide combines with a strong onshore wind, salt water comes bubbling up from the storm sewers and seeping right out of the ground, and the streets of Miami Beach end up hubcap-deep in it. Further inland, seawater is infiltrating the aquifer from which southern Florida gets drinking water, and killing plants in low-lying areas near the coast.
The situation in southern Florida gets some press, but I suspect this is because Florida is a red state and the state government’s frantic denial that global warming is happening makes an easy target for humor. The same phenomenon is happening at varying paces elsewhere in the world, as a combination of thermal expansion of warming seawater, runoff from melting glaciers, and a grab-bag of local and regional oceanographic phenomena boosts sea level well above its historic place. Nothing significant is being done about it—to be fair, it’s unlikely that anything significant can be done about it at this point, short of a total moratorium on greenhouse gas generation, and the COP-21 talks made it painfully clear that that’s not going to happen.
Instead, southern Florida faces a fate that’s going to be all too familiar to many millions of people elsewhere in the world over the years ahead. As fresh water runs short and farm and orchard crops die from salt poisoning, mass migration will be the order of the day. Over the short term, southern Florida will gradually turn into salt marsh; look further into the future, and you can see Florida’s ultimate destiny, as a region of shoals, reefs, and islets extending well out into the Gulf of Mexico, with the corroded ruins of skyscrapers rising from the sea here and there as a reminder of the fading past.
Does this sound like science fiction? It’s the inescapable consequence of changes that are already under way. Even if COP-21 had produced an agreement that mattered—say, a binding commitment on the part of all the world’s nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions immediately and lower them to zero by 2030—southern Florida would still be doomed. The processes that are driving sea levels up can’t turn on a dime; just as it took more than a century of unrestricted atmospheric pollution to begin the flooding of southern Florida, it would take a long time and a great deal of hard work to reverse that, even if the political will was available. As it is, the agreement signed in Paris simply means that the flooding will continue unchecked.
A far more dramatic series of events, meanwhile, is getting under way far north of Florida. Yes, that’s the breakup of the Greenland ice sheet. During the last few summers, as unprecedented warmth gripped the Arctic, rivers of meltwater have begun flowing across Greenland’s glacial surface, plunging into a growing network of chasms and tunnels that riddle the ice sheet like the holes in Swiss cheese. This is new; discussions of Greenland’s ice sheet from as little as five years ago didn’t mention the meltwater rivers at all, much less the hollowing out of the ice. Equally new is the fact that the vast majority of that meltwater isn’t flowing into the ocean—scientists have checked that, using every tool at their disposal up to and including legions of yellow rubber ducks tossed into meltwater streams.
What all this means is that in the decades immediately ahead of us, in all likelihood, we’ll get to see a spectacle no human being has seen since the end of the last ice age: the catastrophic breakup of a major ice sheet. If you got taught in school, as so many American schoolchildren were, that the great glacial sheets of the ice age melted at an imperceptible pace, think again; glaciologists disproved that decades ago. What happens, instead, is a series of sudden collapses that kick the pace of melting into overdrive at unpredictable intervals. What paleoclimatologists call global meltwater pulses—sudden surges of ice and water from collapsing ice sheets—send sea levels soaring by several meters, drowning large tracts of land in an impressively short time.
Ice sheet collapses happen in a variety of ways, and Greenland is very well positioned to enact one of the better documented processes. The vast weight of all that ice pressing down on the crust through the millennia has turned the land beneath the ice into a shallow bowl surrounded by mountains—and that shallow bowl is where all the meltwater is going. Eventually the water will rise high enough to find an outlet to the sea, and when it does, it will begin to flow out—and it will take much of the ice with it.
As that happens, seismographs across the North Atlantic basin will go crazy as Greenland’s ice sheet, tormented beyond endurance by the conflict between gravity and buoyancy, begins to break apart. A first great meltwater surged will vomit anything up to thousands of cubic miles of ice into the ocean. Huge icebergs will drift east and then south on the currents, and release more water as they melt. After that, summer after summer, the process will repeat itself, until some fraction of Greenland’s total ice sheet has been dumped into the ocean. How large a fraction? That’s impossible to know in advance, but all other things being equal, the more greenhouse gases get dumped into the atmosphere, the faster and more complete Greenland’s breakup will be.
Oh, and did I mention that the West Antarctic ice sheet is beginning to break up as well?
The thing to keep in mind here is that the coming global meltwater pulse will have consequences all over the world. Once it happens—and again, the processes that will lead to that event are already well under way, and nothing the world’s industrial nations are willing to do can stop it—it will simply be a matter of time before the statistically inevitable combination of high tides and stormwinds sends sea water flooding into New York City’s subway system and the vast network of underground tunnels that houses much of the city’s infrastructure. Every other coastal city in the world will wait for its own number to come up. No doubt we’ll hear plenty of talk about building vast new flood defenses to keep back the rising waters, but let us please be real; any such project would require years of lead time and almost unimaginable amounts of money, and no nation anywhere in the world is showing the least interest in doing the thing now, when it might still be an option.
There’s a profound irony, in other words, in all the rhetoric from Paris about balancing concerns about the climate with the supposed need for perpetual economic growth. Imagine for a moment just how the coming global meltwater pulse will impact the world economy. Countless trillions of dollars in coastal infrastructure around the world will become “sunk costs” in more than a metaphorical sense; millions of people in low-lying areas such as southern Florida will have to relocate as their homes become uninhabitable, and trillions of dollars of real estate will have its value drop to zero. A galaxy of costs for which nobody is planning will have to be met out of government and business revenue streams that have been hammered by the direct and indirect effects of worldwide coastal flooding.
What’s more, it won’t be a single event, over and done with in a few weeks or months or years. Every year for decades or centuries to come, more ice and meltwater will go sluicing into the oceans, more coastal cities and regions will face that one seawater surge too many, more costs will have to be met out of what’s left of a global economy that’s running out of functioning deepwater ports among many other things. The result, as I’ve noted in previous posts here, will be the disintegration of everything that counts as business as usual, and the opening phases of the bleak new reality that Frank Landis has sketched out in his harrowing new book Hot Earth Dreams—the best currently available book on what the world will look like in the wake of severe climate change, and thus inevitably ignored by everyone in the current environmental mainstream.
By the time COP-21’s attendees convened in Paris, it was probably already too late to keep global climate change from spinning completely out of control. The embarrassingly feeble agreement that came out of that event, though, has guaranteed that nothing significant will be done. The hard political and economic realities that made any actual cut in greenhouse gas emissions all but unthinkable are just layers of icing on the cake, part of the predicament of our time—a predicament that defines the words “too little, too late” as our basic approach to the future looming up ahead of us.
Too Little, Too Late
Last week, after a great deal of debate, the passengers aboard the Titanic voted to impose modest limits sometime soon on the rate at which water is pouring into the doomed ship’s hull. Despite the torrents of self-congratulatory rhetoric currently flooding into the media from the White House and an assortment of groups on the domesticated end of the environmental movement, that’s the sum of what happened at the COP-21 conference in Paris. It’s a spectacle worth observing, and not only for those of us who are connoisseurs of irony; the factors that drove COP-21 to the latest round of nonsolutions are among the most potent forces shoving industrial civilization on its one-way trip to history’s compost bin.
The core issues up for debate at the Paris meeting were the same that have been rehashed endlessly at previous climate conferences. The consequences of continuing to treat the atmosphere as a gaseous sewer for humanity’s pollutants are becoming increasingly hard to ignore, but nearly everything that defines a modern industrial economy as “modern” and “industrial” produces greenhouse gases, and the continued growth of the world’s modern industrial economies remains the keystone of economic policy around the world. The goal pursued by negotiators at this and previous climate conferences, then, is to find some way to do something about anthropogenic global warming that won’t place any kind of restrictions on economic growth.
What that means in practice is that the world’s nations have more or less committed themselves to limit the rate at which the dumping of greenhouse gases will increase over the next fifteen years. I’d encourage those of my readers who think anything important was accomplished at the Paris conference to read that sentence again, and think about what it implies. The agreement that came out of COP-21 doesn’t commit anybody to stop dumping carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, now or at any point in the future. It doesn’t even commit anybody to set a fixed annual output that will not be exceeded. It simply commits the world’s nations to slow down the rate at which they’re increasing their dumping of greenhouse gases. If this doesn’t sound to you like a recipe for saving the world, let’s just say you’re not alone.
It wasn’t exactly encouraging that the immediate aftermath of the COP-21 agreement was a feeding frenzy among those industries most likely to profit from modest cuts in greenhouse gas consumption—yes, those would be the renewable-energy and nuclear industries, with some efforts to get scraps from the table by proponents of “clean coal,” geoengineering, fusion-power research, and a few other subsidy dumpsters of the same sort. Naomi Oreskes, a writer for whom I used to have a certain degree of respect, published a crassly manipulative screed insisting that anybody who questioned the claim that renewable-energy technologies could keep industrial society powered forever was engaged in, ahem, “a new form of climate denialism.” She was more than matched, to be fair, by a chorus of meretricious shills for the nuclear industry, who were just as quick to insist that renewables couldn’t be scaled up fast enough and nuclear power was the only alternative.
The shills in question are quite correct, as it happens, that renewable energy can’t be scaled up fast enough to replace fossil fuels; they could have said with equal truth that renewable energy can’t be scaled up far enough to accomplish that daunting task. The little detail they’re evading is that nuclear power can’t be scaled up far enough or fast enough, either. What’s more, however great they look on paper or PowerPoint, neither nuclear power nor grid-scale renewable power are economically viable in the real world. The evidence for this is as simple as it is conclusive: no nation anywhere on the planet has managed either one without vast and continuing government subsidies. Lacking those, neither one makes enough economic sense to be worth building, because neither one can provide the kind of cheap abundant electrical power that makes a modern industrial society possible.
Say this in the kind of company that takes global climate change seriously, of course, and if you aren’t simply shouted down by those present—and of course this is the most common response—you can expect to hear someone say, “Well, something has to do it.” Right there you can see the lethal blindness that pervades nearly all contemporary debates about the future, because it’s simply not true that something has to do it. No divine providence nor any law of nature guarantees that human beings must have access to as much cheap abundant electricity as they happen to want.
Stated thus baldly, that may seem like common sense, but that sort of sense is far from common these days, even—or especially—among those people who think they’re grappling with the hard realities of the future. Here’s a useful example. One of this blog’s readers—tip of the archdruidical hat to Antroposcen—made an elegant short film that was shown at a climate-themed film festival in Paris while the COP-21 meeting was slouching toward its pointless end. The film is titled A Message from the Past, and as the title suggests, it portrays an incident from a future on the far side of global climate change. I encourage my readers to click through and watch it now; it’s only a few minutes long, and its point will be perfectly clear to any regular reader of this blog.
The audience at the film festival, though, found it incomprehensible. The nearest they came to making sense of it was to guess that, despite the title, it was about a message from our time that had somehow found its way to the distant past. The thought that the future on the far side of global climate change might have some resemblance to the preindustrial past—that people in that future, in the wake of the immense collective catastrophes our actions are busy creating for them, might wear handmade clothing of primitive cut and find surviving scraps of our technologies baffling relics of a bygone time—seems to have been wholly beyond the grasp of their imaginations.
Two factors make this blindness to an entire spectrum of probable futures astonishing. The first is that not that long ago, plenty of people in the climate change activism scene were talking openly about the possibility that uncontrolled climate change could stomp industrial society with the inevitability of a boot descending on an eggshell. I’m thinking here, among other examples, of the much-repeated claim by James Lovelock a few years back that the likely outcome of global climate change, if nothing was done, was heat so severe that the only human survivors a few centuries from now would be “a few hundred breeding pairs” huddled around the shores of the Arctic Ocean.
It used to be all the rage in climate change literature to go on at length about the ghastly future that would be ours if global temperatures warmed far enough to trigger serious methane releases from northern permafrost, tip one or more of the planet’s remaining ice sheets into rapid collapse, and send sea water rising to drown low-lying regions. Lurid scenarios of civilizational collapse and mass dieoff appeared in book after lavishly marketed book. Of late, though, that entire theme seems to have dropped out of the collective imagination of the activist community, to be replaced by strident claims that everything will be just fine if we ignore the hard lessons of the last thirty years of attempted renewable-energy buildouts and fling every available dollar, euro, yuan, etc. into subsidies for an even more grandiose wave of uneconomical renewable-energy powerplants.
The second factor is even more remarkable, and it’s the existence of that first factor that makes it so. Those methane releases, rising seas, and collapsing ice sheets? They’re no longer confined to the pages of remaindered global warming books. They’re happening in the real world, right now.
Methane releases? Check out the massive craters blown out of Siberian permafrost in the last few years by huge methane burps, or the way the Arctic Ocean fizzes every summer like a freshly poured soda as underwater methane deposits get destabilized by rising temperatures. Methane isn’t the world-wrecking ultrapollutant that a certain class of apocalyptic fantasy likes to imagine, mostly because it doesn’t last long in the atmosphere—the average lifespan of a methane molecule once it seeps out of the permafrost is about ten years—but while it’s there, it traps heat much more effectively than carbon dioxide. The Arctic is already warming far more drastically than any other region of the planet, and the nice thick blanket of methane with which it’s wrapped itself is an important part of the reason why.
Those methane releases make a great example of the sudden stop that overtook discussions of the harsh future ahead of us, once that future started to arrive. Before they began to occur, methane releases played a huge role in climate change literature—Mark Lynas’ colorful and heavily marketed book Six Degrees is only one of many examples. Once the methane releases actually got under way, as I noted in a post here some years ago, most activists abruptly stopped talking about it, and references to methane on the doomward end of the blogosphere started fielding dismissive comments by climate-change mavens insisting that methane doesn’t matter and carbon dioxide is the thing to watch.
Rising seas? You can watch that in action in low-lying coastal regions anywhere in the world, but for a convenient close-up, pay a visit to Miami Beach, Florida. You’ll want to do that quickly, though, while it’s still there. Sea levels off Florida have been rising about an inch a year, and southern Florida, Miami Beach included, is built on porous limestone. These days, as a result, whenever an unusually high tide combines with a strong onshore wind, salt water comes bubbling up from the storm sewers and seeping right out of the ground, and the streets of Miami Beach end up hubcap-deep in it. Further inland, seawater is infiltrating the aquifer from which southern Florida gets drinking water, and killing plants in low-lying areas near the coast.
The situation in southern Florida gets some press, but I suspect this is because Florida is a red state and the state government’s frantic denial that global warming is happening makes an easy target for humor. The same phenomenon is happening at varying paces elsewhere in the world, as a combination of thermal expansion of warming seawater, runoff from melting glaciers, and a grab-bag of local and regional oceanographic phenomena boosts sea level well above its historic place. Nothing significant is being done about it—to be fair, it’s unlikely that anything significant can be done about it at this point, short of a total moratorium on greenhouse gas generation, and the COP-21 talks made it painfully clear that that’s not going to happen.
Instead, southern Florida faces a fate that’s going to be all too familiar to many millions of people elsewhere in the world over the years ahead. As fresh water runs short and farm and orchard crops die from salt poisoning, mass migration will be the order of the day. Over the short term, southern Florida will gradually turn into salt marsh; look further into the future, and you can see Florida’s ultimate destiny, as a region of shoals, reefs, and islets extending well out into the Gulf of Mexico, with the corroded ruins of skyscrapers rising from the sea here and there as a reminder of the fading past.
Does this sound like science fiction? It’s the inescapable consequence of changes that are already under way. Even if COP-21 had produced an agreement that mattered—say, a binding commitment on the part of all the world’s nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions immediately and lower them to zero by 2030—southern Florida would still be doomed. The processes that are driving sea levels up can’t turn on a dime; just as it took more than a century of unrestricted atmospheric pollution to begin the flooding of southern Florida, it would take a long time and a great deal of hard work to reverse that, even if the political will was available. As it is, the agreement signed in Paris simply means that the flooding will continue unchecked.
A far more dramatic series of events, meanwhile, is getting under way far north of Florida. Yes, that’s the breakup of the Greenland ice sheet. During the last few summers, as unprecedented warmth gripped the Arctic, rivers of meltwater have begun flowing across Greenland’s glacial surface, plunging into a growing network of chasms and tunnels that riddle the ice sheet like the holes in Swiss cheese. This is new; discussions of Greenland’s ice sheet from as little as five years ago didn’t mention the meltwater rivers at all, much less the hollowing out of the ice. Equally new is the fact that the vast majority of that meltwater isn’t flowing into the ocean—scientists have checked that, using every tool at their disposal up to and including legions of yellow rubber ducks tossed into meltwater streams.
What all this means is that in the decades immediately ahead of us, in all likelihood, we’ll get to see a spectacle no human being has seen since the end of the last ice age: the catastrophic breakup of a major ice sheet. If you got taught in school, as so many American schoolchildren were, that the great glacial sheets of the ice age melted at an imperceptible pace, think again; glaciologists disproved that decades ago. What happens, instead, is a series of sudden collapses that kick the pace of melting into overdrive at unpredictable intervals. What paleoclimatologists call global meltwater pulses—sudden surges of ice and water from collapsing ice sheets—send sea levels soaring by several meters, drowning large tracts of land in an impressively short time.
Ice sheet collapses happen in a variety of ways, and Greenland is very well positioned to enact one of the better documented processes. The vast weight of all that ice pressing down on the crust through the millennia has turned the land beneath the ice into a shallow bowl surrounded by mountains—and that shallow bowl is where all the meltwater is going. Eventually the water will rise high enough to find an outlet to the sea, and when it does, it will begin to flow out—and it will take much of the ice with it.
As that happens, seismographs across the North Atlantic basin will go crazy as Greenland’s ice sheet, tormented beyond endurance by the conflict between gravity and buoyancy, begins to break apart. A first great meltwater surged will vomit anything up to thousands of cubic miles of ice into the ocean. Huge icebergs will drift east and then south on the currents, and release more water as they melt. After that, summer after summer, the process will repeat itself, until some fraction of Greenland’s total ice sheet has been dumped into the ocean. How large a fraction? That’s impossible to know in advance, but all other things being equal, the more greenhouse gases get dumped into the atmosphere, the faster and more complete Greenland’s breakup will be.
Oh, and did I mention that the West Antarctic ice sheet is beginning to break up as well?
The thing to keep in mind here is that the coming global meltwater pulse will have consequences all over the world. Once it happens—and again, the processes that will lead to that event are already well under way, and nothing the world’s industrial nations are willing to do can stop it—it will simply be a matter of time before the statistically inevitable combination of high tides and stormwinds sends sea water flooding into New York City’s subway system and the vast network of underground tunnels that houses much of the city’s infrastructure. Every other coastal city in the world will wait for its own number to come up. No doubt we’ll hear plenty of talk about building vast new flood defenses to keep back the rising waters, but let us please be real; any such project would require years of lead time and almost unimaginable amounts of money, and no nation anywhere in the world is showing the least interest in doing the thing now, when it might still be an option.
There’s a profound irony, in other words, in all the rhetoric from Paris about balancing concerns about the climate with the supposed need for perpetual economic growth. Imagine for a moment just how the coming global meltwater pulse will impact the world economy. Countless trillions of dollars in coastal infrastructure around the world will become “sunk costs” in more than a metaphorical sense; millions of people in low-lying areas such as southern Florida will have to relocate as their homes become uninhabitable, and trillions of dollars of real estate will have its value drop to zero. A galaxy of costs for which nobody is planning will have to be met out of government and business revenue streams that have been hammered by the direct and indirect effects of worldwide coastal flooding.
What’s more, it won’t be a single event, over and done with in a few weeks or months or years. Every year for decades or centuries to come, more ice and meltwater will go sluicing into the oceans, more coastal cities and regions will face that one seawater surge too many, more costs will have to be met out of what’s left of a global economy that’s running out of functioning deepwater ports among many other things. The result, as I’ve noted in previous posts here, will be the disintegration of everything that counts as business as usual, and the opening phases of the bleak new reality that Frank Landis has sketched out in his harrowing new book Hot Earth Dreams—the best currently available book on what the world will look like in the wake of severe climate change, and thus inevitably ignored by everyone in the current environmental mainstream.
By the time COP-21’s attendees convened in Paris, it was probably already too late to keep global climate change from spinning completely out of control. The embarrassingly feeble agreement that came out of that event, though, has guaranteed that nothing significant will be done. The hard political and economic realities that made any actual cut in greenhouse gas emissions all but unthinkable are just layers of icing on the cake, part of the predicament of our time—a predicament that defines the words “too little, too late” as our basic approach to the future looming up ahead of us.
Monday, December 21, 2015
SC132-8
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/christmas-present/
Christmas Present
Theory du jour: the new Star Wars movie is sucking in whatever meager disposable lucre remains among the economically-flayed mid-to-lower orders of America. In fact, I propose a new index showing an inverse relationship between Star Wars box office receipts and soundness of the financial commonweal. In other words, Star Wars is all that remains of the US economy outside of the obscure workings of Wall Street — and that heretofore magical realm is not looking too rosy either in this season of the Great Rate Hike after puking up 623 points of the DJIA last Thursday and Friday.
Here I confess: for thirty years I have hated those stupid space movies, as much for their badly-written scripts (all mumbo-jumbo exposition of nonsensical story-lines between explosions) as for the degenerate techno-narcissism they promote in a society literally dying from the diminishing returns and unintended consequences of technology.
It adds up to an ominous Yuletide. Turns out that the vehicle the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee was driving in its game of “chicken” with oncoming reality was a hearse. The occupants are ghosts, but don’t know it. A lot of commentators around the web think that the Fed “pulled the trigger” on interest rates to save its credibility. Uh, wrong. They had already lost their credibility. What remains is for these ghosts to helplessly watch over the awesome workout, which has obviously been underway for quite a while in the crash of commodity prices (and whole national economies — e.g. Brazil, Canada, Australia), the janky regions of the bond markets, the related death of the shale oil industry, and the imploding hedge fund scene.
As it were, all credit these days looks shopworn and threadbare, as if the capital markets had by stealth turned into a swap meet of previously-owned optimism. Who believes in anything these days besides the allure of fraud? Capital is supposedly plentiful these days — look how much has rushed into the dollar from the nervous former go-go nations with their wobbling ziggurats of bad loans and surfeit of production capacity — but what actually constitutes that capital? Answer: the dwindling faith anyone will pay you back next Tuesday for a hamburger today.
We now enter the “discovery” phase of financial collapse, where things labeled “capital” and “credit” turn out to be mere holograms. Fed Chair Janet Yellen herself had a sort of hologramatic look last Wednesday when she stepped onto her Delphic platform to reveal the long-heralded interest rate news. Perhaps Mrs. Yellen is a figment conjured by George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic shop (now owned by Disney). What could be more fitting in a smoke-and-mirrors culture? Anyway, the rude discovery that capital is not what it has appeared to be is now underway, with the power to derail political systems and societies.
Is there anyone who thinks the Presidential election campaign is not completely deranged? Well, it is the analog for America’s deranged financial polity. The graceless Mr. Trump necessarily reflects the just grievances of the great public wad, but has anyone noticed that he is incapable of stringing together two coherent thoughts? I suppose one thought at a time — or maybe a percentage of one thought — is enough to satisfy the sputtering masses, faced as they are by the arrant theft of both their patrimony and their future. But it adds up to something like flying blind through a shitstorm with your pilot in the throes of cerebral infarction. I don’t want to be on that plane.
Then there’s the giant flying reptile known simply as Hillary. She will blow up the sad and noisome remains of the Democratic party and then she will preside over the blow-up of the USA as an advanced techno-industrial society. That final outcome may be inevitable one way or another, but the journey there need not be so harsh. America needs a vision of something other than itself as a permanent demolition derby, which, by the way, will not be “solved” by pushing everyone into a Tesla instead of a Ford F-150.
It’s not just the Federal Reserve; everything around us is backed into a corner. Come January, when the dazzle of Star Wars fades away, you will hear instead through the long dark nights a howl of raging animals. Merry Christmas to all.
Christmas Present
Theory du jour: the new Star Wars movie is sucking in whatever meager disposable lucre remains among the economically-flayed mid-to-lower orders of America. In fact, I propose a new index showing an inverse relationship between Star Wars box office receipts and soundness of the financial commonweal. In other words, Star Wars is all that remains of the US economy outside of the obscure workings of Wall Street — and that heretofore magical realm is not looking too rosy either in this season of the Great Rate Hike after puking up 623 points of the DJIA last Thursday and Friday.
Here I confess: for thirty years I have hated those stupid space movies, as much for their badly-written scripts (all mumbo-jumbo exposition of nonsensical story-lines between explosions) as for the degenerate techno-narcissism they promote in a society literally dying from the diminishing returns and unintended consequences of technology.
It adds up to an ominous Yuletide. Turns out that the vehicle the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee was driving in its game of “chicken” with oncoming reality was a hearse. The occupants are ghosts, but don’t know it. A lot of commentators around the web think that the Fed “pulled the trigger” on interest rates to save its credibility. Uh, wrong. They had already lost their credibility. What remains is for these ghosts to helplessly watch over the awesome workout, which has obviously been underway for quite a while in the crash of commodity prices (and whole national economies — e.g. Brazil, Canada, Australia), the janky regions of the bond markets, the related death of the shale oil industry, and the imploding hedge fund scene.
As it were, all credit these days looks shopworn and threadbare, as if the capital markets had by stealth turned into a swap meet of previously-owned optimism. Who believes in anything these days besides the allure of fraud? Capital is supposedly plentiful these days — look how much has rushed into the dollar from the nervous former go-go nations with their wobbling ziggurats of bad loans and surfeit of production capacity — but what actually constitutes that capital? Answer: the dwindling faith anyone will pay you back next Tuesday for a hamburger today.
We now enter the “discovery” phase of financial collapse, where things labeled “capital” and “credit” turn out to be mere holograms. Fed Chair Janet Yellen herself had a sort of hologramatic look last Wednesday when she stepped onto her Delphic platform to reveal the long-heralded interest rate news. Perhaps Mrs. Yellen is a figment conjured by George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic shop (now owned by Disney). What could be more fitting in a smoke-and-mirrors culture? Anyway, the rude discovery that capital is not what it has appeared to be is now underway, with the power to derail political systems and societies.
Is there anyone who thinks the Presidential election campaign is not completely deranged? Well, it is the analog for America’s deranged financial polity. The graceless Mr. Trump necessarily reflects the just grievances of the great public wad, but has anyone noticed that he is incapable of stringing together two coherent thoughts? I suppose one thought at a time — or maybe a percentage of one thought — is enough to satisfy the sputtering masses, faced as they are by the arrant theft of both their patrimony and their future. But it adds up to something like flying blind through a shitstorm with your pilot in the throes of cerebral infarction. I don’t want to be on that plane.
Then there’s the giant flying reptile known simply as Hillary. She will blow up the sad and noisome remains of the Democratic party and then she will preside over the blow-up of the USA as an advanced techno-industrial society. That final outcome may be inevitable one way or another, but the journey there need not be so harsh. America needs a vision of something other than itself as a permanent demolition derby, which, by the way, will not be “solved” by pushing everyone into a Tesla instead of a Ford F-150.
It’s not just the Federal Reserve; everything around us is backed into a corner. Come January, when the dazzle of Star Wars fades away, you will hear instead through the long dark nights a howl of raging animals. Merry Christmas to all.
Wednesday, December 16, 2015
SC132-7
http://peakoil.com/business/this-is-what-a-financial-crisis-looks-like
This Is What A Financial Crisis Looks Like
Just within the past few days, three major high yield funds have completely imploded, and panic is spreading rapidly on Wall Street. Funds run by Third Avenue Management and Stone Lion Capital Partners have suspended payments to investors, and a fund run by Lucidus Capital Partners has liquidated its entire portfolio. We are witnessing a race for the exits unlike anything that we have seen since the great financial crash of 2008, and many of those that choose to hesitate are going to end up getting totally wiped out. In case you are wondering, this is what a financial crisis looks like. In 2008, other global stock markets started to tumble, then junk bonds began to crash, and finally U.S. stocks followed. The exact same pattern is playing out again, and the carnage that we have seen so far is just the tip of the iceberg.
Since the end of 2009, a high yield bond ETF that I watch very closely known as JNK has been trading in a range between 36 and 42. I have been waiting all this time for it to dip below 35, because I knew that would be a sign that the next major financial crisis was imminent.
In September, it closed as low as 35.33 at one point, but that was not the signal that I was looking for. Finally, early last week JNK broke below 35 for the very first time since the last financial crisis, and since then it has just kept on falling. As I write this, JNK has plummeted all the way to 33.42, and Bloomberg is reporting that many bond managers “are predicting more carnage for high-yield investors”…
Top bond managers are predicting more carnage for high-yield investors amid a market rout that forced at least three credit funds in the past week to wind down.
Lucidus Capital Partners, a high-yield fund founded in 2009 by former employees of Bruce Kovner’s Caxton Associates, said Monday it has liquidated its entire portfolio and plans to return the $900 million it has under management to investors next month. Funds run by Third Avenue Management and Stone Lion Capital Partners have stopped returning cash to investors, after clients sought to pull too much money.
When it says that those firms “have stopped returning cash to investors”, what that means is that many of those investors will be lucky to get pennies on the dollar when it is all said and done.
Like I said, now that the crisis has started, the ones that are going to lose the most are those that hesitate.
And just check out some of the very big names that are “warning of more high-yield trouble ahead”…
Scott Minerd, global chief investment officer at Guggenheim Partners, predicts 10 percent to 15 percent of junk bond funds may face high withdrawals as more investors worry about getting their money back. He joins money managers Jeffrey Gundlach, Carl Icahn, Bill Gross and Wilbur Ross in warning of more high-yield trouble ahead.
In this type of environment, the Federal Reserve would have to be completely insane to raise interest rates.
Unfortunately, that appears to be exactly what is going to happen.
If the Fed raises rates, that is going to make corporate debt defaults even more likely and will almost certainly drive high-yield bonds down even further…
Higher rates could make corporate bond defaults more likely and investors are already bailing out of the sector, pulling $3.8 billion out of high-yield funds in the week ended December 9, the biggest move in 15 weeks. The effective yield on U.S. junk bonds is now 17 percent, the highest level in five years, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch data.
A whole host of prominent names are warning that the Fed is about to make a tragic mistake. One of them is James Rickards…
“The Fed should have raised interest rates in 2010 and 2011 and if they did that they would actually be in a position to cut them today,” said James Rickards, a central bank critic and chief global strategist at West Shore Funds. “The Fed is on the brink of committing a historic blunder that may rank with the mistakes it made in 1927 and 1929. By raising into weakness, they will likely cause a recession.”
In 2015, we have already seen stocks crash all over the globe. Coming into December, more than half of the 93 largest stock market indexes in the world were down more than 10 percent year to date, and some of them were down by as much as 30 or 40 percent. At this point, conditions are absolutely perfect for a frightening collapse of U.S. markets, and the Federal Reserve is about to pour gasoline on to the fire.
Anyone that says that “nothing is happening” is either completely misinformed or is totally crazy.
I like how James Howard Kunstler summarized what we are currently facing…
Equities barfed nearly four percent just last week, credit is crumbling (nobody wants to lend), junk bonds are tanking (as defaults loom), currencies all around the world are crashing, hedge funds can’t give investors their money back, “liquidity” is AWOL (no buyers for janky securities), commodities are in freefall, oil is going so deep into the sub-basement of value that the industry may never recover, international trade is evaporating, the president is doing everything possible in Syria to start World War Three, and the monster called globalism is lying in its coffin with a stake pointed over its heart.
The financial markets held together far longer than many people thought that they would, but now they are finally coming apart at the seams.
Moving forward, the “winners” are going to be the people that pull their money out the fastest. This is especially true for high risk funds like the three that just imploded. If you hesitate, you could end up losing everything.
And as this rush for the exits accelerates, sellers are going to greatly outnumber buyers, and this is going to push prices down at a very rapid pace. We are going to hear a lot about a “lack of liquidity” in the days ahead, but the truth is that what we will really be looking at is a good old-fashioned panic.
This Is What A Financial Crisis Looks Like
Just within the past few days, three major high yield funds have completely imploded, and panic is spreading rapidly on Wall Street. Funds run by Third Avenue Management and Stone Lion Capital Partners have suspended payments to investors, and a fund run by Lucidus Capital Partners has liquidated its entire portfolio. We are witnessing a race for the exits unlike anything that we have seen since the great financial crash of 2008, and many of those that choose to hesitate are going to end up getting totally wiped out. In case you are wondering, this is what a financial crisis looks like. In 2008, other global stock markets started to tumble, then junk bonds began to crash, and finally U.S. stocks followed. The exact same pattern is playing out again, and the carnage that we have seen so far is just the tip of the iceberg.
Since the end of 2009, a high yield bond ETF that I watch very closely known as JNK has been trading in a range between 36 and 42. I have been waiting all this time for it to dip below 35, because I knew that would be a sign that the next major financial crisis was imminent.
In September, it closed as low as 35.33 at one point, but that was not the signal that I was looking for. Finally, early last week JNK broke below 35 for the very first time since the last financial crisis, and since then it has just kept on falling. As I write this, JNK has plummeted all the way to 33.42, and Bloomberg is reporting that many bond managers “are predicting more carnage for high-yield investors”…
Top bond managers are predicting more carnage for high-yield investors amid a market rout that forced at least three credit funds in the past week to wind down.
Lucidus Capital Partners, a high-yield fund founded in 2009 by former employees of Bruce Kovner’s Caxton Associates, said Monday it has liquidated its entire portfolio and plans to return the $900 million it has under management to investors next month. Funds run by Third Avenue Management and Stone Lion Capital Partners have stopped returning cash to investors, after clients sought to pull too much money.
When it says that those firms “have stopped returning cash to investors”, what that means is that many of those investors will be lucky to get pennies on the dollar when it is all said and done.
Like I said, now that the crisis has started, the ones that are going to lose the most are those that hesitate.
And just check out some of the very big names that are “warning of more high-yield trouble ahead”…
Scott Minerd, global chief investment officer at Guggenheim Partners, predicts 10 percent to 15 percent of junk bond funds may face high withdrawals as more investors worry about getting their money back. He joins money managers Jeffrey Gundlach, Carl Icahn, Bill Gross and Wilbur Ross in warning of more high-yield trouble ahead.
In this type of environment, the Federal Reserve would have to be completely insane to raise interest rates.
Unfortunately, that appears to be exactly what is going to happen.
If the Fed raises rates, that is going to make corporate debt defaults even more likely and will almost certainly drive high-yield bonds down even further…
Higher rates could make corporate bond defaults more likely and investors are already bailing out of the sector, pulling $3.8 billion out of high-yield funds in the week ended December 9, the biggest move in 15 weeks. The effective yield on U.S. junk bonds is now 17 percent, the highest level in five years, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch data.
A whole host of prominent names are warning that the Fed is about to make a tragic mistake. One of them is James Rickards…
“The Fed should have raised interest rates in 2010 and 2011 and if they did that they would actually be in a position to cut them today,” said James Rickards, a central bank critic and chief global strategist at West Shore Funds. “The Fed is on the brink of committing a historic blunder that may rank with the mistakes it made in 1927 and 1929. By raising into weakness, they will likely cause a recession.”
In 2015, we have already seen stocks crash all over the globe. Coming into December, more than half of the 93 largest stock market indexes in the world were down more than 10 percent year to date, and some of them were down by as much as 30 or 40 percent. At this point, conditions are absolutely perfect for a frightening collapse of U.S. markets, and the Federal Reserve is about to pour gasoline on to the fire.
Anyone that says that “nothing is happening” is either completely misinformed or is totally crazy.
I like how James Howard Kunstler summarized what we are currently facing…
Equities barfed nearly four percent just last week, credit is crumbling (nobody wants to lend), junk bonds are tanking (as defaults loom), currencies all around the world are crashing, hedge funds can’t give investors their money back, “liquidity” is AWOL (no buyers for janky securities), commodities are in freefall, oil is going so deep into the sub-basement of value that the industry may never recover, international trade is evaporating, the president is doing everything possible in Syria to start World War Three, and the monster called globalism is lying in its coffin with a stake pointed over its heart.
The financial markets held together far longer than many people thought that they would, but now they are finally coming apart at the seams.
Moving forward, the “winners” are going to be the people that pull their money out the fastest. This is especially true for high risk funds like the three that just imploded. If you hesitate, you could end up losing everything.
And as this rush for the exits accelerates, sellers are going to greatly outnumber buyers, and this is going to push prices down at a very rapid pace. We are going to hear a lot about a “lack of liquidity” in the days ahead, but the truth is that what we will really be looking at is a good old-fashioned panic.
Monday, December 14, 2015
SC132-6
http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/living-a-lie-american-like-in-the-debt-lane/
Living A Lie—-American Life In The Debt Lane
The lies we tell ourselves are only exceeded by the lies perpetrated by those controlling the levers of our society. We’ve lost respect for ourselves and others, transforming from citizens with obligations to consumers with desires. The love of mammon has left our country a hollowed out, debt ridden shell of what it once was. When I see the data from surveys about the amount of debt being carried by people in this country and match it up with the totals reported by the Federal Reserve, I’m honestly flabbergasted that so many people choose to live a lie. By falling for the false materialistic narrative of having it all today, millions of Americans have enslaved themselves in trillions of debt.
The totals are breathtaking to behold:
Total mortgage debt – $13.6 trillion ($9.9 trillion residential)
Total credit card debt – $924 billion
Total auto loan debt – $1.0 trillion
Total student loan debt – $1.3 trillion
Other consumer debt – $300 billion
With 118 million occupied households in the U.S., that comes to $145,000 per household. But, when you consider only 74 million of the households are owner occupied and approximately 26 million of those are free and clear of mortgage debt, that leaves millions of people with in excess of $200,000 in mortgage debt. Keeping up with the Joneses has taken on a new meaning as buying a 6,000 sq ft McMansion with 3% down became the standard operating procedure for a vast swath of image conscious Americans. When you are up to your eyeballs in debt, you don’t own anything. You are living a lie.
The lie was revealed as housing bubble burst and national home prices plummeted by 30%, resulting in millions of foreclosures, the worst recession since the Great Depression and homeowners equity falling to an all-time low of 38%. The Fed induced 2nd housing bubble has convinced millions to believe the lie again. The Fed easy money, Wall Street buy and rent scheme, with the FHA acting as the new purveyor of 3% down mortgages, has artificially boosted homeowners equity back to 57% just in time for the next housing collapse. Living a lie will result in more pain and suffering for those who didn’t learn the lesson last time.
At least there is an asset capable of appreciation backed by the mortgage debt. Auto loans are backed by a rapidly depreciating asset, while credit card debt allows Americans to live above their means while living their lie, and student loans are the new subprime debt which will never get repaid. The country has been living a Big Lie since the day Nixon closed the gold window in 1971, eliminating any vestiges of constraint upon central bankers and politicians.
The Fed has continuously debased the currency and politicians have promised voters freebies while waging never ending wars of choice, creating a warfare/welfare empire of debt totaling $18.7 trillion with unfunded promises of $200 trillion. The masses have been lied to by bankers and their mass media mouthpieces, while willfully buying into the lie of living for today and funding it with debt. An entire society bought into the fallacy that a country could transition from savings and investment to borrowing and consuming, with no adverse consequences. The mass delusion is clearly evident in the comparative consumer debt data from 1971:
US population in 1971 – 208 million
Total credit card debt 1971 – $8.5 billion ($41 per capita)
Total auto loan debt 1971 – $40.5 billion ($195 per capita)
US population in 2015 – 320 million
Total credit card debt 2015 – $890 billion ($2,781 per capita)
Total auto loan debt 2015 – $1.03 trillion ($3,219 per capita)
The population of the US has grown by 54% since 1971, but the amount of credit card debt per person has grown by 6,782%, and the amount of auto loan debt has grown by 1,650%. Meanwhile, real median household income has grown by 8% since 1971. Replacing income with debt in order to give the appearance of wealth is nothing but a lie. It requires an ever larger amount of debt to generate an additional dollar of GDP. The exponential increase in debt became unsustainable and the Wall Street lies resulted in a global conflagration in 2008. The desperate effort by the Fed to re-inflate the debt bubble through ZIRP and QE has resulted in pathetic economic growth, while leaving willfully ignorant consumers with a record level of debt.
A recent report by Nerdwallet revealed the outrageous amount of consumer debt millions of Americans have chosen to take on in order to live the lives they feel they deserve. And Wall Street is only too willing to oblige them with credit, as they reap riches from the billions of interest paid each year by the debt slaves living on the plantation we call America. In addition to charging away their lives, Americans lie to themselves about how much debt they really have. It’s too painful to deal with reality, so they ignore it. The data in the report is frightening:
•The amount of credit card debt carried by the average household carrying this type of debt is $15,355.
•The amount of auto loan debt carried by the average household carrying this type of debt is $26,530.
•The amount of student loan debt carried by the average household carrying this type of debt is $47,712.
•The average household is paying more than $6,600 in interest per year, which means that roughly 9% of the average household’s income is being spent on interest alone.
•Credit card debt — one of the most expensive types of debt — costs consumers an average of $2,630 per year in interest, assuming an average APR of 18%.
•If you have the average amount of credit card debt ($15,355) and a 15% interest rate and only pay the minimum on that debt each month, it will take you more than 31 years to repay your debt and will cost you more than $18,600 in interest payments alone.
•The average amount of credit card debt peaked at $16,912 in 2008, fell by 14% to $14,539 by 2012 as Wall Street banks wrote off billions in bad debt, and has since risen by 6% as consumers have been lured back by the Wall Street propaganda machine.
•Consumers vastly underestimate or under-report how much debt they have. In fact, as of 2013, actuallender-reported credit card debt was 155% greater than borrower-reported balances.
Americans are embarrassed and ashamed by their levels of consumer debt, but they can’t stop. A record number of new cars will be “sold” this year with the highest level of auto loan debt in history, the longest loan length in history, rising percentage of subprime auto loans, and an all-time high in percentage of leases. These people are underwater on their auto loan/lease the second they drive off the lot. But at least their neighbors and co-workers think their successful. Appearances are all that seem to matter in our society today. Dying in debt will be common place in the coming years. Fully 21% of Americans say they don’t think they will be able to pay off their debts — including their car, credit cards, student loans and mortgages — in their lifetime, according to a survey of more than 1,000 adults by CreditCards.com. Our debt addict society is dying of an overdose.
The Fed’s master plan to revive the economy with massive doses of debt has failed. Main Street America is tapped out. Decades of minimal real wage growth, relentless inflation in the things we need to live (food, rent, energy, health care), and wasting money on Chinese produced consumer crap, has left the majority of American households with little or no savings and no disposable income. This is being reflected in the pitiful economic growth and plunge in retail sales since the end of QE3 in October 2014. Our system has become dependent upon exponential debt expansion, and as soon as the spigot is turned off, our economy crashes.
Bernanke chose to not voluntarily abandon the Fed’s failed credit expansion policies in 2008. The end of QE3 and the upcoming interest rate increase by Yellen will usher in financial collapse part two. There is no avoiding a collapse brought on by decades of warped monetary and fiscal policies, and irrational behavior by bankers, corporations and consumers. Even if Yellen reverses course when the economy plunges into a deep recession, catastrophe cannot be avoided.
“There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.” –Ludwig von Mises
Our country has gone mad over the last few decades. We had a chance to come to our senses in 2008, wipe away the debt, liquidate the criminal Wall Street banks, prosecute the perpetrators, and reorient our economy and society back to one built upon savings and investment, rather than borrowing and consumption. It was not to be, as Bernanke and the Deep State decided their best interests trumped the interests of the people. The coming collapse hopefully will force Americans to come to their senses one by one.
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.” – Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 1841
Living A Lie—-American Life In The Debt Lane
The lies we tell ourselves are only exceeded by the lies perpetrated by those controlling the levers of our society. We’ve lost respect for ourselves and others, transforming from citizens with obligations to consumers with desires. The love of mammon has left our country a hollowed out, debt ridden shell of what it once was. When I see the data from surveys about the amount of debt being carried by people in this country and match it up with the totals reported by the Federal Reserve, I’m honestly flabbergasted that so many people choose to live a lie. By falling for the false materialistic narrative of having it all today, millions of Americans have enslaved themselves in trillions of debt.
The totals are breathtaking to behold:
Total mortgage debt – $13.6 trillion ($9.9 trillion residential)
Total credit card debt – $924 billion
Total auto loan debt – $1.0 trillion
Total student loan debt – $1.3 trillion
Other consumer debt – $300 billion
With 118 million occupied households in the U.S., that comes to $145,000 per household. But, when you consider only 74 million of the households are owner occupied and approximately 26 million of those are free and clear of mortgage debt, that leaves millions of people with in excess of $200,000 in mortgage debt. Keeping up with the Joneses has taken on a new meaning as buying a 6,000 sq ft McMansion with 3% down became the standard operating procedure for a vast swath of image conscious Americans. When you are up to your eyeballs in debt, you don’t own anything. You are living a lie.
The lie was revealed as housing bubble burst and national home prices plummeted by 30%, resulting in millions of foreclosures, the worst recession since the Great Depression and homeowners equity falling to an all-time low of 38%. The Fed induced 2nd housing bubble has convinced millions to believe the lie again. The Fed easy money, Wall Street buy and rent scheme, with the FHA acting as the new purveyor of 3% down mortgages, has artificially boosted homeowners equity back to 57% just in time for the next housing collapse. Living a lie will result in more pain and suffering for those who didn’t learn the lesson last time.
At least there is an asset capable of appreciation backed by the mortgage debt. Auto loans are backed by a rapidly depreciating asset, while credit card debt allows Americans to live above their means while living their lie, and student loans are the new subprime debt which will never get repaid. The country has been living a Big Lie since the day Nixon closed the gold window in 1971, eliminating any vestiges of constraint upon central bankers and politicians.
The Fed has continuously debased the currency and politicians have promised voters freebies while waging never ending wars of choice, creating a warfare/welfare empire of debt totaling $18.7 trillion with unfunded promises of $200 trillion. The masses have been lied to by bankers and their mass media mouthpieces, while willfully buying into the lie of living for today and funding it with debt. An entire society bought into the fallacy that a country could transition from savings and investment to borrowing and consuming, with no adverse consequences. The mass delusion is clearly evident in the comparative consumer debt data from 1971:
US population in 1971 – 208 million
Total credit card debt 1971 – $8.5 billion ($41 per capita)
Total auto loan debt 1971 – $40.5 billion ($195 per capita)
US population in 2015 – 320 million
Total credit card debt 2015 – $890 billion ($2,781 per capita)
Total auto loan debt 2015 – $1.03 trillion ($3,219 per capita)
The population of the US has grown by 54% since 1971, but the amount of credit card debt per person has grown by 6,782%, and the amount of auto loan debt has grown by 1,650%. Meanwhile, real median household income has grown by 8% since 1971. Replacing income with debt in order to give the appearance of wealth is nothing but a lie. It requires an ever larger amount of debt to generate an additional dollar of GDP. The exponential increase in debt became unsustainable and the Wall Street lies resulted in a global conflagration in 2008. The desperate effort by the Fed to re-inflate the debt bubble through ZIRP and QE has resulted in pathetic economic growth, while leaving willfully ignorant consumers with a record level of debt.
A recent report by Nerdwallet revealed the outrageous amount of consumer debt millions of Americans have chosen to take on in order to live the lives they feel they deserve. And Wall Street is only too willing to oblige them with credit, as they reap riches from the billions of interest paid each year by the debt slaves living on the plantation we call America. In addition to charging away their lives, Americans lie to themselves about how much debt they really have. It’s too painful to deal with reality, so they ignore it. The data in the report is frightening:
•The amount of credit card debt carried by the average household carrying this type of debt is $15,355.
•The amount of auto loan debt carried by the average household carrying this type of debt is $26,530.
•The amount of student loan debt carried by the average household carrying this type of debt is $47,712.
•The average household is paying more than $6,600 in interest per year, which means that roughly 9% of the average household’s income is being spent on interest alone.
•Credit card debt — one of the most expensive types of debt — costs consumers an average of $2,630 per year in interest, assuming an average APR of 18%.
•If you have the average amount of credit card debt ($15,355) and a 15% interest rate and only pay the minimum on that debt each month, it will take you more than 31 years to repay your debt and will cost you more than $18,600 in interest payments alone.
•The average amount of credit card debt peaked at $16,912 in 2008, fell by 14% to $14,539 by 2012 as Wall Street banks wrote off billions in bad debt, and has since risen by 6% as consumers have been lured back by the Wall Street propaganda machine.
•Consumers vastly underestimate or under-report how much debt they have. In fact, as of 2013, actuallender-reported credit card debt was 155% greater than borrower-reported balances.
Americans are embarrassed and ashamed by their levels of consumer debt, but they can’t stop. A record number of new cars will be “sold” this year with the highest level of auto loan debt in history, the longest loan length in history, rising percentage of subprime auto loans, and an all-time high in percentage of leases. These people are underwater on their auto loan/lease the second they drive off the lot. But at least their neighbors and co-workers think their successful. Appearances are all that seem to matter in our society today. Dying in debt will be common place in the coming years. Fully 21% of Americans say they don’t think they will be able to pay off their debts — including their car, credit cards, student loans and mortgages — in their lifetime, according to a survey of more than 1,000 adults by CreditCards.com. Our debt addict society is dying of an overdose.
The Fed’s master plan to revive the economy with massive doses of debt has failed. Main Street America is tapped out. Decades of minimal real wage growth, relentless inflation in the things we need to live (food, rent, energy, health care), and wasting money on Chinese produced consumer crap, has left the majority of American households with little or no savings and no disposable income. This is being reflected in the pitiful economic growth and plunge in retail sales since the end of QE3 in October 2014. Our system has become dependent upon exponential debt expansion, and as soon as the spigot is turned off, our economy crashes.
Bernanke chose to not voluntarily abandon the Fed’s failed credit expansion policies in 2008. The end of QE3 and the upcoming interest rate increase by Yellen will usher in financial collapse part two. There is no avoiding a collapse brought on by decades of warped monetary and fiscal policies, and irrational behavior by bankers, corporations and consumers. Even if Yellen reverses course when the economy plunges into a deep recession, catastrophe cannot be avoided.
“There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.” –Ludwig von Mises
Our country has gone mad over the last few decades. We had a chance to come to our senses in 2008, wipe away the debt, liquidate the criminal Wall Street banks, prosecute the perpetrators, and reorient our economy and society back to one built upon savings and investment, rather than borrowing and consumption. It was not to be, as Bernanke and the Deep State decided their best interests trumped the interests of the people. The coming collapse hopefully will force Americans to come to their senses one by one.
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.” – Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 1841
SC132-5
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/fedpocalypse-now/
Fedpocalypse Now?
If ever such a thing was, the stage is set this Monday and Tuesday for a rush to the exits in financial markets as the world prepares for the US central bank to take one baby step out of the corner it’s in. Everybody can see Janet Yellen standing naked in that corner — more like a box canyon — and it’s not a pretty sight. Despite her well-broadcasted insistence that the economic skies are blue, storm clouds scud through every realm and quarter. Equities barfed nearly four percent just last week, credit is crumbling (nobody wants to lend), junk bonds are tanking (as defaults loom), currencies all around the world are crashing, hedge funds can’t give investors their money back, “liquidity” is AWOL (no buyers for janky securities), commodities are in freefall, oil is going so deep into the sub-basement of value that the industry may never recover, international trade is evaporating, the president is doing everything possible in Syria to start World War Three, and the monster called globalism is lying in its coffin with a stake pointed over its heart.
Folks who didn’t go to cash a month ago must be hyperventilating today.
But the mundane truth probably is that events have finally caught up with the structural distortions of a financial world running on illusion. To everything there is a season, turn, turn, turn, and economic winter is finally upon us. All the world ‘round, people borrowed too much to buy stuff and now they’re all borrowed out and stuffed up. Welcome to the successor to the global economy: the yard sale economy, with all the previously-bought stuff going back into circulation on its way to the dump.
A generous view of the American predicament might suppose that the unfortunate empire of lies constructed over the last several decades was no more than a desperate attempt to preserve our manifold mis-investments and bad choices. The odious Trump has made such a splash by pointing to a few of them, for instance, gifting US industrial production to the slave-labor nations, at the expense of American workers not fortunate enough to work in Goldman Sachs’s CDO boiler rooms. Readers know I don’t relish the prospect of Trump in the White House. What I don’t hear anyone asking: is he the best we can come up with under the circumstances? Is there not one decent, capable, eligible adult out there in America who can string two coherent thoughts together that comport with reality? Apparently not.
The class of people who formerly trafficked in political ideas have been too busy celebrating the wondrous valor of transgender. Well, now the wheels are going to come off the things that actually matter, such as being able to get food and pay the rent, and might perforce shove aside the neurotic preoccupations with race, gender, privilege, and artificial grievance that have bamboozled vast swathes of citizens wasting a generation of political capital on phantoms and figments. Contrary to current appearances, the election year is hardly over. There is still time for events to steer history in another direction.
Mrs. Yellen and her cortege of necromancers may just lose their nerve and twiddle their thumbs come Wednesday. If they actually make the bold leap to raise the fed funds rate one measly quarter of a percent, they might finally succeed in blowing up a banking system that deserves all the carnage that comes its way. There is something in the air like a gigantic static charge, longing for release.
Fedpocalypse Now?
If ever such a thing was, the stage is set this Monday and Tuesday for a rush to the exits in financial markets as the world prepares for the US central bank to take one baby step out of the corner it’s in. Everybody can see Janet Yellen standing naked in that corner — more like a box canyon — and it’s not a pretty sight. Despite her well-broadcasted insistence that the economic skies are blue, storm clouds scud through every realm and quarter. Equities barfed nearly four percent just last week, credit is crumbling (nobody wants to lend), junk bonds are tanking (as defaults loom), currencies all around the world are crashing, hedge funds can’t give investors their money back, “liquidity” is AWOL (no buyers for janky securities), commodities are in freefall, oil is going so deep into the sub-basement of value that the industry may never recover, international trade is evaporating, the president is doing everything possible in Syria to start World War Three, and the monster called globalism is lying in its coffin with a stake pointed over its heart.
Folks who didn’t go to cash a month ago must be hyperventilating today.
But the mundane truth probably is that events have finally caught up with the structural distortions of a financial world running on illusion. To everything there is a season, turn, turn, turn, and economic winter is finally upon us. All the world ‘round, people borrowed too much to buy stuff and now they’re all borrowed out and stuffed up. Welcome to the successor to the global economy: the yard sale economy, with all the previously-bought stuff going back into circulation on its way to the dump.
A generous view of the American predicament might suppose that the unfortunate empire of lies constructed over the last several decades was no more than a desperate attempt to preserve our manifold mis-investments and bad choices. The odious Trump has made such a splash by pointing to a few of them, for instance, gifting US industrial production to the slave-labor nations, at the expense of American workers not fortunate enough to work in Goldman Sachs’s CDO boiler rooms. Readers know I don’t relish the prospect of Trump in the White House. What I don’t hear anyone asking: is he the best we can come up with under the circumstances? Is there not one decent, capable, eligible adult out there in America who can string two coherent thoughts together that comport with reality? Apparently not.
The class of people who formerly trafficked in political ideas have been too busy celebrating the wondrous valor of transgender. Well, now the wheels are going to come off the things that actually matter, such as being able to get food and pay the rent, and might perforce shove aside the neurotic preoccupations with race, gender, privilege, and artificial grievance that have bamboozled vast swathes of citizens wasting a generation of political capital on phantoms and figments. Contrary to current appearances, the election year is hardly over. There is still time for events to steer history in another direction.
Mrs. Yellen and her cortege of necromancers may just lose their nerve and twiddle their thumbs come Wednesday. If they actually make the bold leap to raise the fed funds rate one measly quarter of a percent, they might finally succeed in blowing up a banking system that deserves all the carnage that comes its way. There is something in the air like a gigantic static charge, longing for release.
Sunday, December 13, 2015
SC132-4
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/12/james-hansen-climate-change-paris-talks-fraud
James Hansen, father of climate change awareness, calls Paris talks 'a fraud'
Mere mention of the Paris climate talks is enough to make James Hansen grumpy. The former Nasa scientist, considered the father of global awareness of climate change, is a soft-spoken, almost diffident Iowan. But when he talks about the gathering of nearly 200 nations, his demeanour changes.
“It’s a fraud really, a fake,” he says, rubbing his head. “It’s just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.”
The talks, intended to reach a new global deal on cutting carbon emissions beyond 2020, have spent much time and energy on two major issues: whether the world should aim to contain the temperature rise to 1.5C or 2C above preindustrial levels, and how much funding should be doled out by wealthy countries to developing nations that risk being swamped by rising seas and bashed by escalating extreme weather events.
But, according to Hansen, the international jamboree is pointless unless greenhouse gas emissions aren’t taxed across the board. He argues that only this will force down emissions quickly enough to avoid the worst ravages of climate change.
Hansen, 74, has just returned from Paris where he again called for a price to be placed on each tonne of carbon from major emitters (he’s suggested a “fee” – because “taxes scare people off” – of $15 a tonne that would rise $10 a year and bring in $600bn in the US alone). There aren’t many takers, even among “big green” as Hansen labels environment groups.
Hansen has been a nagging yet respected voice on climate change since he shot to prominence in the summer of 1988. The Nasa scientists, who had been analyzing changes in the Earth’s climate since the 1970s, told a congressional committee that something called the “greenhouse effect” where heat-trapped gases are released into the atmosphere was causing global warming with a 99% certainty.
A New York Times report of the 1988 testimony includes the radical suggestion that there should be a “sharp reduction in the burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels that release carbon dioxide”, a plea familiar to those who have watched politicians who have traipsed up to the lectern or interviewer’s microphone in Paris over the past two weeks.
After that, things started to get a little difficult for Hansen. He claims the White House altered subsequent testimony, given in 1989, and that Nasa appointed a media overseer who vetted what he said to the press. They held practice press conferences where any suggestion that fossil fuels be reduced was considered political and unscientific, and therefore should not be uttered.
“Scientists are trained to be objective,” Hansen says. “I don’t think we should be prevented for talking about the the implications of science.” He retired from Nasa in 2013. “That was a source of friction. I held on longer than I wanted, by a year or two. I was in my 70s, it was time for someone else to take over. Now I feel a lot better.”
A man rides his bicycle on yellow paint poured on the street during a protest by activists from environmental group Greenpeace on the Champs-Elysee in Paris. Photograph: Christophe Ena/AP
From being possibly America’s most celebrated scientist, Hansen is now probably its most prominent climate activist. He’s been arrested several times in protests outside the White House over mining and the controversial Keystone pipeline extension.
He is also an adjunct professor at Columbia University. When he’s in New York, he lives near the campus, surrounded by books piled on groaning shelves. Hansen’s not slowing down – he’s involved in a climate lobbying group and still undertakes the sort of scientific endeavor which helps maintain his gravitas.
One particular paper, released in July, painted a particularly bleak future for just about anyone living near the coast. Hansen and 16 colleagues found that Earth’s huge ice sheets, such as those found in Greenland, are melting faster than expected, meaning that even the 2C warming limit is “highly dangerous”.
The sea level could soon be up to five meters higher than it is today by the latter part of this century, unless greenhouse gases aren’t radically slashed, the paper states. This would inundate many of the world’s cities, including London, New York, Miami and Shanghai.
“More than half of the world’s cities of the world are at risk,” Hansen says. “If you talk to glaciologists privately they will tell you they are very concerned we are locking in much more significant sea level rises than the ice sheet models are telling us.
“The economic cost of a business as usual approach to emissions is incalculable. It will become questionable whether global governance will break down. You’re talking about hundreds of million of climate refugees from places such as Pakistan and China. We just can’t let that happen. Civilization was set up and developed with a stable, constant coastline.”
The paper has yet to be fully peer reviewed and some of Hansen’s colleagues, including his protege at Nasa, Gavin Schmidt, have voiced their doubts whether sea level rise will be quite this bad, with the IPCC projecting up to a meter by 2100.
Brickbats are thrown in a bipartisan way. Hansen feels Obama, who has made climate change a legacy issue in his final year in office, has botched the opportunity to tackle the issue.
“We all foolishly had such high hopes for Obama, to articulate things, to be like Roosevelt and have fireside chats to explain to the public why we need to have a rising fee on carbon in order to move to clean energy,” he says. “But he’s not particularly good at that. He didn’t make it a priority and now it’s too late for him.”
Hansen is just as scathing of leading Republicans who have embraced climate science denialism to the chagrin of some party elders.
Leading presidential candidates Donald Trump, Marco Rubio and Ben Carson have all derided evidence that the world is warming due to human activity while Ted Cruz, another contender, has taken time out from his campaign to to sit on an inquiry into climate science that has heard testimony from a rightwing radio host who has no scientific background.
“It’s all embarrassing really,” Hansen says. “After a while you realise as a scientist that politicians don’t act rationally.
“Many of the conservatives know climate change is not a hoax. But those running for president are hamstrung by the fact they think they can’t get the nomination if they say this is an issue. They wouldn’t get money from the fossil fuel industry.”
There is a positive note to end on, however. Global emissions have somewhat stalled and Hansen believes China, the world’s largest emitter, will now step up to provide the leadership lacking from the US. A submerged Fifth Avenue and deadly heatwaves aren’t an inevitability.
“I think we will get there because China is rational,” Hansen says. “Their leaders are mostly trained in engineering and such things, they don’t deny climate change and they have a huge incentive, which is air pollution. It’s so bad in their cities they need to move to clean energies. They realise it’s not a hoax. But they will need co-operation.”
James Hansen, father of climate change awareness, calls Paris talks 'a fraud'
Mere mention of the Paris climate talks is enough to make James Hansen grumpy. The former Nasa scientist, considered the father of global awareness of climate change, is a soft-spoken, almost diffident Iowan. But when he talks about the gathering of nearly 200 nations, his demeanour changes.
“It’s a fraud really, a fake,” he says, rubbing his head. “It’s just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.”
The talks, intended to reach a new global deal on cutting carbon emissions beyond 2020, have spent much time and energy on two major issues: whether the world should aim to contain the temperature rise to 1.5C or 2C above preindustrial levels, and how much funding should be doled out by wealthy countries to developing nations that risk being swamped by rising seas and bashed by escalating extreme weather events.
But, according to Hansen, the international jamboree is pointless unless greenhouse gas emissions aren’t taxed across the board. He argues that only this will force down emissions quickly enough to avoid the worst ravages of climate change.
Hansen, 74, has just returned from Paris where he again called for a price to be placed on each tonne of carbon from major emitters (he’s suggested a “fee” – because “taxes scare people off” – of $15 a tonne that would rise $10 a year and bring in $600bn in the US alone). There aren’t many takers, even among “big green” as Hansen labels environment groups.
Hansen has been a nagging yet respected voice on climate change since he shot to prominence in the summer of 1988. The Nasa scientists, who had been analyzing changes in the Earth’s climate since the 1970s, told a congressional committee that something called the “greenhouse effect” where heat-trapped gases are released into the atmosphere was causing global warming with a 99% certainty.
A New York Times report of the 1988 testimony includes the radical suggestion that there should be a “sharp reduction in the burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels that release carbon dioxide”, a plea familiar to those who have watched politicians who have traipsed up to the lectern or interviewer’s microphone in Paris over the past two weeks.
After that, things started to get a little difficult for Hansen. He claims the White House altered subsequent testimony, given in 1989, and that Nasa appointed a media overseer who vetted what he said to the press. They held practice press conferences where any suggestion that fossil fuels be reduced was considered political and unscientific, and therefore should not be uttered.
“Scientists are trained to be objective,” Hansen says. “I don’t think we should be prevented for talking about the the implications of science.” He retired from Nasa in 2013. “That was a source of friction. I held on longer than I wanted, by a year or two. I was in my 70s, it was time for someone else to take over. Now I feel a lot better.”
A man rides his bicycle on yellow paint poured on the street during a protest by activists from environmental group Greenpeace on the Champs-Elysee in Paris. Photograph: Christophe Ena/AP
From being possibly America’s most celebrated scientist, Hansen is now probably its most prominent climate activist. He’s been arrested several times in protests outside the White House over mining and the controversial Keystone pipeline extension.
He is also an adjunct professor at Columbia University. When he’s in New York, he lives near the campus, surrounded by books piled on groaning shelves. Hansen’s not slowing down – he’s involved in a climate lobbying group and still undertakes the sort of scientific endeavor which helps maintain his gravitas.
One particular paper, released in July, painted a particularly bleak future for just about anyone living near the coast. Hansen and 16 colleagues found that Earth’s huge ice sheets, such as those found in Greenland, are melting faster than expected, meaning that even the 2C warming limit is “highly dangerous”.
The sea level could soon be up to five meters higher than it is today by the latter part of this century, unless greenhouse gases aren’t radically slashed, the paper states. This would inundate many of the world’s cities, including London, New York, Miami and Shanghai.
“More than half of the world’s cities of the world are at risk,” Hansen says. “If you talk to glaciologists privately they will tell you they are very concerned we are locking in much more significant sea level rises than the ice sheet models are telling us.
“The economic cost of a business as usual approach to emissions is incalculable. It will become questionable whether global governance will break down. You’re talking about hundreds of million of climate refugees from places such as Pakistan and China. We just can’t let that happen. Civilization was set up and developed with a stable, constant coastline.”
The paper has yet to be fully peer reviewed and some of Hansen’s colleagues, including his protege at Nasa, Gavin Schmidt, have voiced their doubts whether sea level rise will be quite this bad, with the IPCC projecting up to a meter by 2100.
Brickbats are thrown in a bipartisan way. Hansen feels Obama, who has made climate change a legacy issue in his final year in office, has botched the opportunity to tackle the issue.
“We all foolishly had such high hopes for Obama, to articulate things, to be like Roosevelt and have fireside chats to explain to the public why we need to have a rising fee on carbon in order to move to clean energy,” he says. “But he’s not particularly good at that. He didn’t make it a priority and now it’s too late for him.”
Hansen is just as scathing of leading Republicans who have embraced climate science denialism to the chagrin of some party elders.
Leading presidential candidates Donald Trump, Marco Rubio and Ben Carson have all derided evidence that the world is warming due to human activity while Ted Cruz, another contender, has taken time out from his campaign to to sit on an inquiry into climate science that has heard testimony from a rightwing radio host who has no scientific background.
“It’s all embarrassing really,” Hansen says. “After a while you realise as a scientist that politicians don’t act rationally.
“Many of the conservatives know climate change is not a hoax. But those running for president are hamstrung by the fact they think they can’t get the nomination if they say this is an issue. They wouldn’t get money from the fossil fuel industry.”
There is a positive note to end on, however. Global emissions have somewhat stalled and Hansen believes China, the world’s largest emitter, will now step up to provide the leadership lacking from the US. A submerged Fifth Avenue and deadly heatwaves aren’t an inevitability.
“I think we will get there because China is rational,” Hansen says. “Their leaders are mostly trained in engineering and such things, they don’t deny climate change and they have a huge incentive, which is air pollution. It’s so bad in their cities they need to move to clean energies. They realise it’s not a hoax. But they will need co-operation.”
Sunday, December 6, 2015
SC132-3
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/apocalyptic_capitalism_20151206
Apocalyptic Capitalism
The charade of the 21st United Nations climate summit will end, as past climate summits have ended, with lofty rhetoric and ineffectual cosmetic reforms. Since the first summit more than 20 years ago, carbon dioxide emissions have soared. Placing faith in our political and economic elites, who have mastered the arts of duplicity and propaganda on behalf of corporate power, is the triumph of hope over experience. There are only a few ways left to deal honestly with climate change: sustained civil disobedience that disrupts the machinery of exploitation; preparing for the inevitable dislocations and catastrophes that will come from irreversible rising temperatures; and cutting our personal carbon footprints, which means drastically reducing our consumption, particularly of animal products.
“Our civilization,” Dr. Richard Oppenlander writes in “Food Choice and Sustainability, “displays a curious instinct when confronted with a problem related to overconsumption—we simply find a way to produce more of what it is we are consuming, instead of limiting or stopping that consumption.”
The global elites have no intention of interfering with the profits, or ending government subsidies, for the fossil fuel industry and the extraction industries. They will not curtail extraction or impose hefty carbon taxes to keep fossil fuels in the ground. They will not limit the overconsumption that is the engine of global capitalism. They act as if the greatest contributor of greenhouse gases—the animal agriculture industry—does not exist. They siphon off trillions of dollars and employ scientific and technical expertise—expertise that should be directed toward preparing for environmental catastrophe and investing in renewable energy—to wage endless wars in the Middle East. What they airily hold out as a distant solution to the crisis—wind turbines and solar panels—is, as the scientist James Lovelock says, the equivalent of 18th-century doctors attempting to cure serious diseases with leeches and mercury. And as the elites mouth platitudes about saving the climate they are shoving still another trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), down our throats. The TPP permits corporations to ignore nonbinding climate accords made at conferences such as the one in Paris, and it allows them, in secret trade tribunals, to defy environmental regulations imposed by individual states.
New technology—fracking, fuel-efficient vehicles or genetically modified food—is not about curbing overconsumption or conserving resources. It is about ensuring that consumption continues at unsustainable levels. Technological innovation, employed to build systems of greater and greater complexity, has fragmented society into cadres of specialists. The expertise of each of these specialists is limited to a small section of the elaborate technological, scientific and bureaucratic machinery that drives corporate capitalism forward—much as in the specialized bureaucratic machinery that defined the genocide carried out by the Nazis. These technocrats are part of the massive, unthinking hive that makes any system work, even a system of death. They lack the intellectual and moral capacity to question the doomsday machine spawned by global capitalism. And they are in control.
Civilizations careening toward collapse create ever more complex structures, and more intricate specialization, to exploit diminishing resources. But eventually the resources are destroyed or exhausted. The systems and technologies designed to exploit these resources become useless. Economists call such a phenomenon the “Jevons paradox.” The result is systems collapse.
In the wake of collapses, as evidenced throughout history, societies fragment politically, culturally and socially. They become failed states, bleak and desolate outposts where law and order break down, and there is a mad and often violent scramble for the basic necessities of life. Barbarism reigns.
“Only the strong survive; the weak are victimized, robbed, and killed,” the anthropologist Joseph Tainter writes in “The Collapse of Complex Societies.” “There is fighting for food and fuel. Whatever central authority remains lacks the resources to reimpose order. Bands of pitiful, maimed survivors scavenge among the ruins of grandeur. Grass grows in the streets. There is no higher goal than survival.”
The elites, trained in business schools and managerial programs not to solve real problems but to maintain at any cost the systems of global capitalism, profit personally from the assault. They amass inconceivable sums of wealth while their victims, the underclasses around the globe, are thrust into increasing distress from global warming, poverty and societal breakdown. The apparatus of government, seized by this corporate cabal, is hostile to genuine change. It passes laws, as it did for Denton, Texas, after residents voted to outlaw fracking in their city, to overturn the ability of local communities to control their own resources. It persecutes dissidents, along with environmental and animal rights activists, who try to halt the insanity. The elites don’t work for us. They don’t work for the planet. They orchestrate the gaiacide. And they are well paid for it.
The Anthropocene Age—the age of humans, which has caused mass extinctions of plant and animal species and the pollution of the soil, air and oceans—is upon us. The pace of destruction is accelerating. Climate scientists say that sea levels, for example, are rising three times faster than predicted and that the Arctic ice is vanishing at rates that were unforeseen. “If carbon dioxide concentrations reach 550 ppm,” writes Clive Hamilton in “Requiem for a Species,” “after which emissions fell to zero, the global temperature would continue to rise for at least another century.” We have already passed 400 parts per million, a figure not seen on earth for 3 million to 5 million years. We are on track to reach at least 550 ppm by 2100.
The breakdown of the planet, many predict, will be nonlinear, meaning that various systems that sustain life—as Tainter chronicles in his study of collapsed civilizations—will disintegrate simultaneously. The infrastructures that distribute food, supply our energy, ensure our security, produce and transport our baffling array of products, and maintain law and order will crumble at once. It won’t be much fun: Soaring temperatures. Submerged island states and coastal cities. Mass migrations. Species extinction. Monster storms. Droughts. Famines. Declining crop yields. And a security and surveillance apparatus, along with militarized police, that will employ harsher and harsher methods to cope with the chaos.
We have to let go of our relentless positivism, our absurd mania for hope, and face the bleakness of reality before us. To resist means to acknowledge that we are living in a world already heavily damaged by global warming. It means refusing to participate in the destruction of the planet. It means noncooperation with authority. It means defying in every way possible consumer capitalism, militarism and imperialism. It means adjusting our lifestyle, including what we eat, to thwart the forces bent upon our annihilation.
The animal agriculture industry has, in a staggering act of near total censorship, managed to stifle public discussion about the industry’s complicity in global warming. It is barely mentioned in climate summits. Yet livestock and their byproducts, as Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn point out in their book, “The Sustainability Secret,” and their documentary, “Cowspiracy,” account for at least 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year, or 51 percent of all worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. Methane and nitrous oxide are rarely mentioned in climate talks, although those two greenhouse gases are, as the authors point out, respectively, 86 times and 296 times more destructive than carbon dioxide. Cattle, worldwide, they write, produce 150 billion gallons of methane daily. And 65 percent of the nitrous oxide produced by human-related activities is caused by the animal agriculture industry. Water used in fracking, they write, ranges from 70 billion to 140 billion gallons annually. Animal agriculture water consumption, the book notes, ranges from 34 trillion to 76 trillion gallons annually. Raising animals for human consumption takes up to 45 percent of the planet’s land. Ninety-one percent of the deforestation of the Amazon rain forest and up to 80 percent of global rain forest loss are caused by clearing land for the grazing of livestock and growing feed crops for meat and dairy animals. As more and more rain forest disappears, the planet loses one of its primary means to safely sequester carbon dioxide. The animal agriculture industry is, as Andersen and Kuhn write, also a principal cause of species extinction and the creation of more than 95,000 square miles of nitrogen-flooded dead zones in the oceans.
A person who eats a vegan diet, they point out, a diet free of meat, dairy and eggs, saves 1,100 gallons of water, 45 pounds of grain, 30 square feet of forested land, 20 pounds CO2 equivalent, and one animal’s life every day.
The animal agriculture industry has pushed through “Ag-Gag” laws in many states that criminalize protests, critiques of the industry, and whistleblowing attempts to bring the public’s attention to the staggering destruction wrought on the environment by the business of raising 70 billion land animals every year worldwide to be exploited and consumed by humans. And they have done so, I presume, because defying the animal agriculture industry is as easy as deciding not to put animal products—which have tremendous, scientifically proven health risks—into your mouth.
We have little time left. Those who are despoiling the earth do so for personal gain, believing they can use their privilege to escape the fate that will befall the human species. We may not be able to stop the assault. But we can refuse to abet it. The idols of power and greed, as the biblical prophets warned us, threaten to doom the human race.
Timothy Pachirat recounts in his book, “Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight,” an Aug. 5, 2004, story in the Omaha World-Herald. An “old-timer” who lived five miles from the Omaha slaughterhouses recalled the wind carrying the stench of the almost six and a half million cattle, sheep and hogs killed each year in south Omaha. The sickly odor permeated buildings throughout the area.
“It was the smell of money,” the old-timer said. “It was the smell of money.”
Apocalyptic Capitalism
The charade of the 21st United Nations climate summit will end, as past climate summits have ended, with lofty rhetoric and ineffectual cosmetic reforms. Since the first summit more than 20 years ago, carbon dioxide emissions have soared. Placing faith in our political and economic elites, who have mastered the arts of duplicity and propaganda on behalf of corporate power, is the triumph of hope over experience. There are only a few ways left to deal honestly with climate change: sustained civil disobedience that disrupts the machinery of exploitation; preparing for the inevitable dislocations and catastrophes that will come from irreversible rising temperatures; and cutting our personal carbon footprints, which means drastically reducing our consumption, particularly of animal products.
“Our civilization,” Dr. Richard Oppenlander writes in “Food Choice and Sustainability, “displays a curious instinct when confronted with a problem related to overconsumption—we simply find a way to produce more of what it is we are consuming, instead of limiting or stopping that consumption.”
The global elites have no intention of interfering with the profits, or ending government subsidies, for the fossil fuel industry and the extraction industries. They will not curtail extraction or impose hefty carbon taxes to keep fossil fuels in the ground. They will not limit the overconsumption that is the engine of global capitalism. They act as if the greatest contributor of greenhouse gases—the animal agriculture industry—does not exist. They siphon off trillions of dollars and employ scientific and technical expertise—expertise that should be directed toward preparing for environmental catastrophe and investing in renewable energy—to wage endless wars in the Middle East. What they airily hold out as a distant solution to the crisis—wind turbines and solar panels—is, as the scientist James Lovelock says, the equivalent of 18th-century doctors attempting to cure serious diseases with leeches and mercury. And as the elites mouth platitudes about saving the climate they are shoving still another trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), down our throats. The TPP permits corporations to ignore nonbinding climate accords made at conferences such as the one in Paris, and it allows them, in secret trade tribunals, to defy environmental regulations imposed by individual states.
New technology—fracking, fuel-efficient vehicles or genetically modified food—is not about curbing overconsumption or conserving resources. It is about ensuring that consumption continues at unsustainable levels. Technological innovation, employed to build systems of greater and greater complexity, has fragmented society into cadres of specialists. The expertise of each of these specialists is limited to a small section of the elaborate technological, scientific and bureaucratic machinery that drives corporate capitalism forward—much as in the specialized bureaucratic machinery that defined the genocide carried out by the Nazis. These technocrats are part of the massive, unthinking hive that makes any system work, even a system of death. They lack the intellectual and moral capacity to question the doomsday machine spawned by global capitalism. And they are in control.
Civilizations careening toward collapse create ever more complex structures, and more intricate specialization, to exploit diminishing resources. But eventually the resources are destroyed or exhausted. The systems and technologies designed to exploit these resources become useless. Economists call such a phenomenon the “Jevons paradox.” The result is systems collapse.
In the wake of collapses, as evidenced throughout history, societies fragment politically, culturally and socially. They become failed states, bleak and desolate outposts where law and order break down, and there is a mad and often violent scramble for the basic necessities of life. Barbarism reigns.
“Only the strong survive; the weak are victimized, robbed, and killed,” the anthropologist Joseph Tainter writes in “The Collapse of Complex Societies.” “There is fighting for food and fuel. Whatever central authority remains lacks the resources to reimpose order. Bands of pitiful, maimed survivors scavenge among the ruins of grandeur. Grass grows in the streets. There is no higher goal than survival.”
The elites, trained in business schools and managerial programs not to solve real problems but to maintain at any cost the systems of global capitalism, profit personally from the assault. They amass inconceivable sums of wealth while their victims, the underclasses around the globe, are thrust into increasing distress from global warming, poverty and societal breakdown. The apparatus of government, seized by this corporate cabal, is hostile to genuine change. It passes laws, as it did for Denton, Texas, after residents voted to outlaw fracking in their city, to overturn the ability of local communities to control their own resources. It persecutes dissidents, along with environmental and animal rights activists, who try to halt the insanity. The elites don’t work for us. They don’t work for the planet. They orchestrate the gaiacide. And they are well paid for it.
The Anthropocene Age—the age of humans, which has caused mass extinctions of plant and animal species and the pollution of the soil, air and oceans—is upon us. The pace of destruction is accelerating. Climate scientists say that sea levels, for example, are rising three times faster than predicted and that the Arctic ice is vanishing at rates that were unforeseen. “If carbon dioxide concentrations reach 550 ppm,” writes Clive Hamilton in “Requiem for a Species,” “after which emissions fell to zero, the global temperature would continue to rise for at least another century.” We have already passed 400 parts per million, a figure not seen on earth for 3 million to 5 million years. We are on track to reach at least 550 ppm by 2100.
The breakdown of the planet, many predict, will be nonlinear, meaning that various systems that sustain life—as Tainter chronicles in his study of collapsed civilizations—will disintegrate simultaneously. The infrastructures that distribute food, supply our energy, ensure our security, produce and transport our baffling array of products, and maintain law and order will crumble at once. It won’t be much fun: Soaring temperatures. Submerged island states and coastal cities. Mass migrations. Species extinction. Monster storms. Droughts. Famines. Declining crop yields. And a security and surveillance apparatus, along with militarized police, that will employ harsher and harsher methods to cope with the chaos.
We have to let go of our relentless positivism, our absurd mania for hope, and face the bleakness of reality before us. To resist means to acknowledge that we are living in a world already heavily damaged by global warming. It means refusing to participate in the destruction of the planet. It means noncooperation with authority. It means defying in every way possible consumer capitalism, militarism and imperialism. It means adjusting our lifestyle, including what we eat, to thwart the forces bent upon our annihilation.
The animal agriculture industry has, in a staggering act of near total censorship, managed to stifle public discussion about the industry’s complicity in global warming. It is barely mentioned in climate summits. Yet livestock and their byproducts, as Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn point out in their book, “The Sustainability Secret,” and their documentary, “Cowspiracy,” account for at least 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year, or 51 percent of all worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. Methane and nitrous oxide are rarely mentioned in climate talks, although those two greenhouse gases are, as the authors point out, respectively, 86 times and 296 times more destructive than carbon dioxide. Cattle, worldwide, they write, produce 150 billion gallons of methane daily. And 65 percent of the nitrous oxide produced by human-related activities is caused by the animal agriculture industry. Water used in fracking, they write, ranges from 70 billion to 140 billion gallons annually. Animal agriculture water consumption, the book notes, ranges from 34 trillion to 76 trillion gallons annually. Raising animals for human consumption takes up to 45 percent of the planet’s land. Ninety-one percent of the deforestation of the Amazon rain forest and up to 80 percent of global rain forest loss are caused by clearing land for the grazing of livestock and growing feed crops for meat and dairy animals. As more and more rain forest disappears, the planet loses one of its primary means to safely sequester carbon dioxide. The animal agriculture industry is, as Andersen and Kuhn write, also a principal cause of species extinction and the creation of more than 95,000 square miles of nitrogen-flooded dead zones in the oceans.
A person who eats a vegan diet, they point out, a diet free of meat, dairy and eggs, saves 1,100 gallons of water, 45 pounds of grain, 30 square feet of forested land, 20 pounds CO2 equivalent, and one animal’s life every day.
The animal agriculture industry has pushed through “Ag-Gag” laws in many states that criminalize protests, critiques of the industry, and whistleblowing attempts to bring the public’s attention to the staggering destruction wrought on the environment by the business of raising 70 billion land animals every year worldwide to be exploited and consumed by humans. And they have done so, I presume, because defying the animal agriculture industry is as easy as deciding not to put animal products—which have tremendous, scientifically proven health risks—into your mouth.
We have little time left. Those who are despoiling the earth do so for personal gain, believing they can use their privilege to escape the fate that will befall the human species. We may not be able to stop the assault. But we can refuse to abet it. The idols of power and greed, as the biblical prophets warned us, threaten to doom the human race.
Timothy Pachirat recounts in his book, “Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight,” an Aug. 5, 2004, story in the Omaha World-Herald. An “old-timer” who lived five miles from the Omaha slaughterhouses recalled the wind carrying the stench of the almost six and a half million cattle, sheep and hogs killed each year in south Omaha. The sickly odor permeated buildings throughout the area.
“It was the smell of money,” the old-timer said. “It was the smell of money.”
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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article43629.htm
Murder And Mayhem In The Middle East
Why it matters to those living in the West
To understand what’s happening in Syria right now, you have to understand the tactics and motivations of the US and NATO -- parties sharing interwoven aims and goals in the Middle East/North African (MENA) region.
While the populations of Europe and the US are fed raw propaganda about the regional aims involved, the reality is far different.
Where the propaganda claims that various bad dictators have to be taken out, or that democracy is the goal, neither have anything at all to do with what’s actually happening or has happened in the region.
For starters, we all know that if oil fields were not at stake then the West would care much much less about MENA affairs.
But a lot of outside interests do care. And their aims certainly and largely include controlling the region’s critical energy resources. There’s a lot of concern over whether Russia or China will instead come to dominate these last, best oil reserves on the planet.
Further, we can dispense with the idea that the US and NATO have any interest at all in human rights in this story. If they did, then they’d at least have to admit that their strategies and tactics have unleashed immeasurable suffering, as well as created the conditions for lots more. But it would be silly to try and argue about or understand regional motivations through the lenses of human rights or civilian freedoms -- as neither applies here.
Divide And Conquer
Instead, the policies in the MENA region are rooted in fracturing the region so that it will be easier to control.
That’s a very old tactic; first utilized to a great extent by Britain starting back in the 1700s.
Divide and conquer. There’s a reason that’s a well-worn catch phrase: it’s hundreds of years old.
But to get a handle on the level of depravity involved, I think it useful to examine what happened in Libya in 2011 when NATO took out Muamar Gaddafi and left the country a broken shell -- as was intended.
I cannot really give you a good reason for NATO involving itself in taking out Gaddafi. I only have bad ones.
The official reason was that after the Arab Spring uprising in Libya in early 2011 (with plenty of evidence of Western influences in fanning those flames) things got ugly and protesters were shot. This allowed the UN to declare that it needed to protect civilians, and the ICC to charge Gaddafi with crimes against humanity, declaring that he needed to stand trial.
Here’s how it went down:
On 27 June, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Gaddafi, his son Saif al-Islam, and his brother-in-law Abdullah Senussi, head of state security, for charges concerning crimes against humanity.[268] Libyan officials rejected the ICC, claiming that it had "no legitimacy whatsoever" and highlighting that "all of its activities are directed at African leaders".[269]
That month, Amnesty International published their findings, in which they asserted that many of the accusations of mass human rights abuses made against Gaddafist forces lacked credible evidence, and were instead fabrications of the rebel forces which had been readily adopted by the western media.
After the ICC's indictment, it was a hop, skip and a jump to declaring a NATO-enforced ‘no fly zone’ over Libya to protect civilians.
From there it was just a straight jump to NATO actively shooting anything related to the Gaddafi government. NATO had thereby chosen sides and was directly supporting the rebellion.
The pattern in play here is always the same: cherry-picked events are used as a pretext to support the side seeking to topple the existing government and thereby leave a sectarian wasteland to flourish in the inevitable power vacuum.
If you are like most people in the West, you know almost nothing of any of this context. It’s not well reported. And Libya is rarely in the news even though it's going through increasingly desperate times.
I found a speech given by Gaddafi a few months before he was killed to be especially compelling and revealing. I will reproduce it in its entirety here:
For 40 years, or was it longer, I can't remember, I did all I could to give people houses, hospitals, schools, and when they were hungry, I gave them food. I even made Benghazi into farmland from the desert, I stood up to attacks from that cowboy Reagan, when he killed my adopted orphaned daughter, he was trying to kill me, instead he killed that poor innocent child. Then I helped my brothers and sisters from Africa with money for the African Union.
I did all I could to help people understand the concept of real democracy, where people's committees ran our country. But that was never enough, as some told me, even people who had 10 room homes, new suits and furniture, were never satisfied, as selfish as they were they wanted more. They told Americans and other visitors, that they needed "democracy" and "freedom" never realizing it was a cut throat system, where the biggest dog eats the rest, but they were enchanted with those words, never realizing that in America, there was no free medicine, no free hospitals, no free housing, no free education and no free food, except when people had to beg or go to long lines to get soup.
No, no matter what I did, it was never enough for some, but for others, they knew I was the son of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the only true Arab and Muslim leader we've had since Salah-al-Deen, when he claimed the Suez Canal for his people, as I claimed Libya, for my people, it was his footsteps I tried to follow, to keep my people free from colonial domination - from thieves who would steal from us.
Now, I am under attack by the biggest force in military history, my little African son, Obama wants to kill me, to take away the freedom of our country, to take away our free housing, our free medicine, our free education, our free food, and replace it with American style thievery, called "capitalism," but all of us in the Third World know what that means, it means corporations run the countries, run the world, and the people suffer. So, there is no alternative for me, I must make my stand, and if Allah wishes, I shall die by following His path, the path that has made our country rich with farmland, with food and health, and even allowed us to help our African and Arab brothers and sisters to work here with us, in the Libyan Jamahiriya.
I do not wish to die, but if it comes to that, to save this land, my people, all the thousands who are all my children, then so be it.
Let this testament be my voice to the world, that I stood up to crusader attacks of NATO, stood up to cruelty, stood up to betrayal, stood up to the West and its colonialist ambitions, and that I stood with my African brothers, my true Arab and Muslim brothers, as a beacon of light. When others were building castles, I lived in a modest house, and in a tent. I never forgot my youth in Sirte, I did not spend our national treasury foolishly, and like Salah-al-Deen, our great Muslim leader, who rescued Jerusalem for Islam, I took little for myself...
In the West, some have called me "mad", "crazy", but they know the truth yet continue to lie, they know that our land is independent and free, not in the colonial grip, that my vision, my path, is, and has been clear and for my people and that I will fight to my last breath to keep us free, may Allah almighty help us to remain faithful and free.
Gaddafi’s great crime seems to be giving away too much oil wealth to his people. Was he a strongman? Yes, but you have to be to rule in that region right now. Was he the worst strong man? No, not by a long shot.
As bad as he was, at least he didn’t kill a million Iraqis on trumped up charges of non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Nor was he chopping off 50 heads per week and stoning females for adultery as is the case with Saudi Arabia right now.
But again, whether he killed protestors or not, or committed war crimes or not, is irrelevant to the power structure. What mattered was that he had locked out Western interests, and instead used his country's oil wealth to provide free or extremely cheap health care, education and housing to a wide swath of Libyans.
So let’s cut to the murder scene. Here’s how it went down:
At around 08:30 local time on 20 October, Gaddafi, his army chief Abu-Bakr Yunis Jabr, his security chief Mansour Dhao, and a group of loyalists attempted to escape in a convoy of 75 vehicles.[7][8] A Royal Air Force reconnaissance aircraft spotted the convoy moving at high speed, after NATO forces intercepted a satellite phone call made by Gaddafi.[9]
NATO aircraft then fired on 11 of the vehicles, destroying one. A U.S. Predator drone operated from a base near Las Vegas[8] fired the first missiles at the convoy, hitting its target about 3 kilometres (2 mi) west of Sirte. Moments later, French Air Force Rafale fighter jets continued the bombing.[10]
The NATO bombing immobilized much of the convoy and killed dozens of loyalist fighters. Following the first strike, some 20 vehicles broke away from the main group and continued moving south. A second NATO airstrike damaged or destroyed 10 of these vehicles. According to the Financial Times, Free Libya units on the ground also struck the convoy.[11]
According to their statement, NATO was not aware at the time of the strike that Gaddafi was in the convoy. NATO stated that in accordance with Security Council Resolution 1973, it does not target individuals but only military assets that pose a threat. NATO later learned, "from open sources and Allied intelligence," that Gaddafi was in the convoy and that the strike likely contributed to his capture.[11]
To believe NATO, it had no idea Gaddafi was in that convoy (honest!), but just managed to have a Predator drone handy as well as a large number of jets armed for ground targets (not anti-aircraft missiles, as a no-fly zone might imply). It merely struck all of these vehicles over and over again in their quest to kill everyone on board because they were “military assets that posed a threat.”
Because you live in the real world, you know that NATO knew exactly where Gaddafi was at all times and that he was in that convoy attempting to escape NATO's bombing raid. Further, you won’t be surprised to learn that many of these vehicles were pickup trucks that really posed no military threat to NATO. The point was to kill Gaddafi, and numerous resources were brought to bear on that mission.
Gaddafi’s killing was the assassination of a foreign leader by Western interests. In this case, Gaddafi was just yet another target in a long line of leaders that attempted to keep those same interests at bay.
After NATO was finished making a mess of Libya by taking out Gaddafi and leaving a right proper mess of a power vacuum, it simply departed -- leaving the country to fend for itself. Libya descended, of course, into an outright civil war and has remained ever since a hotbed of sectarian violence and increasing ISIS control and presence.
If NATO/US had to follow the Pier I rule of “you break it, you buy it” they would still be in Libya offering money and assistance as the country settles down and begins the long process of rebuilding.
But no such luck. That’s absolutely not how they operate. It’s disaster capitalism in action. The idea is to break things apart and then make money off of the pieces. It's not to help people.
Otherwise, how do we explain these images?
While imperfect by many standards, all of these countries were stable and increasingly prosperous before outside interests came in and turned them into a living nightmare.
It is this context that explains why such reactionary and violent groups as ISIS arose. They are the natural response of violated people seeking to assert some control over lives that otherwise have no hope and even less meaning.
I’m not justifying ISIS; only explaining the context that led to its rise.
Speaking of which, let’s turn back to Libya:
ISIS is tightening its grip in Libya
Nov 15, 2015
GENEVA (Reuters) - Islamic State militants have consolidated control over central Libya, carrying out summary executions, beheadings and amputations, the United Nations said on Monday in a further illustration of the North African state's descent into anarchy.
All sides in Libya's multiple armed conflicts are committing breaches of international law that may amount to war crimes, including abductions, torture and the killing of civilians, according to a U.N. report.
Islamic State (IS) has gained control over swathes of territory, "committing gross abuses including public summary executions of individuals based on their religion or political allegiance", the joint report by the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and the U.N. Support Mission in Libya said.
The U.N. had documented IS executions in their stronghold city of Sirte, in central Libya along the Mediterranean coast, and in Derna to the east, from which they were later ousted by local militias. Victims included Egyptian Copts, Ethiopians, Eritreans and a South Sudanese, the report said.
Some were accused of "treason", others of same-sex relations, but none were given due legal process, according to the report, which covered the year through October.
Four years after the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi, Libya is locked in a conflict between two rival governments - an official one in the east and a self-declared one controlling the capital Tripoli - and the many armed factions that back them.
After that atrocious summary, how bad does life under Gaddafi sound now? Again, he was targeted for execution by Western interests and the resulting mess is of little surprise to anybody with even modest curiosity about how violent overthrows tend to work out in the MENA region.
But where is the UN security council denouncing the war crimes? And where is the ICC leveling crimes against humanity charges? Nowhere. There’s no more Western political interest in Libya now that it has been broken apart.
As they say in the military: once is bad luck, twice is a coincidence, but three times is enemy action. This pattern of eliminating “a very bad man” and leaving the country in a complete mess has happened three times of late, with Syria targeted to be the fourth. So enemy action it is.
ISIS and other extreme jihadist groups arose because of brutal conditions that made such harsh interpretations of ancient religious texts make sense by comparison. When you have nothing left to believe in, one’s belief system can compensate by becoming rather inflexible.
I know I have greatly simplified a terribly complex dynamic, but -- speaking of beliefs -- I don’t believe that terrorists are born, I believe they are raised. When one has nothing left to lose, then anything becomes possible, including strapping on a suicide belt and flicking the switch.
What I am saying is that this is not a battle between Christians and Muslims, nor is it a battle between good and evil, both characterizations that I’ve read recently in great abundance. That’s all nonsense for the masses.
This is about resources and true wealth that is being siphoned from the people who have had the misfortune to be born on top of it, and towards other regions with greater power and reach.
There’s nothing different in what I am reading today from what the British redcoats did in India from the late 1700’s throughout the 1800’s. Their military might assured that the East India Tea Company could continue to extract resources from the locals.
At the time the locals were called heathens, implying they were subhuman and therefore could be safely dispatched. Now they are called terrorists -- same thing. Dehumanize your foe to help rationalize one’s behaviors. It’s a tried and true practice of war propaganda.
How This Affects You
While we might be tempted to sit in our Western environs, secure in the idea that at least we aren’t ‘over there’ where all the bad things are happening, it would be a mistake to think that this turmoil will not impact you.
I’m not talking about the ultra-remote chance of being a victim of blow-back terrorism either. I am referring to the idea that it would be a mistake to think that any government(s) that think nothing of ruining entire MENA countries will hesitate to throw anybody else under the bus that gets in their way.
Ben Bernanke gave no thought to throwing granny under the bus in order to help the big banks get even bigger. He willingly and knowing transferred over a trillion dollars away from savers and handed it to the big banks.
Similarly, we shouldn't expect enlightened behavior to emerge from the shadows of leadership once things get even dicer on the world stage. In fact, we should expect the opposite.
It would be a mistake to think that powers in charge would not turn their malign intent inwards toward their own populace if/when necessary. Today it’s Syria, yesterday it was Libya, but tomorrow it might be us.
The people of France recently got a small taste of the horror that has been visited upon the people of Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya. And while I have no interest in seeing any more violence anywhere, perhaps the people of France will finally begin to ask what happened and why. I don’t mean the fine details of the night of the massacre, but how it came to be considered a ‘thing to do’ at all by the people who did it. (For those unaware, France has been particularly involved for years in fomenting revolt within Syria)
Conclusion
My intention in stringing these dots together is so that we can have an informed discussion about what’s happening in Syria and the Middle East at large. I am not at all interested in trying to understand events through the framing lenses of religion and/or ‘terrorism’, both of which are tools of distraction in my experience.
Instead, I want to understand the power dynamics at play. And to try to peel back the layers, to understand why the powers that be consider this region so important at this moment in history.
I think they know as well as we do that the shale oil revolution is not a revolution at all but a retirement party for an oil industry that has given us everything we hold economically dear but is on its last legs.
I think that the power structures of the next twenty years are going to be utterly shaped by energy – who has it, who needs it and who’s controlling it.
Saudi Arabia is acting increasingly desperate here and I think we know why. They have a saying there: “My father rode a camel, I drove a car, my son flies a jet and his son will ride a camel.”
They know as well as anyone that their oil wealth will run out someday; and so, too, will the West’s interest in them. With no giant military to protect them, the royalty in Saudi Arabia should have some serious concerns about the future.
Heck, it’s even worse than that:
Saudi Wells Running Dry — of Water — Spell End of Desert Wheat
Nov 3, 2015
Saudi Arabia became a net exporter of wheat in 1984 from producing almost none in the 1970s. The self-sufficiency program became a victim of its own success, however, as it quickly depleted aquifers that haven’t been filled since the last Ice Age.
In an unexpected U-turn, the government said in 2008 it was phasing out the policy, reducing purchases of domestic wheat each year by 12.5 percent and bridging the gap progressively with imports.
The last official local harvest occurred in May, although the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization projects that a small crop of about metric 30,000 tons for traditional specialty bakery products will "prevail" in 2016. At its peak in 1992, Saudi Arabia produced 4.1 million tons of wheat and was one of the world’s top 10 wheat exporters.
The Saudis did something very unwise – they pumped an aquifer filled over 10,000 years ago and used it to grow wheat in the desert. Now their wells are running dry and they have no more water.
And yet their population is expanding rapidly even as their oil fields deplete. There’s a very bad intersection for Saudi Arabia, and the rulers know it.
It helps to explain their recent actions of lashing out against long-standing regional foes and helps to explain the increasing desperation of their moves to help destabilize (and even bomb) their neighbors.
My point here is that as resources become tight, the ruling powers can be expected to act in increasingly desperate ways. This is a tenet of the Long Emergency of which James Kunstler wrote.
The only response that makes any sense to me, at the individual level, is to reduce your needs and increase your resilience.
This is something we cover in great detail in our new book, Prosper!: How To Prepare for the Future and Create a World Worth Inheriting, so I won’t go into all the details here. Instead, my goal is to help cast a clarifying light on recent events and add some necessary detail that can help us more fully appreciate what’s happening around the world and why taking prudent preparations today is becoming increasingly urgent.
Murder And Mayhem In The Middle East
Why it matters to those living in the West
To understand what’s happening in Syria right now, you have to understand the tactics and motivations of the US and NATO -- parties sharing interwoven aims and goals in the Middle East/North African (MENA) region.
While the populations of Europe and the US are fed raw propaganda about the regional aims involved, the reality is far different.
Where the propaganda claims that various bad dictators have to be taken out, or that democracy is the goal, neither have anything at all to do with what’s actually happening or has happened in the region.
For starters, we all know that if oil fields were not at stake then the West would care much much less about MENA affairs.
But a lot of outside interests do care. And their aims certainly and largely include controlling the region’s critical energy resources. There’s a lot of concern over whether Russia or China will instead come to dominate these last, best oil reserves on the planet.
Further, we can dispense with the idea that the US and NATO have any interest at all in human rights in this story. If they did, then they’d at least have to admit that their strategies and tactics have unleashed immeasurable suffering, as well as created the conditions for lots more. But it would be silly to try and argue about or understand regional motivations through the lenses of human rights or civilian freedoms -- as neither applies here.
Divide And Conquer
Instead, the policies in the MENA region are rooted in fracturing the region so that it will be easier to control.
That’s a very old tactic; first utilized to a great extent by Britain starting back in the 1700s.
Divide and conquer. There’s a reason that’s a well-worn catch phrase: it’s hundreds of years old.
But to get a handle on the level of depravity involved, I think it useful to examine what happened in Libya in 2011 when NATO took out Muamar Gaddafi and left the country a broken shell -- as was intended.
I cannot really give you a good reason for NATO involving itself in taking out Gaddafi. I only have bad ones.
The official reason was that after the Arab Spring uprising in Libya in early 2011 (with plenty of evidence of Western influences in fanning those flames) things got ugly and protesters were shot. This allowed the UN to declare that it needed to protect civilians, and the ICC to charge Gaddafi with crimes against humanity, declaring that he needed to stand trial.
Here’s how it went down:
On 27 June, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Gaddafi, his son Saif al-Islam, and his brother-in-law Abdullah Senussi, head of state security, for charges concerning crimes against humanity.[268] Libyan officials rejected the ICC, claiming that it had "no legitimacy whatsoever" and highlighting that "all of its activities are directed at African leaders".[269]
That month, Amnesty International published their findings, in which they asserted that many of the accusations of mass human rights abuses made against Gaddafist forces lacked credible evidence, and were instead fabrications of the rebel forces which had been readily adopted by the western media.
After the ICC's indictment, it was a hop, skip and a jump to declaring a NATO-enforced ‘no fly zone’ over Libya to protect civilians.
From there it was just a straight jump to NATO actively shooting anything related to the Gaddafi government. NATO had thereby chosen sides and was directly supporting the rebellion.
The pattern in play here is always the same: cherry-picked events are used as a pretext to support the side seeking to topple the existing government and thereby leave a sectarian wasteland to flourish in the inevitable power vacuum.
If you are like most people in the West, you know almost nothing of any of this context. It’s not well reported. And Libya is rarely in the news even though it's going through increasingly desperate times.
I found a speech given by Gaddafi a few months before he was killed to be especially compelling and revealing. I will reproduce it in its entirety here:
For 40 years, or was it longer, I can't remember, I did all I could to give people houses, hospitals, schools, and when they were hungry, I gave them food. I even made Benghazi into farmland from the desert, I stood up to attacks from that cowboy Reagan, when he killed my adopted orphaned daughter, he was trying to kill me, instead he killed that poor innocent child. Then I helped my brothers and sisters from Africa with money for the African Union.
I did all I could to help people understand the concept of real democracy, where people's committees ran our country. But that was never enough, as some told me, even people who had 10 room homes, new suits and furniture, were never satisfied, as selfish as they were they wanted more. They told Americans and other visitors, that they needed "democracy" and "freedom" never realizing it was a cut throat system, where the biggest dog eats the rest, but they were enchanted with those words, never realizing that in America, there was no free medicine, no free hospitals, no free housing, no free education and no free food, except when people had to beg or go to long lines to get soup.
No, no matter what I did, it was never enough for some, but for others, they knew I was the son of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the only true Arab and Muslim leader we've had since Salah-al-Deen, when he claimed the Suez Canal for his people, as I claimed Libya, for my people, it was his footsteps I tried to follow, to keep my people free from colonial domination - from thieves who would steal from us.
Now, I am under attack by the biggest force in military history, my little African son, Obama wants to kill me, to take away the freedom of our country, to take away our free housing, our free medicine, our free education, our free food, and replace it with American style thievery, called "capitalism," but all of us in the Third World know what that means, it means corporations run the countries, run the world, and the people suffer. So, there is no alternative for me, I must make my stand, and if Allah wishes, I shall die by following His path, the path that has made our country rich with farmland, with food and health, and even allowed us to help our African and Arab brothers and sisters to work here with us, in the Libyan Jamahiriya.
I do not wish to die, but if it comes to that, to save this land, my people, all the thousands who are all my children, then so be it.
Let this testament be my voice to the world, that I stood up to crusader attacks of NATO, stood up to cruelty, stood up to betrayal, stood up to the West and its colonialist ambitions, and that I stood with my African brothers, my true Arab and Muslim brothers, as a beacon of light. When others were building castles, I lived in a modest house, and in a tent. I never forgot my youth in Sirte, I did not spend our national treasury foolishly, and like Salah-al-Deen, our great Muslim leader, who rescued Jerusalem for Islam, I took little for myself...
In the West, some have called me "mad", "crazy", but they know the truth yet continue to lie, they know that our land is independent and free, not in the colonial grip, that my vision, my path, is, and has been clear and for my people and that I will fight to my last breath to keep us free, may Allah almighty help us to remain faithful and free.
Gaddafi’s great crime seems to be giving away too much oil wealth to his people. Was he a strongman? Yes, but you have to be to rule in that region right now. Was he the worst strong man? No, not by a long shot.
As bad as he was, at least he didn’t kill a million Iraqis on trumped up charges of non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Nor was he chopping off 50 heads per week and stoning females for adultery as is the case with Saudi Arabia right now.
But again, whether he killed protestors or not, or committed war crimes or not, is irrelevant to the power structure. What mattered was that he had locked out Western interests, and instead used his country's oil wealth to provide free or extremely cheap health care, education and housing to a wide swath of Libyans.
So let’s cut to the murder scene. Here’s how it went down:
At around 08:30 local time on 20 October, Gaddafi, his army chief Abu-Bakr Yunis Jabr, his security chief Mansour Dhao, and a group of loyalists attempted to escape in a convoy of 75 vehicles.[7][8] A Royal Air Force reconnaissance aircraft spotted the convoy moving at high speed, after NATO forces intercepted a satellite phone call made by Gaddafi.[9]
NATO aircraft then fired on 11 of the vehicles, destroying one. A U.S. Predator drone operated from a base near Las Vegas[8] fired the first missiles at the convoy, hitting its target about 3 kilometres (2 mi) west of Sirte. Moments later, French Air Force Rafale fighter jets continued the bombing.[10]
The NATO bombing immobilized much of the convoy and killed dozens of loyalist fighters. Following the first strike, some 20 vehicles broke away from the main group and continued moving south. A second NATO airstrike damaged or destroyed 10 of these vehicles. According to the Financial Times, Free Libya units on the ground also struck the convoy.[11]
According to their statement, NATO was not aware at the time of the strike that Gaddafi was in the convoy. NATO stated that in accordance with Security Council Resolution 1973, it does not target individuals but only military assets that pose a threat. NATO later learned, "from open sources and Allied intelligence," that Gaddafi was in the convoy and that the strike likely contributed to his capture.[11]
To believe NATO, it had no idea Gaddafi was in that convoy (honest!), but just managed to have a Predator drone handy as well as a large number of jets armed for ground targets (not anti-aircraft missiles, as a no-fly zone might imply). It merely struck all of these vehicles over and over again in their quest to kill everyone on board because they were “military assets that posed a threat.”
Because you live in the real world, you know that NATO knew exactly where Gaddafi was at all times and that he was in that convoy attempting to escape NATO's bombing raid. Further, you won’t be surprised to learn that many of these vehicles were pickup trucks that really posed no military threat to NATO. The point was to kill Gaddafi, and numerous resources were brought to bear on that mission.
Gaddafi’s killing was the assassination of a foreign leader by Western interests. In this case, Gaddafi was just yet another target in a long line of leaders that attempted to keep those same interests at bay.
After NATO was finished making a mess of Libya by taking out Gaddafi and leaving a right proper mess of a power vacuum, it simply departed -- leaving the country to fend for itself. Libya descended, of course, into an outright civil war and has remained ever since a hotbed of sectarian violence and increasing ISIS control and presence.
If NATO/US had to follow the Pier I rule of “you break it, you buy it” they would still be in Libya offering money and assistance as the country settles down and begins the long process of rebuilding.
But no such luck. That’s absolutely not how they operate. It’s disaster capitalism in action. The idea is to break things apart and then make money off of the pieces. It's not to help people.
Otherwise, how do we explain these images?
While imperfect by many standards, all of these countries were stable and increasingly prosperous before outside interests came in and turned them into a living nightmare.
It is this context that explains why such reactionary and violent groups as ISIS arose. They are the natural response of violated people seeking to assert some control over lives that otherwise have no hope and even less meaning.
I’m not justifying ISIS; only explaining the context that led to its rise.
Speaking of which, let’s turn back to Libya:
ISIS is tightening its grip in Libya
Nov 15, 2015
GENEVA (Reuters) - Islamic State militants have consolidated control over central Libya, carrying out summary executions, beheadings and amputations, the United Nations said on Monday in a further illustration of the North African state's descent into anarchy.
All sides in Libya's multiple armed conflicts are committing breaches of international law that may amount to war crimes, including abductions, torture and the killing of civilians, according to a U.N. report.
Islamic State (IS) has gained control over swathes of territory, "committing gross abuses including public summary executions of individuals based on their religion or political allegiance", the joint report by the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and the U.N. Support Mission in Libya said.
The U.N. had documented IS executions in their stronghold city of Sirte, in central Libya along the Mediterranean coast, and in Derna to the east, from which they were later ousted by local militias. Victims included Egyptian Copts, Ethiopians, Eritreans and a South Sudanese, the report said.
Some were accused of "treason", others of same-sex relations, but none were given due legal process, according to the report, which covered the year through October.
Four years after the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi, Libya is locked in a conflict between two rival governments - an official one in the east and a self-declared one controlling the capital Tripoli - and the many armed factions that back them.
After that atrocious summary, how bad does life under Gaddafi sound now? Again, he was targeted for execution by Western interests and the resulting mess is of little surprise to anybody with even modest curiosity about how violent overthrows tend to work out in the MENA region.
But where is the UN security council denouncing the war crimes? And where is the ICC leveling crimes against humanity charges? Nowhere. There’s no more Western political interest in Libya now that it has been broken apart.
As they say in the military: once is bad luck, twice is a coincidence, but three times is enemy action. This pattern of eliminating “a very bad man” and leaving the country in a complete mess has happened three times of late, with Syria targeted to be the fourth. So enemy action it is.
ISIS and other extreme jihadist groups arose because of brutal conditions that made such harsh interpretations of ancient religious texts make sense by comparison. When you have nothing left to believe in, one’s belief system can compensate by becoming rather inflexible.
I know I have greatly simplified a terribly complex dynamic, but -- speaking of beliefs -- I don’t believe that terrorists are born, I believe they are raised. When one has nothing left to lose, then anything becomes possible, including strapping on a suicide belt and flicking the switch.
What I am saying is that this is not a battle between Christians and Muslims, nor is it a battle between good and evil, both characterizations that I’ve read recently in great abundance. That’s all nonsense for the masses.
This is about resources and true wealth that is being siphoned from the people who have had the misfortune to be born on top of it, and towards other regions with greater power and reach.
There’s nothing different in what I am reading today from what the British redcoats did in India from the late 1700’s throughout the 1800’s. Their military might assured that the East India Tea Company could continue to extract resources from the locals.
At the time the locals were called heathens, implying they were subhuman and therefore could be safely dispatched. Now they are called terrorists -- same thing. Dehumanize your foe to help rationalize one’s behaviors. It’s a tried and true practice of war propaganda.
How This Affects You
While we might be tempted to sit in our Western environs, secure in the idea that at least we aren’t ‘over there’ where all the bad things are happening, it would be a mistake to think that this turmoil will not impact you.
I’m not talking about the ultra-remote chance of being a victim of blow-back terrorism either. I am referring to the idea that it would be a mistake to think that any government(s) that think nothing of ruining entire MENA countries will hesitate to throw anybody else under the bus that gets in their way.
Ben Bernanke gave no thought to throwing granny under the bus in order to help the big banks get even bigger. He willingly and knowing transferred over a trillion dollars away from savers and handed it to the big banks.
Similarly, we shouldn't expect enlightened behavior to emerge from the shadows of leadership once things get even dicer on the world stage. In fact, we should expect the opposite.
It would be a mistake to think that powers in charge would not turn their malign intent inwards toward their own populace if/when necessary. Today it’s Syria, yesterday it was Libya, but tomorrow it might be us.
The people of France recently got a small taste of the horror that has been visited upon the people of Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya. And while I have no interest in seeing any more violence anywhere, perhaps the people of France will finally begin to ask what happened and why. I don’t mean the fine details of the night of the massacre, but how it came to be considered a ‘thing to do’ at all by the people who did it. (For those unaware, France has been particularly involved for years in fomenting revolt within Syria)
Conclusion
My intention in stringing these dots together is so that we can have an informed discussion about what’s happening in Syria and the Middle East at large. I am not at all interested in trying to understand events through the framing lenses of religion and/or ‘terrorism’, both of which are tools of distraction in my experience.
Instead, I want to understand the power dynamics at play. And to try to peel back the layers, to understand why the powers that be consider this region so important at this moment in history.
I think they know as well as we do that the shale oil revolution is not a revolution at all but a retirement party for an oil industry that has given us everything we hold economically dear but is on its last legs.
I think that the power structures of the next twenty years are going to be utterly shaped by energy – who has it, who needs it and who’s controlling it.
Saudi Arabia is acting increasingly desperate here and I think we know why. They have a saying there: “My father rode a camel, I drove a car, my son flies a jet and his son will ride a camel.”
They know as well as anyone that their oil wealth will run out someday; and so, too, will the West’s interest in them. With no giant military to protect them, the royalty in Saudi Arabia should have some serious concerns about the future.
Heck, it’s even worse than that:
Saudi Wells Running Dry — of Water — Spell End of Desert Wheat
Nov 3, 2015
Saudi Arabia became a net exporter of wheat in 1984 from producing almost none in the 1970s. The self-sufficiency program became a victim of its own success, however, as it quickly depleted aquifers that haven’t been filled since the last Ice Age.
In an unexpected U-turn, the government said in 2008 it was phasing out the policy, reducing purchases of domestic wheat each year by 12.5 percent and bridging the gap progressively with imports.
The last official local harvest occurred in May, although the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization projects that a small crop of about metric 30,000 tons for traditional specialty bakery products will "prevail" in 2016. At its peak in 1992, Saudi Arabia produced 4.1 million tons of wheat and was one of the world’s top 10 wheat exporters.
The Saudis did something very unwise – they pumped an aquifer filled over 10,000 years ago and used it to grow wheat in the desert. Now their wells are running dry and they have no more water.
And yet their population is expanding rapidly even as their oil fields deplete. There’s a very bad intersection for Saudi Arabia, and the rulers know it.
It helps to explain their recent actions of lashing out against long-standing regional foes and helps to explain the increasing desperation of their moves to help destabilize (and even bomb) their neighbors.
My point here is that as resources become tight, the ruling powers can be expected to act in increasingly desperate ways. This is a tenet of the Long Emergency of which James Kunstler wrote.
The only response that makes any sense to me, at the individual level, is to reduce your needs and increase your resilience.
This is something we cover in great detail in our new book, Prosper!: How To Prepare for the Future and Create a World Worth Inheriting, so I won’t go into all the details here. Instead, my goal is to help cast a clarifying light on recent events and add some necessary detail that can help us more fully appreciate what’s happening around the world and why taking prudent preparations today is becoming increasingly urgent.
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