http://kingworldnews.com/paul-craig-roberts-terrifying-look-life-inside-matrix-government-lies-manipulation-murder/
The Matrix Is Real & How It Will Change All Of Our Lives
As the West stares into the great abyss and the world prepares for even greater economic turmoil, today Dr. Paul Craig Roberts gives readers a terrifying look at the real Matrix and how it will change all of our lives. King World News was given exclusive permission from the Trends Journal to release this amazing piece. It also contains an ominous warning from the former U.S. Treasury official, as the world prepares to descend into total chaos.
By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts Former U.S. Treasury Official
February 5 (King World News) – Americans are the most manipulated people in history. Since 2008, the economy has been manipulated for the benefit of a few oversized banks “too big to fail.” US foreign policy has been manipulated to serve the hegemonic agenda of a handful of neoconservatives. These manipulations have undercut the consumer basis of the US economy and have pushed the American people into a conflict situation with Russia and China.
Lies, US Economic Collapse And Nuclear War
US economic collapse and nuclear war are the two most likely outcomes of Washington’s manipulations of the American people. Time and again, the American public has fallen for transparent lies and orchestrated events. 2015 is a decisive year. Will a credulous people cast off their gullibility, or will they be swept away by economic collapse and war?
There are reasons to believe that the government’s manipulations have overreached and are crossing the point of believability, even on the part of credulous Americans. Let’s review some of these manipulations — first, economic, and then foreign policy.
Unemployment Number Is Meaningless
On January 9, the US government told Americans that the unemployment rate had fallen to a comforting 5.6 percent, an indication that the Federal Reserve’s policy of Quantitative Easing was successful in restoring the US economy. A 5.6 percent rate of unemployment suggests that Americans have a reasonable chance of finding a job. Yet we know there are millions of discouraged workers who have given up looking for a job.
The explanation of this paradox is that the 5.6 percent unemployment rate (U.3) does not include unemployed people who have not looked for a job in the previous four weeks. These unemployed are called “discouraged workers.” If they have been discouraged for less than one year, they are counted in a seldom-reported measure of unemployment (U.6). This rate stands at 11.2 percent, twice as high as the unemployment rate stressed by government and financial media.
The 11.2 percent rate is an official measure, but it is not publicized because it indicates a dismal employment outlook 5.5 years after the 2008 recession was declared over, in June 2009. What kind of recovery is it when the unemployment rate remains at 11.2 percent years after the recession has officially ended?
The Great Lie Exposed
The story worsens. The 11.2 percent rate does not include the millions of unemployed long-term discouraged workers (those discouraged for more than one year). Prior to 1994, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics counted the long-term discouraged as unemployed, and the government of Canada still does. John Williams (shadowstats.com) continues to include the long-term discouraged. When the long- term discouraged are added to the U.6 measure, the rate of unemployment again doubles, to 23 percent.
In other words, the actual unemployment rate is actually four times higher than the comforting figure released January 9.
Inflation Rate Also Falls Victim
The government engages in similar deception with the inflation rate. If the price of an item in the index rises, a lower-priced item is substituted, thus eliminating inflation by substitution. Inflation also is eliminated by redefining a price rise as a quality improvement.
By undercounting inflation, the government reports price increases as real economic growth, denies cost-of-living increases to Social Security recipients, and justifies paying savers negative real interest rates. These manipulations provide banks with free money, thus boosting bank profits while encouraging the stock market with “good news.”
Americans who search for jobs without success know other Americans in the same situation. As time passes, they learn from experience that the unemployment rate cannot be low and falling when jobs are harder to find. People who shop for food and pay utility bills know inflation is far higher than the government reports. Experience and the passage of time make the government’s numbers less and less believable.
King World News - Could The Price Of Gold Really Spike 70 Percent In The Next 90 Days?
Global Financial Markets Manipulated
The financial markets also are manipulated. To protect the dollar from declining in value due to its overproduction, the Federal Reserve’s bullion bank agents drive down the price of gold and silver by dumping uncovered shorts in the futures market. Since 2011, we have had the extraordinary situation in which the prices of gold and silver have been driven down despite strong demand and constraints on supply — a result that can be achieved only by manipulation in the futures market.
The dollar’s value also is manipulated by foreign central banks in cooperation with Washington. The Japanese and European central banks print yen and euros to protect the dollar’s exchange value. If all major currencies also are being printed, the dollar cannot decline.
The government’s Plunge Protection Team can prevent major stock-market corrections by stepping in and purchasing S&P futures, thus preventing the market’s overvaluation from bursting the bubble.
These manipulations are apparent to experienced investors. Sooner or later, attentive Americans will realize that the government’s deceit is not limited to the marketplace, but extends into foreign policy.
Fooled Over And Over Into War
Ever since the Clinton regime’s demonizations of Yugoslavia and Serbia, Americans have been deceived into supporting expensive wars and foreign-policy positions that are not in their interest. Washington’s demonizations of the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, Assad, Iran and of Muslims generally have resulted in 14 years of wars in which seven or eight countries have been invaded, bombed and attacked with drones. Increasingly, people at home and abroad understand these wars and bombings are based on lies and deceptions.
The destruction of countries and the massive human hurt happened because the US government lied and deceived.
There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Assad did not use chemical weapons in Syria. Gaddafi did not issue Viagra to his troops to assist in the rape of Libyan women. Iran does not have a nuclear- weapons program.
Millions of Muslims have been killed, maimed and dislocated by these wars, and tens of thousands of American soldiers have been killed and physically or psychologically maimed. The destruction of countries and the massive human hurt happened because the US government lied and deceived.
The most extraordinary aspect of the Charlie Hebdo event is that the French cartoonists are being championed in the name of free speech. Yet the Anglo-American world does not have free speech. Free speech, if it involves criticism or exposure of the government, is being redefined as “domestic extremism.” Criticism of Washington now implies that the critic is hostile to the public, a possible extremist who must be deterred before he inflicts harm on innocents. As Glenn Greenwald noted, try satirizing Israelis in the manner that Charlie Hebdo satirized Muslims, and you will find out how little free speech there is. http://bit.ly/1xYF93V Free speech is used to demonize Washington’s hand-picked enemies. That’s about as far as it goes.
Washington Demonizing Russia
As 2014 drew to a close, Washington was at work demonizing Russia and its president. Russia no more invaded Ukraine than Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. But despite years of experience with the government’s foreign-policy lies, polls show that more than 60 percent of the US population has fallen for Washington’s demonization of Russia.
We now have two decades of evidence that Washington uses demonization as a prelude to war. Russia and China, recognizing Washington’s intent to destabilize, have formed a strategic alliance. War with Russia and China would not be like war with Iraq and Libya, or drone attacks on Yemen and Pakistan. Unlike Saddam Hussein and Iran, Russia and China do have weapons of mass destruction — plenty of them.
Whereas Americans are not subject to any meaningful retaliation from Washington’s wars against Muslims, Washington’s aggressive warlike policy toward Russia and China, ringing both countries with military bases while demonizing both with false charges, threatens the life of every American and every person on earth. A threat of this magnitude could pull Americans out of their insouciance and force them to confront the government over its dangerous manipulations of public opinion.
Governments successful with their deceptions end up overreaching. The Charlie Hebdo affair possibly is an overreach. The Paris shootings have many characteristics of a false-flag operation. The attack on the cartoonists’ office was a disciplined professional attack associated with special forces; yet the suspects later corralled and killed seemed bumbling and unprofessional. It is like they were two different sets of people.
Is This Really The Official Story?
Muslim terrorists are usually prepared to die in the attack; yet the two professionals who hit Charlie Hebdo so hard escaped. Their identities were established by the unprofessional and unlikely act of leaving their identification in the getaway car. This reminds me of the undamaged passport miraculously found among the ruins of the two World Trade Center towers. The incriminating passport was the only undamaged item in the entire ruins and was the basis for identifying the 9/11 alleged hijackers.
It is a plausible inference that the ID left in the getaway car was the ID of one of the two brothers later killed by police, from whom we will never hear anything, and not the ID of the professionals who attacked Charlie Hebdo. An important fact that supports this inference is the report that the third suspect in the attack, Hamyd Mourad, the alleged driver of the getaway car, when seeing his name circulating on social media as a suspect, realized the danger he was in and quickly turned himself in to police for protection against being murdered by security forces as a terrorist.
Hamyd Mourad says he has an ironclad alibi. If so, this makes him the despoiler of a false-flag attack. If that is the case, he is likely to be coerced or tortured into some sort of confession to support the official story. http://bit.ly/1Aai8pJ
More Propaganda As The Situation In The West Continues To Deteriorate
Mainstream Media Clueless
The American and European media have ignored this important story. I googled Hamyd Mourad and all I found (January 12) was the main US and European media reporting that the third suspect had turned himself in. The news was reported in a fashion that gave credence to the accusation that the suspect who turned himself in was part of the attack. Not a single US mainstream media source reported that the alleged suspect turned himself in because he had an ironclad alibi. The list of sources that reported Mourad’s turning himself in to police report in a way that can be read as confirmation of his guilt.
Some merely reported it in a headline with no coverage in the report. The list of those I googled includes:
• The Washington Post (January 7, by Griff Witte and Anthony Faiola)
• Die Welt (Germany), “One suspect has turned himself in to police in connection with Wednesday’s massacre at the offices of Parisian satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo”
• ABC News (January 7), “Youngest suspect in Charlie Hebdo Attack turns himself in”
• CNN (January 8), “Citing sources, the Agence France Presse news agency reported that an 18-year- old suspect in the attack had surrendered to police.”
High-Ranking Police Official Suddenly Commits Suicide?
Another puzzle in the official story that remains unreported, according to my 6 p.m. Google search on January 12, is the alleged suicide of a high-ranking member of the French Judicial Police who had a lead role in the Charlie Hebdo investigation. For unknown reasons, a police official involved in the most important investigation of a lifetime decided to kill himself in his police office in the middle of the night while writing his report on his investigation. The alternative media reports it: http://bit.ly/1xc8W1W So did the UK Telegraph. But no suspicion is seen in the police official’s death, and as far as the US “presstitute” media is concerned, it did not happen. There are no reports, domestic or foreign, at the time of writing, about his death and whether his report has disappeared.
Media Cloaks The Lies And Crimes Of Government
As Gerald Celente has pointed out for years and as Patrick L. Smith writes in CounterPunch (Vol. 21, No. 10, 2014), the media serve as presstitutes. The media justify withholding information from the public on the basis of patriotism. Patriotism requires the media to support the government, not the truth. Patrick Smith quotes former New York Times editor Jill Abramson, who says in defense of the New York Times misleading the American people: “Journalists are Americans, too. I consider myself to be a patriot.” Of course, journalists lie to us because their careers are controlled by government and corporations dependent on government. Patriotism has little to do with it, but it serves as a cover. Patriotism is like “national security,” a cloak for the lies and crimes of government.
Life In The Matrix
Here we have it. The media lie to us because they are patriots. We believe the lies because we are patriots. More likely, the fact of the matter might be that both the media and the people are morally and spiritually corrupt.
In other words, we willfully live in The Matrix and are our own worst enemy.
Monday, February 23, 2015
SC126-9
http://www.globalresearch.ca/americas-economic-fairy-tale-whatever-became-of-economists-and-the-american-economy/5433065
America’s “Economic Fairy Tale”. Whatever Became of Economists and the American Economy?
According to the official economic fairy tale, the US economy has been in recovery since June 2009.
This fairy tale supports America’s image as the safe haven, an image that keeps the dollar up, the stock market up, and interest rates down. It is an image that causes the massive numbers of unemployed Americans to blame themselves and not the mishandled economy.
This fairy tale survives despite the fact that there is no economic information whatsoever that supports it.
Real median household income has not grown for years and is below the levels of the early 1970s.
There has been no growth in real retail sales for six years.
How does an economy dependent on consumer demand grow when real consumer incomes and real retail sales do not grow?
Not from business investment. Why invest when there is no sales growth? Industrial production, properly deflated, remains well below the pre-recession level.
Not from construction. The real value of total construction put in place declined sharply from 2006 through 2011 and has bounced around the 2011 bottom for the past three years.
How does an economy grow when the labor force is shrinking? The labor force participation rate has declined since 2007 as has the civilian employment to population ratio.
How can there be a recovery when nothing has recovered?
Do economists believe that the entire corpus of macroeconomics taught since the 1940s is simply incorrect? If not, how can economists possibly support the recovery fairy tale?
We see the same absence of economics in the policy response to the sovereign debt crisis in Europe. First of all, the only reason that there is a crisis is because instead of writing off that part of the debt that cannot be paid, as in the past, so that the rest of the debt could be paid, creditors have demanded the impossible–that all the debt be paid.
In an attempt to achieve the impossible, heavily indebted countries, such as Greece, have been forced to reduce old age pensions, fire government employees, reduce social services such as health care and education, reduce wages, and sell-off public property such as ports, municipal water companies, and the state lottery. These austerity packages deprive the government of revenues and the population of spending power. Consequently, consumption, investment, and government spending all fall, and the economy sinks lower. As the economy sinks, the existing debt becomes a larger percentage of the GDP and becomes even more unserviceable.
Economists have known this ever since John Maynard Keynes taught it to them in the 1930s. Yet there is no sign of this foundational economics in the policy approach to the sovereign debt crisis.
Economists it appears have simply vanished from the earth. Or, if some are still present, they have lost their voices and do not speak.
Consider “globalism.” Every country has been convinced that globalism is imperative and that not to be part of the “global economy” means economic death. In fact, to be part of the global economy means death.
Understand the economic destruction that globalism has wreaked on the United States. Millions of middle class factory jobs and professional skill jobs such as software engineering and Information Technology have been taken away from the American middle class and given to people in Asia. In the short-run this drops labor costs and benefits the profits of the US corporations that offshore the jobs, but the consequence is to destroy the domestic consumer market as jobs that permit the formation of households are replaced with lowly paid part-time jobs that do not.
If households cannot form, the demand for housing, home appliances and furnishings declines. College graduates return home to live with their parents.
Part-time jobs hurt the ability to save. People are only able to purchase cars because they can get 100 percent financing, and more in order to pay off an existing car loan that exceeds the vehicle’s trade-in value, in a six-year loan. These loans are possible, because those who make the loans sell them. The loans are then securitized and sold as investments to those desperate for yield in a zero interest rate world. Derivatives are spun off these “investments,” and a new bubble is put in place.
When manufacturing jobs are offshored, the US plants are closed, and the tax base of state and local governments declines. When the governments have trouble servicing their accumulated debt, the tendency is not to meet their pension obligations. This reduces retiree incomes, incomes already reduced by zero or negative interest rates.
This unraveling of consumer demand, the basis for our economy, was entirely obvious at the very beginning. Yet junk economists or hired corporate mouthpieces promised Americans a “New Economy” that would provide them with better, higher paying, cleaner jobs to take the place of the jobs moved abroad. As I have pointed out for more than a decade, there is no sign of these jobs anywhere in the economy.
Why did economists make no protest as the US economy was shipped abroad and deep-sixed at home?
Globalism also devastates “emerging economies.” Self-sufficient agricultural communities are destroyed by the introduction of large-scale monoculture agriculture. The uprooted peoples relocate to cities where they become a drain on social services and a source of political instability.
Globalism, like neoliberal economics, is an instrument of economic imperialism. Labor is exploited, while peoples, cultures, and environments are destroyed. Yet the propaganda is so powerful that people partake of their own destruction.
America’s “Economic Fairy Tale”. Whatever Became of Economists and the American Economy?
According to the official economic fairy tale, the US economy has been in recovery since June 2009.
This fairy tale supports America’s image as the safe haven, an image that keeps the dollar up, the stock market up, and interest rates down. It is an image that causes the massive numbers of unemployed Americans to blame themselves and not the mishandled economy.
This fairy tale survives despite the fact that there is no economic information whatsoever that supports it.
Real median household income has not grown for years and is below the levels of the early 1970s.
There has been no growth in real retail sales for six years.
How does an economy dependent on consumer demand grow when real consumer incomes and real retail sales do not grow?
Not from business investment. Why invest when there is no sales growth? Industrial production, properly deflated, remains well below the pre-recession level.
Not from construction. The real value of total construction put in place declined sharply from 2006 through 2011 and has bounced around the 2011 bottom for the past three years.
How does an economy grow when the labor force is shrinking? The labor force participation rate has declined since 2007 as has the civilian employment to population ratio.
How can there be a recovery when nothing has recovered?
Do economists believe that the entire corpus of macroeconomics taught since the 1940s is simply incorrect? If not, how can economists possibly support the recovery fairy tale?
We see the same absence of economics in the policy response to the sovereign debt crisis in Europe. First of all, the only reason that there is a crisis is because instead of writing off that part of the debt that cannot be paid, as in the past, so that the rest of the debt could be paid, creditors have demanded the impossible–that all the debt be paid.
In an attempt to achieve the impossible, heavily indebted countries, such as Greece, have been forced to reduce old age pensions, fire government employees, reduce social services such as health care and education, reduce wages, and sell-off public property such as ports, municipal water companies, and the state lottery. These austerity packages deprive the government of revenues and the population of spending power. Consequently, consumption, investment, and government spending all fall, and the economy sinks lower. As the economy sinks, the existing debt becomes a larger percentage of the GDP and becomes even more unserviceable.
Economists have known this ever since John Maynard Keynes taught it to them in the 1930s. Yet there is no sign of this foundational economics in the policy approach to the sovereign debt crisis.
Economists it appears have simply vanished from the earth. Or, if some are still present, they have lost their voices and do not speak.
Consider “globalism.” Every country has been convinced that globalism is imperative and that not to be part of the “global economy” means economic death. In fact, to be part of the global economy means death.
Understand the economic destruction that globalism has wreaked on the United States. Millions of middle class factory jobs and professional skill jobs such as software engineering and Information Technology have been taken away from the American middle class and given to people in Asia. In the short-run this drops labor costs and benefits the profits of the US corporations that offshore the jobs, but the consequence is to destroy the domestic consumer market as jobs that permit the formation of households are replaced with lowly paid part-time jobs that do not.
If households cannot form, the demand for housing, home appliances and furnishings declines. College graduates return home to live with their parents.
Part-time jobs hurt the ability to save. People are only able to purchase cars because they can get 100 percent financing, and more in order to pay off an existing car loan that exceeds the vehicle’s trade-in value, in a six-year loan. These loans are possible, because those who make the loans sell them. The loans are then securitized and sold as investments to those desperate for yield in a zero interest rate world. Derivatives are spun off these “investments,” and a new bubble is put in place.
When manufacturing jobs are offshored, the US plants are closed, and the tax base of state and local governments declines. When the governments have trouble servicing their accumulated debt, the tendency is not to meet their pension obligations. This reduces retiree incomes, incomes already reduced by zero or negative interest rates.
This unraveling of consumer demand, the basis for our economy, was entirely obvious at the very beginning. Yet junk economists or hired corporate mouthpieces promised Americans a “New Economy” that would provide them with better, higher paying, cleaner jobs to take the place of the jobs moved abroad. As I have pointed out for more than a decade, there is no sign of these jobs anywhere in the economy.
Why did economists make no protest as the US economy was shipped abroad and deep-sixed at home?
Globalism also devastates “emerging economies.” Self-sufficient agricultural communities are destroyed by the introduction of large-scale monoculture agriculture. The uprooted peoples relocate to cities where they become a drain on social services and a source of political instability.
Globalism, like neoliberal economics, is an instrument of economic imperialism. Labor is exploited, while peoples, cultures, and environments are destroyed. Yet the propaganda is so powerful that people partake of their own destruction.
Monday, February 16, 2015
SC126-8
http://www.globalresearch.ca/collapse-of-global-trade-the-economic-and-financial-lies-are-getting-bigger-a-spade-can-never-be-called-a-spade/5430975
Collapse of Global Trade? The Economic and Financial Lies are Getting Bigger. A Spade can never be Called a Spade!
Yesterday we looked at the situations in both Ukraine and Greece, and how they are both out of money which makes them potential “flash points” for reality to set in. What I’d like to talk about today are the various “slights of hand” and why a spade can never be called a spade.
Currently in the U.S., some (but certainly not all) of the recent economic numbers are showing an absolutely booming economy. All you need to do is look at Friday’s unemployment numbers, they were clearly bogus. The biggest driver of employment over the last five years has been the boom in the oil patch …which is now busted with 1,000′s of pink slips being handed out. BLS revised the November and December numbers to show the fastest growth of employment for any three month period …so far this century! Really? Do you believe this in any fashion at all?
The economic and financial lies are getting bigger and bigger while the economy is shrinking and the financial position is more perilous. The gap between the reality and the true conditions have never before in history been this wide. Stocks are not allowed to drop, institutions are not allowed to fail, heck, financial institutions have been “told” not to mark to market as this would expose failures. Inflation is understated, employment is overstated, gold is not allowed to rise and the game continues. Everything you now see and hear has one goal behind it, hide the reality at any and all costs.
The situation with Greece is very sticky for the West for several reasons. Each and every one of them is because a Greek failure will expose the very ugly reality that the West is one big and interconnected series of Ponzi schemes constructed in pyramid fashion. Greece cannot be allowed to fail because of what, how much, and who they owe. In order for the reality to stay hidden, Greece absolutely must be forced to borrow more money so they have the ability to pay past debts. Already this morning, a six month “trial balloon” extension has been floated. If Greece is allowed to fail, other central banks (including and particularly the ECB) and many commercial banks will take some very real losses. This CANNOT be allowed to happen because of the leverage factor and the fact that no more collateral exists within the system that’s not already encumbered.
You see, many assets have been hypothecated (lent/borrowed against) many times over, including Greek debt. In case you don’t see the problem here, I will spell it out. When something is “lent” out or “borrowed” more than one time, it is theft pure and simple. This truth cannot in any fashion come to the surface because it will create a “call”. The original owners will flood in and ask for their security, their asset, (think gold) back. What do you think the world will look like when 100 or so “owners” of the same asset decide they will not be one of the suckers who are left with nothing? This will be a bank run on a system-wide basis and include nearly any asset type you can think of.
The following analogy sums it up pretty well I believe. This game works well …for a “while”. It works “while” everyone is confident and no one asks any questions. It works while no one at the poker table decides to cash in and leave with their chips. It works well for as long as no one believes anyone else is cheating. Actually, it even works when everyone knows that everyone else is cheating …as long as everyone is winning. The problems begin when people start asking questions. Questions begin when people start to lose money. The answers are brutally ugly when discovered so it is imperative that no questions are allowed to be asked… and this is where we are today. This is exactly what “official policy” is today.
The Chinese, the Russians, The BRICS nations and 135 other nations tagging along ALL know what the “answers” are. They fully understand the casino is 100% rigged. They understand that everything of value has already been borrowed against and in many instances, several times over. This is why there have been so many trade and currency deals signed over the last year and a half …without U.S. involvement, approval or even “dollars”.
My personal opinion is this, a spade will very soon be exposed as the spade it is and all the theft, corruption and intentional fraud will be uncovered. The relevant event could be anything. It could be Greece failing to pay, leaving the EU or even being kicked out. It could be a local currency blowing up which bankrupts someone in derivatives. It could be the failure of a debt auction somewhere in the world. It could be something already well known or not. It could be a war. It could come from the West or the East, and it could be an accident or even an intentional event. It doesn’t matter “why”, the event is coming. The event is coming because everyone knows that everyone knows the system is fraudulent.
Please don’t reply to me saying “no, not everyone knows, the sheeple are as asleep as always”. I am talking about “countries”. I am talking about the players that count. The East et al absolutely knows they are dealing and trading in a lopsided and unfair system. They know the West is massively leveraged and has been dealing unfairly for many years. Even Western countries know this to be true, for example, why are countries repatriating their gold? Because they hope there is enough still in the vault to cover what they originally deposited. Like I said, everyone knows that everyone knows.
As mentioned yesterday, it is my opinion the East would prefer to allow the West’s failure to occur ”naturally” and not force the issue. Time alone will do this. The U.S. has been pushing for war at every turn. A war will be pointed at as “the reason” everything failed. A war will also be used to cover the tracks of the fraud. This is not new thought and only the way it has always been. Distract, pretend, and extend!
If you believe the meme of “recovery” or “growth”, all you need to do is look at this. The Baltic dry index has just dropped to ALL-TIME lows! This index is very basic and when broken down reflects the state of global trade. Global trade has collapsed since the 2008 crisis began, unlike ever before.
This, after huge global deficit spending and monetization. “Magic Policy” which we were assured would cure all ills has failed miserably and no amount of bogus economic reports can mask this fact.
Expect out of control markets, unimaginable financial failures and ultimately a breakdown of distribution and society itself. The truth is, we have lived in financial fantasyland since 2007. 2008 came along, markets collapsed and the reset which should have occurred was aborted …only to become a much bigger and far more painful “inevitable” event now. More debt, more money supply and of course less gold in Western vaults. We in the West have spent, frittered, and given away 100′s of years worth of labor and savings of our forefathers. This in an effort to resist living within our means and calling a spade a spade. Spades are almost all that is left, all the other suits have been spent, lent and borrowed 100+ times over!
Collapse of Global Trade? The Economic and Financial Lies are Getting Bigger. A Spade can never be Called a Spade!
Yesterday we looked at the situations in both Ukraine and Greece, and how they are both out of money which makes them potential “flash points” for reality to set in. What I’d like to talk about today are the various “slights of hand” and why a spade can never be called a spade.
Currently in the U.S., some (but certainly not all) of the recent economic numbers are showing an absolutely booming economy. All you need to do is look at Friday’s unemployment numbers, they were clearly bogus. The biggest driver of employment over the last five years has been the boom in the oil patch …which is now busted with 1,000′s of pink slips being handed out. BLS revised the November and December numbers to show the fastest growth of employment for any three month period …so far this century! Really? Do you believe this in any fashion at all?
The economic and financial lies are getting bigger and bigger while the economy is shrinking and the financial position is more perilous. The gap between the reality and the true conditions have never before in history been this wide. Stocks are not allowed to drop, institutions are not allowed to fail, heck, financial institutions have been “told” not to mark to market as this would expose failures. Inflation is understated, employment is overstated, gold is not allowed to rise and the game continues. Everything you now see and hear has one goal behind it, hide the reality at any and all costs.
The situation with Greece is very sticky for the West for several reasons. Each and every one of them is because a Greek failure will expose the very ugly reality that the West is one big and interconnected series of Ponzi schemes constructed in pyramid fashion. Greece cannot be allowed to fail because of what, how much, and who they owe. In order for the reality to stay hidden, Greece absolutely must be forced to borrow more money so they have the ability to pay past debts. Already this morning, a six month “trial balloon” extension has been floated. If Greece is allowed to fail, other central banks (including and particularly the ECB) and many commercial banks will take some very real losses. This CANNOT be allowed to happen because of the leverage factor and the fact that no more collateral exists within the system that’s not already encumbered.
You see, many assets have been hypothecated (lent/borrowed against) many times over, including Greek debt. In case you don’t see the problem here, I will spell it out. When something is “lent” out or “borrowed” more than one time, it is theft pure and simple. This truth cannot in any fashion come to the surface because it will create a “call”. The original owners will flood in and ask for their security, their asset, (think gold) back. What do you think the world will look like when 100 or so “owners” of the same asset decide they will not be one of the suckers who are left with nothing? This will be a bank run on a system-wide basis and include nearly any asset type you can think of.
The following analogy sums it up pretty well I believe. This game works well …for a “while”. It works “while” everyone is confident and no one asks any questions. It works while no one at the poker table decides to cash in and leave with their chips. It works well for as long as no one believes anyone else is cheating. Actually, it even works when everyone knows that everyone else is cheating …as long as everyone is winning. The problems begin when people start asking questions. Questions begin when people start to lose money. The answers are brutally ugly when discovered so it is imperative that no questions are allowed to be asked… and this is where we are today. This is exactly what “official policy” is today.
The Chinese, the Russians, The BRICS nations and 135 other nations tagging along ALL know what the “answers” are. They fully understand the casino is 100% rigged. They understand that everything of value has already been borrowed against and in many instances, several times over. This is why there have been so many trade and currency deals signed over the last year and a half …without U.S. involvement, approval or even “dollars”.
My personal opinion is this, a spade will very soon be exposed as the spade it is and all the theft, corruption and intentional fraud will be uncovered. The relevant event could be anything. It could be Greece failing to pay, leaving the EU or even being kicked out. It could be a local currency blowing up which bankrupts someone in derivatives. It could be the failure of a debt auction somewhere in the world. It could be something already well known or not. It could be a war. It could come from the West or the East, and it could be an accident or even an intentional event. It doesn’t matter “why”, the event is coming. The event is coming because everyone knows that everyone knows the system is fraudulent.
Please don’t reply to me saying “no, not everyone knows, the sheeple are as asleep as always”. I am talking about “countries”. I am talking about the players that count. The East et al absolutely knows they are dealing and trading in a lopsided and unfair system. They know the West is massively leveraged and has been dealing unfairly for many years. Even Western countries know this to be true, for example, why are countries repatriating their gold? Because they hope there is enough still in the vault to cover what they originally deposited. Like I said, everyone knows that everyone knows.
As mentioned yesterday, it is my opinion the East would prefer to allow the West’s failure to occur ”naturally” and not force the issue. Time alone will do this. The U.S. has been pushing for war at every turn. A war will be pointed at as “the reason” everything failed. A war will also be used to cover the tracks of the fraud. This is not new thought and only the way it has always been. Distract, pretend, and extend!
If you believe the meme of “recovery” or “growth”, all you need to do is look at this. The Baltic dry index has just dropped to ALL-TIME lows! This index is very basic and when broken down reflects the state of global trade. Global trade has collapsed since the 2008 crisis began, unlike ever before.
This, after huge global deficit spending and monetization. “Magic Policy” which we were assured would cure all ills has failed miserably and no amount of bogus economic reports can mask this fact.
Expect out of control markets, unimaginable financial failures and ultimately a breakdown of distribution and society itself. The truth is, we have lived in financial fantasyland since 2007. 2008 came along, markets collapsed and the reset which should have occurred was aborted …only to become a much bigger and far more painful “inevitable” event now. More debt, more money supply and of course less gold in Western vaults. We in the West have spent, frittered, and given away 100′s of years worth of labor and savings of our forefathers. This in an effort to resist living within our means and calling a spade a spade. Spades are almost all that is left, all the other suits have been spent, lent and borrowed 100+ times over!
Monday, February 9, 2015
SC126-7
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article40938.htm
Truth? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Truth
In the previous posting, The Grand Manipulation, I again wrote about the false reality that government manipulation of information and control over explanations creates for Americans and others who have subordinated themselves to Washington.
Consider the “war on terror.” According to a Nobel economist and a Harvard University budget expert, Washington’s 14 years of war on terror has cost Americans a minimum of $6 trillion. That’s 6,000 billion dollars. This sum, together with the current PayRoll tax revenues is enough to keep Social Security and Medicare in the black for years to come. Without the vast sum wasted on the war on terror, Republicans would not have an excuse to be trying to cut Social Security and Medicare for budget reasons and to privatize the old age pensions and health care of people, thus turning Medicare and Social Security pensions into fee income for Wall Street.
Combatting terrorism is the excuse for squandering a minimum of $6,000 billion dollars.
What were the terrorist events that serve as a basis for this expenditure?
There are five: 9/11, the London transport system bombings, the Spanish train bombing, the Boston Marathon Bombing, and the French Charlie Hebdo rifle attack.
In other words, 5 events in 14 years.
The loss of life in all these events combined is minuscule compared to the loss of life in the war on terror. Even the deaths of our own soldiers is greater. Washington’s wars against terror have caused more deaths of Americans than the alleged terrorist events themselves.
But were they terrorist events?
There are many reasons to suspect these “terrorist attacks.” Governments have always resorted to false flag events in order to serve secret agendas. The Czar’s secret police set off bombs in order to create grounds for arresting labor agitators. We know from Operation Gladio that Western intelligence services did the same thing in order to blame European communist parties and block their electoral gains. Washington lived in fear that a communist party would gain executive power in some European country.
The 9/11 Truth movement, consisting of 2,300 architects and engineers, physicists, nano-chemists, military and airline pilots, first responders, and former government officials, have blown the official 9/11 story out of the water. No person with a brain believes the official story. The chairman, co-chairman, and legal counsel of the 9/11 Commission have written books stating that information was withheld from the commission, that the military lied to the commission, and that the commission “was set up to fail.”
Now we have claims from an imprisoned Al Qaeda member that Saudi Arabia financed 9/11. There is a secret government document, whose 28 pages allegedly point to Saudi involvement, that some lawmakers think should be released. At this point we have no way of knowing whether this is another layer of cover, another red herring to divert attention from the collapsing 9/11 story to the Saudis, whose country is also on the neoconservative list of Middle Eastern countries to be overthrown. When Washington lies and withholds information, the American people cannot know what the truth is.
There are peculiarities and contradictory evidence with regard to the London transport bombings and the Spanish train bombing. Moreover, these bombings arrived at the right time to serve Washington’s propaganda and purposes, while what terrorists had to gain from them is unclear and ambiguous. The Boston Marathon Bombing and the Paris Charlie Hebdo attack have many characteristics of false flag attacks, but the media have not asked a single question. Instead, the media hypes the official explanations. When questions cannot be asked or answered, it is a reasonable suspicion that something is wrong with the story.
Myself and a large number of observant and astute persons have asked questions about the Boston and Paris events. Our reward, of course, has been ad hominem attacks. For example, a non-entity of whom no one has ever heard used Salon, known as A Voice For The Government, to call me a series of names for asking the obvious questions that every journalist should be asking.
The only reason to read Salon is to continue your brainwashing experience as a good patriotic American should. I mean, how dare you contemplate disbelieving your honest, caring, loving, humane, moral, life-preserving, truth-telling government, which takes special care to spare human life everywhere, as in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Ukraine.
You can take it as a general rule that anytime you see an ad hominem attack on someone who raises questions that the questions are dangerous and that the government is using its well-paid trolls to discredit the sceptic who raised the questions.
The Charlie Hebdo and Boston bombing have in common that the police decided to kill the alleged perpetuators rather than capture them–just as a person alleged to be Osama bin Laden was gratuitously murdered in the raid on the “mastermind’s compound” in Pakistan. Dead men tell no tales. They can’t contradict the story.
The obvious question is, like the question about Osama bin Laden’s alleged murder by a Seal in Abbottabad, Pakistan, why were such valuable intelligence resources killed rather than captured? But the Western print and TV media have not made a point of this obvious question. One of the alleged suspects in the Charlie Hebdo affair, Hamyd Mourad, when he heard via social media that he was the driver of the getaway car of the Charlie Hebdo killers, had the wits to quickly turn himself into the French police before he could be murdered as a terrorist. The frame-up of this intended victim failed. http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/looking-mourad-hamyd
I have seen nothing in the news questioning how the official story can be so wrong about Hamyd Mourad and still be right about the alleged brothers who conducted the attack. The evidence connecting the brothers to the attack is the claim that they left their ID in the get-away car. This reminds me of the passport initially said to have been found in the ruble of the twin towers that was used to establish the identity of the alleged perpetrators of 9/11.
Hamyd Mourad is like the surviving Tsamaev brother. Neither were supposed to survive, because their stories, if we ever hear them, will not fit the official explanation.
We are only two months short of two years since the Marathon bombing and the surviving brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has still not been brought to trial. Nor has he or his attorney been heard from. http://whowhatwhy.org/2015/01/06/boston-marathon-bombing-suspect-silent/
According to the official story, Dzhokhar wrote his confession on the side of a boat in which the severely wounded, unarmed 19-year old was hiding from execution. That such an unlikely story could become part of American reality demonstrates the stupidity of both the authorities and the American public.
It is entirely possible that Dzhokhar’s attorney has learned from the Lynne Steward case that any lawyer who defends his Muslim client will be himself sentenced to federal prison for not cooperating with the government’s agenda.
But these are speculations. What facts do we have? None, of course, from Washington. Washington needs no facts. Washington is the Imperial Power. Washington’s word rules, the facts be damned. The print and TV media do not dare to contradict Washington on any important point or raise any embarrassing questions.
Concerning facts, we have the non-investigated report that a high-ranked French police official, for reasons unknown, killed himself in police headquarters while writing a report on the Charlie Hebdo affair based on his investigation.
Police officials spend their lives hoping for a major, big time case, participation in which makes their career memorable. No police official benefitting from such an opportunity would deny himself of it by committing suicide. Did the investigation not support the official story? Was the police official Helric Fredou not compliant with cover-up orders? The media has not asked these questions, and I have seen no reports about the content of Fredou’s report. What does his report, finished or unfinished, say? Why isn’t this of media interest?
Moreover, the family of Helric Fredou is unable to get the autopsy report of Helric’s “suicide” from the French government. I have seen no news reports of this fact in the US print and TV media. Here is the only report that I can find: from Kevin Barrett on Veterans Today: http://www.veteranstoday.com/2015/01/26/fredou/
Let’s turn now to one of the last remaining investigative reporters, Russ Baker. In an interview with Lew Rockwell on January 30, 2015, investigative reporter Russ Baker points out that no evidence has ever been presented that the Tsarnave brothers killed a MIT campus cop or highjacked a motorist. He points out that these stories helped to inflame the situation and to firmly place in the public’s mind that the brothers were dangerous and guilty of the bombing, while launching the police on a revenge killing.
There are many anomalies in the case against the Tsarnave brothers. I won’t go into them. The Internet is full of skeptical information about the official story, and you can look into it to your heart’s content. At the time, the main evidence against the brothers was a video of them walking with packs on their backs. Yet there is an abundance of videos available showing large numbers of people with backpacks, including a number of men dressed identically as if in uniform, and there are reports that a terrorist bombing drill was being held at the site complete with crisis actors. To my knowledge, none of this was ever examined or explained by the TV and print media.
One aspect that suggests pre-planning is the quick appearance of 10,000 heavily armed militarized units from a number of police and federal agencies. How (and why) was this varied force so quickly and easily assembled? The complete lockdown of Boston and its suburbs, and the eviction of people from their homes at gunpoint in order to conduct house by house searches for the one wounded brother still alive, is a response so outside of the normal range of responses as to raise questions that the media avoided asking.
Another suspicious incident is the “spontaneous” street party giving thanks to the militarized forces for saving Boston from the 19-year old kid found bleeding to death under a boat by a local resident. This party took place within a very short time just after the kid was found and seems inconsistent with lead times for organizing street parties, especially coming out of a locked-down situation when so much is disorganized.
Lew Rockwell has given me permission to repost his January 30, 2015, transcription of his June 4, 2013 podcast interview with Russ Baker, “Suppressing the Truth About the Boston Bombings.” I have edited the long interview for length, but here is the link to the full interview: http://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/01/no_author/suppressing-the-truth-about-the-boston-bombing/
ROCKWELL: Well, good morning. This is the Lew Rockwell Show. And it’s great to have as our guest this morning, Mr. Russ Baker......
Truth? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Truth
In the previous posting, The Grand Manipulation, I again wrote about the false reality that government manipulation of information and control over explanations creates for Americans and others who have subordinated themselves to Washington.
Consider the “war on terror.” According to a Nobel economist and a Harvard University budget expert, Washington’s 14 years of war on terror has cost Americans a minimum of $6 trillion. That’s 6,000 billion dollars. This sum, together with the current PayRoll tax revenues is enough to keep Social Security and Medicare in the black for years to come. Without the vast sum wasted on the war on terror, Republicans would not have an excuse to be trying to cut Social Security and Medicare for budget reasons and to privatize the old age pensions and health care of people, thus turning Medicare and Social Security pensions into fee income for Wall Street.
Combatting terrorism is the excuse for squandering a minimum of $6,000 billion dollars.
What were the terrorist events that serve as a basis for this expenditure?
There are five: 9/11, the London transport system bombings, the Spanish train bombing, the Boston Marathon Bombing, and the French Charlie Hebdo rifle attack.
In other words, 5 events in 14 years.
The loss of life in all these events combined is minuscule compared to the loss of life in the war on terror. Even the deaths of our own soldiers is greater. Washington’s wars against terror have caused more deaths of Americans than the alleged terrorist events themselves.
But were they terrorist events?
There are many reasons to suspect these “terrorist attacks.” Governments have always resorted to false flag events in order to serve secret agendas. The Czar’s secret police set off bombs in order to create grounds for arresting labor agitators. We know from Operation Gladio that Western intelligence services did the same thing in order to blame European communist parties and block their electoral gains. Washington lived in fear that a communist party would gain executive power in some European country.
The 9/11 Truth movement, consisting of 2,300 architects and engineers, physicists, nano-chemists, military and airline pilots, first responders, and former government officials, have blown the official 9/11 story out of the water. No person with a brain believes the official story. The chairman, co-chairman, and legal counsel of the 9/11 Commission have written books stating that information was withheld from the commission, that the military lied to the commission, and that the commission “was set up to fail.”
Now we have claims from an imprisoned Al Qaeda member that Saudi Arabia financed 9/11. There is a secret government document, whose 28 pages allegedly point to Saudi involvement, that some lawmakers think should be released. At this point we have no way of knowing whether this is another layer of cover, another red herring to divert attention from the collapsing 9/11 story to the Saudis, whose country is also on the neoconservative list of Middle Eastern countries to be overthrown. When Washington lies and withholds information, the American people cannot know what the truth is.
There are peculiarities and contradictory evidence with regard to the London transport bombings and the Spanish train bombing. Moreover, these bombings arrived at the right time to serve Washington’s propaganda and purposes, while what terrorists had to gain from them is unclear and ambiguous. The Boston Marathon Bombing and the Paris Charlie Hebdo attack have many characteristics of false flag attacks, but the media have not asked a single question. Instead, the media hypes the official explanations. When questions cannot be asked or answered, it is a reasonable suspicion that something is wrong with the story.
Myself and a large number of observant and astute persons have asked questions about the Boston and Paris events. Our reward, of course, has been ad hominem attacks. For example, a non-entity of whom no one has ever heard used Salon, known as A Voice For The Government, to call me a series of names for asking the obvious questions that every journalist should be asking.
The only reason to read Salon is to continue your brainwashing experience as a good patriotic American should. I mean, how dare you contemplate disbelieving your honest, caring, loving, humane, moral, life-preserving, truth-telling government, which takes special care to spare human life everywhere, as in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Ukraine.
You can take it as a general rule that anytime you see an ad hominem attack on someone who raises questions that the questions are dangerous and that the government is using its well-paid trolls to discredit the sceptic who raised the questions.
The Charlie Hebdo and Boston bombing have in common that the police decided to kill the alleged perpetuators rather than capture them–just as a person alleged to be Osama bin Laden was gratuitously murdered in the raid on the “mastermind’s compound” in Pakistan. Dead men tell no tales. They can’t contradict the story.
The obvious question is, like the question about Osama bin Laden’s alleged murder by a Seal in Abbottabad, Pakistan, why were such valuable intelligence resources killed rather than captured? But the Western print and TV media have not made a point of this obvious question. One of the alleged suspects in the Charlie Hebdo affair, Hamyd Mourad, when he heard via social media that he was the driver of the getaway car of the Charlie Hebdo killers, had the wits to quickly turn himself into the French police before he could be murdered as a terrorist. The frame-up of this intended victim failed. http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/looking-mourad-hamyd
I have seen nothing in the news questioning how the official story can be so wrong about Hamyd Mourad and still be right about the alleged brothers who conducted the attack. The evidence connecting the brothers to the attack is the claim that they left their ID in the get-away car. This reminds me of the passport initially said to have been found in the ruble of the twin towers that was used to establish the identity of the alleged perpetrators of 9/11.
Hamyd Mourad is like the surviving Tsamaev brother. Neither were supposed to survive, because their stories, if we ever hear them, will not fit the official explanation.
We are only two months short of two years since the Marathon bombing and the surviving brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has still not been brought to trial. Nor has he or his attorney been heard from. http://whowhatwhy.org/2015/01/06/boston-marathon-bombing-suspect-silent/
According to the official story, Dzhokhar wrote his confession on the side of a boat in which the severely wounded, unarmed 19-year old was hiding from execution. That such an unlikely story could become part of American reality demonstrates the stupidity of both the authorities and the American public.
It is entirely possible that Dzhokhar’s attorney has learned from the Lynne Steward case that any lawyer who defends his Muslim client will be himself sentenced to federal prison for not cooperating with the government’s agenda.
But these are speculations. What facts do we have? None, of course, from Washington. Washington needs no facts. Washington is the Imperial Power. Washington’s word rules, the facts be damned. The print and TV media do not dare to contradict Washington on any important point or raise any embarrassing questions.
Concerning facts, we have the non-investigated report that a high-ranked French police official, for reasons unknown, killed himself in police headquarters while writing a report on the Charlie Hebdo affair based on his investigation.
Police officials spend their lives hoping for a major, big time case, participation in which makes their career memorable. No police official benefitting from such an opportunity would deny himself of it by committing suicide. Did the investigation not support the official story? Was the police official Helric Fredou not compliant with cover-up orders? The media has not asked these questions, and I have seen no reports about the content of Fredou’s report. What does his report, finished or unfinished, say? Why isn’t this of media interest?
Moreover, the family of Helric Fredou is unable to get the autopsy report of Helric’s “suicide” from the French government. I have seen no news reports of this fact in the US print and TV media. Here is the only report that I can find: from Kevin Barrett on Veterans Today: http://www.veteranstoday.com/2015/01/26/fredou/
Let’s turn now to one of the last remaining investigative reporters, Russ Baker. In an interview with Lew Rockwell on January 30, 2015, investigative reporter Russ Baker points out that no evidence has ever been presented that the Tsarnave brothers killed a MIT campus cop or highjacked a motorist. He points out that these stories helped to inflame the situation and to firmly place in the public’s mind that the brothers were dangerous and guilty of the bombing, while launching the police on a revenge killing.
There are many anomalies in the case against the Tsarnave brothers. I won’t go into them. The Internet is full of skeptical information about the official story, and you can look into it to your heart’s content. At the time, the main evidence against the brothers was a video of them walking with packs on their backs. Yet there is an abundance of videos available showing large numbers of people with backpacks, including a number of men dressed identically as if in uniform, and there are reports that a terrorist bombing drill was being held at the site complete with crisis actors. To my knowledge, none of this was ever examined or explained by the TV and print media.
One aspect that suggests pre-planning is the quick appearance of 10,000 heavily armed militarized units from a number of police and federal agencies. How (and why) was this varied force so quickly and easily assembled? The complete lockdown of Boston and its suburbs, and the eviction of people from their homes at gunpoint in order to conduct house by house searches for the one wounded brother still alive, is a response so outside of the normal range of responses as to raise questions that the media avoided asking.
Another suspicious incident is the “spontaneous” street party giving thanks to the militarized forces for saving Boston from the 19-year old kid found bleeding to death under a boat by a local resident. This party took place within a very short time just after the kid was found and seems inconsistent with lead times for organizing street parties, especially coming out of a locked-down situation when so much is disorganized.
Lew Rockwell has given me permission to repost his January 30, 2015, transcription of his June 4, 2013 podcast interview with Russ Baker, “Suppressing the Truth About the Boston Bombings.” I have edited the long interview for length, but here is the link to the full interview: http://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/01/no_author/suppressing-the-truth-about-the-boston-bombing/
ROCKWELL: Well, good morning. This is the Lew Rockwell Show. And it’s great to have as our guest this morning, Mr. Russ Baker......
SC126-6
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article40941.htm
The Terror We Give Is the Terror We Get
We fire missiles from the sky that incinerate families huddled in their houses. They incinerate a pilot cowering in a cage. We torture hostages in our black sites and choke them to death by stuffing rags down their throats. They torture hostages in squalid hovels and behead them. We organize Shiite death squads to kill Sunnis. They organize Sunni death squads to kill Shiites. We produce high-budget films such as “American Sniper” to glorify our war crimes. They produce inspirational videos to glorify their twisted version of jihad.
The barbarism we condemn is the barbarism we commit. The line that separates us from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is technological, not moral. We are those we fight.
“From violence, only violence is born,” Primo Levi wrote, “following a pendular action that, as time goes by, rather than dying down, becomes more frenzied.”
The burning of the pilot, Jordanian Lt. Muath Al-Kaseasbeh, by ISIS militants after his F-16 crashed near Raqqa, Syria, was as gruesome as anything devised for the Roman amphitheater. And it was meant to be. Death is the primary spectacle of war. If ISIS had fighter jets, missiles, drones and heavy artillery to bomb American cities there would be no need to light a captured pilot on fire; ISIS would be able to burn human beings, as we do, from several thousand feet up. But since ISIS is limited in its capacity for war it must broadcast to the world a miniature version of what we do to people in the Middle East. The ISIS process is cruder. The result is the same.
Terror is choreographed. Remember “Shock and Awe”? Terror must be seen and felt to be effective. Terror demands gruesome images. Terror must instill a paralyzing fear. Terror requires the agony of families. It requires mutilated corpses. It requires anguished appeals from helpless hostages and prisoners. Terror is a message sent back and forth in the twisted dialogue of war. Terror creates a whirlwind of rage, horror, shame, pain, disgust, pity, frustration and impotence. It consumes civilians and combatants. It elevates violence as the highest virtue, justified in the name of noble ideals. It unleashes a carnival of death and plunges a society into blood-drenched madness.
During the Bosnian War of the 1990s, relatives paid enormous sums to retrieve the bodies of their sons or husbands being held by corpse traders on the opposing side. And they paid even more in attempts to secure the release of sons or husbands when they were alive. Such trades are as old as war itself. Human beings, whether in our black sites or in the hands of Islamic militants, are war’s collateral.
Not all hostages or prisoners evoke the same national outcry. Not all command the same price. And not all are slated for release. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which turned kidnapping and ransom negotiations into an efficient business and took hundreds of captives, held tiers of hostages. Celebrity hostages—including politician Ingrid Betancourt, who was captured while she was running for the presidency of Colombia and who was freed by the Colombian military after being held six years—were essentially priced out of the market. FARC also had middle-priced hostages such as police officers and soldiers and low-priced hostages who included peasants. Celebrity hostages are worth more to all sides of a conflict while they are in captivity. These celebrity hostages—onetime Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, who was kidnapped and executed by the Red Brigades in 1978, is another example—heighten war’s drama. Saddam Hussein in a cage served this purpose. Celebrity hostages, because the price demanded for their release is so extravagant, are often condemned to death in advance. I suspect this was the case with the American journalist James Foley, who was beheaded in captivity. The proposed ransom was so wildly exorbitant—100 million euros and the release of Islamic radicals being held by the United States—that his captors probably never expected it to be paid.
The Jordanian government is struggling to contain a virulent, if small radical Islamic movement. There is unease among Jordan’s population, as there is unease in the United States about American air assaults on ISIS. The death of the Jordanian pilot, however, bolsters the claims by Washington and Amman that the battle with ISIS is a struggle between democratic, enlightened states (although Jordan is not a democracy) and savage jihadists. And Jordan’s hanging of two al-Qaida members Wednesday was calculated, along with Jordanian fighter jet strikes in Syria on the de facto capital of ISIS, to highlight these supposed differences and intensify the conflict.
Sajida al-Rishawi, one of the two who were hanged, had been on death row since 2005 for her role in the attacks on Amman hotels that left 60 people dead. She had been an associate of the Jordanian-born al-Qaida leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed in Iraq in 2006. The tit-for-tat executions by Jordan and ISIS, like the airstrikes, are useful in playing the game of terror versus terror. It fosters the binary vision of a battle between good and evil that is crucial to maintaining the fevered pitch of war. You do not want your enemy to appear human. You do not want to let your population tire of the bloodletting. You must always manufacture terror and fear.
France and most other European states, unlike the United States, negotiate with kidnappers and pay for hostages. This has devolved into an established business practice. The tens of millions of dollars raised by ISIS through kidnapping is a significant source of its revenue, amounting to perhaps as much as half of its operating budget. The New York Times, in an investigation, wrote in July 2014 that “Al Qaeda and its direct affiliates have taken in at least $125 million in revenue from kidnappings since 2008, of which $66 million was paid just last year.” But negotiating and paying ransoms has consequences. While French and other European citizens are more likely to be ransomed, they are also more likely to be taken hostage. But France is spared the scenes that Americans, who refuse to pay, must endure. And because of this France is able to remain relatively sane.
Terror serves the interests of the war mongers on both sides of the divide. This is what happened during the 444-day Iran hostage crisis that took place from 1979 to 1981. And this is why Jordan—unlike Japan, which saw two of its nationals executed but is not involved militarily against ISIS—has reacted with sanctimonious fury and carried out retaliation. It is why Foley’s murder strengthened the call by the war lobby in Washington to launch a bombing campaign against ISIS. Terror—the terror we commit and the terror done to us—feeds the lusts for war. It is a recruiting tool for war’s crusade. If ISIS were not brutal it would have to be made to seem brutal. It is the luck of the fanatics we oppose, and the fanatics in our midst, that everyone’s propaganda needs are amply met. The tragedy is that so many innocents suffer.
Mideast governments allied with the West, including Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, have watched in horror as ISIS has carved out of parts of Syria and Iraq to create a self-declared caliphate the size of Texas. ISIS has managed through oil exports and the business of hostage taking to become financially self-sufficient. The area under its control has become a mecca for jihadists. It has attracted an estimated 12,000 foreign fighters, including 2,000 from Europe.
The longer the rogue caliphate remains in existence the more it becomes a mortal threat to the West’s allies in the region. ISIS will not invade countries such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan, but its continued existence empowers the discontented and the radicals in those countries, many groaning under collapsing economies, to stoke internal upheavals. The United States and its allies in the region are determined to erase ISIS from the map. It is too destabilizing. Dramas like these, because they serve the aims of ISIS as well as those of the nations seeking to destroy ISIS, will be played out as long as the caliphate exists.
Terror is the engine of war. And terror is what all sides in this conflict produce in overabundance.
The Terror We Give Is the Terror We Get
We fire missiles from the sky that incinerate families huddled in their houses. They incinerate a pilot cowering in a cage. We torture hostages in our black sites and choke them to death by stuffing rags down their throats. They torture hostages in squalid hovels and behead them. We organize Shiite death squads to kill Sunnis. They organize Sunni death squads to kill Shiites. We produce high-budget films such as “American Sniper” to glorify our war crimes. They produce inspirational videos to glorify their twisted version of jihad.
The barbarism we condemn is the barbarism we commit. The line that separates us from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is technological, not moral. We are those we fight.
“From violence, only violence is born,” Primo Levi wrote, “following a pendular action that, as time goes by, rather than dying down, becomes more frenzied.”
The burning of the pilot, Jordanian Lt. Muath Al-Kaseasbeh, by ISIS militants after his F-16 crashed near Raqqa, Syria, was as gruesome as anything devised for the Roman amphitheater. And it was meant to be. Death is the primary spectacle of war. If ISIS had fighter jets, missiles, drones and heavy artillery to bomb American cities there would be no need to light a captured pilot on fire; ISIS would be able to burn human beings, as we do, from several thousand feet up. But since ISIS is limited in its capacity for war it must broadcast to the world a miniature version of what we do to people in the Middle East. The ISIS process is cruder. The result is the same.
Terror is choreographed. Remember “Shock and Awe”? Terror must be seen and felt to be effective. Terror demands gruesome images. Terror must instill a paralyzing fear. Terror requires the agony of families. It requires mutilated corpses. It requires anguished appeals from helpless hostages and prisoners. Terror is a message sent back and forth in the twisted dialogue of war. Terror creates a whirlwind of rage, horror, shame, pain, disgust, pity, frustration and impotence. It consumes civilians and combatants. It elevates violence as the highest virtue, justified in the name of noble ideals. It unleashes a carnival of death and plunges a society into blood-drenched madness.
During the Bosnian War of the 1990s, relatives paid enormous sums to retrieve the bodies of their sons or husbands being held by corpse traders on the opposing side. And they paid even more in attempts to secure the release of sons or husbands when they were alive. Such trades are as old as war itself. Human beings, whether in our black sites or in the hands of Islamic militants, are war’s collateral.
Not all hostages or prisoners evoke the same national outcry. Not all command the same price. And not all are slated for release. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which turned kidnapping and ransom negotiations into an efficient business and took hundreds of captives, held tiers of hostages. Celebrity hostages—including politician Ingrid Betancourt, who was captured while she was running for the presidency of Colombia and who was freed by the Colombian military after being held six years—were essentially priced out of the market. FARC also had middle-priced hostages such as police officers and soldiers and low-priced hostages who included peasants. Celebrity hostages are worth more to all sides of a conflict while they are in captivity. These celebrity hostages—onetime Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, who was kidnapped and executed by the Red Brigades in 1978, is another example—heighten war’s drama. Saddam Hussein in a cage served this purpose. Celebrity hostages, because the price demanded for their release is so extravagant, are often condemned to death in advance. I suspect this was the case with the American journalist James Foley, who was beheaded in captivity. The proposed ransom was so wildly exorbitant—100 million euros and the release of Islamic radicals being held by the United States—that his captors probably never expected it to be paid.
The Jordanian government is struggling to contain a virulent, if small radical Islamic movement. There is unease among Jordan’s population, as there is unease in the United States about American air assaults on ISIS. The death of the Jordanian pilot, however, bolsters the claims by Washington and Amman that the battle with ISIS is a struggle between democratic, enlightened states (although Jordan is not a democracy) and savage jihadists. And Jordan’s hanging of two al-Qaida members Wednesday was calculated, along with Jordanian fighter jet strikes in Syria on the de facto capital of ISIS, to highlight these supposed differences and intensify the conflict.
Sajida al-Rishawi, one of the two who were hanged, had been on death row since 2005 for her role in the attacks on Amman hotels that left 60 people dead. She had been an associate of the Jordanian-born al-Qaida leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed in Iraq in 2006. The tit-for-tat executions by Jordan and ISIS, like the airstrikes, are useful in playing the game of terror versus terror. It fosters the binary vision of a battle between good and evil that is crucial to maintaining the fevered pitch of war. You do not want your enemy to appear human. You do not want to let your population tire of the bloodletting. You must always manufacture terror and fear.
France and most other European states, unlike the United States, negotiate with kidnappers and pay for hostages. This has devolved into an established business practice. The tens of millions of dollars raised by ISIS through kidnapping is a significant source of its revenue, amounting to perhaps as much as half of its operating budget. The New York Times, in an investigation, wrote in July 2014 that “Al Qaeda and its direct affiliates have taken in at least $125 million in revenue from kidnappings since 2008, of which $66 million was paid just last year.” But negotiating and paying ransoms has consequences. While French and other European citizens are more likely to be ransomed, they are also more likely to be taken hostage. But France is spared the scenes that Americans, who refuse to pay, must endure. And because of this France is able to remain relatively sane.
Terror serves the interests of the war mongers on both sides of the divide. This is what happened during the 444-day Iran hostage crisis that took place from 1979 to 1981. And this is why Jordan—unlike Japan, which saw two of its nationals executed but is not involved militarily against ISIS—has reacted with sanctimonious fury and carried out retaliation. It is why Foley’s murder strengthened the call by the war lobby in Washington to launch a bombing campaign against ISIS. Terror—the terror we commit and the terror done to us—feeds the lusts for war. It is a recruiting tool for war’s crusade. If ISIS were not brutal it would have to be made to seem brutal. It is the luck of the fanatics we oppose, and the fanatics in our midst, that everyone’s propaganda needs are amply met. The tragedy is that so many innocents suffer.
Mideast governments allied with the West, including Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, have watched in horror as ISIS has carved out of parts of Syria and Iraq to create a self-declared caliphate the size of Texas. ISIS has managed through oil exports and the business of hostage taking to become financially self-sufficient. The area under its control has become a mecca for jihadists. It has attracted an estimated 12,000 foreign fighters, including 2,000 from Europe.
The longer the rogue caliphate remains in existence the more it becomes a mortal threat to the West’s allies in the region. ISIS will not invade countries such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan, but its continued existence empowers the discontented and the radicals in those countries, many groaning under collapsing economies, to stoke internal upheavals. The United States and its allies in the region are determined to erase ISIS from the map. It is too destabilizing. Dramas like these, because they serve the aims of ISIS as well as those of the nations seeking to destroy ISIS, will be played out as long as the caliphate exists.
Terror is the engine of war. And terror is what all sides in this conflict produce in overabundance.
Wednesday, February 4, 2015
SC126-5
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/
As Night Closes In
I was saddened to learn a few days ago, via a phone call from a fellow author, that William R. Catton Jr. died early last month, just short of his 89th birthday. Some of my readers will have no idea who he was; others may dimly recall that I’ve mentioned him and his most important book, Overshoot, repeatedly in these essays. Those who’ve taken the time to read the book just named may be wondering why none of the sites in the peak oil blogosphere has put up an obituary, or even noted the man’s passing. I don’t happen to know the answer to that last question, though I have my suspicions.
I encountered Overshoot for the first time in a college bookstore in Bellingham, Washington in 1983. Red letters on a stark yellow spine spelled out the title, a word I already knew from my classes in ecology and systems theory; I pulled it off the shelf, and found the future staring me in the face. This is what’s on the front cover below the title:
carrying capacity: maximum permanently supportable load.
cornucopian myth: euphoric belief in limitless resources.
drawdown: stealing resources from the future.
cargoism: delusion that technology will always save us from
overshoot: growth beyond an area’s carrying capacity, leading to
crash: die-off.
If you want to know where I got the core ideas I’ve been exploring in these essays for the last eight-going-on-nine years, in other words, now you know. I still have that copy of Overshoot; it’s sitting on the desk in front of me right now, reminding me yet again just how many chances we had to turn away from the bleak future that’s closing in around us now, like the night at the end of a long day.
Plenty of books in the 1970s and early 1980s applied the lessons of ecology to the future of industrial civilization and picked up at least part of the bad news that results. Overshoot was arguably the best of the lot, but it was pretty much guaranteed to land even deeper in the memory hole than the others. The difficulty was that Catton’s book didn’t pander to the standard mythologies that still beset any attempt to make sense of the predicament we’ve made for ourselves; it provided no encouragement to what he called cargoism, the claim that technological progress will inevitably allow us to have our planet and eat it too, without falling off the other side of the balance into the sort of apocalyptic daydreams that Hollywood loves to make into bad movies. Instead, in calm, crisp, thoughtful prose, he explained how industrial civilization was cutting its own throat, how far past the point of no return we’d already gone, and what had to be done in order to salvage anything from the approaching wreck.
As I noted in a post here in 2011, I had the chance to meet Catton at an ASPO conference, and tried to give him some idea of how much his book had meant to me. I did my best not to act like a fourteen-year-old fan meeting a rock star, but I’m by no means sure that I succeeded. We talked for fifteen minutes over dinner; he was very gracious; then things moved on, each of us left the conference to carry on with our lives, and now he’s gone. As the old song says, that’s the way it goes.
There’s much more that could be said about William Catton, but that task should probably be left for someone who knew the man as a teacher, a scholar, and a human being. I didn’t; except for that one fifteen-minute conversation, I knew him solely as the mind behind one of the books that helped me make sense of the world, and then kept me going on the long desert journey through the Reagan era, when most of those who claimed to be environmentalists over the previous decade cashed in their ideals and waved around the cornucopian myth as their excuse for that act. Thus I’m simply going to urge all of my readers who haven’t yet read Overshoot to do so as soon as possible, even if they have to crawl on their bare hands and knees over abandoned fracking equipment to get a copy. Having said that, I’d like to go on to the sort of tribute I think he would have appreciated most: an attempt to take certain of his ideas a little further than he did.
The core of Overshoot, which is also the core of the entire world of appropriate technology and green alternatives that got shot through the head and shoved into an unmarked grave in the Reagan years, is the recognition that the principles of ecology apply to industrial society just as much as they do to other communities of living things. It’s odd, all things considered, that this is such a controversial proposal. Most of us have no trouble grasping the fact that the law of gravity affects human beings the same way it affects rocks; most of us understand that other laws of nature really do apply to us; but quite a few of us seem to be incapable of extending that same sensible reasoning to one particular set of laws, the ones that govern how communities of living things relate to their environments.
If people treated gravity the way they treat ecology, you could visit a news website any day of the week and read someone insisting with a straight face that while it’s true that rocks fall down when dropped, human beings don’t—no, no, they fall straight up into the sky, and anyone who thinks otherwise is so obviously wrong that there’s no point even discussing the matter. That degree of absurdity appears every single day in the American media, and in ordinary conversations as well, whenever ecological issues come up. Suggest that a finite planet must by definition contain a finite amount of fossil fuels, that dumping billions of tons of gaseous trash into the air every single year for centuries might change the way that the atmosphere retains heat, or that the law of diminishing returns might apply to technology the way it applies to everything else, and you can pretty much count on being shouted down by those who, for all practical purposes, might as well believe that the world is flat.
Still, as part of the ongoing voyage into the unspeakable in which this blog is currently engaged, I’d like to propose that, in fact, human societies are as subject to the laws of ecology as they are to every other dimension of natural law. That act of intellectual heresy implies certain conclusions that are acutely unwelcome in most circles just now; still, as my regular readers will have noticed long since, that’s just one of the services this blog offers.
Let’s start with the basics. Every ecosystem, in thermodynamic terms, is a process by which relatively concentrated energy is dispersed into diffuse background heat. Here on Earth, at least, the concentrated energy mostly comes from the Sun, in the form of solar radiation—there are a few ecosystems, in deep oceans and underground, that get their energy from chemical reactions driven by the Earth’s internal heat instead. Ilya Prigogine showed some decades back that the flow of energy through a system of this sort tends to increase the complexity of the system; Jeremy England, a MIT physicist, has recently shown that the same process accounts neatly for the origin of life itself. The steady flow of energy from source to sink is the foundation on which everything else rests.
The complexity of the system, in turn, is limited by the rate at which energy flows through the system, and this in turn depends on the difference in concentration between the energy that enters the system, on the one hand, and the background into which waste heat diffuses when it leaves the system, on the other. That shouldn’t be a difficult concept to grasp. Not only is it basic thermodynamics, it’s basic physics—it’s precisely equivalent, in fact, to pointing out that the rate at which water flows through any section of a stream depends on the difference in height between the place where the water flows into that section and the place where it flows out.
Simple as it is, it’s a point that an astonishing number of people—including some who are scientifically literate—routinely miss. A while back on this blog, for example, I noted that one of the core reasons you can’t power a modern industrial civilization on solar energy is that sunlight is relatively diffuse as an energy source, compared to the extremely concentrated energy we get from fossil fuels. I still field rants from people insisting that this is utter hogwash, since photons have exactly the same amount of energy they did when they left the Sun, and so the energy they carry is just as concentrated as it was when it left the Sun. You’ll notice, though, that if this was the only variable that mattered, Neptune would be just as warm as Mercury, since each of the photons hitting the one planet pack on average the same energetic punch as those that hit the other.
It’s hard to think of a better example of the blindness to whole systems that’s pandemic in today’s geek culture. Obviously, the difference between the temperatures of Neptune and Mercury isn’t a function of the energy of individual photons hitting the two worlds; it’s a function of differing concentrations of photons—the number of them, let’s say, hitting a square meter of each planet’s surface. This is also one of the two figures that matter when we’re talking about solar energy here on Earth. The other? That’s the background heat into which waste energy disperses when the system, eco- or solar, is done with it. On the broadest scale, that’s deep space, but ecosystems don’t funnel their waste heat straight into orbit, you know. Rather, they diffuse it into the ambient temperature at whatever height above or below sea level, and whatever latitude closer or further from the equator, they happen to be—and since that’s heated by the Sun, too, the difference between input and output concentrations isn’t very substantial.
Nature has done astonishing things with that very modest difference in concentration. People who insist that photosynthesis is horribly inefficient, and of course we can improve its efficiency, are missing a crucial point: something like half the energy that reaches the leaves of a green plant from the Sun is put to work lifting water up from the roots by an ingenious form of evaporative pumping, in which water sucked out through the leaf pores as vapor draws up more water through a network of tiny tubes in the plant’s stems. Another few per cent goes into the manufacture of sugars by photosynthesis, and a variety of minor processes, such as the chemical reactions that ripen fruit, also depend to some extent on light or heat from the Sun; all told, a green plant is probably about as efficient in its total use of solar energy as the laws of thermodynamics will permit.
What’s more, the Earth’s ecosystems take the energy that flows through the green engines of plant life and put it to work in an extraordinary diversity of ways. The water pumped into the sky by what botanists call evapotranspiration—that’s the evaporative pumping I mentioned a moment ago—plays critical roles in local, regional, and global water cycles. The production of sugars to store solar energy in chemical form kicks off an even more intricate set of changes, as the plant’s cells are eaten by something, which is eaten by something, and so on through the lively but precise dance of the food web. Eventually all the energy the original plant scooped up from the Sun turns into diffuse waste heat and permeates slowly up through the atmosphere to its ultimate destiny warming some corner of deep space a bit above absolute zero, but by the time it gets there, it’s usually had quite a ride.
That said, there are hard upper limits to the complexity of the ecosystem that these intricate processes can support. You can see that clearly enough by comparing a tropical rain forest to a polar tundra. The two environments may have approximately equal amounts of precipitation over the course of a year; they may have an equally rich or poor supply of nutrients in the soil; even so, the tropical rain forest can easily support fifteen or twenty thousand species of plants and animals, and the tundra will be lucky to support a few hundred. Why? The same reason Mercury is warmer than Neptune: the rate at which photons from the sun arrive in each place per square meter of surface.
Near the equator, the sun’s rays fall almost vertically. Close to the poles, since the Earth is round, the Sun’s rays come in at a sharp angle, and thus are spread out over more surface area. The ambient temperature’s quite a bit warmer in the rain forest than it is on the tundra, but because the vast heat engine we call the atmosphere pumps heat from the equator to the poles, the difference in ambient temperature is not as great as the difference in solar input per cubic meter. Thus ecosystems near the equator have a greater difference in energy concentration between input and output than those near the poles, and the complexity of the two systems varies accordingly.
All this should be common knowledge. Of course it isn’t, because the industrial world’s notions of education consistently ignore what William Catton called “the processes that matter”—that is, the fundamental laws of ecology that frame our existence on this planet—and approach a great many of those subjects that do make it into the curriculum in ways that encourage the most embarrassing sort of ignorance about the natural processes that keep us all alive. Down the road a bit, we’ll be discussing that in much more detail. For now, though, I want to take the points just made and apply them systematically, in much the way Catton did, to the predicament of industrial civilization.
A human society is an ecosystem. Like any other ecosystem, it depends for its existence on flows of energy, and as with any other ecosystem, the upper limit on its complexity depends ultimately on the difference in concentration between the energy that enters it and the background into which its waste heat disperses. (This last point is a corollary of White’s Law, one of the fundamental principles of human ecology, which holds that a society’s economic development is directly proportional to its consumption of energy per capita.) Until the beginning of the industrial revolution, that upper limit was not much higher than the upper limit of complexity in other ecosystems, since human ecosystems drew most of their energy from the same source as nonhuman ones: sunlight falling on green plants. As human societies figured out how to tap other flows of solar energy—windpower to drive windmills and send ships coursing over the seas, water power to turn mills, and so on—that upper limit crept higher, but not dramatically so.
The discoveries that made it possible to turn fossil fuels into mechanical energy transformed that equation completely. The geological processes that stockpiled half a billion years of sunlight into coal, oil, and natural gas boosted the concentration of the energy inputs available to industrial societies by an almost unimaginable factor, without warming the ambient temperature of the planet more than a few degrees, and the huge differentials in energy concentration that resulted drove an equally unimaginable increase in complexity. Choose any measure of complexity you wish—number of discrete occupational categories, average number of human beings involved in the production, distribution, and consumption of any given good or service, or what have you—and in the wake of the industrial revolution, it soared right off the charts. Thermodynamically, that’s exactly what you’d expect.
The difference in energy concentration between input and output, it bears repeating, defines the upper limit of complexity. Other variables determine whether or not the system in question will achieve that upper limit. In the ecosystems we call human societies, knowledge is one of those other variables. If you have a highly concentrated energy source and don’t yet know how to use it efficiently, your society isn’t going to become as complex as it otherwise could. Over the three centuries of industrialization, as a result, the production of useful knowledge was a winning strategy, since it allowed industrial societies to rise steadily toward the upper limit of complexity defined by the concentration differential. The limit was never reached—the law of diminishing returns saw to that—and so, inevitably, industrial societies ended up believing that knowledge all by itself was capable of increasing the complexity of the human ecosystem. Since there’s no upper limit to knowledge, in turn, that belief system drove what Catton called the cornucopian myth, the delusion that there would always be enough resources if only the stock of knowledge increased quickly enough.
That belief only seemed to work, though, as long as the concentration differential between energy inputs and the background remained very high. Once easily accessible fossil fuels started to become scarce, and more and more energy and other resources had to be invested in the extraction of what remained, problems started to crop up. Tar sands and oil shales in their natural form are not as concentrated an energy source as light sweet crude—once they’re refined, sure, the differences are minimal, but a whole system analysis of energy concentration has to start at the moment each energy source enters the system. Take a cubic yard of tar sand fresh from the pit mine, with the sand still in it, or a cubic yard of oil shale with the oil still trapped in the rock, and you’ve simply got less energy per unit volume than you do if you’ve got a cubic yard of light sweet crude fresh from the well, or even a cubic yard of good permeable sandstone with light sweet crude oozing out of every pore.
It’s an article of faith in contemporary culture that such differences don’t matter, but that’s just another aspect of our cornucopian myth. The energy needed to get the sand out of the tar sands or the oil out of the shale oil has to come from somewhere, and that energy, in turn, is not available for other uses. The result, however you slice it conceptually, is that the upper limit of complexity begins moving down. That sounds abstract, but it adds up to a great deal of very concrete misery, because as already noted, the complexity of a society determines such things as the number of different occupational specialties it can support, the number of employees who are involved in the production and distribution of a given good or service, and so on. There’s a useful phrase for a sustained contraction in the usual measures of complexity in a human ecosystem: “economic depression.”
The economic troubles that are shaking the industrial world more and more often these days, in other words, are symptoms of a disastrous mismatch between the level of complexity that our remaining concentration differential can support, and the level of complexity that our preferred ideologies insist we ought to have. As those two things collide, there’s no question which of them is going to win. Adding to our total stock of knowledge won’t change that result, since knowledge is a necessary condition for economic expansion but not a sufficient one: if the upper limit of complexity set by the laws of thermodynamics drops below the level that your knowledge base would otherwise support, further additions to the knowledge base simply mean that there will be a growing number of things that people know how to do in theory, but that nobody has the resources to do in practice.
Knowledge, in other words, is not a magic wand, a surrogate messiah, or a source of miracles. It can open the way to exploiting energy more efficiently than otherwise, and it can figure out how to use energy resources that were not previously being used at all, but it can’t conjure energy out of thin air. Even if the energy resources are there, for that matter, if other factors prevent them from being used, the knowledge of how they might be used offers no consolation—quite the contrary.
That latter point, I think, sums up the tragedy of William Catton’s career. He knew, and could explain with great clarity, why industrialism would bring about its own downfall, and what could be done to salvage something from its wreck. That knowledge, however, was not enough to make things happen; only a few people ever listened, most of them promptly plugged their ears and started chanting “La, la, la, I can’t hear you” once Reagan made that fashionable, and the actions that might have spared all of us a vast amount of misery never happened. When I spoke to him in 2011, he was perfectly aware that his life’s work had done essentially nothing to turn industrial society aside from its rush toward the abyss. That’s got to be a bitter thing to contemplate in your final hours, and I hope his thoughts were on something else last month as the night closed in at last.
As Night Closes In
I was saddened to learn a few days ago, via a phone call from a fellow author, that William R. Catton Jr. died early last month, just short of his 89th birthday. Some of my readers will have no idea who he was; others may dimly recall that I’ve mentioned him and his most important book, Overshoot, repeatedly in these essays. Those who’ve taken the time to read the book just named may be wondering why none of the sites in the peak oil blogosphere has put up an obituary, or even noted the man’s passing. I don’t happen to know the answer to that last question, though I have my suspicions.
I encountered Overshoot for the first time in a college bookstore in Bellingham, Washington in 1983. Red letters on a stark yellow spine spelled out the title, a word I already knew from my classes in ecology and systems theory; I pulled it off the shelf, and found the future staring me in the face. This is what’s on the front cover below the title:
carrying capacity: maximum permanently supportable load.
cornucopian myth: euphoric belief in limitless resources.
drawdown: stealing resources from the future.
cargoism: delusion that technology will always save us from
overshoot: growth beyond an area’s carrying capacity, leading to
crash: die-off.
If you want to know where I got the core ideas I’ve been exploring in these essays for the last eight-going-on-nine years, in other words, now you know. I still have that copy of Overshoot; it’s sitting on the desk in front of me right now, reminding me yet again just how many chances we had to turn away from the bleak future that’s closing in around us now, like the night at the end of a long day.
Plenty of books in the 1970s and early 1980s applied the lessons of ecology to the future of industrial civilization and picked up at least part of the bad news that results. Overshoot was arguably the best of the lot, but it was pretty much guaranteed to land even deeper in the memory hole than the others. The difficulty was that Catton’s book didn’t pander to the standard mythologies that still beset any attempt to make sense of the predicament we’ve made for ourselves; it provided no encouragement to what he called cargoism, the claim that technological progress will inevitably allow us to have our planet and eat it too, without falling off the other side of the balance into the sort of apocalyptic daydreams that Hollywood loves to make into bad movies. Instead, in calm, crisp, thoughtful prose, he explained how industrial civilization was cutting its own throat, how far past the point of no return we’d already gone, and what had to be done in order to salvage anything from the approaching wreck.
As I noted in a post here in 2011, I had the chance to meet Catton at an ASPO conference, and tried to give him some idea of how much his book had meant to me. I did my best not to act like a fourteen-year-old fan meeting a rock star, but I’m by no means sure that I succeeded. We talked for fifteen minutes over dinner; he was very gracious; then things moved on, each of us left the conference to carry on with our lives, and now he’s gone. As the old song says, that’s the way it goes.
There’s much more that could be said about William Catton, but that task should probably be left for someone who knew the man as a teacher, a scholar, and a human being. I didn’t; except for that one fifteen-minute conversation, I knew him solely as the mind behind one of the books that helped me make sense of the world, and then kept me going on the long desert journey through the Reagan era, when most of those who claimed to be environmentalists over the previous decade cashed in their ideals and waved around the cornucopian myth as their excuse for that act. Thus I’m simply going to urge all of my readers who haven’t yet read Overshoot to do so as soon as possible, even if they have to crawl on their bare hands and knees over abandoned fracking equipment to get a copy. Having said that, I’d like to go on to the sort of tribute I think he would have appreciated most: an attempt to take certain of his ideas a little further than he did.
The core of Overshoot, which is also the core of the entire world of appropriate technology and green alternatives that got shot through the head and shoved into an unmarked grave in the Reagan years, is the recognition that the principles of ecology apply to industrial society just as much as they do to other communities of living things. It’s odd, all things considered, that this is such a controversial proposal. Most of us have no trouble grasping the fact that the law of gravity affects human beings the same way it affects rocks; most of us understand that other laws of nature really do apply to us; but quite a few of us seem to be incapable of extending that same sensible reasoning to one particular set of laws, the ones that govern how communities of living things relate to their environments.
If people treated gravity the way they treat ecology, you could visit a news website any day of the week and read someone insisting with a straight face that while it’s true that rocks fall down when dropped, human beings don’t—no, no, they fall straight up into the sky, and anyone who thinks otherwise is so obviously wrong that there’s no point even discussing the matter. That degree of absurdity appears every single day in the American media, and in ordinary conversations as well, whenever ecological issues come up. Suggest that a finite planet must by definition contain a finite amount of fossil fuels, that dumping billions of tons of gaseous trash into the air every single year for centuries might change the way that the atmosphere retains heat, or that the law of diminishing returns might apply to technology the way it applies to everything else, and you can pretty much count on being shouted down by those who, for all practical purposes, might as well believe that the world is flat.
Still, as part of the ongoing voyage into the unspeakable in which this blog is currently engaged, I’d like to propose that, in fact, human societies are as subject to the laws of ecology as they are to every other dimension of natural law. That act of intellectual heresy implies certain conclusions that are acutely unwelcome in most circles just now; still, as my regular readers will have noticed long since, that’s just one of the services this blog offers.
Let’s start with the basics. Every ecosystem, in thermodynamic terms, is a process by which relatively concentrated energy is dispersed into diffuse background heat. Here on Earth, at least, the concentrated energy mostly comes from the Sun, in the form of solar radiation—there are a few ecosystems, in deep oceans and underground, that get their energy from chemical reactions driven by the Earth’s internal heat instead. Ilya Prigogine showed some decades back that the flow of energy through a system of this sort tends to increase the complexity of the system; Jeremy England, a MIT physicist, has recently shown that the same process accounts neatly for the origin of life itself. The steady flow of energy from source to sink is the foundation on which everything else rests.
The complexity of the system, in turn, is limited by the rate at which energy flows through the system, and this in turn depends on the difference in concentration between the energy that enters the system, on the one hand, and the background into which waste heat diffuses when it leaves the system, on the other. That shouldn’t be a difficult concept to grasp. Not only is it basic thermodynamics, it’s basic physics—it’s precisely equivalent, in fact, to pointing out that the rate at which water flows through any section of a stream depends on the difference in height between the place where the water flows into that section and the place where it flows out.
Simple as it is, it’s a point that an astonishing number of people—including some who are scientifically literate—routinely miss. A while back on this blog, for example, I noted that one of the core reasons you can’t power a modern industrial civilization on solar energy is that sunlight is relatively diffuse as an energy source, compared to the extremely concentrated energy we get from fossil fuels. I still field rants from people insisting that this is utter hogwash, since photons have exactly the same amount of energy they did when they left the Sun, and so the energy they carry is just as concentrated as it was when it left the Sun. You’ll notice, though, that if this was the only variable that mattered, Neptune would be just as warm as Mercury, since each of the photons hitting the one planet pack on average the same energetic punch as those that hit the other.
It’s hard to think of a better example of the blindness to whole systems that’s pandemic in today’s geek culture. Obviously, the difference between the temperatures of Neptune and Mercury isn’t a function of the energy of individual photons hitting the two worlds; it’s a function of differing concentrations of photons—the number of them, let’s say, hitting a square meter of each planet’s surface. This is also one of the two figures that matter when we’re talking about solar energy here on Earth. The other? That’s the background heat into which waste energy disperses when the system, eco- or solar, is done with it. On the broadest scale, that’s deep space, but ecosystems don’t funnel their waste heat straight into orbit, you know. Rather, they diffuse it into the ambient temperature at whatever height above or below sea level, and whatever latitude closer or further from the equator, they happen to be—and since that’s heated by the Sun, too, the difference between input and output concentrations isn’t very substantial.
Nature has done astonishing things with that very modest difference in concentration. People who insist that photosynthesis is horribly inefficient, and of course we can improve its efficiency, are missing a crucial point: something like half the energy that reaches the leaves of a green plant from the Sun is put to work lifting water up from the roots by an ingenious form of evaporative pumping, in which water sucked out through the leaf pores as vapor draws up more water through a network of tiny tubes in the plant’s stems. Another few per cent goes into the manufacture of sugars by photosynthesis, and a variety of minor processes, such as the chemical reactions that ripen fruit, also depend to some extent on light or heat from the Sun; all told, a green plant is probably about as efficient in its total use of solar energy as the laws of thermodynamics will permit.
What’s more, the Earth’s ecosystems take the energy that flows through the green engines of plant life and put it to work in an extraordinary diversity of ways. The water pumped into the sky by what botanists call evapotranspiration—that’s the evaporative pumping I mentioned a moment ago—plays critical roles in local, regional, and global water cycles. The production of sugars to store solar energy in chemical form kicks off an even more intricate set of changes, as the plant’s cells are eaten by something, which is eaten by something, and so on through the lively but precise dance of the food web. Eventually all the energy the original plant scooped up from the Sun turns into diffuse waste heat and permeates slowly up through the atmosphere to its ultimate destiny warming some corner of deep space a bit above absolute zero, but by the time it gets there, it’s usually had quite a ride.
That said, there are hard upper limits to the complexity of the ecosystem that these intricate processes can support. You can see that clearly enough by comparing a tropical rain forest to a polar tundra. The two environments may have approximately equal amounts of precipitation over the course of a year; they may have an equally rich or poor supply of nutrients in the soil; even so, the tropical rain forest can easily support fifteen or twenty thousand species of plants and animals, and the tundra will be lucky to support a few hundred. Why? The same reason Mercury is warmer than Neptune: the rate at which photons from the sun arrive in each place per square meter of surface.
Near the equator, the sun’s rays fall almost vertically. Close to the poles, since the Earth is round, the Sun’s rays come in at a sharp angle, and thus are spread out over more surface area. The ambient temperature’s quite a bit warmer in the rain forest than it is on the tundra, but because the vast heat engine we call the atmosphere pumps heat from the equator to the poles, the difference in ambient temperature is not as great as the difference in solar input per cubic meter. Thus ecosystems near the equator have a greater difference in energy concentration between input and output than those near the poles, and the complexity of the two systems varies accordingly.
All this should be common knowledge. Of course it isn’t, because the industrial world’s notions of education consistently ignore what William Catton called “the processes that matter”—that is, the fundamental laws of ecology that frame our existence on this planet—and approach a great many of those subjects that do make it into the curriculum in ways that encourage the most embarrassing sort of ignorance about the natural processes that keep us all alive. Down the road a bit, we’ll be discussing that in much more detail. For now, though, I want to take the points just made and apply them systematically, in much the way Catton did, to the predicament of industrial civilization.
A human society is an ecosystem. Like any other ecosystem, it depends for its existence on flows of energy, and as with any other ecosystem, the upper limit on its complexity depends ultimately on the difference in concentration between the energy that enters it and the background into which its waste heat disperses. (This last point is a corollary of White’s Law, one of the fundamental principles of human ecology, which holds that a society’s economic development is directly proportional to its consumption of energy per capita.) Until the beginning of the industrial revolution, that upper limit was not much higher than the upper limit of complexity in other ecosystems, since human ecosystems drew most of their energy from the same source as nonhuman ones: sunlight falling on green plants. As human societies figured out how to tap other flows of solar energy—windpower to drive windmills and send ships coursing over the seas, water power to turn mills, and so on—that upper limit crept higher, but not dramatically so.
The discoveries that made it possible to turn fossil fuels into mechanical energy transformed that equation completely. The geological processes that stockpiled half a billion years of sunlight into coal, oil, and natural gas boosted the concentration of the energy inputs available to industrial societies by an almost unimaginable factor, without warming the ambient temperature of the planet more than a few degrees, and the huge differentials in energy concentration that resulted drove an equally unimaginable increase in complexity. Choose any measure of complexity you wish—number of discrete occupational categories, average number of human beings involved in the production, distribution, and consumption of any given good or service, or what have you—and in the wake of the industrial revolution, it soared right off the charts. Thermodynamically, that’s exactly what you’d expect.
The difference in energy concentration between input and output, it bears repeating, defines the upper limit of complexity. Other variables determine whether or not the system in question will achieve that upper limit. In the ecosystems we call human societies, knowledge is one of those other variables. If you have a highly concentrated energy source and don’t yet know how to use it efficiently, your society isn’t going to become as complex as it otherwise could. Over the three centuries of industrialization, as a result, the production of useful knowledge was a winning strategy, since it allowed industrial societies to rise steadily toward the upper limit of complexity defined by the concentration differential. The limit was never reached—the law of diminishing returns saw to that—and so, inevitably, industrial societies ended up believing that knowledge all by itself was capable of increasing the complexity of the human ecosystem. Since there’s no upper limit to knowledge, in turn, that belief system drove what Catton called the cornucopian myth, the delusion that there would always be enough resources if only the stock of knowledge increased quickly enough.
That belief only seemed to work, though, as long as the concentration differential between energy inputs and the background remained very high. Once easily accessible fossil fuels started to become scarce, and more and more energy and other resources had to be invested in the extraction of what remained, problems started to crop up. Tar sands and oil shales in their natural form are not as concentrated an energy source as light sweet crude—once they’re refined, sure, the differences are minimal, but a whole system analysis of energy concentration has to start at the moment each energy source enters the system. Take a cubic yard of tar sand fresh from the pit mine, with the sand still in it, or a cubic yard of oil shale with the oil still trapped in the rock, and you’ve simply got less energy per unit volume than you do if you’ve got a cubic yard of light sweet crude fresh from the well, or even a cubic yard of good permeable sandstone with light sweet crude oozing out of every pore.
It’s an article of faith in contemporary culture that such differences don’t matter, but that’s just another aspect of our cornucopian myth. The energy needed to get the sand out of the tar sands or the oil out of the shale oil has to come from somewhere, and that energy, in turn, is not available for other uses. The result, however you slice it conceptually, is that the upper limit of complexity begins moving down. That sounds abstract, but it adds up to a great deal of very concrete misery, because as already noted, the complexity of a society determines such things as the number of different occupational specialties it can support, the number of employees who are involved in the production and distribution of a given good or service, and so on. There’s a useful phrase for a sustained contraction in the usual measures of complexity in a human ecosystem: “economic depression.”
The economic troubles that are shaking the industrial world more and more often these days, in other words, are symptoms of a disastrous mismatch between the level of complexity that our remaining concentration differential can support, and the level of complexity that our preferred ideologies insist we ought to have. As those two things collide, there’s no question which of them is going to win. Adding to our total stock of knowledge won’t change that result, since knowledge is a necessary condition for economic expansion but not a sufficient one: if the upper limit of complexity set by the laws of thermodynamics drops below the level that your knowledge base would otherwise support, further additions to the knowledge base simply mean that there will be a growing number of things that people know how to do in theory, but that nobody has the resources to do in practice.
Knowledge, in other words, is not a magic wand, a surrogate messiah, or a source of miracles. It can open the way to exploiting energy more efficiently than otherwise, and it can figure out how to use energy resources that were not previously being used at all, but it can’t conjure energy out of thin air. Even if the energy resources are there, for that matter, if other factors prevent them from being used, the knowledge of how they might be used offers no consolation—quite the contrary.
That latter point, I think, sums up the tragedy of William Catton’s career. He knew, and could explain with great clarity, why industrialism would bring about its own downfall, and what could be done to salvage something from its wreck. That knowledge, however, was not enough to make things happen; only a few people ever listened, most of them promptly plugged their ears and started chanting “La, la, la, I can’t hear you” once Reagan made that fashionable, and the actions that might have spared all of us a vast amount of misery never happened. When I spoke to him in 2011, he was perfectly aware that his life’s work had done essentially nothing to turn industrial society aside from its rush toward the abyss. That’s got to be a bitter thing to contemplate in your final hours, and I hope his thoughts were on something else last month as the night closed in at last.
SC126-4
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/28864-species-extinctions-human-chronic-disease-on-the-rise-as-climate-disruption-mounts
Species Extinction, Human Chronic Disease On The Rise, As Climate Disruption Mounts
I’m graced to live adjacent to Olympic National Park and have it as my backyard sanctuary.
Recently, I hiked up to an alpine lake at 5,000 feet, where my friend John and I pitched camp and settled in to climb a nearby peak. The clear, rarified air wafting through sub-alpine fir expands the soul, not to mention the power of the incredible mountain views.
But the trip, fantastic weather and summit aside, had a bittersweet edge to it.
To see more stories like this, visit “Planet or Profit?”
We are at high latitude in upper Washington State, relative to the rest of the contiguous 48 states. The trip was in late January, and on the climb we were well over one mile above sea level, but we never saw the temperature drop below freezing, even at night. Large areas of our route up the peak found us slogging up scree slopes bare of snow, when normally the basin we were in would have required the use of avalanche transceivers and other precautions for traveling in heavy snow on steep slopes.
The signs of anthropogenic climate disruption are all around us now, evident to anyone willing to see them.
I brought my snow shovel, but it never left my pack as we pitched our tent on terra firma, on the banks of a formerly frozen alpine lake that was melting out. “These plants are budding, I can’t believe it,” John, who has lived in the area for more than 25 years, told me from nearby our tent. “These are spring conditions, but it’s January!”
Climate Disruption Dispatches
After our climb, we hiked back down toward the trailhead. The trail, just below our campsite at the lake, wound past thick, old-growth cedar trees with orange trail markers placed 10 feet up the trees in order to be visible to skiers amid deep snows. These days, we hiked up bare ground, and had to look up to see the trail markers.
The signs of anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) are all around us now, evident to anyone willing to see them.
This month’s dispatch was a difficult one to write, given the preponderance of earth-shaking reports about how far along we truly are in this anthropogenic climate catastrophe.
But don’t just take my word for it, dear reader.
2014 is officially in the books as the hottest year on record, and all 10 of the hottest years have occurred since 1998.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data also revealed that the 2010s decade is on pace to become the hottest on record, which means it would surpass the 2000s as the previous hottest, which surpassed the 1990s as the same, which surpassed the 1980s.
The trend is clear.
What’s more, 2015 began with atmospheric carbon dioxide levels already above the 400 parts per million level, which is a troubling sign, given that annual levels tend to peak in May.
Sea levels are now rising 25 percent faster than previous estimates, and the acceleration witnessed in the 1990s is even more dramatic than previously calculated.
With experts calling our current time period the sixth great mass extinction event in earth’s history, we have been warned to expect between 30 to 50 percent of all current species to go extinct by 2050 due primarily to ACD. A recent report listed several key species we must expect to see go extinct in 2015, including the Amur leopard, Sumatran elephant, Javan rhinoceros, leatherback turtle and mountain gorilla.
A stunning new study published in the prestigious journal Science concluded that we are on the verge of causing “a major extinction event” in the oceans, and one of the scientists who authored the study stated frankly, “I honestly feel there’s not much hope for normal ecosystems in the ocean” without a dramatic shift away from the current business-as-usual fossil-fueled economy.
Additionally, another recent study found that sea levels are now rising 25 percent faster than previous estimates, and the acceleration witnessed in the 1990s is even more dramatic than previously calculated.
To make matters worse, another major study published in Science recently found that human activity has already pushed the planet beyond four of its nine “planetary boundaries.” The conclusion of the study said that at the rate things are progressing, the coming decades will see the earth no longer as a “safe operating space” for human beings, let alone most other species. The four boundaries we’ve already crossed are the extinction rate, deforestation, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and the flow of nitrogen and phosphorous (land fertilizers) into the oceans.
This is precisely why climate scientists have recently begun begging their respective governments to leave the rest of the planetary fossil fuels in the ground.
All of these terrifying developments, along with the others this series has covered over the last year, have led members of theBulletin of the Atomic Scientists to recently move the hands of the Doomsday clock to three minutes to midnight. This is two minutes closer to planetary catastrophe than we were in 2014, and closer than we have been since the height of the Cold War.
Earth
ACD’s impacts across the planet’s landmasses are becoming much more pronounced.
In January, a report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that California has lost half of all its large trees since the 1930s, and ACD is seen as a major factor.
Among many different species, mass die-offs, sometimes in the hundreds of thousands, are now increasing in both frequency and in the numbers of dead.
Up in the Arctic, the region of the planet that continues to see the most pronounced changes, a little bird known as the dovekie (auk) has become a sentinel of ACD, due to the fact that shrinking sea ice is having a profound impact on its feeding habits, adult birds are losing body mass and their future survival rates look precarious.
There are other ways birds, as well as fish and mammals, serve as warning sentinels: Among many different species, mass die-offs, sometimes in the hundreds of thousands, are now increasing in both frequency and in the numbers of dead, according to a recent study.
In Borneo, half of the mammals there will see their habitats shrink by at least one-third by 2080, recent research shows. Conservationists warn that by then twice as many mammals will be at risk of extinction, due to ACD, loss of rainforest and hunting.
Another report in January showed that conditions across the Himalayas, which, in 2014, found 43 people killed during unseasonable snow storms on summer trekking routes and the single worst disaster ever for Sherpas on Mount Everest when a collapsing hanging glacier killed 16, are continuing to warm due to ACD.
Also in that region of the world, mountain communities in Pakistan are now facing more natural hazards than ever before, due to warmer temperatures and increasing rainfall.
Similarly in Kathmandu, Nepal, hotter temperatures are crippling the supply of power and food to the capital of what is already the poorest country in Asia, after Afghanistan.
In the United States, tens of millions of acres of mountaintop forests spanning the Southwest are now in danger of being scorched out of existence by ACD (due to lack of moisture and increasing temperatures), according to a recent report.
Another report shows that ACD is likely to have a dramatic effect on agriculture in the Midwest, where farmers are facing myriad impacts of weather-related challenges as temperatures continue to increase. Seasonal variations, increasing temperature fluctuations and drought are some of the key impacts, among many others.
The World Health Organization already estimates that ACD will cause at least an additional 250,000 deaths per year around the globe between 2030 and 2050.
A report commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences warned that the US agricultural livestock field must undergo massive systemic changes if it has a hope of coping with food security and sustainability issues stemming directly from ACD. The authors of the report said that in order to meet rising demand from an ever-increasing global population, animal scientists must develop more sustainable production methods while simultaneously coping with ACD’s effects on crop yields and animal well-being.
Human health impacts continue to manifest as well.
A recent survey of members of the American Thoracic Society, which represents 15,000 physicians and medical professionals involved in respiratory and critical care medicine, found that they are already seeing dramatic health effects in their patients that they believe are linked to ACD. An overwhelming 89 percent of the health-care professionals agreed that ACD is occurring, 65 percent of them said ACD was relevant to patient care, and 77 percent said they have already seen an increase in chronic diseases related to air pollution.
A report published in the National Academy of Sciences by a University of Missouri-Columbia researcher warned that ACD might give you intestinal worms: Rising sea levels around coastal river deltas could lead to increased prevalence of flukes that can cause infections and internal organ inflammation if ingested by humans.
Another recent report, this one from the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, listed seven ways ACD can kill you, from deadly bug bites, to respiratory and asthma problems, to lack of water.
Furthermore, the World Health Organization already estimates that ACD will cause at least an additional 250,000 deaths per year around the globe between 2030 and 2050.
Experts also have warned governments to plan for ACD migrants, citing evidence that ACD and natural disasters already force three to 10 times more people from their homes than all of the conflicts and wars in the world, combined.
Water
As usual, the amplification of ACD is most apparent while looking through the water lens.
A recent study published in Nature Climate Change showed that extreme weather arising from La Niña events in the Pacific Ocean will “double,” and parts of the world will have their weather patterns switch between extremes of wet and dry, according to scientists.
The Atlantic Salmon Trust released a report showing that wild Atlantic salmon are now in danger of extinction, due to farming and ACD.
The NOAA warned recently that US coastal cities will face daily flooding by 2050, again due to ACD.
A study published in Geophysical Research Letters shows that the fate of the Galapagos Islands’ coral reefs – most of the reefs surrounding the islands have died out since the 1980s – is likely a preview for coral reefs around the world: The study warned that nearly all reefs could face the same fate by 2050.
Anomalies regarding marine life continue as well. Southern California saw its rare marine life reach record numbers in 2014, due to increasing ocean temperatures spurred on by ACD. Rare sightings of false killer whales, pilot whales and sperm whales are becoming more common.
The US East Coast is already facing dire consequences of ACD, as Baltimore, Boston, Annapolis and other cities are seeing their land sink beneath rising seas, their fishing industries suffer and their barrier islands disappear.
The NOAA warned recently that US coastal cities will face daily flooding by 2050, again due to ACD. Thus, it comes as no surprise that massive cities like Miami are only treading water for now. Their adaptation measures are only postponing the inevitable and show the folly of battling nature, according to a recent report.
In Pakistan, coastal villagers are already retreating further inland due to rising seas, as land erosion is causing fishermen to say things like “the seawater stole our homes.”
News on the sea level front is certainly not expected to get any better.
NASA’s chief scientist Ellen Stofan, during a lecture at the University College of London at the end of 2014, projected a two-meter sea level rise by 2100 due to increasingly rapid melting of the Western Antarctic ice shelf.
Stofan has thus doubled the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) worst-case prediction.
Even the tourist and adventure businesses are being kept on their toes by ACD.
In New Zealand, where the glaciers are retreating dramatically (as they are in most other regions around the planet), tour operators are having a tough time keeping up with the changes in a way that keeps their businesses sustainable.
The blatant harm humans have wrought upon the oceans of the world has become quite obvious, with increasing acidification, massive plankton and fish die-offs, melting Arctic ice, and dead zones.
Adventurers on Kilimanjaro in Africa are having a similar experience. Ice climber Will Gadd, who aimed to climb atop the world’s highest glaciers, did not know he would end up racing against time and ACD to do so. “We were climbing ice that isn’t going to be there next week,” he said of his climbs.
California once again stands out in terms of ACD impact because of its ongoing drought. State and federal water officials gathered in January to sound the alarm about California’s fourth straight year of drought. Officials said that dramatic action will be needed to deal with what is to come as worsening drought and increased wildfires are expected this year, as well as in following years.
According to the National Drought Mitigation Center, the current state of drought in California is unlike anything ever seen there before. These graphs tell the story of how, for example, San Francisco usually averages four and half inches of rain in January, its wettest month of the year. But in January 2015, that city received exactly zero. And the closest it had come to that amount was in January 2014, when it received just 0.06 inches.
Looking south, Brazil’s most populated region is currently experiencing its worst drought in eight decades.
The blatant harm humans have wrought upon the oceans of the world has become quite obvious, with increasing acidification, massive plankton and fish die-offs, melting Arctic ice, and dead zones – but now the harm we have done to the oceans is even becoming visible on land. For example, in Thailand, where the coastal mangrove swamps have been destroyed and overrun by increasingly powerful storms, storm surges are rushing into and destroying that country’s industrial areas, causing billions of dollars in damage.
At the poles, the dramatic impacts of ACD continue to make themselves glaringly apparent.
In January, NASA released a video showing how ACD is causing the Arctic ice sheet to progressively lose its mature, thicker ice, despite some growth during some years. Thus, the perennial Arctic sea ice continues to shrink its way out of existence.
Researchers with Britain’s University of Leeds recently showed that an Arctic ice cap in Norway’s Svalbard island chain is quite literally sliding into the sea. Since only 2012, a portion of the ice cap that covered the island has thinned by 160 feet, according to satellite measurements. One of the researchers described the phenomenon as “a very large signal.”
Given the disconcerting news, NASA’s chief scientist reported recently about the Western Antarctic ice sheet. It is particularly alarming to note that even the largest glacier in East Antarctica, the Totten Glacier, is being melted by warming oceans. The Totten’s annual output now releases enough water over two and a half days to fill Australia’s Sydney Harbor – and its pace is only increasing.
Fire
Some of the worst wildfires in the Southern Hemisphere continue to be in Australia, which at the time of this writing was battling its worst fires in more than 30 years. Climate scientists have long since found that ACD is increasing wildfires’ frequency, season length and intensity.
More bad news for that country comes from its national science agency as well as its Bureau of Meteorology, which recently released their projections based on 40-year global climate models. The projections show that ACD will impact Australia more intensely than the rest of the world, and that the country is most likely on track for a temperature rise of more than 5 degrees Celsius by 2100.
As wildfires in California continue to increase in frequency and intensity amid that state’s ongoing drought, continued discussion and public education efforts, which bring in climate scientists to speak with the public there, are becoming more common.
Air
The changing jet stream continues to be the biggest story on the atmospheric front. In early January, commercial jets traveling from New York to London made the trip at nearly supersonic speeds due to a jet stream roaring at more than 200 miles per hour. A flight that typically takes more than six hours took five hours and 20 minutes.
Meanwhile, it comes as no surprise to see high temperature records continuing to be set around the globe, including Alaska, where 2014 was the warmest year on record for the state. It was also the warmest year for the Bering Sea, Anchorage’s warmest year since 1926, and incredibly, the first time in recorded history that the temperature in Anchorage never dropped below zero for an entire calendar year.
In nearby Canada, researchers are now warning that warmer temperatures pose a threat to the quintessential Canadian experience of outdoor ice rinks.
In the Arctic, the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia has gotten much attention during recent months due to several massive holes in the ground that appeared, which scientists have linked to methane releases. In the same area, methane releases are on the rise, according to recent reports in the Journal of Geophysical Research, Geophysical Research Letters and Truthout.
Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and scientists warn that increased methane emissions already in the atmosphere could warm the planet between 4 and 6 degrees Celsius by 2100....
Species Extinction, Human Chronic Disease On The Rise, As Climate Disruption Mounts
I’m graced to live adjacent to Olympic National Park and have it as my backyard sanctuary.
Recently, I hiked up to an alpine lake at 5,000 feet, where my friend John and I pitched camp and settled in to climb a nearby peak. The clear, rarified air wafting through sub-alpine fir expands the soul, not to mention the power of the incredible mountain views.
But the trip, fantastic weather and summit aside, had a bittersweet edge to it.
To see more stories like this, visit “Planet or Profit?”
We are at high latitude in upper Washington State, relative to the rest of the contiguous 48 states. The trip was in late January, and on the climb we were well over one mile above sea level, but we never saw the temperature drop below freezing, even at night. Large areas of our route up the peak found us slogging up scree slopes bare of snow, when normally the basin we were in would have required the use of avalanche transceivers and other precautions for traveling in heavy snow on steep slopes.
The signs of anthropogenic climate disruption are all around us now, evident to anyone willing to see them.
I brought my snow shovel, but it never left my pack as we pitched our tent on terra firma, on the banks of a formerly frozen alpine lake that was melting out. “These plants are budding, I can’t believe it,” John, who has lived in the area for more than 25 years, told me from nearby our tent. “These are spring conditions, but it’s January!”
Climate Disruption Dispatches
After our climb, we hiked back down toward the trailhead. The trail, just below our campsite at the lake, wound past thick, old-growth cedar trees with orange trail markers placed 10 feet up the trees in order to be visible to skiers amid deep snows. These days, we hiked up bare ground, and had to look up to see the trail markers.
The signs of anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) are all around us now, evident to anyone willing to see them.
This month’s dispatch was a difficult one to write, given the preponderance of earth-shaking reports about how far along we truly are in this anthropogenic climate catastrophe.
But don’t just take my word for it, dear reader.
2014 is officially in the books as the hottest year on record, and all 10 of the hottest years have occurred since 1998.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data also revealed that the 2010s decade is on pace to become the hottest on record, which means it would surpass the 2000s as the previous hottest, which surpassed the 1990s as the same, which surpassed the 1980s.
The trend is clear.
What’s more, 2015 began with atmospheric carbon dioxide levels already above the 400 parts per million level, which is a troubling sign, given that annual levels tend to peak in May.
Sea levels are now rising 25 percent faster than previous estimates, and the acceleration witnessed in the 1990s is even more dramatic than previously calculated.
With experts calling our current time period the sixth great mass extinction event in earth’s history, we have been warned to expect between 30 to 50 percent of all current species to go extinct by 2050 due primarily to ACD. A recent report listed several key species we must expect to see go extinct in 2015, including the Amur leopard, Sumatran elephant, Javan rhinoceros, leatherback turtle and mountain gorilla.
A stunning new study published in the prestigious journal Science concluded that we are on the verge of causing “a major extinction event” in the oceans, and one of the scientists who authored the study stated frankly, “I honestly feel there’s not much hope for normal ecosystems in the ocean” without a dramatic shift away from the current business-as-usual fossil-fueled economy.
Additionally, another recent study found that sea levels are now rising 25 percent faster than previous estimates, and the acceleration witnessed in the 1990s is even more dramatic than previously calculated.
To make matters worse, another major study published in Science recently found that human activity has already pushed the planet beyond four of its nine “planetary boundaries.” The conclusion of the study said that at the rate things are progressing, the coming decades will see the earth no longer as a “safe operating space” for human beings, let alone most other species. The four boundaries we’ve already crossed are the extinction rate, deforestation, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and the flow of nitrogen and phosphorous (land fertilizers) into the oceans.
This is precisely why climate scientists have recently begun begging their respective governments to leave the rest of the planetary fossil fuels in the ground.
All of these terrifying developments, along with the others this series has covered over the last year, have led members of theBulletin of the Atomic Scientists to recently move the hands of the Doomsday clock to three minutes to midnight. This is two minutes closer to planetary catastrophe than we were in 2014, and closer than we have been since the height of the Cold War.
Earth
ACD’s impacts across the planet’s landmasses are becoming much more pronounced.
In January, a report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that California has lost half of all its large trees since the 1930s, and ACD is seen as a major factor.
Among many different species, mass die-offs, sometimes in the hundreds of thousands, are now increasing in both frequency and in the numbers of dead.
Up in the Arctic, the region of the planet that continues to see the most pronounced changes, a little bird known as the dovekie (auk) has become a sentinel of ACD, due to the fact that shrinking sea ice is having a profound impact on its feeding habits, adult birds are losing body mass and their future survival rates look precarious.
There are other ways birds, as well as fish and mammals, serve as warning sentinels: Among many different species, mass die-offs, sometimes in the hundreds of thousands, are now increasing in both frequency and in the numbers of dead, according to a recent study.
In Borneo, half of the mammals there will see their habitats shrink by at least one-third by 2080, recent research shows. Conservationists warn that by then twice as many mammals will be at risk of extinction, due to ACD, loss of rainforest and hunting.
Another report in January showed that conditions across the Himalayas, which, in 2014, found 43 people killed during unseasonable snow storms on summer trekking routes and the single worst disaster ever for Sherpas on Mount Everest when a collapsing hanging glacier killed 16, are continuing to warm due to ACD.
Also in that region of the world, mountain communities in Pakistan are now facing more natural hazards than ever before, due to warmer temperatures and increasing rainfall.
Similarly in Kathmandu, Nepal, hotter temperatures are crippling the supply of power and food to the capital of what is already the poorest country in Asia, after Afghanistan.
In the United States, tens of millions of acres of mountaintop forests spanning the Southwest are now in danger of being scorched out of existence by ACD (due to lack of moisture and increasing temperatures), according to a recent report.
Another report shows that ACD is likely to have a dramatic effect on agriculture in the Midwest, where farmers are facing myriad impacts of weather-related challenges as temperatures continue to increase. Seasonal variations, increasing temperature fluctuations and drought are some of the key impacts, among many others.
The World Health Organization already estimates that ACD will cause at least an additional 250,000 deaths per year around the globe between 2030 and 2050.
A report commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences warned that the US agricultural livestock field must undergo massive systemic changes if it has a hope of coping with food security and sustainability issues stemming directly from ACD. The authors of the report said that in order to meet rising demand from an ever-increasing global population, animal scientists must develop more sustainable production methods while simultaneously coping with ACD’s effects on crop yields and animal well-being.
Human health impacts continue to manifest as well.
A recent survey of members of the American Thoracic Society, which represents 15,000 physicians and medical professionals involved in respiratory and critical care medicine, found that they are already seeing dramatic health effects in their patients that they believe are linked to ACD. An overwhelming 89 percent of the health-care professionals agreed that ACD is occurring, 65 percent of them said ACD was relevant to patient care, and 77 percent said they have already seen an increase in chronic diseases related to air pollution.
A report published in the National Academy of Sciences by a University of Missouri-Columbia researcher warned that ACD might give you intestinal worms: Rising sea levels around coastal river deltas could lead to increased prevalence of flukes that can cause infections and internal organ inflammation if ingested by humans.
Another recent report, this one from the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, listed seven ways ACD can kill you, from deadly bug bites, to respiratory and asthma problems, to lack of water.
Furthermore, the World Health Organization already estimates that ACD will cause at least an additional 250,000 deaths per year around the globe between 2030 and 2050.
Experts also have warned governments to plan for ACD migrants, citing evidence that ACD and natural disasters already force three to 10 times more people from their homes than all of the conflicts and wars in the world, combined.
Water
As usual, the amplification of ACD is most apparent while looking through the water lens.
A recent study published in Nature Climate Change showed that extreme weather arising from La Niña events in the Pacific Ocean will “double,” and parts of the world will have their weather patterns switch between extremes of wet and dry, according to scientists.
The Atlantic Salmon Trust released a report showing that wild Atlantic salmon are now in danger of extinction, due to farming and ACD.
The NOAA warned recently that US coastal cities will face daily flooding by 2050, again due to ACD.
A study published in Geophysical Research Letters shows that the fate of the Galapagos Islands’ coral reefs – most of the reefs surrounding the islands have died out since the 1980s – is likely a preview for coral reefs around the world: The study warned that nearly all reefs could face the same fate by 2050.
Anomalies regarding marine life continue as well. Southern California saw its rare marine life reach record numbers in 2014, due to increasing ocean temperatures spurred on by ACD. Rare sightings of false killer whales, pilot whales and sperm whales are becoming more common.
The US East Coast is already facing dire consequences of ACD, as Baltimore, Boston, Annapolis and other cities are seeing their land sink beneath rising seas, their fishing industries suffer and their barrier islands disappear.
The NOAA warned recently that US coastal cities will face daily flooding by 2050, again due to ACD. Thus, it comes as no surprise that massive cities like Miami are only treading water for now. Their adaptation measures are only postponing the inevitable and show the folly of battling nature, according to a recent report.
In Pakistan, coastal villagers are already retreating further inland due to rising seas, as land erosion is causing fishermen to say things like “the seawater stole our homes.”
News on the sea level front is certainly not expected to get any better.
NASA’s chief scientist Ellen Stofan, during a lecture at the University College of London at the end of 2014, projected a two-meter sea level rise by 2100 due to increasingly rapid melting of the Western Antarctic ice shelf.
Stofan has thus doubled the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) worst-case prediction.
Even the tourist and adventure businesses are being kept on their toes by ACD.
In New Zealand, where the glaciers are retreating dramatically (as they are in most other regions around the planet), tour operators are having a tough time keeping up with the changes in a way that keeps their businesses sustainable.
The blatant harm humans have wrought upon the oceans of the world has become quite obvious, with increasing acidification, massive plankton and fish die-offs, melting Arctic ice, and dead zones.
Adventurers on Kilimanjaro in Africa are having a similar experience. Ice climber Will Gadd, who aimed to climb atop the world’s highest glaciers, did not know he would end up racing against time and ACD to do so. “We were climbing ice that isn’t going to be there next week,” he said of his climbs.
California once again stands out in terms of ACD impact because of its ongoing drought. State and federal water officials gathered in January to sound the alarm about California’s fourth straight year of drought. Officials said that dramatic action will be needed to deal with what is to come as worsening drought and increased wildfires are expected this year, as well as in following years.
According to the National Drought Mitigation Center, the current state of drought in California is unlike anything ever seen there before. These graphs tell the story of how, for example, San Francisco usually averages four and half inches of rain in January, its wettest month of the year. But in January 2015, that city received exactly zero. And the closest it had come to that amount was in January 2014, when it received just 0.06 inches.
Looking south, Brazil’s most populated region is currently experiencing its worst drought in eight decades.
The blatant harm humans have wrought upon the oceans of the world has become quite obvious, with increasing acidification, massive plankton and fish die-offs, melting Arctic ice, and dead zones – but now the harm we have done to the oceans is even becoming visible on land. For example, in Thailand, where the coastal mangrove swamps have been destroyed and overrun by increasingly powerful storms, storm surges are rushing into and destroying that country’s industrial areas, causing billions of dollars in damage.
At the poles, the dramatic impacts of ACD continue to make themselves glaringly apparent.
In January, NASA released a video showing how ACD is causing the Arctic ice sheet to progressively lose its mature, thicker ice, despite some growth during some years. Thus, the perennial Arctic sea ice continues to shrink its way out of existence.
Researchers with Britain’s University of Leeds recently showed that an Arctic ice cap in Norway’s Svalbard island chain is quite literally sliding into the sea. Since only 2012, a portion of the ice cap that covered the island has thinned by 160 feet, according to satellite measurements. One of the researchers described the phenomenon as “a very large signal.”
Given the disconcerting news, NASA’s chief scientist reported recently about the Western Antarctic ice sheet. It is particularly alarming to note that even the largest glacier in East Antarctica, the Totten Glacier, is being melted by warming oceans. The Totten’s annual output now releases enough water over two and a half days to fill Australia’s Sydney Harbor – and its pace is only increasing.
Fire
Some of the worst wildfires in the Southern Hemisphere continue to be in Australia, which at the time of this writing was battling its worst fires in more than 30 years. Climate scientists have long since found that ACD is increasing wildfires’ frequency, season length and intensity.
More bad news for that country comes from its national science agency as well as its Bureau of Meteorology, which recently released their projections based on 40-year global climate models. The projections show that ACD will impact Australia more intensely than the rest of the world, and that the country is most likely on track for a temperature rise of more than 5 degrees Celsius by 2100.
As wildfires in California continue to increase in frequency and intensity amid that state’s ongoing drought, continued discussion and public education efforts, which bring in climate scientists to speak with the public there, are becoming more common.
Air
The changing jet stream continues to be the biggest story on the atmospheric front. In early January, commercial jets traveling from New York to London made the trip at nearly supersonic speeds due to a jet stream roaring at more than 200 miles per hour. A flight that typically takes more than six hours took five hours and 20 minutes.
Meanwhile, it comes as no surprise to see high temperature records continuing to be set around the globe, including Alaska, where 2014 was the warmest year on record for the state. It was also the warmest year for the Bering Sea, Anchorage’s warmest year since 1926, and incredibly, the first time in recorded history that the temperature in Anchorage never dropped below zero for an entire calendar year.
In nearby Canada, researchers are now warning that warmer temperatures pose a threat to the quintessential Canadian experience of outdoor ice rinks.
In the Arctic, the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia has gotten much attention during recent months due to several massive holes in the ground that appeared, which scientists have linked to methane releases. In the same area, methane releases are on the rise, according to recent reports in the Journal of Geophysical Research, Geophysical Research Letters and Truthout.
Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and scientists warn that increased methane emissions already in the atmosphere could warm the planet between 4 and 6 degrees Celsius by 2100....
Monday, February 2, 2015
SC126-3
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/malcolm_x_was_right_about_america_20150201
Malcolm X Was Right About America
Malcolm X, unlike Martin Luther King Jr., did not believe America had a conscience. For him there was no great tension between the lofty ideals of the nation—which he said were a sham—and the failure to deliver justice to blacks. He, perhaps better than King, understood the inner workings of empire. He had no hope that those who managed empire would ever get in touch with their better selves to build a country free of exploitation and injustice. He argued that from the arrival of the first slave ship to the appearance of our vast archipelago of prisons and our squalid, urban internal colonies where the poor are trapped and abused, the American empire was unrelentingly hostile to those Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth.” This, Malcolm knew, would not change until the empire was destroyed.
“It is impossible for capitalism to survive, primarily because the system of capitalism needs some blood to suck,” Malcolm said. “Capitalism used to be like an eagle, but now it’s more like a vulture. It used to be strong enough to go and suck anybody’s blood whether they were strong or not. But now it has become more cowardly, like the vulture, and it can only suck the blood of the helpless. As the nations of the world free themselves, then capitalism has less victims, less to suck, and it becomes weaker and weaker. It’s only a matter of time in my opinion before it will collapse completely.”
King was able to achieve a legal victory through the civil rights movement, portrayed in the new film “Selma.” But he failed to bring about economic justice and thwart the rapacious appetite of the war machine that he was acutely aware was responsible for empire’s abuse of the oppressed at home and abroad. And 50 years after Malcolm X was assassinated in the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem by hit men from the Nation of Islam, it is clear that he, not King, was right. We are the nation Malcolm knew us to be. Human beings can be redeemed. Empires cannot. Our refusal to face the truth about empire, our refusal to defy the multitudinous crimes and atrocities of empire, has brought about the nightmare Malcolm predicted. And as the Digital Age and our post-literate society implant a terrifying historical amnesia, these crimes are erased as swiftly as they are committed.
“Sometimes, I have dared to dream … that one day, history may even say that my voice—which disturbed the white man’s smugness, and his arrogance, and his complacency—that my voice helped to save America from a grave, possibly even fatal catastrophe,” Malcolm wrote.
The integration of elites of color, including Barack Obama, into the upper echelons of institutional and political structures has done nothing to blunt the predatory nature of empire. Identity and gender politics—we are about to be sold a woman president in the form of Hillary Clinton—have fostered, as Malcolm understood, fraud and theft by Wall Street, the evisceration of our civil liberties, the misery of an underclass in which half of all public school children live in poverty, the expansion of our imperial wars and the deep and perhaps fatal exploitation of the ecosystem. And until we heed Malcolm X, until we grapple with the truth about the self-destruction that lies at the heart of empire, the victims, at home and abroad, will mount. Malcolm, like James Baldwin, understood that only by facing the truth about who we are as members of an imperial power can people of color, along with whites, be liberated. This truth is bitter and painful. It requires an acknowledgment of our capacity for evil, injustice and exploitation, and it demands repentance. But we cling like giddy children to the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves. We refuse to grow up. And because of these lies, perpetrated across the cultural and political spectrum, liberation has not taken place. Empire devours us all.
“We’re anti-evil, anti-oppression, anti-lynching,” Malcolm said. “You can’t be anti- those things unless you’re also anti- the oppressor and the lyncher. You can’t be anti-slavery and pro-slavemaster; you can’t be anti-crime and pro-criminal. In fact, Mr. Muhammad teaches that if the present generation of whites would study their own race in the light of true history, they would be anti-white themselves.”
Malcolm once said that, had he been a middle-class black who was encouraged to go to law school, rather than a poor child in a detention home who dropped out of school at 15, “I would today probably be among some city’s professional black bourgeoisie, sipping cocktails and palming myself off as a community spokesman for and leader of the suffering black masses, while my primary concern would be to grab a few more crumbs from the groaning board of the two-faced whites with whom they’re begging to ‘integrate.’ ”
Malcolm’s family, struggling and poor, was callously ripped apart by state agencies in a pattern that remains unchanged. The courts, substandard schooling, roach-filled apartments, fear, humiliation, despair, poverty, greedy bankers, abusive employers, police, jails and probation officers did their work then as they do it now. Malcolm saw racial integration as a politically sterile game, one played by a black middle class anxious to sell its soul as an enabler of empire and capitalism. “The man who tosses worms in the river,” Malcolm said, “isn’t necessarily a friend of the fish. All the fish who take him for a friend, who think the worm’s got no hook on it, usually end up in the frying pan.” He related to the apocalyptic battles in the Book of Revelation where the persecuted rise up in revolt against the wicked.
“Martin [Luther King Jr.] doesn’t have the revolutionary fire that Malcolm had until the very end of his life,” Cornel West says in his book with Christa Buschendorf, “Black Prophetic Fire.” “And by revolutionary fire I mean understanding the system under which we live, the capitalist system, the imperial tentacles, the American empire, the disregard for life, the willingness to violate law, be it international law or domestic law. Malcolm understood that from very early on, and it hit Martin so hard that he does become a revolutionary in his own moral way later in his short life, whereas Malcolm had the revolutionary fire so early in his life.”
There are three great books on Malcolm X: “The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley,” “The Death and Life of Malcolm X” by Peter Goldman and “Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare” by James H. Cone.
On Friday I met Goldman—who as a reporter for a St. Louis newspaper and later for Newsweek knew and covered Malcolm—in a New York City cafe. Goldman was part of a tiny circle of white reporters Malcolm respected, including Charles Silberman of Fortune and M.S. “Mike” Handler of The New York Times, who Malcolm once said had “none of the usual prejudices or sentimentalities about black people.”
Goldman and his wife, Helen Dudar, who also was a reporter, first met Malcolm in 1962 at the Shabazz Frosti Kreem, a Black Muslim luncheonette in St. Louis’ north-side ghetto. At that meeting Malcolm poured some cream into his coffee. “Coffee is the only thing I liked integrated,” he commented. He went on: “The average Negro doesn’t even let another Negro know what he thinks, he’s so mistrusting. He’s an acrobat. He had to be to survive in this civilization. But by me being a Muslim, I’m black first—my sympathies are black, my allegiance is black, my whole objectives are black. By me being a Muslim, I’m not interested in being American, because America has never been interested in me.”
He told Goldman and Dudar: “We don’t hate. The white man has a guilt complex—he knows he’s done wrong. He knows that if he had undergone at our hands what we have undergone at his, he would hate us.” When Goldman told Malcolm he believed in a single society in which race did not matter Malcolm said sharply: “You’re dealing in fantasy. You’ve got to deal in facts.”
Goldman remembered, “He was the messenger who brought us the bad news, and nobody wanted to hear it.” Despite the “bad news” at that first meeting, Goldman would go on to have several more interviews with him, interviews that often lasted two or three hours. The writer now credits Malcolm for his “re-education.”
Goldman was struck from the beginning by Malcolm’s unfailing courtesy, his dazzling smile, his moral probity, his courage and, surprisingly, his gentleness. Goldman mentions the day that psychologist and writer Kenneth B. Clark and his wife escorted a group of high school students, most of them white, to meet Malcolm. They arrived to find him surrounded by reporters. Mrs. Clark, feeling that meeting with reporters was probably more important, told Malcolm the teenagers would wait. “The important thing is these kids,” Malcolm said to the Clarks as he called the students forward. “He didn’t see a difference between white kids and kids,” Kenneth Clark is quoted as saying in Goldman’s book.
James Baldwin too wrote of Malcolm’s deep sensitivity. He and Malcolm were on a radio program in 1961 with a young civil rights activist who had just returned from the South. “If you are an American citizen,” Baldwin remembered Malcolm asking the young man, “why have you got to fight for your rights as a citizen? To be a citizen means that you have the rights of a citizen. If you haven’t got the rights of a citizen, then you’re not a citizen.” “It’s not as simple as that,” the young man answered. “Why not?” Malcolm asked.
During the exchange, Baldwin wrote, “Malcolm understood that child and talked to him as though he was talking to a younger brother, and with that same watchful attention. What most struck me was that he was not at all trying to proselytize the child: he was trying to make him think. ... I will never forget Malcolm and that child facing each other, and Malcolm’s extraordinary gentleness. And that’s the truth about Malcolm: he was one of the gentlest people I have ever met.”
“One of Malcolm’s many lines that I liked was ‘I am the man you think you are,’ ” Goldman said. “What he meant by that was if you hit me I would hit you back. But over the period of my acquaintance with him I came to believe it also meant if you respect me I will respect you back.”
Cone amplifies this point in “Martin & Malcolm & America”:
Malcolm X is the best medicine against genocide. He showed us by example and prophetic preaching that one does not have to stay in the mud. We can wake up; we can stand up; and we can take that long walk toward freedom. Freedom is first and foremost an inner recognition of self-respect, a knowledge that one was not put on this earth to be a nobody. Using drugs and killing each other are the worst forms of nobodyness. Our forefathers fought against great odds (slavery, lynching, and segregation), but they did not self-destruct. Some died fighting, and others, inspired by their example, kept moving toward the promised land of freedom, singing ‘we ain’t gonna let nobody turn us around.’ African-Americans can do the same today. We can fight for our dignity and self-respect. To be proud to be black does not mean being against white people, unless whites are against respecting the humanity of blacks. Malcolm was not against whites; he was for blacks and against their exploitation.
Goldman lamented the loss of voices such as Malcolm’s, voices steeped in an understanding of our historical and cultural truths and endowed with the courage to speak these truths in public.
“We don’t read anymore,” Goldman said. “We don’t learn anymore. History is disappearing. People talk about living in the moment as if it is a virtue. It is a horrible vice. Between the twitterverse and the 24-hour cable news cycle our history keeps disappearing. History is something boring that you had to endure in high school and then you are rid of it. Then you go to college and study finance, accounting, business management or computer science. There are damn few liberal arts majors left. And this has erased our history. The larger figure in the ’60s was, of course, King. But what the huge majority of Americans know about King is [only] that he made a speech where he said ‘I have a dream’ and that his name is attached to a day off.”
Malcolm, like King, understood the cost of being a prophet. The two men daily faced down this cost.
Malcolm, as Goldman writes, met with the reporter Claude Lewis not long before his Feb. 21, 1965, murder. He had already experienced several attempts on his life.
“This is an era of hypocrisy,” he told Lewis. “When white folks pretend that they want Negroes to be free, and Negroes pretend to white folks that they really believe that white folks want ’em to be free, it’s an era of hypocrisy, brother. You fool me and I fool you. You pretend that you’re my brother, and I pretend that I really believe you believe you’re my brother.”
He told Lewis he would never reach old age. “If you read, you’ll find that very few people who think like I think live long enough to get old. When I say by any means necessary, I mean it with all my heart, my mind and my soul. A black man should give his life to be free, and he should also be able, be willing to take the life of those who want to take his. When you really think like that, you don’t live long.”
Lewis asked him how he wanted to be remembered. “Sincere,” Malcolm said. “In whatever I did or do. Even if I made mistakes, they were made in sincerity. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong in sincerity. I think that the best thing that a person can be is sincere.”
“The price of freedom,” Malcolm said shortly before he was killed, “is death.”
Malcolm X Was Right About America
Malcolm X, unlike Martin Luther King Jr., did not believe America had a conscience. For him there was no great tension between the lofty ideals of the nation—which he said were a sham—and the failure to deliver justice to blacks. He, perhaps better than King, understood the inner workings of empire. He had no hope that those who managed empire would ever get in touch with their better selves to build a country free of exploitation and injustice. He argued that from the arrival of the first slave ship to the appearance of our vast archipelago of prisons and our squalid, urban internal colonies where the poor are trapped and abused, the American empire was unrelentingly hostile to those Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth.” This, Malcolm knew, would not change until the empire was destroyed.
“It is impossible for capitalism to survive, primarily because the system of capitalism needs some blood to suck,” Malcolm said. “Capitalism used to be like an eagle, but now it’s more like a vulture. It used to be strong enough to go and suck anybody’s blood whether they were strong or not. But now it has become more cowardly, like the vulture, and it can only suck the blood of the helpless. As the nations of the world free themselves, then capitalism has less victims, less to suck, and it becomes weaker and weaker. It’s only a matter of time in my opinion before it will collapse completely.”
King was able to achieve a legal victory through the civil rights movement, portrayed in the new film “Selma.” But he failed to bring about economic justice and thwart the rapacious appetite of the war machine that he was acutely aware was responsible for empire’s abuse of the oppressed at home and abroad. And 50 years after Malcolm X was assassinated in the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem by hit men from the Nation of Islam, it is clear that he, not King, was right. We are the nation Malcolm knew us to be. Human beings can be redeemed. Empires cannot. Our refusal to face the truth about empire, our refusal to defy the multitudinous crimes and atrocities of empire, has brought about the nightmare Malcolm predicted. And as the Digital Age and our post-literate society implant a terrifying historical amnesia, these crimes are erased as swiftly as they are committed.
“Sometimes, I have dared to dream … that one day, history may even say that my voice—which disturbed the white man’s smugness, and his arrogance, and his complacency—that my voice helped to save America from a grave, possibly even fatal catastrophe,” Malcolm wrote.
The integration of elites of color, including Barack Obama, into the upper echelons of institutional and political structures has done nothing to blunt the predatory nature of empire. Identity and gender politics—we are about to be sold a woman president in the form of Hillary Clinton—have fostered, as Malcolm understood, fraud and theft by Wall Street, the evisceration of our civil liberties, the misery of an underclass in which half of all public school children live in poverty, the expansion of our imperial wars and the deep and perhaps fatal exploitation of the ecosystem. And until we heed Malcolm X, until we grapple with the truth about the self-destruction that lies at the heart of empire, the victims, at home and abroad, will mount. Malcolm, like James Baldwin, understood that only by facing the truth about who we are as members of an imperial power can people of color, along with whites, be liberated. This truth is bitter and painful. It requires an acknowledgment of our capacity for evil, injustice and exploitation, and it demands repentance. But we cling like giddy children to the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves. We refuse to grow up. And because of these lies, perpetrated across the cultural and political spectrum, liberation has not taken place. Empire devours us all.
“We’re anti-evil, anti-oppression, anti-lynching,” Malcolm said. “You can’t be anti- those things unless you’re also anti- the oppressor and the lyncher. You can’t be anti-slavery and pro-slavemaster; you can’t be anti-crime and pro-criminal. In fact, Mr. Muhammad teaches that if the present generation of whites would study their own race in the light of true history, they would be anti-white themselves.”
Malcolm once said that, had he been a middle-class black who was encouraged to go to law school, rather than a poor child in a detention home who dropped out of school at 15, “I would today probably be among some city’s professional black bourgeoisie, sipping cocktails and palming myself off as a community spokesman for and leader of the suffering black masses, while my primary concern would be to grab a few more crumbs from the groaning board of the two-faced whites with whom they’re begging to ‘integrate.’ ”
Malcolm’s family, struggling and poor, was callously ripped apart by state agencies in a pattern that remains unchanged. The courts, substandard schooling, roach-filled apartments, fear, humiliation, despair, poverty, greedy bankers, abusive employers, police, jails and probation officers did their work then as they do it now. Malcolm saw racial integration as a politically sterile game, one played by a black middle class anxious to sell its soul as an enabler of empire and capitalism. “The man who tosses worms in the river,” Malcolm said, “isn’t necessarily a friend of the fish. All the fish who take him for a friend, who think the worm’s got no hook on it, usually end up in the frying pan.” He related to the apocalyptic battles in the Book of Revelation where the persecuted rise up in revolt against the wicked.
“Martin [Luther King Jr.] doesn’t have the revolutionary fire that Malcolm had until the very end of his life,” Cornel West says in his book with Christa Buschendorf, “Black Prophetic Fire.” “And by revolutionary fire I mean understanding the system under which we live, the capitalist system, the imperial tentacles, the American empire, the disregard for life, the willingness to violate law, be it international law or domestic law. Malcolm understood that from very early on, and it hit Martin so hard that he does become a revolutionary in his own moral way later in his short life, whereas Malcolm had the revolutionary fire so early in his life.”
There are three great books on Malcolm X: “The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley,” “The Death and Life of Malcolm X” by Peter Goldman and “Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare” by James H. Cone.
On Friday I met Goldman—who as a reporter for a St. Louis newspaper and later for Newsweek knew and covered Malcolm—in a New York City cafe. Goldman was part of a tiny circle of white reporters Malcolm respected, including Charles Silberman of Fortune and M.S. “Mike” Handler of The New York Times, who Malcolm once said had “none of the usual prejudices or sentimentalities about black people.”
Goldman and his wife, Helen Dudar, who also was a reporter, first met Malcolm in 1962 at the Shabazz Frosti Kreem, a Black Muslim luncheonette in St. Louis’ north-side ghetto. At that meeting Malcolm poured some cream into his coffee. “Coffee is the only thing I liked integrated,” he commented. He went on: “The average Negro doesn’t even let another Negro know what he thinks, he’s so mistrusting. He’s an acrobat. He had to be to survive in this civilization. But by me being a Muslim, I’m black first—my sympathies are black, my allegiance is black, my whole objectives are black. By me being a Muslim, I’m not interested in being American, because America has never been interested in me.”
He told Goldman and Dudar: “We don’t hate. The white man has a guilt complex—he knows he’s done wrong. He knows that if he had undergone at our hands what we have undergone at his, he would hate us.” When Goldman told Malcolm he believed in a single society in which race did not matter Malcolm said sharply: “You’re dealing in fantasy. You’ve got to deal in facts.”
Goldman remembered, “He was the messenger who brought us the bad news, and nobody wanted to hear it.” Despite the “bad news” at that first meeting, Goldman would go on to have several more interviews with him, interviews that often lasted two or three hours. The writer now credits Malcolm for his “re-education.”
Goldman was struck from the beginning by Malcolm’s unfailing courtesy, his dazzling smile, his moral probity, his courage and, surprisingly, his gentleness. Goldman mentions the day that psychologist and writer Kenneth B. Clark and his wife escorted a group of high school students, most of them white, to meet Malcolm. They arrived to find him surrounded by reporters. Mrs. Clark, feeling that meeting with reporters was probably more important, told Malcolm the teenagers would wait. “The important thing is these kids,” Malcolm said to the Clarks as he called the students forward. “He didn’t see a difference between white kids and kids,” Kenneth Clark is quoted as saying in Goldman’s book.
James Baldwin too wrote of Malcolm’s deep sensitivity. He and Malcolm were on a radio program in 1961 with a young civil rights activist who had just returned from the South. “If you are an American citizen,” Baldwin remembered Malcolm asking the young man, “why have you got to fight for your rights as a citizen? To be a citizen means that you have the rights of a citizen. If you haven’t got the rights of a citizen, then you’re not a citizen.” “It’s not as simple as that,” the young man answered. “Why not?” Malcolm asked.
During the exchange, Baldwin wrote, “Malcolm understood that child and talked to him as though he was talking to a younger brother, and with that same watchful attention. What most struck me was that he was not at all trying to proselytize the child: he was trying to make him think. ... I will never forget Malcolm and that child facing each other, and Malcolm’s extraordinary gentleness. And that’s the truth about Malcolm: he was one of the gentlest people I have ever met.”
“One of Malcolm’s many lines that I liked was ‘I am the man you think you are,’ ” Goldman said. “What he meant by that was if you hit me I would hit you back. But over the period of my acquaintance with him I came to believe it also meant if you respect me I will respect you back.”
Cone amplifies this point in “Martin & Malcolm & America”:
Malcolm X is the best medicine against genocide. He showed us by example and prophetic preaching that one does not have to stay in the mud. We can wake up; we can stand up; and we can take that long walk toward freedom. Freedom is first and foremost an inner recognition of self-respect, a knowledge that one was not put on this earth to be a nobody. Using drugs and killing each other are the worst forms of nobodyness. Our forefathers fought against great odds (slavery, lynching, and segregation), but they did not self-destruct. Some died fighting, and others, inspired by their example, kept moving toward the promised land of freedom, singing ‘we ain’t gonna let nobody turn us around.’ African-Americans can do the same today. We can fight for our dignity and self-respect. To be proud to be black does not mean being against white people, unless whites are against respecting the humanity of blacks. Malcolm was not against whites; he was for blacks and against their exploitation.
Goldman lamented the loss of voices such as Malcolm’s, voices steeped in an understanding of our historical and cultural truths and endowed with the courage to speak these truths in public.
“We don’t read anymore,” Goldman said. “We don’t learn anymore. History is disappearing. People talk about living in the moment as if it is a virtue. It is a horrible vice. Between the twitterverse and the 24-hour cable news cycle our history keeps disappearing. History is something boring that you had to endure in high school and then you are rid of it. Then you go to college and study finance, accounting, business management or computer science. There are damn few liberal arts majors left. And this has erased our history. The larger figure in the ’60s was, of course, King. But what the huge majority of Americans know about King is [only] that he made a speech where he said ‘I have a dream’ and that his name is attached to a day off.”
Malcolm, like King, understood the cost of being a prophet. The two men daily faced down this cost.
Malcolm, as Goldman writes, met with the reporter Claude Lewis not long before his Feb. 21, 1965, murder. He had already experienced several attempts on his life.
“This is an era of hypocrisy,” he told Lewis. “When white folks pretend that they want Negroes to be free, and Negroes pretend to white folks that they really believe that white folks want ’em to be free, it’s an era of hypocrisy, brother. You fool me and I fool you. You pretend that you’re my brother, and I pretend that I really believe you believe you’re my brother.”
He told Lewis he would never reach old age. “If you read, you’ll find that very few people who think like I think live long enough to get old. When I say by any means necessary, I mean it with all my heart, my mind and my soul. A black man should give his life to be free, and he should also be able, be willing to take the life of those who want to take his. When you really think like that, you don’t live long.”
Lewis asked him how he wanted to be remembered. “Sincere,” Malcolm said. “In whatever I did or do. Even if I made mistakes, they were made in sincerity. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong in sincerity. I think that the best thing that a person can be is sincere.”
“The price of freedom,” Malcolm said shortly before he was killed, “is death.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
