http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_age_of_the_demagogues_20151129
The Age of the Demagogues
The increase in nihilistic violence such as school shootings and Friday’s lethal assault on a Planned Parenthood clinic, the frequent executions of poor people of color by police, and the rise of thuggish demagogues such as Donald Trump are symptoms of the collapse of our political and cultural institutions.
These institutions, which once made possible piecemeal and incremental reform, which sought to protect the weak from the tyranny of the majority and give them a voice, acted as a safety valve to ameliorate the excesses of capitalism and address the grievances of the underclass. They did not defy the system of capitalism. They colluded with the structures of privilege and white supremacy. But they provided some restraints on the worst abuse and exploitation. The capturing of major institutions by corporate power and the moral bankruptcy of our elites, especially members of our self-identified liberal class, have shattered this equilibrium.
A faux liberal class, epitomized by amoral politicians such as the Clintons and Barack Obama, has led many disenfranchised people, especially the white underclass, to direct a legitimate rage toward liberals and the supposed liberal values they represent. Racism, bigotry, religious intolerance, homophobia, sexism and vigilante violence, condemned by liberal, college-educated elites, are embraced by those who have been betrayed, those who now speak back to liberal elites in words, gestures and acts, sometimes violent, designed to denigrate the core values of a liberal democracy. The hatred is the product of a liberal class that did nothing to halt corporations from driving tens of millions of families into poverty and desperation as it mouthed empty platitudes about rights and economic advancement.
The Republican business elites, which declared war on the liberal class’ call for cultural diversity, allied themselves with an array of protofascists in the Christian right, the tea party, groups such as the National Rifle Association and The Heritage Foundation, the neo-Confederate movement, the right-to-life movement and right-wing militias. The elites in the Republican Party, who needed an ideological veneer to mask their complicity in the corporate assault, saw these protofascists as useful idiots. They thought, naively, that by demonizing liberals, feminists, African-Americans, Muslims, abortion providers, undocumented workers, intellectuals and homosexuals they could redirect the growing rage of the masses, sending it against the vulnerable, as well as against the only institution that could curb corporate power, the government, while they greedily disemboweled the nation.
But what the Republican elites have done, as they now realize to their horror, is empower a huge swath of the public—largely white—that is gripped by magical thinking and fetishizes violence. It was only a matter of time before a demagogue whom these elites could not control would ride the wave of alienation and rage. If Trump fails in his bid to become the GOP presidential nominee, another demagogue will emerge to take his place. Trump is not making a political revolution. He is responding to one.
The corporate state was never threatened by the liberal class’ myopic preoccupation with cultural diversity or the right wing’s championing of supposedly “Christian” values. This was anti-politics masquerading as politics. The culture wars did not challenge imperialism, neoliberalism and globalization. The dictates of the market, the primacy of corporate profit and the military-industrial complex remained sacrosanct. The mounting distress of the underclass was ignored or manipulated during the culture wars. Liberals who embraced cultural diversity did so within a neoliberal framework. Feminism, for example, became about placing individual women in positions of power—this is Hillary Clinton’s mantra—not about empowering poor, marginalized and oppressed women. Post-racial America became about a black president who, as Cornel West says, serves as “a black mascot for Wall Street.”
The preoccupation with cultural diversity, as Russell Jacoby writes in “The End of Utopia,” was nothing more than a call to include a broader spectrum of people within neoliberal elites. It was, as he says, about “patronage, not revolution.”
“The radical multiculturalists, postcolonialists and other cutting edge theorists gush about marginality with the implicit, and sometimes explicit, goal of joining the mainstream,” he writes. “They specialize in marginalization to up their market value. Again, this is understandable; the poor and the excluded want to be wealthy and included, but why is this multicultural or subversive?”
Jacoby argues that cultural diversity among the liberal class represents “power devoid of a vision or program.” He goes on to say that the call by multiculturalists for inclusion within the power structure does nothing to challenge the deadly “monoculturalism” of corporatism.
Jacoby’s point is important. The liberal class failed for decades to decry neoliberalism’s assault on the poor and on workingmen and -women. It busied itself with a boutique activism. It is not that cultural diversity is bad. It isn’t. It is that cultural diversity when divorced from economic and political justice, from the empowerment of the oppressed, is elitist. And this is why these liberal values are being rejected by a disenfranchised white underclass. They are seen as serving the elites, and marginalized groups, at the expense of that underclass.
The academy, the press, the entertainment industry, the arts and religious institutions have been purged of those who do not sing to the tune of neoliberalism and bow before the glories of corporate capitalism. The destruction of the liberal class, something I explore in my book “Death of the Liberal Class,” has created a closed political system crippled by polarization, political gridlock, crushing austerity, unchecked pillage by financial elites and a carnival of meaningless political theater. It has shut out genuine voices of dissent. The failure by liberals to confront or even name what Sheldon Wolin called our system of “inverted totalitarianism” made them complicit in the destruction of our capitalist democracy.
The gains made by minorities and the oppressed within the society, whether on college campuses or in the workplace, are being rolled back. The culture wars, used by the political and economic elites to divert attention from the ascendancy of corporate power, have escaped from the hands of their manipulators. A destitute working class knows the feel-your-pain language of the liberal class and the Democratic Party is a lie. And it knows the “compassionate conservatism” epitomized by the Bush dynasty and the Republican establishment is a lie.
Republicans, like Democrats, did not prevent wages from declining, unemployment and chronic underemployment from mounting, foreclosures from ripping apart communities, banks from looting the U.S. treasury, or jobs from being exported. The two major parties colluded to pass trade agreements, ranging from NAFTA and the WTO to the now-pending TPP, that impoverish workers and weaken the power of government to intervene to protect the citizenry and the environment. They worked together to strip citizens of constitutional rights and install the most pervasive security and surveillance state in human history. They collaborated with Wall Street to trash the global economy and seize trillions in taxpayer money in bailouts. The two parties funded disastrous and futile imperial wars that enrich the arms manufacturers and defense contractors while bankrupting the nation. They militarized police, rewrote the laws to explode our prison population and destroyed social service programs such as our welfare system, which was dismantled by the Clinton administration. The two parties orchestrated the corporate coup d’état while diverting citizens with the battles over gay rights, abortion, “Christian” values, gun laws and affirmative action.
The country realizes it has been sold out. Most citizens are apathetic and do not vote consistently. Some, especially in the white underclass, are willing to follow anyone, no matter how buffoonish, who promises that the parasites and courtiers will be driven from power. This mixture of rage and apathy is a recipe for totalitarianism.
The hypermasculine values of the military are embraced across the political spectrum as an antidote to paralysis and decay. Toughness and violence are venerated. The obsequious hero worship, the celebration of American power, the sanctification of the military and military values, inflect all political discourse. Hero worship of the military has unwittingly laid the ideological groundwork for demagogues who promise glory, strength, order and discipline. It justifies the emergence of an authoritarian police state.
Half of all Americans live in poverty. They have watched helplessly as their communities have been plunged into distress by the flight of manufacturing jobs and as their infrastructure, both moral and physical, has been ripped out from under them. America resembles the developing world. A tiny, oligarchic elite amasses obscene amounts of wealth while most of the population lives amid boarded-up storefronts, dilapidated houses, pothole-riddled streets, abandoned factories and warehouses and crumbling schools. They see no future. They have abandoned hope. Their despair now infects a shrinking and desperate middle class. Americans feel isolated, vulnerable and frightened. They yearn for moral and economic renewal, revived greatness, and vengeance. And many are desperately hunting for a savior outside the established political order.
The disgust directed at an ineffectual liberalism—as was true in late imperial Russia and the latter days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Weimar Republic and the former Yugoslavia—has given rise to a rejection of liberalism. Liberals and secularists, along with groups such as feminists, African-Americans and homosexuals that were supposedly championed in the quest for cultural diversity, are viewed not as political competitors but as contaminants. This is giving rise to a homegrown fascism—a subject I examined in “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America”—buttressed by the gun culture, a resurgence of racism and sexism and the fusion of the symbols of the Christian cross and the American flag. This American fascism will expand unless there is a radical restructuring to reintegrate dispossessed Americans into the economy. The failure to reverse the corporate assault, the continued expansion of poverty and despair, will accelerate the country’s breakdown. It will ensure the emergence of demagogues who, channeling this rage, will stoke white vigilante violence and call for the state repression of all groups including Black Lives Matter, abortion providers, environmentalists and anti-capitalists that are blamed for the country’s decline.
The perfidious game of the Democrats and the Republicans has backfired. Playing the Democrats’ mantra of cultural diversity against the Republicans’ mantra of cultural diversity weakening the fabric of American society no longer works as a mechanism of control. We have entered a new and dangerous phase in American political life. The ruling political elites have been exposed as charlatans. The rage of the underclass, especially the white underclass, has broken its bonds. The age of the demagogues has arrived.
Monday, November 30, 2015
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http://www.salon.com/2015/11/20/10_reasons_young_americans_are_absolutely_screwed/
10 reasons young Americans are absolutely screwed
Generation gaps are nothing new. Back in the 1930s, members of the World War I generation complained bitterly about their World War II generation offspring and all the swing-dancing, noisy big bands and awful crooners they were into (many of those jitterbugging teenagers of the 1930s went on to fight the Nazis after high school and have since been called the “Greatest Generation”).
So it isn’t surprising that there are members of the baby boomer generation and Gen X who have a hard time figuring out what makes Millennials, aka Generation Y, tick. People in their 40s, 50s and 60s not understanding people in their 20s is as old as time itself. But if there is one claim about the Millennial generation that is truly absurd, it is the notion that they are entitled, spoiled and pampered. Some baby boomers and Gen-X members (especially boomers) insist that Millennials don’t want to pay their dues and expect everything handed to them on a silver platter, but Millennials on the whole are the polar opposite of entitled or spoiled.
Millennials—those born between the early 1980s and the late 1990s/early 2000s—in the United States inherited a country that is broken in many respects. From the worst economy in 80 years to a post-9/11 surveillance state to a dysfunctional healthcare system, Millennials have been given a raw deal. And fighting to get the country back on track will be an enormous task for them.
Here are 10 reasons why Millennials are the most screwed-over generation in recent history.
1. A dying middle class.
Many baby boomers and members of the Silent Generation (essentially the younger end of the World War II generation) entered the workforce at a time when there were still plenty of good-paying jobs in the United States. In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, a college degree practically guaranteed a job that paid a living wage, and for blue-collar workers who went to trade school, high-paying unionized jobs were not hard to come by. Gen X, however, confronted some harsh realities during the recession of the early 1990s, when many college graduates found themselves in dead-end service jobs (which was unheard of in the 1950s and 1960s). But the American economy boomed considerably in the mid- to late-1990s, and many Gen-Xers who had struggled in the early 1990s went on to prosper as the 1990s progressed (especially during Bill Clinton’s second term as president). Millennials, however, were unable to take advantage of that Clinton-era prosperity, and they entered the workforce at a time when the American middle class was in danger of extinction. Many boomers and X-ers have had their savings depleted by the economic downturn of the late 2000s and early 2010; many Millennials haven’t even had a chance to build a substantial savings.
2. The financial crash of September 2008.
The United States’ financial problems didn’t begin with the crash of September 2008. American manufacturing jobs were being exported to developing countries long before that, and the North American Free Trade Agreement of the early 1990s proved to be every bit as damaging as Ross Perot predicted it would be. But the crash of 2008 greatly accelerated the U.S.’ decline, and five years later, millions of Americans continue to suffer. The number of Americans who were poor enough to qualify for food stamps was just over 17 million in 2000; in 2013, it’s 47 million. Misleading Bureau of Labor Statistics figures claim that the unemployment rate in the U.S. fell to 7.4 percent in July 2013, but that figure excludes all the Americans who have been unemployed for so long the BLS no longer counts them as part of the workforce. In this abysmal job climate, Millennials have a hard time building a résumé because they are competing with desperate Gen-Xers and boomers who have decided that being underemployed is better than being unemployed and are willing to dumb down their résumés in the hope of finding steady, if inadequate, income.
3. Crushing student loan debt.
Millennials are graduating from high school at a time when there is a serious shortage of both good, unionized blue-collar jobs and a shortage of good, white-collar jobs. The America of the 1950s, when a blue-collar male could have a mortgage and support a wife and two kids, is a world Millennials have never known. And if Millennials go the college route in 2013, they can look forward to tuition rates that are more unaffordable than ever. But an expensive college degree won’t necessarily result in a high-paying job. Plenty of Millennials with BAs and even master’s degrees are making minimum wage in dollar stores, and minimum wage is hardly conducive to paying back a huge student loan debt. Some Millennials, inevitably, will be late making their student loan payments, thus hurting their credit scores and placing them even more behind the eight ball.
4. The broken healthcare system.
Millennials certainly weren’t the first generation of Americans to be victimized by the U.S.’ dysfunctional health insurance system. But a system that was broken in the 1980s and 1990s has gone from bad to worse: premiums have skyrocketed, medical bankruptcies are common even among those who have insurance, and the number of uninsured Americans has continued to rise (according to a study that the Commonwealth Fund conducted in 2012, 55 million Americans were without health insurance at some point last year). To make matters worse, Millennials are likely to be in low-paying service jobs that don’t offer any benefits whatsoever. And while the Affordable Care Act of 2010 is a small step in the direction of universal healthcare, it doesn’t go nearly far enough. (Robert Reich, former secretary of labor under the Clinton administration, complains that Obamacare “still leaves 20 million Americans without coverage.”)
5. The post-9/11 surveillance state.
Millennials entered adulthood after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Between the use of torture on political detainees at Guantanamo, the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretapping, the National Defense Authorization Act, false positives on the Terrorist Screening Center’s No-Fly List, and intrusive TSA searches at airports, Millennials have spent their adult lives in an era in which constitutional liberties are under constant attack in the name of fighting terrorism. Many Millennials are too young to remember a time when U.S. citizens didn’t need a passport to visit Mexico or Canada. But then, a lot of Millennials don’t have much of a travel budget: they’re too poor.
6. Endless war.
Post-9/11, the U.S. has been in a constant state of war. The neocon-dominated George W. Bush administration gave us the disastrous invasion of Iraq, which was one of the worst foreign policy blunders in U.S. history—and although the U.S.’ post-9/11 intervention in Afghanistan seemed to make more sense (at least initially) given the Taliban’s connection to al-Qaida, U.S. military involvement in that country became much too deep and went on much too long. Some neocons are even calling for an all-out invasion of Iran and have urged the Obama administration to attack Syria.
7. Painfully low interest rates.
Those who were adults in the 1980s and 1990s remember the days of higher interest rates, which were an excellent way to build one’s nest egg and plan for the future. Certificates of deposit were a blessing in the days of 10 percent, 11 percent or 12 percent interest; three-month or six-month CDs were a great short-term investment strategy, and for boomers and Gen-Xers who had IRAs, long-term IRA CDs made perfect sense because that was money you couldn’t touch until retirement—so why not put retirement funds in an IRA CD at 10 percent or 11 percent interest? But many Millennials have reached adulthood during a time of pathetically low interest rates. Assuming they have some extra money to invest, interest rates of less than 1 percent for a CD or money market account do little to increase one’s nest egg. Thanks to a prolonged period of ultra-low interest rates, many boomers and X-ers are going to have a hard time retiring; for Millennials, retirement prospects will be much worse.
8. Bailouts and the federal deficit.
It’s understandable that members of the Tea Party were indignant about the U.S.’ gigantic federal deficit. But the Tea Party became useful idiots for the banksters and stooges for the 1 percent when they turned their wrath on food stamp recipients and the poor instead of pointing the finger at the real culprits: Wall Street, bailouts that cost billions of dollars, corporate welfare, the military/industrial complex, the failed war on drugs and the prison/industrial complex. Millennials have spent much of their adulthood with an enormous federal deficit hanging over their heads, and they will spend much of their lives dealing with the cuts to our safety net politicians claim are necessary to diminish the deficit.
9. The George W. Bush administration.
It isn’t hard to see why George W. Bush left office in January 2009 with an approval rating of only 22 percent: he was easily the worst president boomers and Gen-X experienced in their lifetimes. Between a record federal deficit, the war in Iraq, the torture of political detainees, the eroding of constitutional liberties and the financial meltdown of 2008, the Bush years were devastating for the United States. And many Millennials, unlike boomers and Gen-X, had the misfortune of reaching adulthood either during the Bush presidency or after Bush had left behind a long list of problems for the Obama administration to deal with. Certainly, many boomers and Gen-Xers have suffered enormously because of the Bush years, but at least they had the advantage of being in the workforce before the Bush administration did so much to destroy the country.
10. Unlikely homeownership.
In the United States, banksters went from one extreme to another when it came to mortgages. During the George W. Bush years, many banksters were only too happy to give mortgages to people they knew would likely end up in foreclosure. People making only 15K or 16K were given $300,000 or $400,000 adjustable-rate mortgages with down payments of 3.5 percent or 5 percent. But now, some banks have gone to the opposite extreme and are asking for down payments of up to 30 percent or 40 percent—and good luck saving that much when the job market is abysmal and rents are skyrocketing in many places. The reality is that unless things seriously turn around, homeownership—which historically, has been a measure of middle-class life—will be out of reach for most Millennials.
10 reasons young Americans are absolutely screwed
Generation gaps are nothing new. Back in the 1930s, members of the World War I generation complained bitterly about their World War II generation offspring and all the swing-dancing, noisy big bands and awful crooners they were into (many of those jitterbugging teenagers of the 1930s went on to fight the Nazis after high school and have since been called the “Greatest Generation”).
So it isn’t surprising that there are members of the baby boomer generation and Gen X who have a hard time figuring out what makes Millennials, aka Generation Y, tick. People in their 40s, 50s and 60s not understanding people in their 20s is as old as time itself. But if there is one claim about the Millennial generation that is truly absurd, it is the notion that they are entitled, spoiled and pampered. Some baby boomers and Gen-X members (especially boomers) insist that Millennials don’t want to pay their dues and expect everything handed to them on a silver platter, but Millennials on the whole are the polar opposite of entitled or spoiled.
Millennials—those born between the early 1980s and the late 1990s/early 2000s—in the United States inherited a country that is broken in many respects. From the worst economy in 80 years to a post-9/11 surveillance state to a dysfunctional healthcare system, Millennials have been given a raw deal. And fighting to get the country back on track will be an enormous task for them.
Here are 10 reasons why Millennials are the most screwed-over generation in recent history.
1. A dying middle class.
Many baby boomers and members of the Silent Generation (essentially the younger end of the World War II generation) entered the workforce at a time when there were still plenty of good-paying jobs in the United States. In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, a college degree practically guaranteed a job that paid a living wage, and for blue-collar workers who went to trade school, high-paying unionized jobs were not hard to come by. Gen X, however, confronted some harsh realities during the recession of the early 1990s, when many college graduates found themselves in dead-end service jobs (which was unheard of in the 1950s and 1960s). But the American economy boomed considerably in the mid- to late-1990s, and many Gen-Xers who had struggled in the early 1990s went on to prosper as the 1990s progressed (especially during Bill Clinton’s second term as president). Millennials, however, were unable to take advantage of that Clinton-era prosperity, and they entered the workforce at a time when the American middle class was in danger of extinction. Many boomers and X-ers have had their savings depleted by the economic downturn of the late 2000s and early 2010; many Millennials haven’t even had a chance to build a substantial savings.
2. The financial crash of September 2008.
The United States’ financial problems didn’t begin with the crash of September 2008. American manufacturing jobs were being exported to developing countries long before that, and the North American Free Trade Agreement of the early 1990s proved to be every bit as damaging as Ross Perot predicted it would be. But the crash of 2008 greatly accelerated the U.S.’ decline, and five years later, millions of Americans continue to suffer. The number of Americans who were poor enough to qualify for food stamps was just over 17 million in 2000; in 2013, it’s 47 million. Misleading Bureau of Labor Statistics figures claim that the unemployment rate in the U.S. fell to 7.4 percent in July 2013, but that figure excludes all the Americans who have been unemployed for so long the BLS no longer counts them as part of the workforce. In this abysmal job climate, Millennials have a hard time building a résumé because they are competing with desperate Gen-Xers and boomers who have decided that being underemployed is better than being unemployed and are willing to dumb down their résumés in the hope of finding steady, if inadequate, income.
3. Crushing student loan debt.
Millennials are graduating from high school at a time when there is a serious shortage of both good, unionized blue-collar jobs and a shortage of good, white-collar jobs. The America of the 1950s, when a blue-collar male could have a mortgage and support a wife and two kids, is a world Millennials have never known. And if Millennials go the college route in 2013, they can look forward to tuition rates that are more unaffordable than ever. But an expensive college degree won’t necessarily result in a high-paying job. Plenty of Millennials with BAs and even master’s degrees are making minimum wage in dollar stores, and minimum wage is hardly conducive to paying back a huge student loan debt. Some Millennials, inevitably, will be late making their student loan payments, thus hurting their credit scores and placing them even more behind the eight ball.
4. The broken healthcare system.
Millennials certainly weren’t the first generation of Americans to be victimized by the U.S.’ dysfunctional health insurance system. But a system that was broken in the 1980s and 1990s has gone from bad to worse: premiums have skyrocketed, medical bankruptcies are common even among those who have insurance, and the number of uninsured Americans has continued to rise (according to a study that the Commonwealth Fund conducted in 2012, 55 million Americans were without health insurance at some point last year). To make matters worse, Millennials are likely to be in low-paying service jobs that don’t offer any benefits whatsoever. And while the Affordable Care Act of 2010 is a small step in the direction of universal healthcare, it doesn’t go nearly far enough. (Robert Reich, former secretary of labor under the Clinton administration, complains that Obamacare “still leaves 20 million Americans without coverage.”)
5. The post-9/11 surveillance state.
Millennials entered adulthood after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Between the use of torture on political detainees at Guantanamo, the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretapping, the National Defense Authorization Act, false positives on the Terrorist Screening Center’s No-Fly List, and intrusive TSA searches at airports, Millennials have spent their adult lives in an era in which constitutional liberties are under constant attack in the name of fighting terrorism. Many Millennials are too young to remember a time when U.S. citizens didn’t need a passport to visit Mexico or Canada. But then, a lot of Millennials don’t have much of a travel budget: they’re too poor.
6. Endless war.
Post-9/11, the U.S. has been in a constant state of war. The neocon-dominated George W. Bush administration gave us the disastrous invasion of Iraq, which was one of the worst foreign policy blunders in U.S. history—and although the U.S.’ post-9/11 intervention in Afghanistan seemed to make more sense (at least initially) given the Taliban’s connection to al-Qaida, U.S. military involvement in that country became much too deep and went on much too long. Some neocons are even calling for an all-out invasion of Iran and have urged the Obama administration to attack Syria.
7. Painfully low interest rates.
Those who were adults in the 1980s and 1990s remember the days of higher interest rates, which were an excellent way to build one’s nest egg and plan for the future. Certificates of deposit were a blessing in the days of 10 percent, 11 percent or 12 percent interest; three-month or six-month CDs were a great short-term investment strategy, and for boomers and Gen-Xers who had IRAs, long-term IRA CDs made perfect sense because that was money you couldn’t touch until retirement—so why not put retirement funds in an IRA CD at 10 percent or 11 percent interest? But many Millennials have reached adulthood during a time of pathetically low interest rates. Assuming they have some extra money to invest, interest rates of less than 1 percent for a CD or money market account do little to increase one’s nest egg. Thanks to a prolonged period of ultra-low interest rates, many boomers and X-ers are going to have a hard time retiring; for Millennials, retirement prospects will be much worse.
8. Bailouts and the federal deficit.
It’s understandable that members of the Tea Party were indignant about the U.S.’ gigantic federal deficit. But the Tea Party became useful idiots for the banksters and stooges for the 1 percent when they turned their wrath on food stamp recipients and the poor instead of pointing the finger at the real culprits: Wall Street, bailouts that cost billions of dollars, corporate welfare, the military/industrial complex, the failed war on drugs and the prison/industrial complex. Millennials have spent much of their adulthood with an enormous federal deficit hanging over their heads, and they will spend much of their lives dealing with the cuts to our safety net politicians claim are necessary to diminish the deficit.
9. The George W. Bush administration.
It isn’t hard to see why George W. Bush left office in January 2009 with an approval rating of only 22 percent: he was easily the worst president boomers and Gen-X experienced in their lifetimes. Between a record federal deficit, the war in Iraq, the torture of political detainees, the eroding of constitutional liberties and the financial meltdown of 2008, the Bush years were devastating for the United States. And many Millennials, unlike boomers and Gen-X, had the misfortune of reaching adulthood either during the Bush presidency or after Bush had left behind a long list of problems for the Obama administration to deal with. Certainly, many boomers and Gen-Xers have suffered enormously because of the Bush years, but at least they had the advantage of being in the workforce before the Bush administration did so much to destroy the country.
10. Unlikely homeownership.
In the United States, banksters went from one extreme to another when it came to mortgages. During the George W. Bush years, many banksters were only too happy to give mortgages to people they knew would likely end up in foreclosure. People making only 15K or 16K were given $300,000 or $400,000 adjustable-rate mortgages with down payments of 3.5 percent or 5 percent. But now, some banks have gone to the opposite extreme and are asking for down payments of up to 30 percent or 40 percent—and good luck saving that much when the job market is abysmal and rents are skyrocketing in many places. The reality is that unless things seriously turn around, homeownership—which historically, has been a measure of middle-class life—will be out of reach for most Millennials.
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http://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-11-25/why-supply-and-demand-doesn-t-work-for-oil
Why "Supply and Demand" doesn't Work for Oil
The traditional understanding of supply and demand works in some limited cases–will a manufacturer make red dresses or blue dresses? The manufacturer’s choice doesn’t make much difference to the economic system as a whole, except perhaps in the amount of red and blue dye sold, so it is easy to accommodate.
Figure 1. From Wikipedia: The price P of a product is determined by a balance between production at each price (supply S) and the desires of those with purchasing power at each price (demand D). The diagram shows a positive shift in demand from D1 to D2, resulting in an increase in price (P) and quantity sold (Q) of the product.
Figure 1. From Wikipedia: The price P of a product is determined by a balance between production at each price (supply S) and the desires of those with purchasing power at each price (demand D). The diagram shows a positive shift in demand from D1 to D2, resulting in an increase in price (P) and quantity sold (Q) of the product.
A gradual switch in consumer preferences from beef to chicken is also fairly easy to accommodate within the system, as more chicken producers are added and the number of beef producers is reduced. The transition is generally helped by the fact that it takes fewer resources to produce a pound of chicken meat than a pound of beef, so that the spendable income of consumers tends to go farther. Thus, while supply and demand are not independent in this example, a rising percentage of chicken consumption tends to be helpful in increasing the “quantity demanded,” because chicken is more affordable than beef. The lack of independence between supply and demand is in the “helpful” direction. It would be different if chicken were a lot more expensive to produce than beef. Then the quantity demanded would tend to decrease as the shift was increasingly made, putting a fairly quick end to the transition to the higher-priced substitute.
A gradual switch to higher-cost energy products, in a sense, works in the opposite direction to a switch from beef to chicken. Instead of taking fewer resources, it takes more resources, because we extracted the cheapest-to-extract energy products first. It takes more and more humans working in these industries to produce a given number of barrels of oil equivalent, or Btus of energy. The workers are becoming less efficient, but not because of any fault of their own. It is really the processes that are being used that are becoming less efficient–deeper wells, locations in the Arctic and other inhospitable climates, use of new procedures like hydraulic fracturing, use of chemicals for extraction that wouldn’t have been used in the past. The workers may be becoming more efficient at drilling one foot of pipe used for extraction; the problem is that so many more feet need to be drilled for extraction to take place. In addition, so many other steps need to take place that the overall process is becoming less efficient. The return on any kind of investment (human labor, US dollars of investment, steel invested, energy invested) is falling.
For a time, these increasing inefficiencies can be hidden from the system, and the prices of commodities can rise. At some point, however, the price rise becomes too great, and the system can no longer accommodate it. This is the situation we have been running into, most severely since mid-2014 for oil, but also for other commodities, dating back to 2011.
Figure 2. Bloomberg Commodity Index from Bloomberg", reflecting a combination of 22 ETFs in Energy (35%), Agriculture (29%), Industrial Metal (15%), Precious Metals (16%) and Livestock (5%)
Figure 2. Bloomberg Commodity Index from Bloomberg, reflecting a combination of 22 ETFs in Energy (35%), Agriculture (29%), Industrial Metal (15%), Precious Metals (16%) and Livestock (5%)
The higher cost of producing oil and other energy products affects the economy more than a shift from chicken to beef.
The economy is in a sense more dependent on energy products than it is on our decision whether to eat chicken or beef. If the cost of producing oil rises, and that higher cost is carried through to prices, it affects the prices of many things. It affects the cost of food production because oil is used in the production and transport of food. The higher cost of oil also affects nearly all transported goods, since oil is our primary transportation fuel.
Some of the impacts of higher oil prices are clearly adverse for the economy.
If higher oil costs are passed on to consumers as higher prices, these higher prices make goods less affordable for consumers. As a result, they cut back on purchases, often leading to layoffs in discretionary sectors, and recession.
The higher cost of oil products (or of other energy products) also tends to reduce profits for businesses, unless they can find workarounds to keep costs down. Otherwise, businesses find themselves in a situation where customers cut back on purchasing their products. As we will discuss in a later section, this tends to lead to reduced wages.
Some of the impacts of higher oil prices are somewhat positive.
Rising oil prices clearly encourage rising oil production. With this, more jobs are added, both in the United States and elsewhere. More debt is added to extract this oil, and more equipment is purchased, thus stimulating industries that support oil production. The value of oil leases and oil properties tends to rise.
As noted previously, the cost of food supply depends on oil prices. The cost of producing metals also depends on oil prices, because oil is used in extracting metal ores. As the prices of metals and foods rise, these industries are stimulated as well. Values of mines rise, as do values of agricultural land. More debt is taken out, and more workers are hired. More equipment is purchased for producing these products, adding yet more stimulation to the economy.
The higher price of oil also favorably affects the many countries that extract oil. Part of this effect comes from the wages that the workers receive, and the impact these wages have, as they cycle through the economy. For example, workers will often want new homes, and the purchase of these new homes will add jobs as well. Part of the effect comes through taxes on oil production. Oil production tends to be very highly taxed, especially in parts of the world where oil extraction can be performed cheaply. This tax money can be put to work in public works programs, providing better schools and hospitals, and more jobs for citizens.
It is inevitable that the price of oil must stop rising at some point because of the adverse impact on spendable income of consumers.
The adverse impact of higher oil prices on the spendable income of consumers comes in many ways. Perhaps one of the biggest impacts, but the least obvious, is the “push” the higher cost of oil gives to moving manufacturing to locations with lower costs (cheaper fuel, such as coal, and lower wages), because without such a change, higher oil prices tend to lead to lower profits for many makers of goods and services, as mentioned previously.
The competition with lower-wage areas tends to reduce wages in the US and parts of Europe. This push is especially great for jobs that are easily transferred to other countries, such as jobs in manufacturing, “call-centers,” and computer tech support.
Another way businesses can maintain their profit levels, despite higher oil costs, is through greater automation. This automation reduces the number of jobs directly. Automation may use some oil, but because the cost of human labor is so high, it still reduces costs overall.
All of these effects lead to fewer jobs and lower wages, especially in the traditionally higher-wage countries. In a sense, what we are seeing is lower productivity of human labor feeding back as lower wages, if we think of the distribution of wages as being a worldwide wage distribution, including workers in places such as China and India.
Normally, greater productivity feeds back as higher wages, and higher wages help stimulate higher economic growth. Lower wages unfortunately seem to feed back in the reverse direction–less demand for goods that use energy in their production, such as new homes and cars. Ultimately, this seems to lead to economic contraction, and lower commodity prices. This is especially the case in the countries with the most wage loss.
The drop in oil prices doesn’t do very much to stop oil production.
Oil exporting countries typically have relatively low costs of production, but very high taxes. These taxes are necessary, because governments of oil exporters tend to be very dependent on oil companies for tax revenue. If the price of oil drops, the most adverse impact may be on tax revenue. As long as the price is high enough that it leads to the collection of some tax revenue, production will take place–in fact, production may even be increased. The government desperately needs the tax revenue.
Even oil companies in oil-importing countries have a need for revenue to pay back debt and to continue to pay their trained workers. Thus, these companies will continue to extract oil to the best of their ability. They will aim for the “sweet spots”–places that have better than average prospects for production. In some cases, companies will have derivative contracts that assure them of a high oil price for several months after the price drops, so there is no need to reduce production very quickly.
The drop in oil prices, and of commodity prices in general, makes debt harder to repay and discourages adding new debt.
We earlier noted that a rise in the price of commodities tends to make asset prices rise, making it easier to take out more debt, and thus stimulates the economy. A drop in the price of oil or other commodities does the opposite: it reduces asset prices, such as the price of the property containing the oil, or the farmland now producing less-expensive food. The amount of outstanding debt does not decline. Because of this mismatch, companies quickly find themselves with debt problems, especially if they need to take out additional loans for production to continue.
Another part of the problem is that on the way up, rising prices of oil and other commodities helped lift inflation rates, making debt easier to repay. On the way down, we get exactly the opposite effect–falling oil and other commodity prices lead to falling inflation rates, making debt more difficult to repay. Commodity prices in general have been falling since early 2011, leading to the situation where interest rates are now negative in some European countries.
The costs of producing commodities continue to rise, as a result of diminishing returns, so this fall in prices is clearly a problem. Low prices make future production unprofitable; it also leads to an increasing number of debt defaults. There are many examples of companies in financial difficulty; Chesapeake Energy is an example in the oil and gas industry.
Where oil supply and demand goes from here
The traditional view of the impact of low oil prices seems to be, “It is just another cycle.” Or, “The cure for low prices is low prices.”
I am doubtful that either of these views is right. Falling prices have been a problem for a wide range of commodities since 2011 (Figure 2, above). The Wall Street Journal reported that as early as 2013, when oil prices were still above $100 per barrel, none of the world’s “super major” oil companies covered its dividends with cash flow. Thus, if prices are to be sufficiently high that oil companies don’t need to keep going deeper into debt, a price of well over $100 per barrel is needed. We would need an oil price close to triple its current level. This would be a major challenge, especially if prices of other commodities also need to rise because production costs are higher than current prices.
We are familiar with illnesses: sometimes people bounce back; sometimes they don’t. Instead of expecting oil prices to bounce back, we should think of the current cycle as being different from past cycles because it relates to diminishing returns–in other words, the rising cost of production, because we extracted the cheapest-to-extract oil first. Trying to substitute oil that is high in cost to produce, for oil that is low in cost to produce, seems to bring on a fatal illness for the economy.
Because of the differing underlying cause compared to prior low-price cycles, we should expect oil prices to fall, perhaps to $20 per barrel or below, without much of a price recovery. We are now encountering the feared “Peak Oil,” because much of the cheap oil has already been extracted. Peak Oil doesn’t behave the way most people expected, though. The economy is a networked system, with high oil prices adversely affecting both wages and economic growth. Because of this, the symptoms of Peak Oil are the opposite of what most people have imagined: they are falling demand and prices below the cost of production.
If low prices don’t rise sufficiently, they can cut off oil production quite quickly–more quickly than high prices. The strategy of selling assets at depressed prices to new operators will have limited success, because much higher prices are needed to allow new operators to be successful.
Perhaps the most serious near-term problem from continued low prices is the likelihood of rising debt defaults. These debt defaults can be expected to have a very adverse impact on banks, pension plans, and insurance companies. Governments would likely have little ability to bail out these organizations because of the widespread nature of the problem and also because of their own high debt levels. As a result, the losses incurred by financial institutions seem likely be passed on to businesses and individual citizens, in one way or another.
Why "Supply and Demand" doesn't Work for Oil
The traditional understanding of supply and demand works in some limited cases–will a manufacturer make red dresses or blue dresses? The manufacturer’s choice doesn’t make much difference to the economic system as a whole, except perhaps in the amount of red and blue dye sold, so it is easy to accommodate.
Figure 1. From Wikipedia: The price P of a product is determined by a balance between production at each price (supply S) and the desires of those with purchasing power at each price (demand D). The diagram shows a positive shift in demand from D1 to D2, resulting in an increase in price (P) and quantity sold (Q) of the product.
Figure 1. From Wikipedia: The price P of a product is determined by a balance between production at each price (supply S) and the desires of those with purchasing power at each price (demand D). The diagram shows a positive shift in demand from D1 to D2, resulting in an increase in price (P) and quantity sold (Q) of the product.
A gradual switch in consumer preferences from beef to chicken is also fairly easy to accommodate within the system, as more chicken producers are added and the number of beef producers is reduced. The transition is generally helped by the fact that it takes fewer resources to produce a pound of chicken meat than a pound of beef, so that the spendable income of consumers tends to go farther. Thus, while supply and demand are not independent in this example, a rising percentage of chicken consumption tends to be helpful in increasing the “quantity demanded,” because chicken is more affordable than beef. The lack of independence between supply and demand is in the “helpful” direction. It would be different if chicken were a lot more expensive to produce than beef. Then the quantity demanded would tend to decrease as the shift was increasingly made, putting a fairly quick end to the transition to the higher-priced substitute.
A gradual switch to higher-cost energy products, in a sense, works in the opposite direction to a switch from beef to chicken. Instead of taking fewer resources, it takes more resources, because we extracted the cheapest-to-extract energy products first. It takes more and more humans working in these industries to produce a given number of barrels of oil equivalent, or Btus of energy. The workers are becoming less efficient, but not because of any fault of their own. It is really the processes that are being used that are becoming less efficient–deeper wells, locations in the Arctic and other inhospitable climates, use of new procedures like hydraulic fracturing, use of chemicals for extraction that wouldn’t have been used in the past. The workers may be becoming more efficient at drilling one foot of pipe used for extraction; the problem is that so many more feet need to be drilled for extraction to take place. In addition, so many other steps need to take place that the overall process is becoming less efficient. The return on any kind of investment (human labor, US dollars of investment, steel invested, energy invested) is falling.
For a time, these increasing inefficiencies can be hidden from the system, and the prices of commodities can rise. At some point, however, the price rise becomes too great, and the system can no longer accommodate it. This is the situation we have been running into, most severely since mid-2014 for oil, but also for other commodities, dating back to 2011.
Figure 2. Bloomberg Commodity Index from Bloomberg", reflecting a combination of 22 ETFs in Energy (35%), Agriculture (29%), Industrial Metal (15%), Precious Metals (16%) and Livestock (5%)
Figure 2. Bloomberg Commodity Index from Bloomberg, reflecting a combination of 22 ETFs in Energy (35%), Agriculture (29%), Industrial Metal (15%), Precious Metals (16%) and Livestock (5%)
The higher cost of producing oil and other energy products affects the economy more than a shift from chicken to beef.
The economy is in a sense more dependent on energy products than it is on our decision whether to eat chicken or beef. If the cost of producing oil rises, and that higher cost is carried through to prices, it affects the prices of many things. It affects the cost of food production because oil is used in the production and transport of food. The higher cost of oil also affects nearly all transported goods, since oil is our primary transportation fuel.
Some of the impacts of higher oil prices are clearly adverse for the economy.
If higher oil costs are passed on to consumers as higher prices, these higher prices make goods less affordable for consumers. As a result, they cut back on purchases, often leading to layoffs in discretionary sectors, and recession.
The higher cost of oil products (or of other energy products) also tends to reduce profits for businesses, unless they can find workarounds to keep costs down. Otherwise, businesses find themselves in a situation where customers cut back on purchasing their products. As we will discuss in a later section, this tends to lead to reduced wages.
Some of the impacts of higher oil prices are somewhat positive.
Rising oil prices clearly encourage rising oil production. With this, more jobs are added, both in the United States and elsewhere. More debt is added to extract this oil, and more equipment is purchased, thus stimulating industries that support oil production. The value of oil leases and oil properties tends to rise.
As noted previously, the cost of food supply depends on oil prices. The cost of producing metals also depends on oil prices, because oil is used in extracting metal ores. As the prices of metals and foods rise, these industries are stimulated as well. Values of mines rise, as do values of agricultural land. More debt is taken out, and more workers are hired. More equipment is purchased for producing these products, adding yet more stimulation to the economy.
The higher price of oil also favorably affects the many countries that extract oil. Part of this effect comes from the wages that the workers receive, and the impact these wages have, as they cycle through the economy. For example, workers will often want new homes, and the purchase of these new homes will add jobs as well. Part of the effect comes through taxes on oil production. Oil production tends to be very highly taxed, especially in parts of the world where oil extraction can be performed cheaply. This tax money can be put to work in public works programs, providing better schools and hospitals, and more jobs for citizens.
It is inevitable that the price of oil must stop rising at some point because of the adverse impact on spendable income of consumers.
The adverse impact of higher oil prices on the spendable income of consumers comes in many ways. Perhaps one of the biggest impacts, but the least obvious, is the “push” the higher cost of oil gives to moving manufacturing to locations with lower costs (cheaper fuel, such as coal, and lower wages), because without such a change, higher oil prices tend to lead to lower profits for many makers of goods and services, as mentioned previously.
The competition with lower-wage areas tends to reduce wages in the US and parts of Europe. This push is especially great for jobs that are easily transferred to other countries, such as jobs in manufacturing, “call-centers,” and computer tech support.
Another way businesses can maintain their profit levels, despite higher oil costs, is through greater automation. This automation reduces the number of jobs directly. Automation may use some oil, but because the cost of human labor is so high, it still reduces costs overall.
All of these effects lead to fewer jobs and lower wages, especially in the traditionally higher-wage countries. In a sense, what we are seeing is lower productivity of human labor feeding back as lower wages, if we think of the distribution of wages as being a worldwide wage distribution, including workers in places such as China and India.
Normally, greater productivity feeds back as higher wages, and higher wages help stimulate higher economic growth. Lower wages unfortunately seem to feed back in the reverse direction–less demand for goods that use energy in their production, such as new homes and cars. Ultimately, this seems to lead to economic contraction, and lower commodity prices. This is especially the case in the countries with the most wage loss.
The drop in oil prices doesn’t do very much to stop oil production.
Oil exporting countries typically have relatively low costs of production, but very high taxes. These taxes are necessary, because governments of oil exporters tend to be very dependent on oil companies for tax revenue. If the price of oil drops, the most adverse impact may be on tax revenue. As long as the price is high enough that it leads to the collection of some tax revenue, production will take place–in fact, production may even be increased. The government desperately needs the tax revenue.
Even oil companies in oil-importing countries have a need for revenue to pay back debt and to continue to pay their trained workers. Thus, these companies will continue to extract oil to the best of their ability. They will aim for the “sweet spots”–places that have better than average prospects for production. In some cases, companies will have derivative contracts that assure them of a high oil price for several months after the price drops, so there is no need to reduce production very quickly.
The drop in oil prices, and of commodity prices in general, makes debt harder to repay and discourages adding new debt.
We earlier noted that a rise in the price of commodities tends to make asset prices rise, making it easier to take out more debt, and thus stimulates the economy. A drop in the price of oil or other commodities does the opposite: it reduces asset prices, such as the price of the property containing the oil, or the farmland now producing less-expensive food. The amount of outstanding debt does not decline. Because of this mismatch, companies quickly find themselves with debt problems, especially if they need to take out additional loans for production to continue.
Another part of the problem is that on the way up, rising prices of oil and other commodities helped lift inflation rates, making debt easier to repay. On the way down, we get exactly the opposite effect–falling oil and other commodity prices lead to falling inflation rates, making debt more difficult to repay. Commodity prices in general have been falling since early 2011, leading to the situation where interest rates are now negative in some European countries.
The costs of producing commodities continue to rise, as a result of diminishing returns, so this fall in prices is clearly a problem. Low prices make future production unprofitable; it also leads to an increasing number of debt defaults. There are many examples of companies in financial difficulty; Chesapeake Energy is an example in the oil and gas industry.
Where oil supply and demand goes from here
The traditional view of the impact of low oil prices seems to be, “It is just another cycle.” Or, “The cure for low prices is low prices.”
I am doubtful that either of these views is right. Falling prices have been a problem for a wide range of commodities since 2011 (Figure 2, above). The Wall Street Journal reported that as early as 2013, when oil prices were still above $100 per barrel, none of the world’s “super major” oil companies covered its dividends with cash flow. Thus, if prices are to be sufficiently high that oil companies don’t need to keep going deeper into debt, a price of well over $100 per barrel is needed. We would need an oil price close to triple its current level. This would be a major challenge, especially if prices of other commodities also need to rise because production costs are higher than current prices.
We are familiar with illnesses: sometimes people bounce back; sometimes they don’t. Instead of expecting oil prices to bounce back, we should think of the current cycle as being different from past cycles because it relates to diminishing returns–in other words, the rising cost of production, because we extracted the cheapest-to-extract oil first. Trying to substitute oil that is high in cost to produce, for oil that is low in cost to produce, seems to bring on a fatal illness for the economy.
Because of the differing underlying cause compared to prior low-price cycles, we should expect oil prices to fall, perhaps to $20 per barrel or below, without much of a price recovery. We are now encountering the feared “Peak Oil,” because much of the cheap oil has already been extracted. Peak Oil doesn’t behave the way most people expected, though. The economy is a networked system, with high oil prices adversely affecting both wages and economic growth. Because of this, the symptoms of Peak Oil are the opposite of what most people have imagined: they are falling demand and prices below the cost of production.
If low prices don’t rise sufficiently, they can cut off oil production quite quickly–more quickly than high prices. The strategy of selling assets at depressed prices to new operators will have limited success, because much higher prices are needed to allow new operators to be successful.
Perhaps the most serious near-term problem from continued low prices is the likelihood of rising debt defaults. These debt defaults can be expected to have a very adverse impact on banks, pension plans, and insurance companies. Governments would likely have little ability to bail out these organizations because of the widespread nature of the problem and also because of their own high debt levels. As a result, the losses incurred by financial institutions seem likely be passed on to businesses and individual citizens, in one way or another.
SC131-10
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-story-line-dissolves/
The Story Line Dissolves
Sometimes societies just go crazy. Japan, 1931, Germany, 1933. China, 1966. Spain 1483, France, 1793, Russia, 1917, Cambodia, 1975, Iran, 1979, Rwanda, 1994, Congo, 1996, to name some. By “crazy” I mean a time when anything goes, especially mass killing. The wheels came off the USA in 1861, and though the organized slaughter developed an overlay of romantic historical mythos — especially after Ken Burns converted it into a TV show — the civilized world to that time had hardly ever seen such an epic orgy of death-dealing.
I doubt that I’m I alone in worrying that America today is losing its collective mind. Our official relations with other countries seem perfectly designed to provoke chaos. The universities have melted into toxic sumps beyond even anti-intellectualism to a realm of hallucination. Demented gunmen mow down total strangers weekly in what looks like a growing competition to end their miserable lives with the highest victim score. The financial engineers have done everything possible to pervert and undermine the operations of markets. The political parties are committing suicide by cluelessness and corruption.
There is no narrative for our behavior toward Russia that makes sense anymore. Our campaign to destabilize Ukraine worked out nicely, didn’t it? And then we acted surprised when Russia reclaimed the traditionally Russian territory of Crimea, with its crucial warm-water naval ports. Who woulda thought? Then we attempted to antagonize them further with economic sanctions. The net effect is that Vladimir Putin ended up looking more rational and sane than any leader in the NATO coalition.
Lately, Russia has filled the vacuum of competence in Syria, cleaning up a mess that America left with its two-decade-long crusade to leave a train of broken governments everywhere in the region. A few weeks back, Mr. Putin made the point before the UN General Assembly that wrecking every national institution in sight among weak and unstable nations was probably not a recipe for world peace. President Obama never did formulate a coherent comeback to that. It’s a little terrifying to realize that the leader of our former arch-adversary is the only figure onstage who can come up with a credible story about what needs to happen there. And his restraint this week following what may have been a US-assisted shoot-down of a Russian bomber by idiots in Turkey is really estimable. It all looks like a feckless slide provoked by our side into World War III, and for what? To make the world safe for the Kardashians?
The uproars on campus before Thanksgiving are more a reflection on the astounding cowardice of college presidents than the foolishness of young minds — which, being not fully formed, are easily susceptible to idealist figments. The adults in charge ought to know better. Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber actually entertained the “demand” to erase Woodrow Wilson’s presence on campus for being an arch-segregationist by a black “social justice league” that at the very same time demanded separate (i.e. segregated) social space for blacks only. How did he reconcile these pleadings in his own mind, I wonder.
President Biddy Martin of Amherst pandered to students protesting against free speech, saying:
“Over the course of several days, a significant number of students have spoken eloquently and movingly about their experiences of racism and prejudice on and off campus. The depth and intensity of their pain and exhaustion are evident. That pain is real. Their expressions of loneliness and sense of invisibility are heartrending. No attempt to minimize or trivialize those feelings will be convincing to those of us who have listened. It is good that our students have seized this opportunity to speak, rather than further internalizing the isolation and lack of caring they have described.”
Bottom line: hurt feelings supposedly cancel free speech. No, that’s exactly the opposite of the meaning of the First Amendment. How can a college president fail to understand that and fail to defend the campus against that sort of Jacobin despotism? The answer is they are hostage to dogmas cooked up by race-and-identity careerists who don’t really care to make distinctions between what is true and what is not true — and that is now the official tone of higher education in America. It’s a short hop from there to not knowing the difference between what is real and what is unreal.
The phenomenon of demented lone gunmen killing strangers and innocents will morph into civil insurrection, especially as the major political parties break apart and the loosed factions set out to settle their old scores by whatever means they can. History knows that violence is infectious and that social inhibitions melt away when the conditions are ripe. Groups give themselves permission to act outside the bounds of normal behavior, and all of a sudden atrocity is the order of the day.
Both Trump and Hillary have the mojo to destroy their respective parties and I think the probability is that they will. Unfortunately, we don’t live under a parliamentary system that recognizes smaller factions as legitimate parties, so we are sure to live through an era of political disorder. What emerges from that could be a very severe polity, since it will be based on the wish to restore order at all costs.
It is likely to get the shove it needs from the implosion of the financial system, which is now running on the fumes of dwindling credit. A false capitalism reigns based on false capital — notional wealth where there is really no wealth; value where there is no value. Moments like this in history beat a path straight to currency collapse, and that will open the door to a greater collapse of all our familiar arrangements.
Surely there is some kind of massive unseen sensory organ in societies that receives the signal that systems are failing. And surely it spooks the individuals who make up those societies so badly that they will believe anything and do anything.
The Story Line Dissolves
Sometimes societies just go crazy. Japan, 1931, Germany, 1933. China, 1966. Spain 1483, France, 1793, Russia, 1917, Cambodia, 1975, Iran, 1979, Rwanda, 1994, Congo, 1996, to name some. By “crazy” I mean a time when anything goes, especially mass killing. The wheels came off the USA in 1861, and though the organized slaughter developed an overlay of romantic historical mythos — especially after Ken Burns converted it into a TV show — the civilized world to that time had hardly ever seen such an epic orgy of death-dealing.
I doubt that I’m I alone in worrying that America today is losing its collective mind. Our official relations with other countries seem perfectly designed to provoke chaos. The universities have melted into toxic sumps beyond even anti-intellectualism to a realm of hallucination. Demented gunmen mow down total strangers weekly in what looks like a growing competition to end their miserable lives with the highest victim score. The financial engineers have done everything possible to pervert and undermine the operations of markets. The political parties are committing suicide by cluelessness and corruption.
There is no narrative for our behavior toward Russia that makes sense anymore. Our campaign to destabilize Ukraine worked out nicely, didn’t it? And then we acted surprised when Russia reclaimed the traditionally Russian territory of Crimea, with its crucial warm-water naval ports. Who woulda thought? Then we attempted to antagonize them further with economic sanctions. The net effect is that Vladimir Putin ended up looking more rational and sane than any leader in the NATO coalition.
Lately, Russia has filled the vacuum of competence in Syria, cleaning up a mess that America left with its two-decade-long crusade to leave a train of broken governments everywhere in the region. A few weeks back, Mr. Putin made the point before the UN General Assembly that wrecking every national institution in sight among weak and unstable nations was probably not a recipe for world peace. President Obama never did formulate a coherent comeback to that. It’s a little terrifying to realize that the leader of our former arch-adversary is the only figure onstage who can come up with a credible story about what needs to happen there. And his restraint this week following what may have been a US-assisted shoot-down of a Russian bomber by idiots in Turkey is really estimable. It all looks like a feckless slide provoked by our side into World War III, and for what? To make the world safe for the Kardashians?
The uproars on campus before Thanksgiving are more a reflection on the astounding cowardice of college presidents than the foolishness of young minds — which, being not fully formed, are easily susceptible to idealist figments. The adults in charge ought to know better. Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber actually entertained the “demand” to erase Woodrow Wilson’s presence on campus for being an arch-segregationist by a black “social justice league” that at the very same time demanded separate (i.e. segregated) social space for blacks only. How did he reconcile these pleadings in his own mind, I wonder.
President Biddy Martin of Amherst pandered to students protesting against free speech, saying:
“Over the course of several days, a significant number of students have spoken eloquently and movingly about their experiences of racism and prejudice on and off campus. The depth and intensity of their pain and exhaustion are evident. That pain is real. Their expressions of loneliness and sense of invisibility are heartrending. No attempt to minimize or trivialize those feelings will be convincing to those of us who have listened. It is good that our students have seized this opportunity to speak, rather than further internalizing the isolation and lack of caring they have described.”
Bottom line: hurt feelings supposedly cancel free speech. No, that’s exactly the opposite of the meaning of the First Amendment. How can a college president fail to understand that and fail to defend the campus against that sort of Jacobin despotism? The answer is they are hostage to dogmas cooked up by race-and-identity careerists who don’t really care to make distinctions between what is true and what is not true — and that is now the official tone of higher education in America. It’s a short hop from there to not knowing the difference between what is real and what is unreal.
The phenomenon of demented lone gunmen killing strangers and innocents will morph into civil insurrection, especially as the major political parties break apart and the loosed factions set out to settle their old scores by whatever means they can. History knows that violence is infectious and that social inhibitions melt away when the conditions are ripe. Groups give themselves permission to act outside the bounds of normal behavior, and all of a sudden atrocity is the order of the day.
Both Trump and Hillary have the mojo to destroy their respective parties and I think the probability is that they will. Unfortunately, we don’t live under a parliamentary system that recognizes smaller factions as legitimate parties, so we are sure to live through an era of political disorder. What emerges from that could be a very severe polity, since it will be based on the wish to restore order at all costs.
It is likely to get the shove it needs from the implosion of the financial system, which is now running on the fumes of dwindling credit. A false capitalism reigns based on false capital — notional wealth where there is really no wealth; value where there is no value. Moments like this in history beat a path straight to currency collapse, and that will open the door to a greater collapse of all our familiar arrangements.
Surely there is some kind of massive unseen sensory organ in societies that receives the signal that systems are failing. And surely it spooks the individuals who make up those societies so badly that they will believe anything and do anything.
Sunday, November 22, 2015
SC131-9
http://www.blacklistednews.com/Hang_Onto_Your_Wallets%3A_Negative_Interest%2C_the_War_on_Cash%2C_and_the_%2410_Trillion_Bail-in/47437/0/38/38/Y/M.html
Hang Onto Your Wallets: Negative Interest, the War on Cash, and the $10 Trillion Bail-in
In uncertain times, “cash is king,” but central bankers are systematically moving to eliminate that option. Is it really about stimulating the economy? Or is there some deeper, darker threat afoot?
Remember those old ads showing a senior couple lounging on a warm beach, captioned “Let your money work for you”? Or the scene in Mary Poppins where young Michael is being advised to put his tuppence in the bank, so that it can compound into “all manner of private enterprise,” including “bonds, chattels, dividends, shares, shipyards, amalgamations . . . .”?
That may still work if you’re a Wall Street banker, but if you’re an ordinary saver with your money in the bank, you may soon be paying the bank to hold your funds rather than the reverse.
Four European central banks – the European Central Bank, the Swiss National Bank, Sweden’s Riksbank, and Denmark’s Nationalbank – have now imposed negative interest rates on the reserves they hold for commercial banks; and discussion has turned to whether it’s time to pass those costs on to consumers. The Bank of Japan and the Federal Reserve are still at ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy), but several Fed officials have also begun calling for NIRP (negative rates).
The stated justification for this move is to stimulate “demand” by forcing consumers to withdraw their money and go shopping with it. When an economy is struggling, it is standard practice for a central bank to cut interest rates, making saving less attractive. This is supposed to boost spending and kick-start an economic recovery.
That is the theory, but central banks have already pushed the prime rate to zero, and still their economies are languishing. To the uninitiated observer, that means the theory is wrong and needs to be scrapped. But not to our intrepid central bankers, who are now experimenting with pushing rates below zero.
Locking the Door to Bank Runs: The Cashless Society
The problem with imposing negative interest on savers, as explained in the UK Telegraph, is that “there’s a limit, what economists called the ‘zero lower bound’. Cut rates too deeply, and savers would end up facing negative returns. In that case, this could encourage people to take their savings out of the bank and hoard them in cash. This could slow, rather than boost, the economy.”
Again, to the ordinary observer, this would seem to signal that negative interest rates won’t work and the approach needs to be abandoned. But not to our undaunted central bankers, who have chosen instead to plug this hole in their leaky theory by moving to eliminate cash as an option. If your only choice is to keep your money in a digital account in a bank and spend it with a bank card or credit card or checks, negative interest can be imposed with impunity. This is already happening in Sweden, and other countries are close behind. As reported on Wolfstreet.com:
The War on Cash is advancing on all fronts. One region that has hogged the headlines with its war against physical currency is Scandinavia. Sweden became the first country to enlist its own citizens as largely willing guinea pigs in a dystopian economic experiment: negative interest rates in a cashless society. As Credit Suisse reports, no matter where you go or what you want to purchase, you will find a small ubiquitous sign saying “Vi hanterar ej kontanter” (“We don’t accept cash”) . . . .
The Lesson of Gesell’s Decaying Currency
Whether negative interests will actually stimulate an economic recovery, however, remains in doubt. Proponents of the theory cite Silvio Gesell and the Wörgl experiment of the 1930s. As explained by Charles Eisenstein in Sacred Economics:
The pioneering theoretician of negative-interest money was the German-Argentinean businessman Silvio Gesell, who called it “free-money” (Freigeld) . . . . The system he proposed in his 1906 masterwork, The Natural Economic Order, was to use paper currency to which a stamp costing a small fraction of the note’s value had to be affixed periodically. This effectively attached a maintenance cost to monetary wealth.
. . . [In 1932], the depressed town of Wörgl, Austria, issued its own stamp scrip inspired by Gesell . . . . The Wörgl currency was by all accounts a huge success. Roads were paved, bridges built, and back taxes were paid. The unemployment rate plummeted and the economy thrived, attracting the attention of nearby towns. Mayors and officials from all over the world began to visit Wörgl until, as in Germany, the central government abolished the Wörgl currency and the town slipped back into depression.
. . . [T]he Wörgl currency bore a demurrage rate [a maintenance charge for carrying money] of 1 percent per month. Contemporary accounts attributed to this the very rapid velocity of the currencies’ circulation. Instead of generating interest and growing, accumulation of wealth became a burden, much like possessions are a burden to the nomadic hunter-gatherer. As theorized by Gesell, money afflicted with loss-inducing properties ceased to be preferred over any other commodity as a store of value.
There is a critical difference, however, between the Wörgl currency and the modern-day central bankers’ negative interest scheme. The Wörgl government first issued its new “free money,” getting it into the local economy and increasing purchasing power, before taxing a portion of it back. And the proceeds of the stamp tax went to the city, to be used for the benefit of the taxpayers. As Eisenstein observes:
It is impossible to prove . . . that the rejuvenating effects of these currencies came from demurrage and not from the increase in the money supply . . . .
Today’s central bankers are proposing to tax existing money, diminishing spending power without first building it up. And the interest will go to private bankers, not to the local government.
Consumers today already have very little discretionary money. Imposing negative interest without first adding new money into the economy means they will have even less money to spend. This would be more likely to prompt them to save their scarce funds than to go on a shopping spree.
People are not keeping their money in the bank today for the interest (which is already nearly non-existent). It is for the convenience of writing checks, issuing bank cards, and storing their money in a “safe” place. They would no doubt be willing to pay a modest negative interest for that convenience; but if the fee got too high, they might pull their money out and save it elsewhere. The fee itself, however, would not drive them to buy things they did not otherwise need.
Is There a Bigger Threat than a Sluggish Economy?
The scheme to impose negative interest and eliminate cash seems so unlikely to stimulate the economy that one wonders if that is the real motive. Stopping tax evaders and terrorists (real or presumed) are other proposed justifications for going cashless. Economist Martin Armstrong goes further and suggests that the goal is to gain totalitarian control over our money. In a cashless society, our savings can be taxed away by the banks; the threat of bank runs by worried savers can be eliminated; and the too-big-to-fail banks can be assured that ample deposits will be there when they need to confiscate them through bail-ins to stay afloat.
And that may be the real threat on the horizon: a major derivatives default that hits the largest banks, those that do the vast majority of derivatives trading. On November 10, 2015, the Wall Street Journal reported the results of a study requested by Senator Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Elijah Cummings, involving the cost to taxpayers of the rollback of the Dodd-Frank Act in the “cromnibus” spending bill last December. As Jessica Desvarieux put it on the Real News Network, “the rule reversal allows banks to keep $10 trillion in swaps trades on their books, which taxpayers could be on the hook for if the banks need another bailout.”
The promise of Dodd-Frank, however, was that there would be “no more taxpayer bailouts.” Instead, insolvent systemically-risky banks were supposed to “bail in” (confiscate) the money of their creditors, including their depositors (the largest class of creditor of any bank). That could explain the push to go cashless. By quietly eliminating the possibility of cash withdrawals, the central bank can make sure the deposits are there to be grabbed when disaster strikes....
Hang Onto Your Wallets: Negative Interest, the War on Cash, and the $10 Trillion Bail-in
In uncertain times, “cash is king,” but central bankers are systematically moving to eliminate that option. Is it really about stimulating the economy? Or is there some deeper, darker threat afoot?
Remember those old ads showing a senior couple lounging on a warm beach, captioned “Let your money work for you”? Or the scene in Mary Poppins where young Michael is being advised to put his tuppence in the bank, so that it can compound into “all manner of private enterprise,” including “bonds, chattels, dividends, shares, shipyards, amalgamations . . . .”?
That may still work if you’re a Wall Street banker, but if you’re an ordinary saver with your money in the bank, you may soon be paying the bank to hold your funds rather than the reverse.
Four European central banks – the European Central Bank, the Swiss National Bank, Sweden’s Riksbank, and Denmark’s Nationalbank – have now imposed negative interest rates on the reserves they hold for commercial banks; and discussion has turned to whether it’s time to pass those costs on to consumers. The Bank of Japan and the Federal Reserve are still at ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy), but several Fed officials have also begun calling for NIRP (negative rates).
The stated justification for this move is to stimulate “demand” by forcing consumers to withdraw their money and go shopping with it. When an economy is struggling, it is standard practice for a central bank to cut interest rates, making saving less attractive. This is supposed to boost spending and kick-start an economic recovery.
That is the theory, but central banks have already pushed the prime rate to zero, and still their economies are languishing. To the uninitiated observer, that means the theory is wrong and needs to be scrapped. But not to our intrepid central bankers, who are now experimenting with pushing rates below zero.
Locking the Door to Bank Runs: The Cashless Society
The problem with imposing negative interest on savers, as explained in the UK Telegraph, is that “there’s a limit, what economists called the ‘zero lower bound’. Cut rates too deeply, and savers would end up facing negative returns. In that case, this could encourage people to take their savings out of the bank and hoard them in cash. This could slow, rather than boost, the economy.”
Again, to the ordinary observer, this would seem to signal that negative interest rates won’t work and the approach needs to be abandoned. But not to our undaunted central bankers, who have chosen instead to plug this hole in their leaky theory by moving to eliminate cash as an option. If your only choice is to keep your money in a digital account in a bank and spend it with a bank card or credit card or checks, negative interest can be imposed with impunity. This is already happening in Sweden, and other countries are close behind. As reported on Wolfstreet.com:
The War on Cash is advancing on all fronts. One region that has hogged the headlines with its war against physical currency is Scandinavia. Sweden became the first country to enlist its own citizens as largely willing guinea pigs in a dystopian economic experiment: negative interest rates in a cashless society. As Credit Suisse reports, no matter where you go or what you want to purchase, you will find a small ubiquitous sign saying “Vi hanterar ej kontanter” (“We don’t accept cash”) . . . .
The Lesson of Gesell’s Decaying Currency
Whether negative interests will actually stimulate an economic recovery, however, remains in doubt. Proponents of the theory cite Silvio Gesell and the Wörgl experiment of the 1930s. As explained by Charles Eisenstein in Sacred Economics:
The pioneering theoretician of negative-interest money was the German-Argentinean businessman Silvio Gesell, who called it “free-money” (Freigeld) . . . . The system he proposed in his 1906 masterwork, The Natural Economic Order, was to use paper currency to which a stamp costing a small fraction of the note’s value had to be affixed periodically. This effectively attached a maintenance cost to monetary wealth.
. . . [In 1932], the depressed town of Wörgl, Austria, issued its own stamp scrip inspired by Gesell . . . . The Wörgl currency was by all accounts a huge success. Roads were paved, bridges built, and back taxes were paid. The unemployment rate plummeted and the economy thrived, attracting the attention of nearby towns. Mayors and officials from all over the world began to visit Wörgl until, as in Germany, the central government abolished the Wörgl currency and the town slipped back into depression.
. . . [T]he Wörgl currency bore a demurrage rate [a maintenance charge for carrying money] of 1 percent per month. Contemporary accounts attributed to this the very rapid velocity of the currencies’ circulation. Instead of generating interest and growing, accumulation of wealth became a burden, much like possessions are a burden to the nomadic hunter-gatherer. As theorized by Gesell, money afflicted with loss-inducing properties ceased to be preferred over any other commodity as a store of value.
There is a critical difference, however, between the Wörgl currency and the modern-day central bankers’ negative interest scheme. The Wörgl government first issued its new “free money,” getting it into the local economy and increasing purchasing power, before taxing a portion of it back. And the proceeds of the stamp tax went to the city, to be used for the benefit of the taxpayers. As Eisenstein observes:
It is impossible to prove . . . that the rejuvenating effects of these currencies came from demurrage and not from the increase in the money supply . . . .
Today’s central bankers are proposing to tax existing money, diminishing spending power without first building it up. And the interest will go to private bankers, not to the local government.
Consumers today already have very little discretionary money. Imposing negative interest without first adding new money into the economy means they will have even less money to spend. This would be more likely to prompt them to save their scarce funds than to go on a shopping spree.
People are not keeping their money in the bank today for the interest (which is already nearly non-existent). It is for the convenience of writing checks, issuing bank cards, and storing their money in a “safe” place. They would no doubt be willing to pay a modest negative interest for that convenience; but if the fee got too high, they might pull their money out and save it elsewhere. The fee itself, however, would not drive them to buy things they did not otherwise need.
Is There a Bigger Threat than a Sluggish Economy?
The scheme to impose negative interest and eliminate cash seems so unlikely to stimulate the economy that one wonders if that is the real motive. Stopping tax evaders and terrorists (real or presumed) are other proposed justifications for going cashless. Economist Martin Armstrong goes further and suggests that the goal is to gain totalitarian control over our money. In a cashless society, our savings can be taxed away by the banks; the threat of bank runs by worried savers can be eliminated; and the too-big-to-fail banks can be assured that ample deposits will be there when they need to confiscate them through bail-ins to stay afloat.
And that may be the real threat on the horizon: a major derivatives default that hits the largest banks, those that do the vast majority of derivatives trading. On November 10, 2015, the Wall Street Journal reported the results of a study requested by Senator Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Elijah Cummings, involving the cost to taxpayers of the rollback of the Dodd-Frank Act in the “cromnibus” spending bill last December. As Jessica Desvarieux put it on the Real News Network, “the rule reversal allows banks to keep $10 trillion in swaps trades on their books, which taxpayers could be on the hook for if the banks need another bailout.”
The promise of Dodd-Frank, however, was that there would be “no more taxpayer bailouts.” Instead, insolvent systemically-risky banks were supposed to “bail in” (confiscate) the money of their creditors, including their depositors (the largest class of creditor of any bank). That could explain the push to go cashless. By quietly eliminating the possibility of cash withdrawals, the central bank can make sure the deposits are there to be grabbed when disaster strikes....
Saturday, November 21, 2015
SC131-8
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article43476.htm
6 Painful Truths About the War on Terrorism
If you were 4 years old when 9/11 occurred in 2001, then you’re now old enough to enlist and fight in the war on terror. Recent geo-political events suggest that this conflict may endure for some generations to come, so, regretfully, your children may also get to participate. The war on terrorism is apparently part of our culture and part of our lives now.
“The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for peace in our time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are at war now — with somebody — and we will stay at war with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives. It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy.” – Hunter S. Thompson
By no means a prophet, Hunter S. Thompson was just an eccentric observer with a knack for connecting the dots between political events and the ongoing mainstream media narrative that supports and manufactures consent for the oligarchy. When taken at face value, the terror script is indeed a rather convincing and motivating story, but when you dismantle the official fiction and bring the hidden pieces into the picture, the truth about the war on terror is just too heavy for conscious people to ignore any longer.
As it persists, international terrorism is guaranteed to increase, and as time goes by, we learn more and more about the real reasons why we’ve been forced into this apocalyptic conflict. After nearly 15 years of kicking down doors, drone bombing villagers, shattering societies, and mourning our own senselessly dead, here are 6 things we now know for sure about the war on terrorism.
“The first casualty when war comes is truth.” – Hiram W. Johnson
1.) The war on terror was never about ensuring the security of Americans at home or abroad, nor was the current situation the result of foreign policy blunders.
The conflict was engineered from the onset to break up, destroy and destabilize most of the oil-producing countries in the Middle East and Northern Africa. The war on terrorism is about control of oil, about conquering national economies and turning them over to ‘foreign investors,’ about demonizing Muslim nations, about creating a lawless territory in which to develop Western controlled mercenary armies like ISIS, about protecting Israel’s interests in the region, about destabilizing Europe, about opening access to the poppy fields of Afghanistan, and about punishing those nations which dared to defy the international banking cartel by moving to avert the petro-dollar.
The war on terrorism is also about radically altering the legal framework of Western governments to allow for greater surveillance, control and the militarization of once free societies. The aim is to continually broaden the definition of terrorism so that any act of defiance against the state or the corporate oligarchy, whether advocating for human rights, the environment, or any other issue of popular concern, can be persecuted without due process. The war on terror will be used to target American citizens who support the idea of limited government and strive to maintain the protections afforded by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights of the United States of America.
Additionally, the war on terror is about creating new markets for the security industry and opening steady income streams for war profiteers and arms manufacturers, so that a relative minority can profit heavily from the continuance of the war and the waste, swindling and destruction involved.
2.) The war on terror doesn’t stop terror, because it is terror.
The Western nations most heavily invested in the war on terror are also the nations most heavily involved in global arms trading, which gives advanced weaponry to any despotic tin pot dictator with an oilfield. And France just happens to be the world’s number one exporter of arms per capita. The Western ‘coalition’ regularly kills civilians in other nations directly and indirectly, which is in and of itself a very real type of terrorism.
“You cannot have freedom or peace in a country whose government is engaged in the global wholesale of advanced military arms and weaponry to national governments.” –Stefan Molyneux
3.) Our worst terrorist enemies are the products of government, the military industrial complex and Western intelligence agencies.
The Mujahideen was originally organized, funded, trained and supplied by the CIA to oppose the Soviet Union. The Mujahideen became Al Qaeda with the assistance of Saudi Arabia and American training, arms and financial aid. Al Qaeda has morphed into, or been replaced with ISIS, who is the creation of the military industrial complex, the US, Israel, the UK and France, and is supported by some 40 other nations who knowingly trade and deal with ISIS.
“They tax you in order to create weapons to sell to foreigners to attack you.” –Stefan Molyneux
ISIS, the new Islamic Caliphate as they call it, is the most barbaric, cruel and inhumane social movement to come about in some number of centuries, perhaps even a millenia or more. ISIS was given birth and nurtured into being by the West, and now, primarily Muslim people are suffering horribly in their own homelands while the war intensifies and extends into Europe in acts of urban terrorism.
4.) The mainstream media plays a crucial in perpetuating the war on terrorism.
The primary role of the corporate-owned and government-controlled mainstream media is to transform selected acts of terror into enduring symbols that can be used again and again to reinforce the war on terror narrative. Their secondary role is to keep the level of tension and stress as high as possible by ceaselessly over-reacting to non-events and over-reporting on non-issues, thereby keeping the public captivated and hypnotized by an ongoing drama so that when a major event does occur it has the greatest possible psychological impact.
Reporting on global terrorism is duplicitous and hypocritical because certain events have more franchise than others in influencing public support for government policy changes and military actions. In the practical world of marketing, French flags pictured draped over national monuments at night-time will go much further in promoting the war on terror than Kenyan flags draped over African monuments.
The media uses shock and awe in a war of psychological attrition against the public. The objective is to incapacitate and sideline people from participating in dissent, while scaring people into acquiescence to any imposed government authority or security measures.
5.) State-sponsored False flag attacks still work to achieve political objectives.
There is a tremendous continual international effort underway to expose the true facts behind each new terror attack, terror plot, and major government lie. The alternative media is growing in reach and effectiveness, however, the reality is that the Hegelian dialectic of problem, reaction, solution still works on a shell-shocked public.
6.) Suicide is more deadly to our soldiers than any terrorist organization.
The war on terrorism represents the first time in US history that suicide has been the leading cause of death of US soldiers. The psychological impact of this type of conflict is unique and the suicide rate of returning soldiers may be our best evidence that the war is unwinnable.
Final Thoughts
The goal of the war on terror is transform people into willing participants in chaos, mayhem and murder, or to turn them into collateral damage. Nobody is born a terrorist, and we are all being set up as dispensable pawns in an orchestrated clash of civilizations.
The truth is out there. When you cut through the propaganda, emotional triggers, and the divisive nature of discourse today, what’s left is the truth that the war on terror is something that we must end. The rise in global consciousness and our willingness to speak out may be our only hope.
6 Painful Truths About the War on Terrorism
If you were 4 years old when 9/11 occurred in 2001, then you’re now old enough to enlist and fight in the war on terror. Recent geo-political events suggest that this conflict may endure for some generations to come, so, regretfully, your children may also get to participate. The war on terrorism is apparently part of our culture and part of our lives now.
“The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for peace in our time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are at war now — with somebody — and we will stay at war with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives. It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy.” – Hunter S. Thompson
By no means a prophet, Hunter S. Thompson was just an eccentric observer with a knack for connecting the dots between political events and the ongoing mainstream media narrative that supports and manufactures consent for the oligarchy. When taken at face value, the terror script is indeed a rather convincing and motivating story, but when you dismantle the official fiction and bring the hidden pieces into the picture, the truth about the war on terror is just too heavy for conscious people to ignore any longer.
As it persists, international terrorism is guaranteed to increase, and as time goes by, we learn more and more about the real reasons why we’ve been forced into this apocalyptic conflict. After nearly 15 years of kicking down doors, drone bombing villagers, shattering societies, and mourning our own senselessly dead, here are 6 things we now know for sure about the war on terrorism.
“The first casualty when war comes is truth.” – Hiram W. Johnson
1.) The war on terror was never about ensuring the security of Americans at home or abroad, nor was the current situation the result of foreign policy blunders.
The conflict was engineered from the onset to break up, destroy and destabilize most of the oil-producing countries in the Middle East and Northern Africa. The war on terrorism is about control of oil, about conquering national economies and turning them over to ‘foreign investors,’ about demonizing Muslim nations, about creating a lawless territory in which to develop Western controlled mercenary armies like ISIS, about protecting Israel’s interests in the region, about destabilizing Europe, about opening access to the poppy fields of Afghanistan, and about punishing those nations which dared to defy the international banking cartel by moving to avert the petro-dollar.
The war on terrorism is also about radically altering the legal framework of Western governments to allow for greater surveillance, control and the militarization of once free societies. The aim is to continually broaden the definition of terrorism so that any act of defiance against the state or the corporate oligarchy, whether advocating for human rights, the environment, or any other issue of popular concern, can be persecuted without due process. The war on terror will be used to target American citizens who support the idea of limited government and strive to maintain the protections afforded by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights of the United States of America.
Additionally, the war on terror is about creating new markets for the security industry and opening steady income streams for war profiteers and arms manufacturers, so that a relative minority can profit heavily from the continuance of the war and the waste, swindling and destruction involved.
2.) The war on terror doesn’t stop terror, because it is terror.
The Western nations most heavily invested in the war on terror are also the nations most heavily involved in global arms trading, which gives advanced weaponry to any despotic tin pot dictator with an oilfield. And France just happens to be the world’s number one exporter of arms per capita. The Western ‘coalition’ regularly kills civilians in other nations directly and indirectly, which is in and of itself a very real type of terrorism.
“You cannot have freedom or peace in a country whose government is engaged in the global wholesale of advanced military arms and weaponry to national governments.” –Stefan Molyneux
3.) Our worst terrorist enemies are the products of government, the military industrial complex and Western intelligence agencies.
The Mujahideen was originally organized, funded, trained and supplied by the CIA to oppose the Soviet Union. The Mujahideen became Al Qaeda with the assistance of Saudi Arabia and American training, arms and financial aid. Al Qaeda has morphed into, or been replaced with ISIS, who is the creation of the military industrial complex, the US, Israel, the UK and France, and is supported by some 40 other nations who knowingly trade and deal with ISIS.
“They tax you in order to create weapons to sell to foreigners to attack you.” –Stefan Molyneux
ISIS, the new Islamic Caliphate as they call it, is the most barbaric, cruel and inhumane social movement to come about in some number of centuries, perhaps even a millenia or more. ISIS was given birth and nurtured into being by the West, and now, primarily Muslim people are suffering horribly in their own homelands while the war intensifies and extends into Europe in acts of urban terrorism.
4.) The mainstream media plays a crucial in perpetuating the war on terrorism.
The primary role of the corporate-owned and government-controlled mainstream media is to transform selected acts of terror into enduring symbols that can be used again and again to reinforce the war on terror narrative. Their secondary role is to keep the level of tension and stress as high as possible by ceaselessly over-reacting to non-events and over-reporting on non-issues, thereby keeping the public captivated and hypnotized by an ongoing drama so that when a major event does occur it has the greatest possible psychological impact.
Reporting on global terrorism is duplicitous and hypocritical because certain events have more franchise than others in influencing public support for government policy changes and military actions. In the practical world of marketing, French flags pictured draped over national monuments at night-time will go much further in promoting the war on terror than Kenyan flags draped over African monuments.
The media uses shock and awe in a war of psychological attrition against the public. The objective is to incapacitate and sideline people from participating in dissent, while scaring people into acquiescence to any imposed government authority or security measures.
5.) State-sponsored False flag attacks still work to achieve political objectives.
There is a tremendous continual international effort underway to expose the true facts behind each new terror attack, terror plot, and major government lie. The alternative media is growing in reach and effectiveness, however, the reality is that the Hegelian dialectic of problem, reaction, solution still works on a shell-shocked public.
6.) Suicide is more deadly to our soldiers than any terrorist organization.
The war on terrorism represents the first time in US history that suicide has been the leading cause of death of US soldiers. The psychological impact of this type of conflict is unique and the suicide rate of returning soldiers may be our best evidence that the war is unwinnable.
Final Thoughts
The goal of the war on terror is transform people into willing participants in chaos, mayhem and murder, or to turn them into collateral damage. Nobody is born a terrorist, and we are all being set up as dispensable pawns in an orchestrated clash of civilizations.
The truth is out there. When you cut through the propaganda, emotional triggers, and the divisive nature of discourse today, what’s left is the truth that the war on terror is something that we must end. The rise in global consciousness and our willingness to speak out may be our only hope.
SC131-7
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-11-19/can-we-afford-the-future
Can We Afford the Future?
As a child of the 1950s I grew up immersed in a near-universal expectation of progress. Everybody expected a shiny new future; the only thing that might have prevented us from having it was nuclear war, and thankfully that hasn’t happened (so far). But, in the intervening decades, progress has begun to lose its luster. Official agencies still project economic growth as far as the eye can see, but those forecasts of a better future now ring hollow.
Why? It’s simple. We can’t afford it.
To understand why, it’s helpful to recall how the present got to be so much grander (in terms of economic activity) than the past. Much of that story has to do with fossil fuels. Everything we do requires energy, and coal, natural gas, and oil provided energy that was cheap, abundant, concentrated, and easily stored and transported. Once we figured out how to get these fuels out of the ground and use them, we went on history’s biggest joy ride.
But fossil fuels are depleting non-renewable resources, and are therefore subject to declining resource quality. Oil is the most economically important of the fossil fuels, and depletion is already eating away at expectations of further petroleum-fed progress. During the past decade, production rates for conventional oil—the stuff that fueled the economic extravaganza of the 20th century—have stalled out and are set to drop (according to the IEA’s latest forecast). Between 2004 and 2014, the oil industry’s costs for exploration and production rose at almost 11 percent per year. The main bright spot in the oil world has been growing production of unconventional oil—specifically tight oil in North America associated with the fracking boom. But now that boom is going bust.
It’s true that boom and bust cycles have typified the oil and gas industry throughout its history, but this time it really does seem different. Tight oil is expensive to produce, individual wells decline quickly, well quality varies greatly, and good drilling sites are limited in number. These problems didn’t seem to be an issue at first. During the boom years money was cheap and investors were easily conned. The frackers had every incentive to lease as much land as they could borrow money for, drill the best sites as quickly as possible, and leave the leftovers for laggards. This mentality led them to over-produce over the short run, driving oil prices down far below the cost of doing business. Now drilling rigs are idled and production is headed south, leaving fracking companies’ high-priced PR spokescritters to whine that surely production will pick up again when prices eventually recover. Will it? Only if new cadres of investors (read: “suckers”) can be found, and even then only briefly. Overall, the oil industry is in treacherous waters and headed for worse.
This is part of a general trend. Extractive industries are always ruled by the imperative to target highest-quality resources first and leave the crappy stuff for later. After decades of extracting oil, coal, and natural gas, the fossil fuel industry is increasingly faced with unpalatable future prospects (unconventional oil and gas, lower grades of coal) that are more expensive to extract and that entail higher environmental risks and costs.
So the fossil-fueled future will be more expensive. But if we want to tally its real cost, we must add the also soaring “external” costs of burning fossil fuels. Over the short run, the biggest of those costs may simply be the health impacts from breathing coal smoke and dust: a study I co-authored in 2011 calculated that coal use costs the U.S. between a third and over half a trillion dollars each year in health, economic, and environmental impacts. The costs for China, where 670,000 people die each year of coal-related diseases, is no doubt far higher. Now add the bills for cleaning up oil spills, for the health impacts of fracking, and for the potential health costs of environmentally dispersed petrochemical-based hormone disrupters, and we’re talking real money.
On top of all that, add the costs of climate change. They’re relatively modest now, but set to explode. What would be the cost the U.S., for example, of having to largely abandon one major coastal city (Miami or New Orleans)? How about a dozen (possibly including New York)? What would be the cost from death and illness due to an unprecedented heat wave? What would be the cost of the nearly complete loss of agricultural production in California’s Central Valley due to drought? The answer: it’s probably incalculable. But that’s all just the tip of the proverbial (and quickly melting) iceberg, and it’s all just a matter of time. It should be clear by now that we really can’t afford a fossil-fueled future.
Well then, how about a renewable energy future? I must start by noting my own view that a transition to renewable energy is necessary and inevitable, and that we must organize and pursue that effort as a top societal priority. But that doesn’t mean we can just unplug coal power plants, plug in solar panels, and continue living essentially as we do now. True, solar and wind are getting cheaper. A lot cheaper. Which is a good thing, because until recently they required subsidies for any substantial growth. They still do, in many situations. But even assuming further cost reductions, the fact is that an energy transition is a big deal. It takes time and the replacement of an extraordinary amount of infrastructure. Solar and wind energy production is greatly expandable, but these energy sources have some drawbacks: they produce energy intermittently and uncontrollably. It takes additional technology to adapt these sources to our 24/7 energy demand patterns.
In recent studies, Mark Jacobson of Stanford University and his co-authors have concluded that a full transition to renewable energy would be affordable. Their conclusion depends on counting savings from the avoided costs of climate change and health damage from fossil fuel use. However, subtracting these avoided costs tells us only that a transition to renewables would be more affordable than maintaining our status quo reliance on fossil fuels; it does not necessarily mean that the transition would be affordable on its own terms.
Estimating how much a total energy transition would cost is difficult. The problem can be simplified greatly by including only the direct cost of solar panels and wind turbines, but doing so is unrealistic. Better estimates would include the costs of energy storage, grid redesign, and redundant capacity; plus required investments in new technology for the transportation, agriculture, and manufacturing sectors; in new equipment for building operations; and in energy efficiency retrofits to nearly every existing structure. Just one example: we currently make cement (which is used in nearly all construction projects) using high heat from fossil fuels; we could get that heat from sunlight, hydrogen, or electricity, but that would require a complete redesign of the process, and it’s unclear how much cement made with renewable energy would cost relative to cement made with fossil fuels. Altogether, the cost of a full global renewable energy transition would certainly run into the many tens of trillions of dollars—if (and this is crucial) our goal is to produce enough energy to maintain current levels of mobility and amenity.
Actual rates of investment in renewable energy globally have leveled off in the past four years, with investment rates in Europe shrinking while China continues to surge ahead.
Wait, I’m not finished. This isn’t all about energy, though energy is probably the single greatest factor determining whether we can afford our assumed future of further material progress. Ask any civil engineer and they will tell you the United States is literally falling apart. Roads, bridges, water mains, airports, rails, and power grids were built during the last century in an orgy of construction such as the world had never seen. Today that infrastructure is aging, and we can’t seem to find the money with which to repair or replace it.
Finally we come to the financial tool inevitably used to deal with all such costs—debt. Credit (the other side of the debt coin) is wonderful: it enables us to spend now but pay later. We’ve exploited this tool ruthlessly over the past few decades, and as a result today’s household debt, corporate debt, and government debt are all at or near record levels. The financial crisis of 2008 is widely regarded as having been triggered by too much unserviceable debt; nevertheless, global debt has actually increased by $57 Trillion since then. Greece’s debt crisis still threatens the economic stability of the European continent.Global debt now stands at 286 percent of GDP, a level that many economists believe is unsustainable and must eventually lead to a deleveraging event perhaps comparable to, or worse than, the Great Depression. But how are we to pay for our energy future (fossil fueled or renewable), and needed infrastructure repair, without still more debt? It doesn’t look as though we’ll be able to do all that spending using current account surpluses, as world GDP growth is slowing rather than accelerating.
Some readers may assume that I just got up on the wrong side of the bed, and that this is all just too pessimistic. Surely we will muddle through, with new technology making further progress affordable. I must be cherry-picking a worst-case scenario, right? No, in my view there is no exaggeration here. The evidence as I see it is stacked almost entirely on the side of my thesis: we (as a nation, or as a global civilization, take your pick) really and truly cannot afford much more of the kind of progress—defined in terms of increases in energy and material consumption—that we got used to during the last century.
That means that if we don’t start planning for whatever kind of future we can afford (in both dollar and energy terms), we’ll end up broke, foreclosed, and without much of a future worth living in.
Clearly, the affordable future will be slower, simpler, and less mobile than Futurama daydreams of the 1960s. It will entail living closer to the land and using much less in the way of energy and materials than folks in wealthy industrial nations currently are accustomed to using. If we’re dropped headlong into that future with no preparation, we’re likely to see it as—and turn it into—a dystopian, post-apocalyptic nightmare. However, if we plan and prepare, our affordable future could actually be an improvement over the soul-destroying existence that pervades so much of urban and suburban America these days. Permaculturists, organizations of idealistic young organic farmers, eco-villages like Dancing Rabbit and The Farm, and Transition Initiatives represent what appear currently to be barely visible fringe phenomena. But the folks pursuing these roads-less-traveled deserve our attention and help, because they’re about the only people in the industrialized world who are preparing for the kind of future that’s actually within our means.
Can We Afford the Future?
As a child of the 1950s I grew up immersed in a near-universal expectation of progress. Everybody expected a shiny new future; the only thing that might have prevented us from having it was nuclear war, and thankfully that hasn’t happened (so far). But, in the intervening decades, progress has begun to lose its luster. Official agencies still project economic growth as far as the eye can see, but those forecasts of a better future now ring hollow.
Why? It’s simple. We can’t afford it.
To understand why, it’s helpful to recall how the present got to be so much grander (in terms of economic activity) than the past. Much of that story has to do with fossil fuels. Everything we do requires energy, and coal, natural gas, and oil provided energy that was cheap, abundant, concentrated, and easily stored and transported. Once we figured out how to get these fuels out of the ground and use them, we went on history’s biggest joy ride.
But fossil fuels are depleting non-renewable resources, and are therefore subject to declining resource quality. Oil is the most economically important of the fossil fuels, and depletion is already eating away at expectations of further petroleum-fed progress. During the past decade, production rates for conventional oil—the stuff that fueled the economic extravaganza of the 20th century—have stalled out and are set to drop (according to the IEA’s latest forecast). Between 2004 and 2014, the oil industry’s costs for exploration and production rose at almost 11 percent per year. The main bright spot in the oil world has been growing production of unconventional oil—specifically tight oil in North America associated with the fracking boom. But now that boom is going bust.
It’s true that boom and bust cycles have typified the oil and gas industry throughout its history, but this time it really does seem different. Tight oil is expensive to produce, individual wells decline quickly, well quality varies greatly, and good drilling sites are limited in number. These problems didn’t seem to be an issue at first. During the boom years money was cheap and investors were easily conned. The frackers had every incentive to lease as much land as they could borrow money for, drill the best sites as quickly as possible, and leave the leftovers for laggards. This mentality led them to over-produce over the short run, driving oil prices down far below the cost of doing business. Now drilling rigs are idled and production is headed south, leaving fracking companies’ high-priced PR spokescritters to whine that surely production will pick up again when prices eventually recover. Will it? Only if new cadres of investors (read: “suckers”) can be found, and even then only briefly. Overall, the oil industry is in treacherous waters and headed for worse.
This is part of a general trend. Extractive industries are always ruled by the imperative to target highest-quality resources first and leave the crappy stuff for later. After decades of extracting oil, coal, and natural gas, the fossil fuel industry is increasingly faced with unpalatable future prospects (unconventional oil and gas, lower grades of coal) that are more expensive to extract and that entail higher environmental risks and costs.
So the fossil-fueled future will be more expensive. But if we want to tally its real cost, we must add the also soaring “external” costs of burning fossil fuels. Over the short run, the biggest of those costs may simply be the health impacts from breathing coal smoke and dust: a study I co-authored in 2011 calculated that coal use costs the U.S. between a third and over half a trillion dollars each year in health, economic, and environmental impacts. The costs for China, where 670,000 people die each year of coal-related diseases, is no doubt far higher. Now add the bills for cleaning up oil spills, for the health impacts of fracking, and for the potential health costs of environmentally dispersed petrochemical-based hormone disrupters, and we’re talking real money.
On top of all that, add the costs of climate change. They’re relatively modest now, but set to explode. What would be the cost the U.S., for example, of having to largely abandon one major coastal city (Miami or New Orleans)? How about a dozen (possibly including New York)? What would be the cost from death and illness due to an unprecedented heat wave? What would be the cost of the nearly complete loss of agricultural production in California’s Central Valley due to drought? The answer: it’s probably incalculable. But that’s all just the tip of the proverbial (and quickly melting) iceberg, and it’s all just a matter of time. It should be clear by now that we really can’t afford a fossil-fueled future.
Well then, how about a renewable energy future? I must start by noting my own view that a transition to renewable energy is necessary and inevitable, and that we must organize and pursue that effort as a top societal priority. But that doesn’t mean we can just unplug coal power plants, plug in solar panels, and continue living essentially as we do now. True, solar and wind are getting cheaper. A lot cheaper. Which is a good thing, because until recently they required subsidies for any substantial growth. They still do, in many situations. But even assuming further cost reductions, the fact is that an energy transition is a big deal. It takes time and the replacement of an extraordinary amount of infrastructure. Solar and wind energy production is greatly expandable, but these energy sources have some drawbacks: they produce energy intermittently and uncontrollably. It takes additional technology to adapt these sources to our 24/7 energy demand patterns.
In recent studies, Mark Jacobson of Stanford University and his co-authors have concluded that a full transition to renewable energy would be affordable. Their conclusion depends on counting savings from the avoided costs of climate change and health damage from fossil fuel use. However, subtracting these avoided costs tells us only that a transition to renewables would be more affordable than maintaining our status quo reliance on fossil fuels; it does not necessarily mean that the transition would be affordable on its own terms.
Estimating how much a total energy transition would cost is difficult. The problem can be simplified greatly by including only the direct cost of solar panels and wind turbines, but doing so is unrealistic. Better estimates would include the costs of energy storage, grid redesign, and redundant capacity; plus required investments in new technology for the transportation, agriculture, and manufacturing sectors; in new equipment for building operations; and in energy efficiency retrofits to nearly every existing structure. Just one example: we currently make cement (which is used in nearly all construction projects) using high heat from fossil fuels; we could get that heat from sunlight, hydrogen, or electricity, but that would require a complete redesign of the process, and it’s unclear how much cement made with renewable energy would cost relative to cement made with fossil fuels. Altogether, the cost of a full global renewable energy transition would certainly run into the many tens of trillions of dollars—if (and this is crucial) our goal is to produce enough energy to maintain current levels of mobility and amenity.
Actual rates of investment in renewable energy globally have leveled off in the past four years, with investment rates in Europe shrinking while China continues to surge ahead.
Wait, I’m not finished. This isn’t all about energy, though energy is probably the single greatest factor determining whether we can afford our assumed future of further material progress. Ask any civil engineer and they will tell you the United States is literally falling apart. Roads, bridges, water mains, airports, rails, and power grids were built during the last century in an orgy of construction such as the world had never seen. Today that infrastructure is aging, and we can’t seem to find the money with which to repair or replace it.
Finally we come to the financial tool inevitably used to deal with all such costs—debt. Credit (the other side of the debt coin) is wonderful: it enables us to spend now but pay later. We’ve exploited this tool ruthlessly over the past few decades, and as a result today’s household debt, corporate debt, and government debt are all at or near record levels. The financial crisis of 2008 is widely regarded as having been triggered by too much unserviceable debt; nevertheless, global debt has actually increased by $57 Trillion since then. Greece’s debt crisis still threatens the economic stability of the European continent.Global debt now stands at 286 percent of GDP, a level that many economists believe is unsustainable and must eventually lead to a deleveraging event perhaps comparable to, or worse than, the Great Depression. But how are we to pay for our energy future (fossil fueled or renewable), and needed infrastructure repair, without still more debt? It doesn’t look as though we’ll be able to do all that spending using current account surpluses, as world GDP growth is slowing rather than accelerating.
Some readers may assume that I just got up on the wrong side of the bed, and that this is all just too pessimistic. Surely we will muddle through, with new technology making further progress affordable. I must be cherry-picking a worst-case scenario, right? No, in my view there is no exaggeration here. The evidence as I see it is stacked almost entirely on the side of my thesis: we (as a nation, or as a global civilization, take your pick) really and truly cannot afford much more of the kind of progress—defined in terms of increases in energy and material consumption—that we got used to during the last century.
That means that if we don’t start planning for whatever kind of future we can afford (in both dollar and energy terms), we’ll end up broke, foreclosed, and without much of a future worth living in.
Clearly, the affordable future will be slower, simpler, and less mobile than Futurama daydreams of the 1960s. It will entail living closer to the land and using much less in the way of energy and materials than folks in wealthy industrial nations currently are accustomed to using. If we’re dropped headlong into that future with no preparation, we’re likely to see it as—and turn it into—a dystopian, post-apocalyptic nightmare. However, if we plan and prepare, our affordable future could actually be an improvement over the soul-destroying existence that pervades so much of urban and suburban America these days. Permaculturists, organizations of idealistic young organic farmers, eco-villages like Dancing Rabbit and The Farm, and Transition Initiatives represent what appear currently to be barely visible fringe phenomena. But the folks pursuing these roads-less-traveled deserve our attention and help, because they’re about the only people in the industrialized world who are preparing for the kind of future that’s actually within our means.
Monday, November 16, 2015
SC131-6
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article43410.htm
Reaping the Whirlwind of Western Support for Extremist Violence
We, the West, overthrew Saddam by violence. We overthrew Gadafy by violence. We are trying to overthrow Assad by violence. Harsh regimes all — but far less draconian than our Saudi allies, and other tyrannies around the world. What has been the result of these interventions? A hell on earth, one that grows wider and more virulent year after year.
Without the American crime of aggressive war against Iraq — which, by the measurements used by Western governments themselves, left more than a million innocent people dead — there would be no ISIS, no “Al Qaeda in Iraq.” Without the Saudi and Western funding and arming of an amalgam of extremist Sunni groups across the Middle East, used as proxies to strike at Iran and its allies, there would be no ISIS. Let’s go back further. Without the direct, extensive and deliberate creation by the United States and its Saudi ally of a world-wide movement of armed Sunni extremists during the Carter and Reagan administrations (in order to draw the Soviets into a quagmire in Afghanistan), there would have been no “War on Terror” — and no terrorist attacks in Paris tonight.
Again, let’s be as clear as possible: the hellish world we live in today is the result of deliberate policies and actions undertaken by the United States and its allies over the past decades. It was Washington that led and/or supported the quashing of secular political resistance across the Middle East, in order to bring recalcitrant leaders like Nasser to heel and to back corrupt and brutal dictators who would advance the US agenda of political domination and resource exploitation.
The open history of the last half-century is very clear in this regard. Going all the way back to the overthrow of the democratic government of Iran in 1953, the United States has deliberately and consciously pushed the most extreme sectarian groups in order to undermine a broader-based secular resistance to its domination agenda.
Why bring up this “ancient history” when fresh blood is running in the streets of Paris? Because that blood would not be running if not for this ancient history; and because the reaction to this latest reverberation of Washington’s decades-long, bipartisan cultivation of religious extremism will certainly be more bloodshed, more repression and more violent intervention. Which will, in turn, inevitably, produce yet more atrocities and upheaval as we are seeing in Paris tonight.
I write in despair. Despair of course at the depravity displayed by the murderers of innocents in Paris tonight; but an even deeper despair at the depravity of the egregious murderers who have brought us to this ghastly place in human history: those gilded figures who have strode the halls of power for decades in the high chambers of the West, killing innocent people by the hundreds of thousands, crushing secular opposition to their favored dictators — and again, again and again — supporting, funding and arming some of the most virulent sectarians on earth.
And one further cause of despair: that although this historical record is there in the open, readily available from the most mainstream sources, it is and will continue to be completely ignored, both by the power-gamers and by the public. The latter will continue to support the former as they replicate and regurgitate the same old policies of intervention, the same old agendas of domination and greed, over and over and over again — creating ever-more fresh hells for us all to live in, and poisoning the lives of our children, and of all those who come after us.
Reaping the Whirlwind of Western Support for Extremist Violence
We, the West, overthrew Saddam by violence. We overthrew Gadafy by violence. We are trying to overthrow Assad by violence. Harsh regimes all — but far less draconian than our Saudi allies, and other tyrannies around the world. What has been the result of these interventions? A hell on earth, one that grows wider and more virulent year after year.
Without the American crime of aggressive war against Iraq — which, by the measurements used by Western governments themselves, left more than a million innocent people dead — there would be no ISIS, no “Al Qaeda in Iraq.” Without the Saudi and Western funding and arming of an amalgam of extremist Sunni groups across the Middle East, used as proxies to strike at Iran and its allies, there would be no ISIS. Let’s go back further. Without the direct, extensive and deliberate creation by the United States and its Saudi ally of a world-wide movement of armed Sunni extremists during the Carter and Reagan administrations (in order to draw the Soviets into a quagmire in Afghanistan), there would have been no “War on Terror” — and no terrorist attacks in Paris tonight.
Again, let’s be as clear as possible: the hellish world we live in today is the result of deliberate policies and actions undertaken by the United States and its allies over the past decades. It was Washington that led and/or supported the quashing of secular political resistance across the Middle East, in order to bring recalcitrant leaders like Nasser to heel and to back corrupt and brutal dictators who would advance the US agenda of political domination and resource exploitation.
The open history of the last half-century is very clear in this regard. Going all the way back to the overthrow of the democratic government of Iran in 1953, the United States has deliberately and consciously pushed the most extreme sectarian groups in order to undermine a broader-based secular resistance to its domination agenda.
Why bring up this “ancient history” when fresh blood is running in the streets of Paris? Because that blood would not be running if not for this ancient history; and because the reaction to this latest reverberation of Washington’s decades-long, bipartisan cultivation of religious extremism will certainly be more bloodshed, more repression and more violent intervention. Which will, in turn, inevitably, produce yet more atrocities and upheaval as we are seeing in Paris tonight.
I write in despair. Despair of course at the depravity displayed by the murderers of innocents in Paris tonight; but an even deeper despair at the depravity of the egregious murderers who have brought us to this ghastly place in human history: those gilded figures who have strode the halls of power for decades in the high chambers of the West, killing innocent people by the hundreds of thousands, crushing secular opposition to their favored dictators — and again, again and again — supporting, funding and arming some of the most virulent sectarians on earth.
And one further cause of despair: that although this historical record is there in the open, readily available from the most mainstream sources, it is and will continue to be completely ignored, both by the power-gamers and by the public. The latter will continue to support the former as they replicate and regurgitate the same old policies of intervention, the same old agendas of domination and greed, over and over and over again — creating ever-more fresh hells for us all to live in, and poisoning the lives of our children, and of all those who come after us.
Friday, November 13, 2015
SC131-5
http://peakoil.com/enviroment/a-human-tsunami-of-overshoot
Listen to the 10:50 audio file at this link
A Human Tsunami of Overshoot
By now, everyone who follows the Collapse blogs knows about the escalating Refugee crisis in Europe, as desperate Syrians and Afghanis attempt to escape War Zones for a new life in the Promised Lands of Sweden and Germany.
Already, with barely the first ripple of this wave rolling in, communities from Kos & Lesbos in the Greek Islands right up to the border between Mother Russia and Norway north of Murmansk and north of the Arctic Circle are being overwhelmed by a HUMAN WAVE.
To date, only a few hundred thousand have begun the migration to GTFO of Dodge before it is too late, but for most it is already too late. The Borders are closing and the local populations becoming less accepting by the day of the thousands crossing their borders looking just for a meal to eat and peace in their lives. They are sacrificing everything they have, all they have ever known for the chance to make it to the Promised Land. They have NOTHING LEFT TO LOSE. They know they are dead if they stay where they lay. So move they will, en masse here.
For those on the receiving end, they have EVERYTHING TO LOSE. Their peaceful lives to begin with, but eventually an existential battle for survival.
This year to date in the Refugee Crisis is not the End of it. It is not even the Beginning of the End. It is only the End of the Beginning. Thank you once again Winston Churchill.
If you like Happy Endings, don’t listen to this rant. It will not make you happy.
Listen to the 10:50 audio file at this link
A Human Tsunami of Overshoot
By now, everyone who follows the Collapse blogs knows about the escalating Refugee crisis in Europe, as desperate Syrians and Afghanis attempt to escape War Zones for a new life in the Promised Lands of Sweden and Germany.
Already, with barely the first ripple of this wave rolling in, communities from Kos & Lesbos in the Greek Islands right up to the border between Mother Russia and Norway north of Murmansk and north of the Arctic Circle are being overwhelmed by a HUMAN WAVE.
To date, only a few hundred thousand have begun the migration to GTFO of Dodge before it is too late, but for most it is already too late. The Borders are closing and the local populations becoming less accepting by the day of the thousands crossing their borders looking just for a meal to eat and peace in their lives. They are sacrificing everything they have, all they have ever known for the chance to make it to the Promised Land. They have NOTHING LEFT TO LOSE. They know they are dead if they stay where they lay. So move they will, en masse here.
For those on the receiving end, they have EVERYTHING TO LOSE. Their peaceful lives to begin with, but eventually an existential battle for survival.
This year to date in the Refugee Crisis is not the End of it. It is not even the Beginning of the End. It is only the End of the Beginning. Thank you once again Winston Churchill.
If you like Happy Endings, don’t listen to this rant. It will not make you happy.
Monday, November 9, 2015
SC131-4
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-leviathan/
The Leviathan
The economic picture manufactured by the national consensus trance has never been more out of touch with reality in my lifetime. And so the questions as to what anyone might do can hardly be addressed. How can I protect my savings? Who do I vote for? How do I think about where my country is going? Incoherence reigns, especially in the circles ruled by those who guard the status quo, which includes the failing legacy news media.
The Federal Reserve has morphed from being a faceless background institution of the most limited purpose to a claque of necromancers and astrologasters, led by one grand vizier, in full public view pretending to steer a gigantic economic vessel that has, in fact, lost its rudder and is drifting into a maelstrom.
For more than a year, the fate of the nation has hung on whether the Fed might raise their benchmark interest rate one quarter of a percent. They talk about it incessantly, and therefore the mob of financial market observers has to chatter about it incessantly, and the chatter itself has appeared to obviate the need for any actual action on the matter. The Fed gets to influence markets without ever having to do anything. And mostly it has worked to produce the false narrative of an advanced economy that is working splendidly well to the advantage of the common good.
This is all occurring against the background of a larger global network of economic relations that is quite clearly breaking apart. The rising tensions between the US, Russia, China, and the Euro Union grew out of monetary mischief “innovated” by our central bank, especially the shenanigans around debt monetization, which have created dangerous distortions in markets, trade, and perceptions of national interest. Nations are rattling sabers at one another and bluster is in the air. The world is bankrupt after thirty years of borrowing from the future to throw a party in the present, and the authorities can’t acknowledge that.
But they can provide the conditions for disguising it, especially in the statistical hall of mirrors that once-upon-a-time produced meaningful signals for the movement of capital. Instead of reality-based choices and decisions, the task at hand for the people in charge has been the ever more baroque elaboration of a Potemkin economic false-front, behind which lies a landscape of ruin scavenged by desperate racketeers. That this racketeering has moved so seamlessly into the once-sacred precincts of medicine and higher ed ought to inform us how desperate and perilous it has become.
The latest installment of the disinformation game was Friday’s employment release from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. It was a “blockbuster,” implying blue skies everywhere from Montauk to Malibu. Except that no one with a remaining shred of critical faculty can be expected to believe it. 80 percent of the new jobs numbers were attributed to the mystical birth-death model, a pseudo-scientific fantasy of hypothetical new business starts and associated hypothetical new hires. Demographically, the most new jobs went to the over-55 age cohort — grocery baggers and Walmart greeters — and the fewest to men 25 to 54 (that bracket substantially lost jobs). The official unemployment rate fell to 5.0 rate, with no meaningful discussion of the huge numbers of discouraged people who have dropped out of the workforce.
But the perception of an economy on full throttle chug sent the stock indexes up. The Dow, the S & P and the NASDAQ are the only signaling mechanisms that the legacy media pays attention to, and the politicos take their cues from them, in a feedback loop of false information that begets more delusional positive psychology in those same markets. I suspect the sentiment that reigns now is about nothing more than getting through the holiday season without a financial accident.
But this Fed now finds itself in a trap of its own making. Having so interminably yapped about the interest rate hike, the central bank will have to put up or shut up in December. Only the year-final BLS employment figures might give them an out, if the numbers don’t look so phosphorescent. I think the truth is, this phony baloney economy can’t withstand even a measly quarter-point benchmark interest rate hike. For one thing, it would blow up the operating models of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the buyers of home mortgages who are keeping the construction industry on life support, as well as the parallel rackets in securitized auto and student loans. Imagine all the derivatives bets that would go south. In reality, the Fed knows that it will have to shovel more ZIRP money into the debt-saturated maw of a dying financial leviathan. It can do that, of course, and probably will in the coming winter of 2016, but when that time comes, it will have absolutely no credibility left. And the leviathan will be a little closer to heaving up dead on the beach.
The Leviathan
The economic picture manufactured by the national consensus trance has never been more out of touch with reality in my lifetime. And so the questions as to what anyone might do can hardly be addressed. How can I protect my savings? Who do I vote for? How do I think about where my country is going? Incoherence reigns, especially in the circles ruled by those who guard the status quo, which includes the failing legacy news media.
The Federal Reserve has morphed from being a faceless background institution of the most limited purpose to a claque of necromancers and astrologasters, led by one grand vizier, in full public view pretending to steer a gigantic economic vessel that has, in fact, lost its rudder and is drifting into a maelstrom.
For more than a year, the fate of the nation has hung on whether the Fed might raise their benchmark interest rate one quarter of a percent. They talk about it incessantly, and therefore the mob of financial market observers has to chatter about it incessantly, and the chatter itself has appeared to obviate the need for any actual action on the matter. The Fed gets to influence markets without ever having to do anything. And mostly it has worked to produce the false narrative of an advanced economy that is working splendidly well to the advantage of the common good.
This is all occurring against the background of a larger global network of economic relations that is quite clearly breaking apart. The rising tensions between the US, Russia, China, and the Euro Union grew out of monetary mischief “innovated” by our central bank, especially the shenanigans around debt monetization, which have created dangerous distortions in markets, trade, and perceptions of national interest. Nations are rattling sabers at one another and bluster is in the air. The world is bankrupt after thirty years of borrowing from the future to throw a party in the present, and the authorities can’t acknowledge that.
But they can provide the conditions for disguising it, especially in the statistical hall of mirrors that once-upon-a-time produced meaningful signals for the movement of capital. Instead of reality-based choices and decisions, the task at hand for the people in charge has been the ever more baroque elaboration of a Potemkin economic false-front, behind which lies a landscape of ruin scavenged by desperate racketeers. That this racketeering has moved so seamlessly into the once-sacred precincts of medicine and higher ed ought to inform us how desperate and perilous it has become.
The latest installment of the disinformation game was Friday’s employment release from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. It was a “blockbuster,” implying blue skies everywhere from Montauk to Malibu. Except that no one with a remaining shred of critical faculty can be expected to believe it. 80 percent of the new jobs numbers were attributed to the mystical birth-death model, a pseudo-scientific fantasy of hypothetical new business starts and associated hypothetical new hires. Demographically, the most new jobs went to the over-55 age cohort — grocery baggers and Walmart greeters — and the fewest to men 25 to 54 (that bracket substantially lost jobs). The official unemployment rate fell to 5.0 rate, with no meaningful discussion of the huge numbers of discouraged people who have dropped out of the workforce.
But the perception of an economy on full throttle chug sent the stock indexes up. The Dow, the S & P and the NASDAQ are the only signaling mechanisms that the legacy media pays attention to, and the politicos take their cues from them, in a feedback loop of false information that begets more delusional positive psychology in those same markets. I suspect the sentiment that reigns now is about nothing more than getting through the holiday season without a financial accident.
But this Fed now finds itself in a trap of its own making. Having so interminably yapped about the interest rate hike, the central bank will have to put up or shut up in December. Only the year-final BLS employment figures might give them an out, if the numbers don’t look so phosphorescent. I think the truth is, this phony baloney economy can’t withstand even a measly quarter-point benchmark interest rate hike. For one thing, it would blow up the operating models of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the buyers of home mortgages who are keeping the construction industry on life support, as well as the parallel rackets in securitized auto and student loans. Imagine all the derivatives bets that would go south. In reality, the Fed knows that it will have to shovel more ZIRP money into the debt-saturated maw of a dying financial leviathan. It can do that, of course, and probably will in the coming winter of 2016, but when that time comes, it will have absolutely no credibility left. And the leviathan will be a little closer to heaving up dead on the beach.
Saturday, November 7, 2015
SC131-3
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_most_brazen_corporate_power_grab_in_american_history_20151106
The Most Brazen Corporate Power Grab in American History
The release Thursday of the 5,544-page text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership—a trade and investment agreement involving 12 countries comprising nearly 40 percent of global output—confirms what even its most apocalyptic critics feared.
“The TPP, along with the WTO [World Trade Organization] and NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement], is the most brazen corporate power grab in American history,” Ralph Nader told me when I reached him by phone in Washington, D.C. “It allows corporations to bypass our three branches of government to impose enforceable sanctions by secret tribunals. These tribunals can declare our labor, consumer and environmental protections [to be] unlawful, non-tariff barriers subject to fines for noncompliance. The TPP establishes a transnational, autocratic system of enforceable governance in defiance of our domestic laws.”
The TPP is part of a triad of trade agreements that includes the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA). TiSA, by calling for the privatization of all public services, is a mortal threat to the viability of the U.S. Postal Service, public education and other government-run enterprises and utilities; together these operations make up 80 percent of the U.S. economy. The TTIP and TiSA are still in the negotiation phase. They will follow on the heels of the TPP and are likely to go before Congress in 2017.
These three agreements solidify the creeping corporate coup d’état along with the final evisceration of national sovereignty. Citizens will be forced to give up control of their destiny and will be stripped of the ability to protect themselves from corporate predators, safeguard the ecosystem and find redress and justice in our now anemic and often dysfunctional democratic institutions. The agreements—filled with jargon, convoluted technical, trade and financial terms, legalese, fine print and obtuse phrasing—can be summed up in two words: corporate enslavement.
The TPP removes legislative authority from Congress and the White House on a range of issues. Judicial power is often surrendered to three-person trade tribunals in which only corporations are permitted to sue. Workers, environmental and advocacy groups and labor unions are blocked from seeking redress in the proposed tribunals. The rights of corporations become sacrosanct. The rights of citizens are abolished.
The Sierra Club issued a statement after the release of the TPP text saying that the “deal is rife with polluter giveaways that would undermine decades of environmental progress, threaten our climate, and fail to adequately protect wildlife because big polluters helped write the deal.”
If there is no sustained popular uprising to prevent the passage of the TPP in Congress this spring we will be shackled by corporate power. Wages will decline. Working conditions will deteriorate. Unemployment will rise. Our few remaining rights will be revoked. The assault on the ecosystem will be accelerated. Banks and global speculation will be beyond oversight or control. Food safety standards and regulations will be jettisoned. Public services ranging from Medicare and Medicaid to the post office and public education will be abolished or dramatically slashed and taken over by for-profit corporations. Prices for basic commodities, including pharmaceuticals, will skyrocket. Social assistance programs will be drastically scaled back or terminated. And countries that have public health care systems, such as Canada and Australia, that are in the agreement will probably see their public health systems collapse under corporate assault. Corporations will be empowered to hold a wide variety of patents, including over plants and animals, turning basic necessities and the natural world into marketable products. And, just to make sure corporations extract every pound of flesh, any public law interpreted by corporations as impeding projected profit, even a law designed to protect the environment or consumers, will be subject to challenge in an entity called the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) section. The ISDS, bolstered and expanded under the TPP, will see corporations paid massive sums in compensation from offending governments for impeding their “right” to further swell their bank accounts. Corporate profit effectively will replace the common good.
Given the bankruptcy of our political class—including amoral politicians such as Hillary Clinton, who is denouncing the TPP during the presidential campaign but whose unwavering service to corporate capitalism assures her fealty to her corporate backers—the trade agreement has a good chance of becoming law. And because the Obama administration won fast-track authority, a tactic designed by the Nixon administration to subvert democratic debate, President Obama will be able to sign the agreement before it goes to Congress.
The TPP, because of fast track, bypasses the normal legislative process of public discussion and consideration by congressional committees. The House and the Senate, which have to vote on the TPP bill within 90 days of when it is sent to Congress, are prohibited by the fast-track provision from adding floor amendments or holding more than 20 hours of floor debate. Congress cannot raise concerns about the effects of the TPP on the environment. It can only vote yes or no. It is powerless to modify or change one word.
There will be a mass mobilization Nov. 14 through 18 in Washington to begin the push to block the TPP. Rising up to stop the TPP is a far, far better investment of our time and energy than engaging in the empty political theater that passes for a presidential campaign.
“The TPP creates a web of corporate laws that will dominate the global economy,” attorney Kevin Zeese of the group Popular Resistance, which has mounted a long fight against the trade agreement, told me from Baltimore by telephone. “It is a global corporate coup d’état. Corporations will become more powerful than countries. Corporations will force democratic systems to serve their interests. Civil courts around the world will be replaced with corporate courts or so-called trade tribunals. This is a massive expansion that builds on the worst of NAFTA rather than what Barack Obama promised, which was to get rid of the worst aspects of NAFTA.”
The agreement is the product of six years of work by global capitalists from banks, insurance companies, Goldman Sachs, Monsanto and other corporations.
“It was written by them [the corporations], it is for them and it will serve them,” Zeese said of the TPP. “It will hurt domestic businesses and small businesses. The buy-American provisions will disappear. Local communities will not be allowed to build buy-local campaigns. The thrust of the agreement is the privatization and commodification of everything. The agreement has built within it a deep antipathy to state-supported or state-owned enterprises. It gives away what is left of our democracy to the World Trade Organization.”
The economist David Rosnick, in a report on the TPP by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), estimated that under the trade agreement only the top 10 percent of U.S. workers would see their wages increase. Rosnick wrote that the real wages of middle-income U.S. workers (from the 35th percentile to the 80th percentile) would decline under the TPP. NAFTA, contributing to a decline in manufacturing jobs (now only 9 percent of the economy), has forced workers into lower-paying service jobs and resulted in a decline in real wages of between 12 and 17 percent. The TPP would only accelerate this process, Rosnick concluded.
“This is a continuation of the global race to the bottom,” Dr. Margaret Flowers, also from Popular Resistance and a candidate for the U.S. Senate, said from Baltimore in a telephone conversation with me. “Corporations are free to move to countries that have the lowest labor standards. This drives down high labor standards here. It means a decimation of industries and unions. It means an accelerated race to the bottom, which we must rise up to stop.”
“In Malaysia one-third of tech workers are essentially slaves,” Zeese said. “In Vietnam the minimum wage is 35 cents an hour. Once these countries are part of the trade agreement U.S. workers are put in a very difficult position.”
Fifty-one percent of working Americans now make less than $30,000 a year, a new study by the Social Security Administration reported. Forty percent are making less than $20,000 a year. The federal government considers a family of four living on an income of less than $24,250 to be in poverty.
“Half of American workers earn essentially the poverty level,” Zeese said. “This agreement only accelerates this trend. I don’t see how American workers are going to cope.”
The assault on the American workforce by NAFTA—which was established under the Clinton administration in 1994 and which at the time promised creation of 200,000 net jobs a year in the United States—has been devastating. NAFTA has led to a $181 billion trade deficit with Mexico and Canada and the loss of at least 1 million U.S. jobs, according to a report by Public Citizen. The flooding of the Mexican market with cheap corn by U.S. agro-businesses drove down the price of Mexican corn and saw 1 million to 3 million poor Mexican farmers go bankrupt and lose their small farms. Many of them crossed the border into the United States in a desperate effort to find work.
“Obama has misled the public throughout this process,” Dr. Flowers said. “He claimed that environmental groups were supportive of the agreement because it provided environmental protections, and this has now been proven false. He told us that it would create 650,000 jobs, and this has now been proven false. He calls this a 21st century trade agreement, but it actually rolls back progress made in Bush-era trade agreements. The most recent model of a 21st century trade agreement is the Korean free trade agreement. That was supposed to create 140,000 U.S. jobs. But what we saw within a couple years was a loss of about 70,000 jobs and a larger trade deficit with Korea. This agreement [the TPP] is sold to us with the same deceits that were used to sell us NAFTA and other trade agreements.”
The agreement, in essence, becomes global law. Any agreements over carbon emissions by countries made through the United Nations are effectively rendered null and void by the TPP.
“Trade agreements are binding,” Flowers said. “They supersede any of the nonbinding agreements made by the United Nations Climate Change Conference that might come out of Paris.”
There is more than enough evidence from past trade agreements to indicate where the TPP—often called “NAFTA on steroids”—will lead. It is part of the inexorable march by corporations to wrest from us the ability to use government to defend the public and to build social and political organizations that promote the common good. Our corporate masters seek to turn the natural world and human beings into malleable commodities that will be used and exploited until exhaustion or collapse. Trade agreements are the tools being used to achieve this subjugation. The only response left is open, sustained and defiant popular revolt.
The Most Brazen Corporate Power Grab in American History
The release Thursday of the 5,544-page text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership—a trade and investment agreement involving 12 countries comprising nearly 40 percent of global output—confirms what even its most apocalyptic critics feared.
“The TPP, along with the WTO [World Trade Organization] and NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement], is the most brazen corporate power grab in American history,” Ralph Nader told me when I reached him by phone in Washington, D.C. “It allows corporations to bypass our three branches of government to impose enforceable sanctions by secret tribunals. These tribunals can declare our labor, consumer and environmental protections [to be] unlawful, non-tariff barriers subject to fines for noncompliance. The TPP establishes a transnational, autocratic system of enforceable governance in defiance of our domestic laws.”
The TPP is part of a triad of trade agreements that includes the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA). TiSA, by calling for the privatization of all public services, is a mortal threat to the viability of the U.S. Postal Service, public education and other government-run enterprises and utilities; together these operations make up 80 percent of the U.S. economy. The TTIP and TiSA are still in the negotiation phase. They will follow on the heels of the TPP and are likely to go before Congress in 2017.
These three agreements solidify the creeping corporate coup d’état along with the final evisceration of national sovereignty. Citizens will be forced to give up control of their destiny and will be stripped of the ability to protect themselves from corporate predators, safeguard the ecosystem and find redress and justice in our now anemic and often dysfunctional democratic institutions. The agreements—filled with jargon, convoluted technical, trade and financial terms, legalese, fine print and obtuse phrasing—can be summed up in two words: corporate enslavement.
The TPP removes legislative authority from Congress and the White House on a range of issues. Judicial power is often surrendered to three-person trade tribunals in which only corporations are permitted to sue. Workers, environmental and advocacy groups and labor unions are blocked from seeking redress in the proposed tribunals. The rights of corporations become sacrosanct. The rights of citizens are abolished.
The Sierra Club issued a statement after the release of the TPP text saying that the “deal is rife with polluter giveaways that would undermine decades of environmental progress, threaten our climate, and fail to adequately protect wildlife because big polluters helped write the deal.”
If there is no sustained popular uprising to prevent the passage of the TPP in Congress this spring we will be shackled by corporate power. Wages will decline. Working conditions will deteriorate. Unemployment will rise. Our few remaining rights will be revoked. The assault on the ecosystem will be accelerated. Banks and global speculation will be beyond oversight or control. Food safety standards and regulations will be jettisoned. Public services ranging from Medicare and Medicaid to the post office and public education will be abolished or dramatically slashed and taken over by for-profit corporations. Prices for basic commodities, including pharmaceuticals, will skyrocket. Social assistance programs will be drastically scaled back or terminated. And countries that have public health care systems, such as Canada and Australia, that are in the agreement will probably see their public health systems collapse under corporate assault. Corporations will be empowered to hold a wide variety of patents, including over plants and animals, turning basic necessities and the natural world into marketable products. And, just to make sure corporations extract every pound of flesh, any public law interpreted by corporations as impeding projected profit, even a law designed to protect the environment or consumers, will be subject to challenge in an entity called the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) section. The ISDS, bolstered and expanded under the TPP, will see corporations paid massive sums in compensation from offending governments for impeding their “right” to further swell their bank accounts. Corporate profit effectively will replace the common good.
Given the bankruptcy of our political class—including amoral politicians such as Hillary Clinton, who is denouncing the TPP during the presidential campaign but whose unwavering service to corporate capitalism assures her fealty to her corporate backers—the trade agreement has a good chance of becoming law. And because the Obama administration won fast-track authority, a tactic designed by the Nixon administration to subvert democratic debate, President Obama will be able to sign the agreement before it goes to Congress.
The TPP, because of fast track, bypasses the normal legislative process of public discussion and consideration by congressional committees. The House and the Senate, which have to vote on the TPP bill within 90 days of when it is sent to Congress, are prohibited by the fast-track provision from adding floor amendments or holding more than 20 hours of floor debate. Congress cannot raise concerns about the effects of the TPP on the environment. It can only vote yes or no. It is powerless to modify or change one word.
There will be a mass mobilization Nov. 14 through 18 in Washington to begin the push to block the TPP. Rising up to stop the TPP is a far, far better investment of our time and energy than engaging in the empty political theater that passes for a presidential campaign.
“The TPP creates a web of corporate laws that will dominate the global economy,” attorney Kevin Zeese of the group Popular Resistance, which has mounted a long fight against the trade agreement, told me from Baltimore by telephone. “It is a global corporate coup d’état. Corporations will become more powerful than countries. Corporations will force democratic systems to serve their interests. Civil courts around the world will be replaced with corporate courts or so-called trade tribunals. This is a massive expansion that builds on the worst of NAFTA rather than what Barack Obama promised, which was to get rid of the worst aspects of NAFTA.”
The agreement is the product of six years of work by global capitalists from banks, insurance companies, Goldman Sachs, Monsanto and other corporations.
“It was written by them [the corporations], it is for them and it will serve them,” Zeese said of the TPP. “It will hurt domestic businesses and small businesses. The buy-American provisions will disappear. Local communities will not be allowed to build buy-local campaigns. The thrust of the agreement is the privatization and commodification of everything. The agreement has built within it a deep antipathy to state-supported or state-owned enterprises. It gives away what is left of our democracy to the World Trade Organization.”
The economist David Rosnick, in a report on the TPP by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), estimated that under the trade agreement only the top 10 percent of U.S. workers would see their wages increase. Rosnick wrote that the real wages of middle-income U.S. workers (from the 35th percentile to the 80th percentile) would decline under the TPP. NAFTA, contributing to a decline in manufacturing jobs (now only 9 percent of the economy), has forced workers into lower-paying service jobs and resulted in a decline in real wages of between 12 and 17 percent. The TPP would only accelerate this process, Rosnick concluded.
“This is a continuation of the global race to the bottom,” Dr. Margaret Flowers, also from Popular Resistance and a candidate for the U.S. Senate, said from Baltimore in a telephone conversation with me. “Corporations are free to move to countries that have the lowest labor standards. This drives down high labor standards here. It means a decimation of industries and unions. It means an accelerated race to the bottom, which we must rise up to stop.”
“In Malaysia one-third of tech workers are essentially slaves,” Zeese said. “In Vietnam the minimum wage is 35 cents an hour. Once these countries are part of the trade agreement U.S. workers are put in a very difficult position.”
Fifty-one percent of working Americans now make less than $30,000 a year, a new study by the Social Security Administration reported. Forty percent are making less than $20,000 a year. The federal government considers a family of four living on an income of less than $24,250 to be in poverty.
“Half of American workers earn essentially the poverty level,” Zeese said. “This agreement only accelerates this trend. I don’t see how American workers are going to cope.”
The assault on the American workforce by NAFTA—which was established under the Clinton administration in 1994 and which at the time promised creation of 200,000 net jobs a year in the United States—has been devastating. NAFTA has led to a $181 billion trade deficit with Mexico and Canada and the loss of at least 1 million U.S. jobs, according to a report by Public Citizen. The flooding of the Mexican market with cheap corn by U.S. agro-businesses drove down the price of Mexican corn and saw 1 million to 3 million poor Mexican farmers go bankrupt and lose their small farms. Many of them crossed the border into the United States in a desperate effort to find work.
“Obama has misled the public throughout this process,” Dr. Flowers said. “He claimed that environmental groups were supportive of the agreement because it provided environmental protections, and this has now been proven false. He told us that it would create 650,000 jobs, and this has now been proven false. He calls this a 21st century trade agreement, but it actually rolls back progress made in Bush-era trade agreements. The most recent model of a 21st century trade agreement is the Korean free trade agreement. That was supposed to create 140,000 U.S. jobs. But what we saw within a couple years was a loss of about 70,000 jobs and a larger trade deficit with Korea. This agreement [the TPP] is sold to us with the same deceits that were used to sell us NAFTA and other trade agreements.”
The agreement, in essence, becomes global law. Any agreements over carbon emissions by countries made through the United Nations are effectively rendered null and void by the TPP.
“Trade agreements are binding,” Flowers said. “They supersede any of the nonbinding agreements made by the United Nations Climate Change Conference that might come out of Paris.”
There is more than enough evidence from past trade agreements to indicate where the TPP—often called “NAFTA on steroids”—will lead. It is part of the inexorable march by corporations to wrest from us the ability to use government to defend the public and to build social and political organizations that promote the common good. Our corporate masters seek to turn the natural world and human beings into malleable commodities that will be used and exploited until exhaustion or collapse. Trade agreements are the tools being used to achieve this subjugation. The only response left is open, sustained and defiant popular revolt.
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