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http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/

How Great the Fall Can Be

While I type these words, an old Supertramp CD is playing in the next room. Those of my readers who belong to the same slice of an American generation I do will likely remember the words Roger Hodgson is singing just now, the opening line from “Fool’s Overture”:

“History recalls how great the fall can be...”

It’s an apposite quote for a troubled time.

Over the last year or so, in and among the other issues I’ve tried to discuss in this blog, the US presidential campaign has gotten a certain amount of air time. Some of the conversations that resulted generated a good deal more heat than light, but then that’s been true across the board since Donald Trump overturned the established certainties of American political life and launched himself and the nation on an improbable trajectory toward our current situation. Though the diatribes I fielded from various sides were more than occasionally tiresome, I don’t regret making the election a theme for discussion here, as it offered a close-up view of issues I’ve been covering for years now.

A while back on this blog, for example, I spent more than a year sketching out the process by which civilizations fall and dark ages begin, with an eye toward the next five centuries of North American history—a conversation that turned into my book Dark Age America. Among the historical constants I discussed in the posts and the book was the way that governing elites and their affluent supporters stop adapting their policies to changing political and economic conditions, and demand instead that political and economic conditions should conform to their preferred policies. That’s all over today’s headlines, as the governing elites of the industrial world cower before the furious backlash sparked by their rigid commitment to the failed neoliberal nostrums of global trade and open borders.

Another theme I discussed in the same posts and book was the way that science and culture in a civilization in decline become so closely identified with the interests of the governing elite that the backlash against the failed policies of the elite inevitably becomes a backlash against science and culture as well. We’ve got plenty of that in the headlines as well. According to recent news stories, for example, the Trump administration plans to scrap the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and get rid of all the federal offices that study anthropogenic climate change.

Their termination with extreme prejudice isn’t simply a matter of pruning the federal bureaucracy, though that’s a factor. All these organizations display various forms of the identification of science and culture with elite values just discussed, and their dismantling will be greeted by cheers from a great many people outside the circles of the affluent, who have had more than their fill of patronizing lectures from their self-proclaimed betters in recent years. Will many worthwhile programs be lost, along with a great deal that’s less than worthwhile? Of course. That’s a normal feature of the twilight years of a civilization.

A couple of years before the sequence of posts on dark age America, for that matter, I did another series on the end of US global hegemony and the rough road down from empire. That sequence also turned into a book, Decline and Fall. In the posts and the book, I pointed out that one of the constants of the history of democratic societies—actual democracies, warts and all, as distinct from the imaginary “real democracy” that exists solely in rhetoric—is a regular cycle of concentration and diffusion of power. The ancient Greek historian Polybius, who worked it out in detail, called it anacyclosis.

A lot can be said about anacyclosis, but the detail that’s relevant just now is the crisis phase, when power has become so gridlocked among competing power centers that it becomes impossible for the system to break out of even the most hopelessly counterproductive policies. That ends, according to Polybius, when a charismatic demagogue gets into power, overturns the existing political order, and sets in motion a general free-for-all in which old alliances shatter and improbable new ones take shape. Does that sound familiar? In a week when union leaders emerged beaming from a meeting with the new president, while Democrats are still stoutly defending the integrity of the CIA, it should.

For that matter, one of the central themes of the sequence of posts and the book was the necessity of stepping back from global commitments that the United States can no longer afford to maintain. That’s happening, too, though it’s being covered up just now by a great deal of Trumped-up bluster about a massive naval expansion. (If we do get a 350-ship navy in the next decade, I’d be willing to bet that a lot of those ships will turn out to be inexpensive corvettes, like the ones the Russians have been using so efficiently as cruise missile platforms on the Caspian Sea.) European politicians are squawking at top volume about the importance of NATO, which means in practice the continuation of a scheme that allows most European countries to push most of the costs of their own defense onto the United States, but the new administration doesn’t seem to be buying it.

Mind you, I’m far from enthusiastic about the remilitarization of Europe. Outside the brief interval of enforced peace following the Second World War, Europe has been a boiling cauldron of warfare since its modern cultures began to emerge out of the chaos of the post-Roman dark ages. Most of the world’s most devastating wars have been European in origin, and of course it escapes no one’s attention in the rest of the world that it was from Europe that hordes of invaders and colonizers swept over the entire planet from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, as often as not leaving total devastation in their wake. In histories written a thousand years from now, Europeans will have the same sort of reputation that Huns and Mongols have today—and it’s only in the fond fantasies of those who think history has a direction that those days are definitely over.

It can’t be helped, though, for the fact of the matter is that the United States can no longer afford to foot the bill for the defense of other countries. Behind a facade of hallucinatory paper wealth, our nation is effectively bankrupt. The only thing that enables us to pay our debts now is the status of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency—this allows the Treasury to issue debt at a breakneck pace and never have to worry about the cost—and that status is trickling away as one country after another signs bilateral deals to facilitate trading in other currencies. Sooner or later, probably in the next two decades, the United States will be forced to default on its national debt, the way Russia did in 1998. Before that happens, a great many currently overvalued corporations that support themselves by way of frantic borrowing will have done the same thing by way of the bankruptcy courts, and of course the vast majority of America’s immense consumer debt will have to be discharged the same way.

That means, among other things, that the extravagant lifestyles available to affluent Americans in recent decades will be going away forever in the not too distant future. That’s another point I made in Decline and Fall and the series of posts that became raw material for it. During the era of US global hegemony, the five per cent of our species who lived in the United States disposed of a third of the world’s raw materials and manufactured products and a quarter of its total energy production. That disproportionate share came to us via unbalanced patterns of exchange hardwired into the global economy, and enforced at gunpoint by the military garrisons we keep in more than a hundred countries worldwide. The ballooning US government, corporate, and consumer debt load of recent years was an attempt to keep those imbalances in place even as their basis in geopolitics trickled away. Now the dance is ending and the piper has to be paid.

There’s a certain bleak amusement to be had from the fact that one of the central themes of this blog not that many years back—“Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush”—has already passed its pull date. The rush, in case you haven’t noticed, is already under way. The fraction of US adults of working age who are permanently outside the work force is at an all-time high; so is the fraction of young adults who are living with their parents because they can’t afford to start households of their own. There’s good reason to think that the new administration’s trade and immigration policies may succeed in driving both those figures down, at least for a while, but of course there’ll a price to be paid for that—and those industries and social classes that have profited most from the policies of the last thirty years, and threw their political and financial weight behind the Clinton campaign, will be first in line to pay it. Vae victis!*

More generally, the broader landscape of ideas this blog has tried to explore since its early days remains what it is. The Earth’s economically accessible reserves of fossil carbon dwindle day by day; with each year that passes, on average, the amount of coal, oil, and natural gas burnt exceeds the amount that’s discovered by a wider margin; the current temporary glut in the oil markets is waning so fast that analysts are predicting the next price spike as soon as 2018. Talk of transitioning away from fossil fuels to renewable energy, on the one hand, or nuclear power on the other, remains talk—I encourage anyone who doubts this to look up the amount of fossil fuels burnt each year over the last two decades and see if they can find a noticeable decrease in global fossil fuel consumption to match the much-ballyhooed buildout of solar and wind power.

The industrial world remains shackled to fossil fuels for most of its energy and all of its transportation fuel, for the simple reason that no other energy source in this end of the known universe provides the abundant, concentrated, and fungible energy supply that’s needed to keep our current lifestyles going. There was always an alternative—deliberately downshifting out of the embarrassing extravagance that counts for normal lifestyles in the industrial world these days, accepting more restricted ways of living in order to leave a better world for our descendants—but not enough people were willing to accept that alternative to make a difference while there was still a chance.

Meanwhile the other jaw of the vise that’s tightening around the future is becoming increasingly visible just now. In the Arctic, freak weather systems has sucked warm air up from lower latitudes and brought the normal process of winter ice formation to a standstill. In the Antarctic, the Larsen C ice shelf, until a few years ago considered immovable by most glaciologists, is in the process of loosing an ice sheet the size of Delaware into the Antarctic Ocean. I look out my window and see warm rain falling; here in the north central Appalachians, in January, it’s been most of a month since the thermometer last dipped below freezing. The new administration has committed itself to do nothing about anthropogenic climate change, but then, despite plenty of talk, the Obama administration didn’t do anything about it either.

There’s good reason for that, too. The only way to stop anthropogenic climate change in its tracks is to stop putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and doing that would require the world to ground its airlines, turn its highways over to bicycles and oxcarts, and shut down every other technology that won’t be economically viable if it has to depend on the diffuse intermittent energy available from renewable sources. Does the political will to embrace such changes exist? Since I know of precisely three climate change scientists, out of thousands, who take their own data seriously enough to cut their carbon footprint by giving up air travel, it’s safe to say that the answer is “no.”

So, basically, we’re in for it.

The thing that fascinates me is that this is something I’ve been saying for the whole time this blog has been appearing. The window of opportunity for making a smooth transition to a renewable future slammed shut in the early 1980s, when majorities across the industrial world turned their backs on the previous decade’s promising initiatives toward sustainability, and bought into the triumphalist rhetoric of the Reagan-Thatcher counterrevolution instead. Since then, year after weary year, most of the green movement—with noble exceptions—has been long on talk and short on action. Excuses for doing nothing and justifications for clinging to lifestyles the planet cannot support have proliferated like rabbits on Viagra, and most of the people who talked about sustainability at all took it for granted that the time to change course was still somewhere conveniently off in the future. That guaranteed that the chance to change course would slide steadily further back into the past.

There was another detail of the post-Seventies sustainability scene that deserves discussion, though, because it’s been displayed with an almost pornographic degree of nakedness in the weeks just past. From the early days of the peak oil movement in the late 1990s on, a remarkably large number of the people who talked eagerly about the looming crisis of our age seemed to think that its consequences would leave them and the people and things they cared about more or less intact. That wasn’t universal by any means; there were always some people who grappled with the hard realities that the end of the fossil fuel age was going to impose on their own lives; but all things considered, there weren’t that many, in comparison to all those who chattered amiably about how comfortable they’d be in their rural doomsteads, lifeboat communities, Transition Towns, et al.

Now, as discussed earlier in this post, we’ve gotten a very modest helping of decline and fall, and people who were enthusiastically discussing the end of the industrial age not that long ago are freaking out six ways from Sunday. If a relatively tame event like the election of an unpopular president can send people into this kind of tailspin, what are they going to do the day their paychecks suddenly turn out to be worth only half as much in terms of goods and services as before—a kind of event that’s already become tolerably common elsewhere, and could quite easily happen in this country as the dollar loses its reserve currency status?

What kinds of meltdowns are we going to get when internet service or modern health care get priced out of reach, or become unavailable at any price? How are they going to cope if the accelerating crisis of legitimacy in this country causes the federal government to implode, the way the government of the Soviet Union did, and suddenly they’re living under cobbled-together regional governments that don’t have the money to pay for basic services? What sort of reaction are we going to see if the US blunders into a sustained domestic insurgency—suicide bombs going off in public places, firefights between insurgent forces and government troops, death squads from both sides rounding up potential opponents and leaving them in unmarked mass graves—or, heaven help us, all-out civil war?

This is what the decline and fall of a civilization looks like. It’s not about sitting in a cozy earth-sheltered home under a roof loaded with solar panels, living some close approximation of a modern industrial lifestyle, while the rest of the world slides meekly down the chute toward history’s compost bin, leaving you and yours untouched. It’s about political chaos—meaning that you won’t get the leaders you want, and you may not be able to count on the rule of law or even the most basic civil liberties. It’s about economic implosion—meaning that your salary will probably go away, your savings almost certainly won’t keep its value, and if you have gold bars hidden in your home, you’d better hope to Hannah that nobody ever finds out, or it’ll be a race between the local government and the local bandits to see which one gets to tie your family up and torture them to death, starting with the children, until somebody breaks and tells them where your stash is located.

It’s about environmental chaos—meaning that you and the people you care about may have many hungry days ahead as crazy weather messes with the harvests, and it’s by no means certain you won’t die early from some tropical microbe that’s been jarred loose from its native habitat to find a new and tasty home in you. It’s about rapid demographic contraction—meaning that you get to have the experience a lot of people in the Rust Belt have already, of walking past one abandoned house after another and remembering the people who used to live there, until they didn’t any more.

More than anything else, it’s about loss. Things that you value—things you think of as important, meaningful, even necessary—are going to go away forever in the years immediately ahead of us, and there will be nothing you can do about it. It really is as simple as that. People who live in an age of decline and fall can’t afford to cultivate a sense of entitlement. Unfortunately, for reasons discussed at some length in one of last month’s posts, the notion that the universe is somehow obliged to give people what they think they deserve is very deeply engrained in American popular culture these days. That’s a very unwise notion to believe right now, and as we slide further down the slope, it could very readily become fatal—and no, by the way, I don’t mean that last adjective in a metaphorical sense.

History recalls how great the fall can be, Roger Hodgson sang. In our case, it’s shaping up to be one for the record books—and those of my readers who have worked themselves up to the screaming point about the comparatively mild events we’ve seen so far may want to save some of their breath for the times ahead when it’s going to get much, much worse.

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http://peakoil.com/enviroment/i-am-so-tired-of-malthus

....A comment under the article,

Davy on Tue, 24th Jan 2017 7:29 am

What we have ahead is the perfect storm of BAD. We have the economy, ecosystem, climate, and our civilization on a negative trend. This at the same time we are deceiving ourselves with techno optimism of an opposite direction. Our status quo is pumping out hopium and delusions of plenty. This type of spectacles is playing out globally. In the past civilizations that exhausted themselves had new places to move to both physical and mental. We are now systematically and ecologically at the end of the line. A planet has been consumed and a vital climate abruptly altered.

Many of us who are honest and see things for what they are feel this. We know this is going to end badly. We try to tell others but it is of little use. The world is on a gradient with momentum. It is lost in false vision of a manifest destiny. The inertia of limits and diminishing returns to problem solving has swung the existential momentum towards collapse. No amount of talk will change that. Our social narrative has not yet adapted even though science is clearly telling us of this end.

We can adapt somewhat. If we adapt we can mitigate some of the pain and suffering. Most of what is coming can’t be solved. There are no solutions to predicaments. We will pay a price for our hubris of knowledge and individual advancement. Market based capitalism and liberal democracy ensured we would take life to the limit and we did. Wow was it wonderful. This is beyond a political fix like we had in earlier generations. This is about natural consequences. We are so far into a hole of insanity that there is little hope at the top. Civilization is completely lost in itself from religion to academia.

Where there is still meaning is you as an individual. Meaning has always resided in the heart. It is when we look for meaning outside ourselves at times like this we get lost. Find a good place and good people. Practice relative sacrifice. Downsize with dignity if the circumstances allow. If you want to preach about this tell those who will listen but you are deluding yourself if you think you can change the world. Begin your hospice of spirit. Get ready for a new reality of death along with decline and decay. This will likely not be a Hollywood freak movie so in addition stop the fantasy. Long periods of tedious uncomfortable boredom will be punctuated by terror and loss. The other option is walk cavalierly into the jaws of death enjoying life while you can as you are. Many have a rich and wonderful life but that will surely not last with all the existential traps ahead for our global civilization. You can’t build a civilization into a global racket with no future and expect anything to shake out good from that. The best we can hope for is a shallow decline and a reasonable die off. This type of circumstance will be difficult to manage by people who have grown weak in spirit and with bodies fat and lazy. We still might have hope to strengthen mind and spirit in the boot camp of reality ahead.

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http://energyskeptic.com/2017/we-all-fall-off-the-net-energy-cliff-in-2022-just-6-years-away/

Civilization goes over the net energy cliff in 2022 — just 6 years away

Oil extraction costs have been shooting up and can only become higher as nearly all of the ‘easy oil’ has been found. Once more energy is used than gained, exploration and production end.
For the average barrel of oil this may happen in 2022 — just 6 years away.

So by 2022 half the oil industry is likely to be out of business. Oil production won’t end — there will still be “above average” barrels produced, but dramatically less and less as we fall over the energy cliff, with the tail end around 2095.

The rapid end of the Oil Age began in 2012 and will be over within some 10 years. By 2022 the number of service stations in the US will have shrunk by 75%.

The critical parameter to consider is not the million barrels produced per day, but the net energy from oil per head of global population, since when this gets too close to nil we must expect complete social breakdown, globally.

We are in an unprecedented situation. As stressed by Tainter, no previous civilization has ever managed to survive the kind of predicament we are in. However, the people living in those civilizations were mostly rural and had a safety net, in that their energy source was 100% solar, photosynthesis for food, fiber and timber – they always could keep going even though it may have been under harsh conditions. We no longer have such a safety net; our entire food systems are almost completely dependent on the net energy from oil that is in the process of dropping to the floor and our food supply systems cannot cope without it.

The Hills Group has models that predicted the price of oil going down before it began in 2014, and several other models all arrive at the same conclusion that the end of the age of oil for most of us ends around 2030 — though really 2022 since 2030 assumes total energy efficiency. If you need a kick in the pants to change your life and location, I can’t imagine a more important document to read (ignore the math, the methods and results in the charts are clear). And besides, it’s good brain exercise to prevent Alzheimer’s)

The Hill’s Group. March 1, 2015. Depletion : A determination for the world’s petroleum reserve. A reserve status report # HC3-433 Version 2

Or for an easier read look at this short summary of Dr. Alister Hamilton’s talk “Brexit, Oil and the World Economy” here, and view the hour video here on YouTube.

Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report ]
Louis Arnoux. July 12, 2016. Some reflections on the Twilight of the Oil Age – part I. cassandralegacy.blogspot.com

Introduction

Since at least the end of 2014 there has been increasing confusions about oil prices, whether so-called “Peak Oil” has already happened, or will happen in the future and when, matters of EROI (or EROEI) values for current energy sources and for alternatives, climate change and the phantasmatic 2oC warming limit, and concerning the feasibility of shifting rapidly to renewables or sustainable sources of energy supply. Overall, it matters a great deal whether a reasonable time horizon to act is say 50 years, i.e. in the main the troubles that we are contemplating are taking place way past 2050, or if we are already in deep trouble and the timeframe to try and extricate ourselves is some 10 years. Answering this kind of question requires paying close attention to system boundary definitions and scrutinizing all matters taken for granted.

It took over 50 years for climatologists to be heard and for politicians to reach the Paris Agreement re climate change (CC) at the close of the COP21, late last year. As you no doubt can gather from the title, I am of the view that we do not have 50 years to agonise about oil. In the three sections of this post I will first briefly take stock of where we are oil wise; I will then consider how this situation calls upon us to do our utter best to extricate ourselves from the current prevailing confusion and think straight about our predicament; and in the third part I will offer a few considerations concerning the near term, the next ten years – how to approach it, what cannot work and what may work, and the urgency to act, without delay.
Part 1 – Alice looking down the end of the barrel

In his recent post, Ugo contrasted the views of the Doomstead Diner‘s readers with that of energy experts regarding the feasibility of replacing fossil fuels within a reasonable timeframe. In my view, the Doomstead’s guests had a much better sense of the situation than the “experts” in Ugo’s survey. To be blunt, along current prevailing lines we are not going to make it. I am not just referring here to “business-as-usual” (BAU) parties holding for dear life onto fossil fuels and nukes. I also include all current efforts at implementing alternatives and combating CC. Here is why.
The energy cost of system replacement

What a great number of energy technology specialists miss are the challenges of whole system replacement – moving from fossil-based to 100% sustainable over a given period of time. Of course, the prior question concerns the necessity or otherwise of whole system replacement. For those of us who have already concluded that this is an urgent necessity, if only due to Climate Change, no need to discuss this matter here. For those who maybe are not yet clear on this point, hopefully, the matter will become a lot clearer a few paragraphs down.

So coming back for now to whole system replacement, the first challenge most remain blind to is the huge energy cost of whole system replacement in terms of both the 1st principle of thermodynamics (i.e. how much net energy is required to develop and deploy a whole alternative system, while the old one has to be kept going and be progressively replaced) and also concerning the 2nd principle (i.e. the waste heat involved in the whole system substitution process). The implied issues are to figure out first how much total fossil primary energy is required by such a shift, in addition to what is required for ongoing BAU business and until such a time when any sustainable alternative has managed to become self-sustaining, and second to ascertain where this additional fossil energy may come from.
The end of the Oil Age is now

If we had a whole century ahead of us to transition, it would be comparatively easy. Unfortunately, we no longer have that leisure since the second key challenge is the remaining timeframe for whole system replacement. What most people miss is that the rapid end of the Oil Age began in 2012 and will be over within some 10 years. To the best of my knowledge, the most advanced material in this matter is the thermodynamic analysis of the oil industry taken as a whole system (OI) produced by The Hill’s Group (THG) over the last two years or so (http://www.thehillsgroup.org).

THG are seasoned US oil industry engineers led by B.W. Hill. I find its analysis elegant and rock hard. For example, one of its outputs concerns oil prices. Over a 56 year time period, its correlation factor with historical data is 0.995. In consequence, they began to warn in 2013 about the oil price crash that began late 2014 (see: http://www.thehillsgroup.org/depletion2_022.htm). In what follows I rely on THG’s report and my own work.

Three figures summarize the situation we are in rather well, in my view.

Figure 1 – End Game

arnoux-end-game

For purely thermodynamic reasons net energy delivered to the globalized industrial world (GIW) per barrel by the oil industry (OI) is rapidly trending to zero. By net energy we mean here what the OI delivers to the GIW, essentially in the form of transport fuels, after the energy used by the OI for exploration, production, transport, refining and end products delivery have been deducted.

However, things break down well before reaching “ground zero”; i.e. within 10 years the OI as we know it will have disintegrated. Actually, a number of analysts from entities like Deloitte or Chatham House, reading financial tea leaves, are progressively reaching the same kind of conclusions.[1]

The Oil Age is finishing now, not in a slow, smooth, long slide down from “Peak Oil”, but in a rapid fizzling out of net energy. This is now combining with things like climate change and the global debt issues to generate what I call a “Perfect Storm” big enough to bring the GIW to its knees.
In an Alice world

Under the prevailing paradigm, there is no known way to exit from the Perfect Storm within the emerging time constraint (available time has shrunk by one order of magnitude, from 100 to 10 years). This is where I think that Doomstead Diner’s readers are guessing right. Many readers are no doubt familiar with the so-called “Red Queen” effect illustrated in Figure 2 – to have to run fast to stay put, and even faster to be able to move forward. The OI is fully caught in it.

Figure 2 – Stuck on a one track to nowhere

arnoux-red-queen

The top part of Figure 2 highlights that, due to declining net energy per barrel, the OI has to keep running faster and faster (i.e. pumping oil) to keep supplying the GIW with the net energy it requires. What most people miss is that due to that same rapid decline of net energy/barrel towards nil, the OI can’t keep “running” for much more than a few years – e.g. B.W. Hill considers that within 10 years the number of petrol stations in the US will have shrunk by 75%…

What people also neglect, depicted in the bottom part of Figure 2, is what I call the inverse Red Queen effect (1/RQ). Building an alternative whole system takes energy that to a large extent initially has to come from the present fossil-fueled system. If the shift takes place too rapidly, the net energy drain literally kills the existing BAU system.[2] The shorter the transition time the harder is the 1/RQ.

I estimate the limit growth rate for the alternative whole system at 7% growth per year. So growth rates for solar and wind, well above 20% and in some cases over 60%, are not viable globally. However, the kind of growth rates, in the order of 35%, that are required for a very short transition under the Perfect Storm time frame are even less viable. As the last part of Figure 2 suggests, there is a way out by focusing on current huge energy waste, but presently this is the road not taken.
On the way to Olduvai

In my view, given that nearly everything within the GIW requires transport and that said transport is still about 94% dependent on oil-derived fuels, the rapid fizzling out of net energy from oil must be considered as the defining event of the 21st century – it governs the operation of all other energy sources, as well as that of the entire GIW. Therefore the critical parameter to consider is not that absolute amount of oil mined (as even “peakoilers” do), such as Million barrels produced per year, but net energy from oil per head of global population, since when this gets too close to nil we must expect complete social breakdown, globally.

The overall picture, as depicted ion Figure 3, is that of the “Mother of all Senecas” (to use Ugo’s expression). It presents net energy from oil per head of global population.[3] The Olduvai Gorge as a backdrop is a wink to Dr. Richard Duncan’s scenario (he used barrels of oil equivalent which was a mistake) and to stress the dire consequences if we do reach the “bottom of the Gorge” – a kind of “postmodern hunter-gatherer” fate.

Oil has been in use for thousands of year, in limited fashion at locations where it seeped naturally or where small well could be dug out by hand. Oil sands began to be mined industrially in 1745 at Merkwiller-Pechelbronn in north east France (the birthplace of Schlumberger). From such very modest beginnings to a peak in the early 1970s, the climb took over 220 years. The fall back to nil will have taken about 50 years.

The amazing economic growth in the three post WWII decades was actually fueled by a 321% growth in net energy/head. The peak of 18GJ/head in around 1973, was actually in the order of some 40GJ/head for those who actually has access to oil at the time, i.e. the industrialized fraction of the global population.

Figure 3 – The “Mother of all Senecas”

arnoux-peak-net-end-user-energy-1970sIn 2012 the OI began to use more energy per barrel in its own processes (from oil exploration to transport fuel deliveries at the petrol stations) than what it delivers net to the GIW. We are now down below 4GJ/head and dropping fast.

This is what is now actually driving the oil prices: since 2014, through millions of trade transactions (functioning as the “invisible hand” of the markets), the reality is progressively filtering that the GIW can only afford oil prices in proportion to the amount of GDP growth that can be generated by a rapidly shrinking net energy delivered per barrel, which is no longer much. Soon it will be nil. So oil prices are actually on a downtrend towards nil.

To cope, the OI has been cannibalizing itself since 2012. This trend is accelerating but cannot continue for very long. Even mainstream analysts have begun to recognize that the OI is no longer replenishing its reserves. We have entered fire-sale times (as shown by the recent announcements by Saudi Arabia (whose main field, Ghawar, is probably over 90% depleted) to sell part of Aramco and make a rapid shift out of a near 100% dependence on oil and towards “solar”.

Given what Figure 1 to 3 depict, it should be obvious that resuming growth along BAU lines is no longer doable, and that incurring ever more debt that can never be reimbursed is no longer a solution, not even short-term
Part 2 – Inquiring into the appropriateness of the question

Let’s acknowledge it, the situation we are in, is complex. As many commentators like to state, there is still plenty of oil, coal, and gas left “in the ground”. Since 2014, debates have been raging, concerning the assumed “oil glut”, concerning how low oil prices may go down, how high prices may rebound as demand possibly picks up and the “glut” vanishes, and, in the face of all this, what may or may not happen regarding “renewables”. However, my Part 1 data have indicated that most of what’s left in terms of fossil fuels is likely to stay where it is, underground because this is what thermodynamics dictates.

We can now venture a little bit further if we keep firmly in mind that the globalized industrial world (GIW), and by extension all of us, do not “live” on fossil resources but on net energy delivered by the global energy system; and if we also keep in mind that, in this matter, oil-derived transport fuels are the key since, without them, none of the other fossil and nuclear resources can be mobilized and the GIW itself can’t function.

In my experience, most often, when faced with such a broad spectrum of conflicting views, especially involving matters pertaining to physics and the social sciences, the lack of agreement is indicative that the core questions are not well formulated. Physicist David Bohm liked to stress: “In scientific inquiries, a crucial step is to ask the right question. Indeed each question contains presuppositions, largely implicit. If these presuppositions are wrong or confused, the question itself is wrong, in the sense that to try to answer it has no meaning. One has thus to inquire into the appropriateness of the question.”

Here it is important, in terms of system analysis, to differentiate between the global energy industry (GEI) and the GIW. The GEI bears the brunt of thermodynamics directly, and within the GEI, the oil industry (OI) is key since, as seen in Part 1, it is the first to reach the thermodynamics limit of resource extraction and, since it conditions the viability of the GEI’s other components – in their present state and within the remaining timeframe, they can’t survive the OI’s eventual collapse. On the other hand, the GIW is impacted by thermodynamic decline with a lag, in the main because it is buffered by debt – so that by the time the impact of the thermodynamic collapse of the OI becomes undeniable it’s too late to do much about it.

At the micro level, debt can be “good” – e.g. a company borrows to expand and then reimburses its debt, etc… At the macro level, it can be, and has now become, lethal, as the global debt can no longer be reimbursed (I estimate the energy equivalent of current global debt, from states, businesses, and households to be in the order of some 10,700 EJ, while current world energy use is in the order of 554 EJ; it is no longer doable to “mind the gap”).
Crude oil prices are dropping to the floor

Figure 4 – The radar signal for an Oil Pearl Harbor

arnoux-oil-pearl-harbor

In brief, the GIW has been living on ever growing total debt since around the time net energy from oil per head peaked in the early 1970s. The 2007-08 crisis was a warning shot. Since 2012, we have entered the last stage of this sad saga – when the OI began to use more energy within its own production chains than what it delivers to the GIW. From this point onwards retrieving the present financial fiat system is no longer doable.

This 2012 point marked a radical shift in price drivers.[4] Figure 4 combines the analyses of TGH (The Hills Group) and mine. In late 2014 I saw the beginning of the oil price crash as a signal of a radar screen. Being well aware that EROIs for oil and gas combined had already passed below the minimum threshold of 10:1, I understood that this crash was different from previous ones: prices were on their way right down to the floor. I then realized what TGH had anticipated this trend months earlier, that their analysis was robust and was being corroborated by the market there and then.

Until 2012, the determining price driver was the total energy cost incurred by the OI. Until then the GIW could more or less happily sustain the translation of these costs into high oil prices, around or above $100/bbl. This is no longer the case. Since 2012, the determining oil price driver is what the GIW can afford to pay in order to still be able to generate residual GDP growth (on borrowed time) under the sway of a Red Queen that is running out of thermodynamic “breath”. I call the process we are in an “Oil Pearl Harbor”, taking place in a kind of eerie slow motion. This is no longer retrievable. Within roughly ten years the oil industry as we know it will have disintegrated. The GIW is presently defenseless in the face of this threat.
The Oil Fizzle Dragon-King

Figure 5 – The “Energy Hand”

energy-hand-take-5

To illustrate how the GEI works I often compare its energy flows to the five fingers of the one hand: all are necessary and all are linked (Figure 5). Under the Red Queen, the GEI is progressively loosing its “knuckles” one by one like a kind of unseen leprosy – unseen yet because of the debt “veil” that hides the progressive losses and more fundamentally because of what I refer to at the bottom of Figure 5, namely were are in what I call Oil Fizzle Dragon-King.

A Dragon-King (DK) is a statistical concept developed by Didier Sornette of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, and a few others to differentiate high probability and high impact processes and events from Black Swans, i.e. events that are of low probability and high impact. I call it the Oil Fizzle because what is triggering it is the very rapid fizzling out of net energy per barrel. It is a DK, i.e. a high probability, high impact unexpected process, purely because almost none of the decision-making elites is familiar with the thermodynamics of complex systems operating far from equilibrium; nor are they familiar with the actual social workings of the societies they live in. Researchers have been warning about the high likelihood of something like this at least since the works of the Meadows in the early 1970s.[5]

The Oil Fizzle DK is the result of the interaction between this net energy fizzling out, climate change, debt and the full spectrum of ecological and social issues that have been mounting since the early 1970s – as I noted on Figure 1, the Oil Fizzle DK is in the process of whipping up a “Perfect Storm” strong enough to bring the GIW to its knees. The Oil Pearl Harbor marks the Oil Fizzle DK getting into full swing.

To explain this further, with reference to Figure 5, oil represents some 33% of global primary energy use (BP data). Fossil fuels represented some 86% of total primary energy in 2014. However, coal, oil, and gas are not like three boxes neatly set side by side from which energy is supplied magically, as most economists would have it.

In the real world (i.e. outside the world economists live in), energy supply chains form networks, rather complex ones. For example, it takes electricity to produce many products derived from oil, coal, and gas, while electricity is generated substantially from coal and gas, and so on. More to the point, as noted earlier, because 94% of all transport is oil-based, oil stands at the root of the entire, complex, globalized set of energy networks. Coal mining, transport, processing, and use depend substantially on oil-derived transport fuels; ditto for gas.[6] The same applies to nuclear plants. So the thermodynamic collapse of the oil industry, that is now underway, not only is likely to be completed within some 10 years but is also in the process of triggering a falling domino effect (aka an avalanche, or in systemic terms, a self-organising criticality, a SOC).

Presently, and for the foreseeable future, we do not have substitutes for oil derived transport fuels that can be deployed within the required time frame and that would be affordable to the GIW. In other words, the GIW is falling into a thermodynamic trap, right now. As B. W. Hill recently noted, “The world is now spending $2.3 trillion per year more to produce oil than what is received when it is sold. The world is now losing a great deal of money to maintain its dependence on oil.”

In the longer run, the end effect of the Oil Fizzle DK is likely to be an abrupt decline of GHG emissions.

However, the danger I see is that meanwhile the GEI, and most notably the OI, is not going to just “curl up and die”. I think we are in a “die hard” situation. Since 2012, we are already seeing what I call a Big Mad Scramble (BMS) by a wide range of GEI actors that try to keep going while they still can, flying blind into the ground. The eventual outcome is hard to avoid with a GEI operating with only about 12% energy efficiency, i.e. some 88% wasteful current primary energy use. The GIW’s agony is likely to result in a big burst of GHG emissions while net energy fizzles out. The high danger is that the old quip will eventuate on a planetary scale: “the operation was successful but the patient died”… Hence my call for “inquiring into the appropriateness of the question” and for systemic thinking. We are in deep trouble. We can’t afford to get this wrong.
Part 3 – Standing slightly past the edge of the cliff

At least since the early 1970s and the Meadows’ work, we have known that the globalized industrial world (GIW) is on a self-destructive path, aka BAU (Business as usual). We now know that we are living through the tail end of this process, the end of the Oil Age, precipitating what I have called the Oil Fizzle Dragon-King, Seneca style, that is, after a slow, relatively smooth climb (aka “economic growth”) we are at the beginning of an abrupt fall down a thermodynamic cliff.

The chief issue is whole system change. This means thinking in whole systems terms where the thermodynamics of complex systems operating far from equilibrium is the key. Understanding the situation requires moving repeatedly from the particulars, the details, to the whole system, improving our understanding of the whole and from this going back to the particulars, improving our understanding of them, going back to considering the whole, and so on.

Whole system replacement, i.e. going 100% renewable, requires a huge energy embodiment that is not feasible. Having the “Energy Hand” in mind (Figure 5), where does this required energy come from in a context of sharp decline of net energy from oil and the Red Queen effect, and concerning renewable, inverse Red Queen/cannibalization effects?

Solely considering the performances and cost of this or that alternative energy technology won’t suffice. Short of addressing the complexities of whole system replacement, the situation we are in is some kind of “Apocalypse now”. The chief challenge I see is thus how to shift safely, with minimal loss of life (substantial loss of life there will be; this has become unavoidable), from fossil-BAU (and nuclear) …

We currently have some 17 TW of power installed globally (mostly fossil with some nuclear), i.e. about 2.3kW/head, but with some 4 billion people who at best are grossly energy stressed, many who have no access to electricity at all and only limited transport, in a context of an efficiency of global energy systems in the order of 12%.[9]

Going “green” and surviving it (i.e. avoiding the inverse Red Queen effect) means increasing our Energy Hand from 17 TW to 50 TW (as a rough order of magnitude), with efficiencies shifting from 12% to over 80%.

It should be clear that under this predicament something would have to give, i.e. some of us would get even more energy stressed and die, or as the Chinese and Indians have been doing use much more of remaining fossil resources but then this would accelerate global warming and many other nasties.

Whole system replacement (on a “do or die” mode) requires considering whole production chain networks from mining the ores, through making the metals, cement, etc., to making the machines, to using them to produce the stuff we require to go 100% sustainable. Given the very short time window constraint, we can’t afford to get it wrong in terms of how to possibly getting out of there – we have hardly enough time to have one go at it.

Remaining time frame

We no longer have 35 years, (say up to around 2050). We have at best 10 years, not to debate and agonize but to actually do, with the next three years being key. The thermodynamics on this, summarized in Part 1, is rock hard. This time-frame, combined with the Oil Pearl Harbor challenge and the inverse Red Queen constraints, means in my view that none of the current “doings” renewable-wise can cut it.
Weak links

Notwithstanding its apparent power, the GIW is in fact extremely fragile. It embodies a number of very weak links in its networks. I have highlighted the oil issue, an issue that defines the overall time frame for dealing with “Apocalypse now”. In addition to that and to climate change, there are a few other challenges that have been variously put forward by a range of researchers in recent years, such as fresh water availability, massive soil degradation, trace pollutants, degradation of life in oceans (about 99% of life is aquatic), staple food threats (e.g. black stem rust, wheat blast, ground level ozone, etc.), loss of biodiversity and 6th mass extinction, all the way to Joseph Tainter’s work concerning the links between energy flows, power (in TW), complexity and overshoot to collapse.[11]

These weak links are currently in the process of breaking or are about to break, the breaks forming a self-reinforcing avalanche (SOC) or Perfect Storm. All have the same key time-frame of about 10 years as an order of magnitude for acting. All require a fair “whack” of energy as a prerequisite to handling them (the “whack” being a flexible and elastic unit of something substantial that usually one does not have).
Cognitive failure

The “Brexit” saga is perhaps the latest large-scale demonstration of cognitive failure in a very long series. That is to say, the failure on the part of decision-making elites to make use of available knowledge, experience, and expertise to tackle effectively challenges within the time-frame required to do so.

Cognitive failure is probably most blatant, but largely remaining unseen, concerning energy, the Oil Fizzle DK and matters of energy returns on energy investments (EROI or EROEI). What we can observe is a triple failure of BAU, but also of most current “green” alternatives (Figure 7): (1) the BAU development trajectory since the 1950s failed; (2) there has been a failure to take heed of over 40 years of warnings; and (3) there has been a failure to develop viable alternatives.

Figure 8 – The necessity of very high EROIs

With an EROI of 1.1 : 1 at the production well we can pump oil out and look at it…that’s all – there is no spare energy to do anything else with it
1.2 : 1 We can refine crude oil into diesel fuel…and that’s all
1.3 : 1 We can dispatch the diesel to a service station…and that’s all
3 : 1 We can run a truck with it as well as enough spare energy to build and maintain the truck, roads, and bridges…and that’s all
5 : 1 We can put something in the truck and deliver it…and that’s all
8 : 1 We can provide a living to the oil field worker, the refinery worker, the truck driver, and the farmer…and that’s all
10 : 1 You may have minimal health care, some education…and that’s all
20 : 1 You may have the basic set of consumer items such as refrigerators, stoves, radios, TV, a small car…and that’s all
30 : 1 Or higher – you can have a prosperous lifestyle and the spare energy to deal with ecological issues and to invest in a secure energy future

This is expanded from similar attempts by Jessica Lambert et al., to perhaps highlights what sliding down the thermodynamic cliff entails. Charles Hall has shown that a production EROI of 10:1 corresponds roughly to an end-user EROI of 3.3:1 and is the bare minimum for an industrial society to function.[15] In sociological terms, for 10:1 think of North Korea. As shown on Figure 7, currently I know of no alternative, either unconventional fossils based, nuclear or “green” technologies with production EROIs (i.e. equivalent to the well head EROI for oil) above 20:1; most remain below 10:1. I do think it feasible to go back above 30:1, in 100% sustainable fashion, but not along prevalent modes of technology development, social organization, and decision-making.

We are in an unprecedented situation. As stressed by Tainter, no previous civilization has ever managed to survive the kind of predicament we are in. However, the people living in those civilizations were mostly rural and had a safety net, in that their energy source was 100% solar, photosynthesis for food, fiber and timber – they always could keep going even though it may have been under harsh conditions. We no longer have such a safety net; our entire food systems are almost completely dependent on the net energy from oil that is in the process of dropping to the floor and our food supply systems cannot cope without it.

Arnoux responds to readers comments:

It is important to not confuse EROI or EROEI at the well head and for the whole system up to the end-users. The Hill’s Group people have shown that the EROIE as defined by them passed below the critical viability level of 10:1 around 2010 and that along current dynamics by circa 2030 it will be about 6.89:1, by which time no net energy per barrel will reach end-users (assuming there is still an oil industry at this point, which a number of us consider most unlikely, at least not the oil industry as we presently know it). Net energy here means what is available to end-users typically to go from A to B, the energy lost as waste heat (2nd principle) and the energy used by the oil industry having been fully deducted – as such it cannot be directly linked in reverse to evaluate an EROI.

We are considering the whole system, from oil exploration to end-users. The matter is that relative to the early stages in the development of the oil industry, the total energy costs of producing the energy reaching end-users has been increasing steadily barrel after barrel and we are now getting close to a point when no significant energy will reach end-users. We expect that the industry will breakdown well before this critical point is reached.

The idea of collapse remains taboo in numerous circles and understandably is rather unpalatable. However, increasingly the awareness of the dangers appears to be progressing rapidly, all the way notably among very wealthy people who now constitute a booming market segment for underground luxury bunkers where, as the marketing goes, they could survive 5 years without going back to the surface in case of heavy turmoil…

In energy matters inequality is prevalent. Some regions are likely to retain access to residual net energy from oil longer than others and to the detriment of others, and this isn’t shaping up as a nice and smooth affair. Prof Micheal Klare has spoken of a global “30 Year War” (Klare, Michael, 2011, “The New Thirty Years War”, in European Energy Review, 5 September). However, war requires a lot of oil-based energy, so war is likely to accelerate thermodynamic collapse dynamics. For example, in the Middle East a number of researchers have noted the contribution of years of drought and displacement of about 1 million farmers to Syrian cities that has led to the present tragedy. However, few realize that another factor contributing to turmoil in the region is the competition between two sets of pipelines projects and related political and military interests, one focused on Iran and the other on KSA to link those areas to the Mediterranean. It is not possible to read through a crystal ball at the regional level. It is likely that if mistakes can be made and atrocities committed, they will take place… All in all, however, I tend to agree with B. W. Hill that globally the tail end of the Oil Fizzle process is most unlikely to extend beyond 2030.

You ask “how are they to be convinced to abandon their investments prior to catastrophic collapse?” It’s clear to me that they are not going to be convinced and there is no point in trying to and above all not time left to do so. I have come to think that those who cling to BAU for dear life do not have much prospects to last long simply because they are no longer within a viable thermodynamic space. On the other hand there are millions currently innovating and doing their utter best to stay or come back within such a space. They do so mostly flying blind, mostly without enquiring into the appropriateness of the questions they ask, which makes their life a lot harder and riskier. As a result many will end up outside the viable space and vanish, however, given the numbers, I think that statistically quite a number will manage to live within that space and evolve new ways, probably enough for one or more new kind(s) of civilization(s).

For over a century the ratio of gold to oil has remained in a narrow range of 1g to 6g of gold per barrel of sweet crude – gold being an age old monetary means that goes by weight and is not subject to inflation and other vagaries it can be used as a fixed metric not amenable to much manipulations (as fiat currencies and price indices are). This ratio is presently close to 1.04g/bbl. However, as we have seen, the GIW does not “live” on crude but on net energy from crude, essentially in the form of transport fuels. Currently the net energy that reaches end-users is about 16% of the gross energy in an average barrel of sweet crude (it was about 70% in 1920). This gives a present shadow price of about US$277/bbl, a highly unpalatable figure for the GIW’s operations (or 6.5g of gold/bbl). Of course, as net energy keeps dropping, a time will come, very soon, when after a burst the shadow price also drops to the floor (a value of x times zero equals zero). Put in other words, gold and oil have begun to diverge since 2014. All currencies have been dropping against gold since 1971. The stable gold-oil relationship is breaking down because the fundamental was not the crude barrel but the amount of net energy able to “power growth”; since 2012 this is now fizzling out.

I am saying that when 1 barrel of sweet crude is traded at US$44 (actually as I write it’s at about $43 and a bit), the GIW has access to only 16% of the energy it contains, so the net financial impact for the GIW as a whole is yes, $277/bbl equivalent. The GIW can’t make money with the full barrel, only the 16% residual, so it all happens as if it was attempting to “grow” at a basic cost of $277/bbl, which these days is quite a challenge. Even adjusting for inflation, at the time of the 1978-79 crisis (based on BP inflation adjusted price data) with some 56% net energy available to end-users, the shadow price was around US$188/bbl equivalent, and back then the situation was dire. In New Zealand we had carless days… So now at $277/bbl? The main difference I see is that now the GIW lives fully on debt, with central banks “printing money” like there is no tomorrow, which is probably correct – there is no tomorrow for the GIW in this fashion. We are at the stage where thermodynamics comes back home to roost.

In practice, no one but businesses from the oil industry buys oil. End-users buy transport fuels, plastics, etc… Now, in the main transport fuels are used to generate economic activity. No one can generate as much economic activity per barrel now, with only 16% net energy that can be used to do so, as compared to say 1920 when about 70% net energy was available. So after quite a bit of speculation up and down by traders who by and large have not a clue about what is going on, progressively the price of crude adjusts in proportion to the economic activity that can be generated downstream. The globalised industrial world (GIW), taken as a whole, cannot afford to pay more for its fuel than the amount of economic “growth” that it can generate with it, not for a long time any way. The consequence, however, is that the GIW decelerates in proportion, which is what we are observing.

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http://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html

The Protected, Privileged Establishment vs. The Working Class

Meanwhile, back in reality, household income for the bottom 95% has declined while the owners of capital and their privileged, protected servants in the Establishment have gorged themselves on private wealth.

As noted yesterday in The Collapse of the Left, the working class has finally awakened to the Left's betrayal and abandonment of labor in favor of the protected privileges of the elitist Establishment. I also described the Left's Great Con:

To mask the collapse of the Left's economic defense of labor, the Left has substituted social justice movements for economic opportunities and security. This has succeeded brilliantly, as tens of millions of self-described "progressives" now parrot the Great Con that "social justice" campaigns on behalf of marginalized social groups are now the defining feature of Progressive Social Democratic movements.

This diversionary sleight-of-hand embrace of economically neutered "social justice" campaigns masked the fact that social democratic parties everywhere have thrown labor into the churning propellers of globalization, open immigration and neoliberal financial policies--all of which benefit mobile capital, which has engorged itself on the abandonment of labor by the Left.

Meanwhile, the fat-cats of the Left have engorged themselves on capital's largesse in exchange for their treachery. Bill and Hillary Clinton's $200 million in "earnings" come to mind, as do countless other examples of personal aggrandizement by self-proclaimed "defenders" of labor.

But it isn't just the Left's fat-cats who have feathered their own nests while denigrating the Working Class with arrogantly contemptuous scorn: the entire protected, privileged "liberal" elitist Establishment has responded with a very illiberal outrage that their protected, privileged skims and scams might be endangered by an uprising of the loathed and ridiculed Working Class that they reckoned would remain safely cowed and conned.

As noted yesterday, the only moment in recent history in which the Wall Street-cartel-state strongholds of privilege, wealth and power (i.e. owners of capital) felt threatened by political insurrection by disenfranchised labor was The Great Depression of the 1930s.

With the first iteration of global debt-based capitalism in near-collapse (systemic bad debt was not written off, lest the big banks' insolvency be recognized), owners of capital and the political class reluctantly swallowed modest social-democratic reforms that gave labor enough of the pie to stave off revolt / revolution (as noted by Arshad A. on my Facebook thread).

Just as Marx had predicted, this crisis of global-debt-cartel-state capitalism was the result of internal contradictions built into all forms capitalism dominated by capital and the state that protects and serves capital.

Now we face another crisis of the current iteration of global-debt-cartel-state capitalism, also the result of internal contradictions--not just financial, but cultural, energy-based and political contradictions.

The privileged, protected elitist Establishment reckoned the social-welfare programs of the 1930s and the Left's Great Cons would keep the disenfranchised Working Class permanently cowed and conned. If welfare (now called "disability," "crazy money", etc.) and the distractions of "social justice" campaigns didn't keep the Working Class fragmented and powerless, then the ceaseless drumbeat of arrogant dismissal and disdain aimed at any Working Class resistance would do the trick.

Any Working Class individual who recognized that globalization, open immigration and neoliberal financial policies were the propellers dismembering the Working Class economically and disenfranchising the Working Class politically was immediately labeled with the worst that "liberal" privileged, protected elites could spew: you're racist, Luddite, backward, etc.--in other words, you're not a rootless Cosmopolitan who loves your servitude to capital and the state like us.

Since the Left has masked its abandonment and betrayal of the Working Class with "social justice" speech acts, the worst insults the Left can dish out are those that suggest opposition to the Left's social justice campaigns.

Self-identified "Progressives" are fine with the destruction and disenfranchisement of the Working Class, as long as the politically correct speech acts praising the Left's Great Con are being uttered.

The self-serving, privileged, protected "liberal" Establishment is enraged that the Working Class is no longer following the script, i.e. remaining cowed, conned and fragmented. Like every other disenfranchised group, the Working Class has essentially zero choice of representational leadership, as the machinery of governance, finance and the mainstream media are all controlled by the privileged, protected elites of the Establishment.

So it boiled down to: choose more disenfranchisement and cowed servitude to "liberal" Elites, or vote for Trump. There was no other choice, so the Working Class voted for Trump as their only option other than surrender and servitude.

This rejection of their "betters" script has enraged their "betters," who now demand the destruction of their proxy voice (Trump) and their rebellion. The Establishment's war on Trump is beneath the surface also a war against a Working Class that has finally had enough of its arrogant, hubris-soaked, self-serving, privileged, elitist "betters" of the Establishment.

If the Establishment had deigned to offer a radical-Left leader who correctly called out the American carnage that is the Working Class experience of the globalized, open-immigration neoliberalism that has so enriched the owners of capital and their "liberal" apparatchiks, then the Working Class may well have voted for the radical-Left truth-teller.

Alas, the Left ground down any opposition to "we 'earned' $200 million" Hillary Clinton and her corrupt coterie of self-serving elites. Having beaten down, stripmined, insulted, denigrated, scorned and exploited the Working Class (whose "proper role" is to provide cannon fodder for the Elites' neocon Permanent War), the privileged, protected Establishment (like every other elite that suddenly finds its entitled dominance challenged) is in a full-blown fury: how dare the Working Class not accept our self-serving rule! We are entitled to rule! How dare they!

Meanwhile, back in reality, household income for the bottom 95% has declined while the owners of capital and their privileged, protected servants in the Establishment have gorged themselves on private wealth.

Here's what's happened as the Left and its armies of privileged fake-Progressives threw the Working Class overboard in favor of serving capital on the First Class deck:

What will it take to shift the balance of power decisively in favor of labor? My guess is the downward mobility of another 10 or 20 million people who currently reckon themselves "middle class" into the unprotected, disenfranchised ranks of the Working Class will do it.

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http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/revolt_is_the_only_barrier_to_a_fascist_america_20170122

Revolt Is the Only Barrier to a Fascist America

The ruling elites, terrified by the mobilization of the left in the 1960s, or by what [political scientist] Samuel P. Huntington called America’s “excess of democracy,” built counter-institutions to delegitimize and marginalize critics of corporate capitalism and imperialism. They bought the allegiances of the two main political parties. They imposed … obedience to the neoliberal ideology within academia and the press. This campaign, laid out by Lewis Powell in his 1971 memorandum titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” was the blueprint for the creeping corporate coup d’état that 45 years later is complete.

The destruction of democratic institutions, places where the citizen has agency and a voice, is far graver than the ascendancy to the White House of the demagogue Donald Trump. The coup destroyed our two-party system. It destroyed labor unions. It destroyed public education. It destroyed the judiciary. It destroyed the press. It destroyed academia. It destroyed consumer and environmental protection. It destroyed our industrial base. It destroyed communities and cities. And it destroyed the lives of tens of millions of Americans no longer able to find work that provides a living wage, cursed to live in chronic poverty or locked in cages in our monstrous system of mass incarceration.

This coup also destroyed the credibility of liberal democracy. Self-identified liberals such as the Clintons and Barack Obama mouthed the words of liberal democratic values while making war on these values in the service of corporate power. The revolt we see rippling across the country is a revolt not only against a corporate system that has betrayed workers, but also, for many, liberal democracy itself. This is very dangerous. It will allow the radical right under a Trump administration to cement into place an Americanized fascism.

“Ignorance allied with power,” James Baldwin wrote, “is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”

It turns out, 45 years later, that those who truly hate us for our freedoms are not the array of dehumanized enemies cooked up by the war machine—the Vietnamese, Cambodians, Afghans, Iraqis, Iranians or even the Taliban, al-Qaida and ISIS. They are the financiers, bankers, politicians, public intellectuals and pundits, lawyers, journalists and businesspeople cultivated in the elite universities and business schools who sold us the utopian dream of neoliberalism.

We are entering the twilight phase of capitalism. Wealth is no longer created by producing or manufacturing. It is created by manipulating the prices of stocks and commodities and imposing a crippling debt peonage on the public. Our casino capitalism has merged with the gambling industry. The entire system is parasitic. It is designed to prey on the desperate—young men and women burdened by student loans, underpaid workers burdened by credit card debt and mortgages, towns and cities forced to borrow to maintain municipal services.

Casino magnates such as Sheldon Adelson and hedge fund managers such as Robert Mercer add nothing of value to society. They do not generate money but instead redistribute it upwards to the 1 percent. They use lobbyists and campaign contributions to built monopolies—this is how the drug company Mylan raised the price of an “EpiPen,” used to treat allergy reactions, from $57 in 2007 to about $500—and to rewrite laws and regulations. They have given themselves the legal power to carry out a tax boycott, loot the U.S. Treasury, close factories and send the jobs overseas, gut social service programs and impose austerity. They have, at the same time, militarized our police, built the most sophisticated security and surveillance apparatus in human history and used judicial fiat to strip us of our civil liberties. They are ready should we rise up in defiance.

These mandarins are, if we speak in the language of God and country, traitors. They are parasites. Financial speculation in 17th-century England was a crime. Speculators were hanged. The heads of most of [today’s] banks and hedge funds and the executives of large corporations, such as Walmart and Gap, that run sweatshop death traps for impoverished workers overseas deserve prison far more than most of the poor students of color I teach within the prison system, people who never had a fair trial or a chance in life.

When a tiny cabal seizes power—monarchist, communist, fascist or corporate—it creates a mafia economy and a mafia state. Donald Trump is not an anomaly. He is the grotesque visage of a collapsed democracy. Trump and his coterie of billionaires, generals, half-wits, Christian fascists, criminals, racists and deviants play the role of the Snopes clan in some of William Faulkner’s novels. The Snopeses filled the power vacuum of the decayed South and ruthlessly seized control from the degenerated, former slave-holding aristocratic elites. Flem Snopes and his extended family—which includes a killer, a pedophile, a bigamist, an arsonist, a mentally disabled man who copulates with a cow, and a relative who sells tickets to witness the bestiality—are fictional representations of the scum now elevated to the highest level of the federal government. They embody the moral rot unleashed by unfettered capitalism.

“The usual reference to ‘amorality,’ while accurate, is not sufficiently distinctive and by itself does not allow us to place them, as they should be placed, in a historical moment,” the critic Irving Howe wrote of the Snopeses. “Perhaps the most important thing to be said is that they are what comes afterwards: the creatures that emerge from the devastation, with the slime still upon their lips.”

“Let a world collapse, in the South or Russia, and there appear figures of coarse ambition driving their way up from beneath the social bottom, men to whom moral claims are not so much absurd as incomprehensible, sons of bushwhackers or muzhiks drifting in from nowhere and taking over through the sheer outrageousness of their monolithic force,” Howe wrote. “They become presidents of local banks and chairmen of party regional committees, and later, a trifle slicked up, they muscle their way into Congress or the Politburo. Scavengers without inhibition, they need not believe in the crumbling official code of their society; they need only learn to mimic its sounds.”

What comes next, history has shown, will not be pleasant. A corrupt and inept ruling elite, backed by the organs of state security and law enforcement, will unleash a naked kleptocracy. Workers will become serfs. The most benign dissent will be criminalized. The ravaging of the ecosystem propels us towards extinction. Hate talk will call for attacks against Muslims, undocumented workers, African-Americans, feminists, intellectuals, artists and dissidents, all of whom will be scapegoated for the country’s stagnation. Magical thinking will dominate our airwaves and be taught in our public schools. Art and culture will be degraded to nationalist kitsch. All the cultural and intellectual disciplines that allow us to view the world from the perspective of the other, that foster empathy, understanding and compassion, will be replaced by a grotesque and cruel hypermasculinity and hypermilitarism. Those in power will validate racism, bigotry, misogyny and homophobia.

Our only hope now is an unwavering noncooperation with the systems of corporate control. We must rebuild … democratic institutions from the ground up. We must not be seduced into trusting the power elites, including the Democratic Party, whose seven leading candidates to be the next chair of the Democratic National Committee demonstrated the other night at George Washington University that they have no interest in defying corporate power or backing democratic populism. We must also acknowledge our own failures on the left, our elitism, arrogance and refusal to root our politics locally in our communities. Rosa Luxemburg understood that unless we first address the most pressing economic and physical needs of the destitute we will never gain credibility or build a resistance movement. Revolt, she said, is achieved only by building genuine relationships, including with people who do not think like us. Revolt surges up from below, exemplified by the water protectors at Standing Rock.

Politics is a game of fear. Those who do not have the ability to make power elites afraid do not succeed. The movements that opened up the democratic space in America—the abolitionists, suffragists, labor movement, communists, socialists, anarchists and civil rights and labor movements—developed a critical mass and militancy that forced the centers of power to respond. The platitudes about justice, equality and democracy are just that. Only when power is threatened does it react. Appealing to its better nature is useless. It doesn’t have one.

We once had within our capitalist democracy liberal institutions—the press, labor unions, third parties, civic and church groups, public broadcasting, well-funded public universities and a liberal wing of the Democratic Party—that were capable of responding to outside pressure from movements. They did so imperfectly. They provided only enough reforms to save the capitalist system from widespread unrest or, with the breakdown of capitalism in the 1930s, from revolution. They never addressed white supremacy and institutional racism or the cruelty that is endemic to capitalism. But they had the ability to ameliorate the suffering of working men and women. This safety valve no longer works. When reform becomes impossible, revolution becomes inevitable.

The days ahead will be dark and frightening. But as Immanuel Kant reminded us, “if justice perishes, human life on earth has lost its meaning.” We fight for the sacred. We fight for life. It is a fight we must not lose. To be a bystander is to be complicit in radical evil.

Revolt is a political necessity. It is a moral imperative. It is a defense of the sacred. It allows us to live in truth. It alone makes hope possible.

The moment we defy power, we are victorious. The moment we stand alongside the oppressed, and accept being treated like the oppressed, we are victorious. The moment we hold up a flickering light in the darkness for others to see, we are victorious. The moment we thwart the building of a pipeline or a fracking site, we are victorious. And the moment those in power become frightened of us, we are victorious.

I do not know if we can build a better society. I do not even know if we will survive as a species. But I do know these corporate forces have us by the throat. And they have my children by the throat. I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.

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https://kulturcritic.wordpress.com/eminence-front/

The Big Lie

Everybody knows the best lies incorporate an element of the truth, there are however, all kinds of lies. Half-truths, subterfuge, misdirection, flim-flam, propaganda, not to forget Madison Avenue and the old razzle-dazzle. Of course, Americans love the carnival barker pitch, the soft-soap, the softball, just as long as what is being pitched agrees with their existing predilections, prejudices, and desires. Such is the case with capitalism, this system of ruthlessly exploiting the poor working class, all while selling this barbarism as the veritable salvation of mankind. Never mind that 8 men (as reported recently by OXFAM) own more wealth than half of mankind, it is justified by how hard they work and the good that this obscene inequity brings to all the world. Here at home it is said that wealth inequality sees the greatest extreme since before the Great Depression, but it is said to be a question of more training, and a need for greater flexibility on the part of the working class. The “gig” economy as it is called is hailed as the answer for the down-trodden, Uber, contract labor, it is sold as allowing a person to work at their leisure, so to speak.

Let us look at the real picture of American capitalism, people working 2 part-time jobs for close to $7.25 an hour while a scuzzy apartment in a ghetto block infested by crack dealers goes for $600, $800, $1,000 a month depending on the locale. You do the math, add in the cost of a vehicle, insurance, clothing, food, utilities, not a pretty picture. If you want to take a chance drive in your Lexus, Range Rover, or BMW down through these hell-holes, preferably late at night, see what the cop cars see. But then, even were this little missive receiving wide distribution I doubt if very many readers will even do this in broad daylight. But then I have a better suggestion for the faint of heart, drive out to the wealthy gated communities around your town, they’re there, go without invitation, for no reason, see how far you get. You know these communities, they are where the doctors, lawyers, oil executives, insurance executives, people of means live in huge empty houses, but they deserve it, don’t they? They have never hurt anybody, what they do is for the good of society, pillars of the community. Think of their catered parties the next time you hear an ad on the radio asking for money to solve the problem of hunger in America. This phenomenon of the very rich and the very poor is not confined to these shores, oh no, this is a worldwide condition, matter of fact, every person in the Western hemisphere is in the top 25 % of the food chain. We must remember when we hear about poor Americans, poor Mexicans, etc. we are relatively well off compared to the people of Africa, India, and parts of China.

Truth is, Americans want to believe the big lie, it’s easier. Believing in the big lie you feel justified buying your $700 I-phone, who cares if the poor Chinese worker in the high tech sweat shop despaired of his or her life to the point of jumping off the roof?

The Wicked Witch, The Milquetoast, and The Madman

The preceding rant was merely window dressing, setting the stage to discuss the current state of politics in the good old USA, which, if not so tragic would be comical.

The Democratic party put up the most cynical and corrupt candidate one could imagine, and sold her as the salvation of whatever interest group you could think of, leaving aside the baskets and baskets of deplorables. Forgotten was the fact that it was HRC’s husband who signed the Republican sponsored bill legalizing derivative trading, and finalizing the implementation of NAFTA. There is no point detailing the damage done to Mexican farmers and American workers from this agreement, either one understands the game of playing the workers of countries off against each other, or one doesn’t; the IWW understood it 100 years ago.

Up against her highness was the “Socialist” Dear old Uncle Bernie, who never once questioned her complicity in war, coups, and the overthrowing of governments. A little-known fact of all the color-coded revolutions and “reform” movements dotted around the globe during the last decade or so is that before these outbreaks erupted NGO’s such as the NED were busy funding opposition groups who were supposedly sympathetic to the views of the USA. Neither did we hear from either Democratic candidate any suggestion of outlawing futures trading, or of declaring certain industries non-profit by law, oh no, wouldn’t please the Goldman-Sachs crew too awful much. What we had from the Democratic side was collusion to defeat even a mildly socialistic candidate, who will now thunder and roar at the Trumpster about how horrible he is, when he hadn’t the guts to say what needed to be said when he had the spotlight.

So now carrot top is in the Oval Office, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

The bit players in this Kabuki hardly deserve mention, too unwilling to bend their views and opinions to gain the support of the very working class they purport to care about.

The Fallout

No, we will go on as always, bombing, subverting, lying, cheating, and stealing. Our big cities will get uglier, more sirens will sound, guns will go off, things will not get better, they are not supposed to, it’s capitalism and people will ignore it. We will keep our mouths shut for fear of losing our jobs, displeasing our social set, but we will not be honest about it. The political parties will toss out red meat to the crowds, trans this, phobic that, a job to be done, it’s time to move forward, it’s gonna be great, fantastic, fabulous. So…………….

“Come on join the party
Dress to kill
Dress yourself to kill.”

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http://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html

25 Years of Neocon-Neoliberalism: Great for the Top 5%, A Disaster for Everyone Else

It cannot be merely coincidental that the incomes and wealth of the top 5% have pulled away from the stagnating 95% in the 25 years dominated by neocon-neoliberalism.

One unexamined narrative I keep hearing is: "OK, so neocon-neoliberalism was less than ideal, but Trump could be much worse." Let's start by asking: would Syrian civilians agree with this assessment? The basic idea in the "OK, so neocon-neoliberalism was less than ideal, but Trump could be much worse" narrative is that the modest problems created by neocon-neoliberalism will pale next to what Trump will do, implying jackbooted Waffen SS troops will soon be marching through America on Trump's orders.

This narrative is yet another example of American parochialism: since neocon-neoliberalism didn't cause American cities to be bombed and its institutions demolished, it's really not that bad.

Try telling that to the Iraqis, Libyans and Syrians who have been on the receiving end of neocon-neoliberalism policies. The reality is very unpleasant: for those targeted by America's neocon-neoliberalism, nothing worse is imaginable, because the worst has already happened.

The cold reality is America's 25 years of neocon-neoliberalism has been great for the top 5% and an unmitigated disaster for everyone else in the U.S. and the nations it has targeted for intervention.

Those defending the Democratic Party's 16 years of neocon-neoliberalism (Clinton and Obama) and the Republican Party's 8 years of neocon-neoliberalism (Bush) are defending a system that benefited the few at the expense of the many.

Rather than admit the past 25 years have been catastrophic for the bottom 95%, the apologists speak darkly of fantastical visions of a Nazi America as a diversion to the grim truth that they have blindly supported an evil Empire that has stripmined the bottom 95% in America and laid waste to entire nations abroad.

Neoconservatism's malignant spores hatched in the Reagan years, and spread quickly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Stripped to its essence, Neoconservatism is American Exceptionalism turned into a global entitlement: it's our right to intervene anywhere in the world we choose to defend what we perceive as our interests, and it's our right to impose our version of democracy and a market economy on other peoples.

Self-interest melds seamlessly with moral superiority in neocon-neoliberalism. The moral justification is: since ours is the best possible system, we're doing you a favor by tearing down your institutions and imposing our system on you. The self-interest is: garsh, the "market" we imposed extracts your resources and benefits our banks and corporations. Amazing, isn't it, how "free markets" benefit everyone?

But not equally. The claim of neoliberalism is: everything is transformed for the better when it is turned into a market. Once buyers and sellers can meet in a transparent marketplace, everybody prospers and everything becomes more efficient.

Stripped to its essence, neoliberalism is: the markets we set up are rigged to favor those at the top. All that talk about free markets is just public-relations cover to mask an intrinsically rigged quasi-market that has features of "real" markets while beneath the surface, it's rigged to the advantage of big players at the top of the wealth-power pyramid.

Neoconservatism and neoliberalism are both inherently global, and so globalization is the necessary outcome. There is no market that cannot be skimmed for outsized profits once it has been globalized, and so once bat guano becomes a global tradeable commodity, Goldman Sachs establishes a bat guano trading desk. (This is a spoof, but you get the point.)

Neoconservatism entitles the U.S. to have an "interest" (as in profitable interest) in every nook and cranny of the planet. Policy changes in Lower Slobovia? It's in our "interest" to monitor those changes and intervene if the policies are "not in our interests."

Neocon-neoliberalism is brilliantly evil because it masks its true objectives behind such warm and fuzzy PR. Those looking for enemies of the people will find them not on the streets of America in cartoonish display but in the corridors of financial and policy power.

Dear apologists of the status quo: do you understand you're defending this?

Notice how the wealth of the bottom 90% nosedived once neocon-neoliberalism became the de facto policy of Democrats and Republicans alike. No wonder Obama's two terms seemed like Bush terms 3 and 4--in terms of a continuation of neocon-neoliberalism, they were.

Yes, profound changes in technology, automation, and geopolitics have influenced finance and wealth, but it cannot be merely coincidental that the incomes and wealth of the top 5% have pulled away from the stagnating 95% in the 25 years dominated by neocon-neoliberalism....

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http://www.blacklistednews.com/After_the_WaPost%E2%80%99s_Latest_Shot%2C_It%E2%80%99s_Time_to_Call_%E2%80%98Fake_News%E2%80%99_By_Its_Real_Name_%E2%80%98Weaponized_Journalism%E2%80%99/56333/0/38/38/Y/M.html

After the WaPost’s Latest Shot, It’s Time to Call ‘Fake News’ By Its Real Name ‘Weaponized Journalism’

Defying any sense of journalistic integrity and loyalty to the truth, the Washington Post did it again — publishing Fake News for clicks — which had the desired effect of worldwide outrage to suit a tightly-defined political agenda.

This latest astounding deviation from the facts, however, makes indisputably clear the weaponization of news. Journalists and media outlets make mistakes from time to time, but a pattern and practice of publishing unfounded, unverified, and fraudulent articles cannot be characterized simply as irresponsible.

We are in the midst of an information war of epic proportions — led haplessly astray of the truth with the Post leading the way — and it’s a dangerous and frightening portent of things to come, not the least of which will be propagandized truth and heavy-handed censorship.

On Friday, WaPo published an article claiming President-elect Donald Trump fired Washington, D.C., National Guard Major General Errol R. Schwartz — just in time for the inauguration — and that he would be forced to leave his post as soon as the president takes the oath of office.

But that isn’t true.

“My troops will be on the street,” Schwartz told the Post. “I’ll see them off, but I won’t be able to welcome them back to the armory.” He added he would “never plan to leave a mission in the middle of a battle.”

WaPo’s erroneous reporting included a statement from D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson, who lamented, “It doesn’t make sense to can the general in the middle of an active deployment.”

“I’m a soldier,” the Post quoted Schwartz. “I’m a presidential appointee, therefore the president has the power to remove me.”

But WaPo left out a number of critical points — and horrendously slanted the rest — about this “firing” of the head of the D.C. National Guard.

That D.C. position — unlike the equivalent for states — is appointed by the president, not by the Pentagon, as the Post suggested, nor by any branch of the military. Also, the article glaringly omitted any statement from the Trump transition team, an inexcusable offense, considering it later emerged Schwartz had been offered to keep his position through the end of Inauguration Day — it was Schwartz who turned down the offer, preferring instead to vacate the role at 12 noon, when Trump will be sworn in.

Of course, the blatant misinformation presented by the Post seemed so juicy, countless corporate outlets parroted the claim. Thus this Fake News rippled around the planet earning the scorn of millions who believed Trump must have lost all sensibility for firing a man who had diligently performed his duties since his appointment to the post by former President George W. Bush — during a potentially dangerous event.

This also spawned a number of rumors — with raucous protests planned for Inauguration Day, and the week before, why would the incoming president fire the man in charge of security? Isn’t this a preposterous decision on Trump’s part? What is Trump thinking?

Like previous viral stories — at this point, one would be hard-pressed to deem them ‘news articles’ — the Washington Post published faulty information and subsequently began backtracking.

Notably, in each case, after erroneous information went viral worldwide, edits after publication go largely unnoticed by most of the populace. While retractions and post-publication editor’s notes sometimes appear on WaPo’s articles they are orders of magnitude less popular than the original story and, in this instance, the firing of Schwartz story has only been appended in content — no editor’s note yet graces the top or bottom of the article. (The original version can be found here.)

Any news organization actually practicing journalism would tell you this is egregiously irresponsible.

Except, it’s beginning to appear the Washington Post publishes misinformation and Fake News intentionally — knowing any subsequent disputation of its claims won’t gather as much steam as the original publication.

A distinct reason exists why this would be the case — Brandolini’s law.

“The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it,” Alberto Brandolini, an Italian independent software development consultant, keenly observed in 2013 — the Post knows this, and has been manipulating public perception exactly this way.

It was, after all, the Washington Post who initiated the altogether ironic war on Fake News — first turning from journalistic duty in the publication of several items blaming disinformation for the downfall of, well, nearly everything.

WaPo published an ‘article’ about supposed blacklist of over 200 outlets a nascent and seemingly prepubescent website, PropOrNot, had decided were Russian propagandists — linked either directly to the Russian government or had haplessly joined the effort by reporting Fake News during the election.

Literally nothing in that Post article was true. None of the claims were backed by evidence, no research or investigation had been performed, nothing. WaPo just printed the claims of PropOrNot and inserted plausible deniability by failing to link to the list or site. A subsequent retraction at the top of the page was akin to plugging a crack in a dam that’s already burst — damage to many reputable and award-winning outlets listed had already been done.

Additional stories from the Post — none including any proof — blamed The Russians for everything from meddling in the U.S. election to install Trump, to hacking into the power grid in Vermont. ‘We’re all in peril because Russia,’ WaPo repeatedly claimed — without so much as a shred of evidence.

Has the Post — and the rest of mainstream media — abandoned journalism?

Prior to the faulty article on Schwartz, an op-ed unintentionally gave sharp insight into what’s actually going on — the outlet attempted to retire the term Fake News.

By declaring the term Fake News more damaging than Fake News, itself, the Post exposed its end game — propaganda. Alternative and independent media has done a fantastic job of using the term against corporate outlets — particularly WaPo.

So, by ending its self-declared war on Fake News officially over, any outlets terming corporate media’s false stories Fake News will be seen as doing damage to journalism — giving the Washington Post and its ilk free rein to continue publishing misinformation — and taking the punch out of anyone criticizing such stories as the Fake News they actually are.

In effect, the Post — and outlets parroting its articles — have thus weaponized the news.

Using the distraction of semantics, the once-illustrious outlet has established its method of inserting propaganda into the American news cycle. In fact, three of the most crucial tools of a propagandist are semantics, the media, and misinformation — the wider the audience, the better, as is the situation for WaPo.

Indeed, in all this murkiness, one thing remains clear: the Post uses a two-pronged attack — one against alternative media and outlets who failed to support Hillary Clinton (or, worse, dared to report on Democrat establishment corruption exposed by Wikileaks), and another intending to paint Russia as a rogue enemy state.

While the former represents the agenda of the ailing political establishment, the latter constitutes the more perilous goals of the military-industrial machine — perhaps with the ultimate conclusion of war against the nonexistent threat of Russia. The incidental attempt to smear Trump’s reputation shouldn’t be ignored.

But the end goal isn’t necessarily as urgent as the alarming methods employed. Now that President Obama signed pro-U.S. propaganda into law with the signing of the 2017 NDAA, we can expect more of the same — indeed, it’s worth questioning whether the Washington Post got an early start for a reason.

Outrageous claims made in the Post’s Fake News are exponentially injurious to the truth, because when the public must constantly question whether articles, outlets, and news items have integrity, information — both faulty and factual — has become a weapon.

In short, it may appear the Washington Post and other corporate outlets incompetently publish poorly-vetted articles, but the reality evinces a far darker turn toward propaganda over the imperative of journalism to report the facts.

This is Russian roulette with facts — and that’s every bit as treacherous as it sounds.