http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_dance_of_death_20170312
The Dance of Death
The ruling corporate elites no longer seek to build. They seek to destroy. They are agents of death. They crave the unimpeded power to cannibalize the country and pollute and degrade the ecosystem to feed an insatiable lust for wealth, power and hedonism. Wars and military “virtues” are celebrated. Intelligence, empathy and the common good are banished. Culture is degraded to patriotic kitsch. Education is designed only to instill technical proficiency to serve the poisonous engine of corporate capitalism. Historical amnesia shuts us off from the past, the present and the future. Those branded as unproductive or redundant are discarded and left to struggle in poverty or locked away in cages. State repression is indiscriminate and brutal. And, presiding over the tawdry Grand Guignol is a deranged ringmaster tweeting absurdities from the White House.
The graveyard of world empires—Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Mayan, Khmer, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian—followed the same trajectory of moral and physical collapse. Those who rule at the end of empire are psychopaths, imbeciles, narcissists and deviants, the equivalents of the depraved Roman emperors Caligula, Nero, Tiberius and Commodus. The ecosystem that sustains the empire is degraded and exhausted. Economic growth, concentrated in the hands of corrupt elites, is dependent on a crippling debt peonage imposed on the population. The bloated ruling class of oligarchs, priests, courtiers, mandarins, eunuchs, professional warriors, financial speculators and corporate managers sucks the marrow out of society.
The elites’ myopic response to the looming collapse of the natural world and the civilization is to make subservient populations work harder for less, squander capital in grandiose projects such as pyramids, palaces, border walls and fracking, and wage war. President Trump’s decision to increase military spending by $54 billion and take the needed funds out of the flesh of domestic programs typifies the behavior of terminally ill civilizations. When the Roman Empire fell, it was trying to sustain an army of half a million soldiers that had become a parasitic drain on state resources.
The complex bureaucratic mechanisms that are created by all civilizations ultimately doom them. The difference now, as Joseph Tainter points out in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” is that “collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global. No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole.”
Civilizations in decline, despite the palpable signs of decay around them, remain fixated on restoring their “greatness.” Their illusions condemn them. They cannot see that the forces that gave rise to modern civilization, namely technology, industrial violence and fossil fuels, are the same forces that are extinguishing it. Their leaders are trained only to serve the system, slavishly worshipping the old gods long after these gods begin to demand millions of sacrificial victims.
“Hope drives us to invent new fixes for old messes, which in turn create even more dangerous messes,” Ronald Wright writes in “A Short History of Progress.” “Hope elects the politician with the biggest empty promise; and as any stockbroker or lottery seller knows, most of us will take a slim hope over prudent and predictable frugality. Hope, like greed, fuels the engine of capitalism.”
The Trump appointees—Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, Rex Tillerson, Steve Mnuchin, Betsy DeVos, Wilbur Ross, Rick Perry, Alex Acosta and others—do not advocate innovation or reform. They are Pavlovian dogs that salivate before piles of money. They are hard-wired to steal from the poor and loot federal budgets. Their single-minded obsession with personal enrichment drives them to dismantle any institution or abolish any law or regulation that gets in the way of their greed. Capitalism, Karl Marx wrote, is “a machine for demolishing limits.” There is no internal sense of proportion or scale. Once all external impediments are lifted, global capitalism ruthlessly commodifies human beings and the natural world to extract profit until exhaustion or collapse. And when the last moments of a civilization arrive, the degenerate edifices of power appear to crumble overnight.
Sigmund Freud wrote that societies, along with individuals, are driven by two primary instincts. One is the instinct for life, Eros, the quest to love, nurture, protect and preserve. The second is the death instinct. The death instinct, called Thanatos by post-Freudians, is driven by fear, hatred and violence. It seeks the dissolution of all living things, including our own beings. One of these two forces, Freud wrote, is always ascendant. Societies in decline enthusiastically embrace the death instinct, as Freud observed in “Civilization and Its Discontents,” written on the eve of the rise of European fascism and World War II.
“It is in sadism, where the death instinct twists the erotic aim in its own sense and yet at the same time fully satisfies the erotic urge, that we succeed in obtaining the clearest insight into its nature and its relation to Eros,” Freud wrote. “But even where it emerges without any sexual purpose, in the blindest fury of destructiveness, we cannot fail to recognize that the satisfaction of the instinct is accompanied by an extraordinary high degree of narcissistic enjoyment, owing to its presenting the ego with a fulfillment of the latter’s old wishes for omnipotence.”
The lust for death, as Freud understood, is not, at first, morbid. It is exciting and seductive. I saw this in the wars I covered. A god-like power and adrenaline-driven fury, even euphoria, sweep over armed units and ethnic or religious groups given the license to destroy anything and anyone around them. Ernst Juenger captured this “monstrous desire for annihilation” in his World War I memoir, “Storm of Steel.”
A population alienated and beset by despair and hopelessness finds empowerment and pleasure in an orgy of annihilation that soon morphs into self-annihilation. It has no interest in nurturing a world that has betrayed it and thwarted its dreams. It seeks to eradicate this world and replace it with a mythical landscape. It turns against institutions, as well as ethnic and religious groups, that are scapegoated for its misery. It plunders diminishing natural resources with abandon. It is seduced by the fantastic promises of demagogues and the magical solutions characteristic of the Christian right or what anthropologists call “crisis cults.”
Norman Cohn, in “The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and Its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements,” draws a link between that turbulent period and our own. Millennial movements are a peculiar, collective psychological response to profound societal despair. They recur throughout human history. We are not immune.
“These movements have varied in tone from the most violent aggressiveness to the mildest pacifism and in aim from the most ethereal spirituality to the most earth-bound materialism; there is no counting the possible ways of imagining the Millennium and the route to it,” Cohen wrote. “But similarities can present themselves as well as differences; and the more carefully one compares the outbreaks of militant social chiliasm during the later Middle Ages with modern totalitarian movements the more remarkable the similarities appear. The old symbols and the old slogans have indeed disappeared, to be replaced by new ones; but the structure of the basic phantasies seems to have changed scarcely at all.”
These movements, Cohen wrote, offered “a coherent social myth which was capable of taking entire possession of those who believed in it. It explained their suffering, it promised them recompense, it held their anxieties at bay, it gave them an illusion of security—even while it drove them, held together by a common enthusiasm, on a quest which was always vain and often suicidal.
“So it came about that multitudes of people acted out with fierce energy a shared phantasy which though delusional yet brought them such intense emotional relief that they could live only through it and were perfectly willing to die for it. It is a phenomenon which was to recur many times between the eleventh century and the sixteenth century, now in one area, now in another, and which, despite the obvious differences in cultural context and in scale, is not irrelevant to the growth of totalitarian movements, with their messianic leaders, their millennial mirages and their demon-scapegoats, in the present century.”
The severance of a society from reality, as ours has been severed from collective recognition of the severity of climate change and the fatal consequences of empire and deindustrialization, leaves it without the intellectual and institutional mechanisms to confront its impending mortality. It exists in a state of self-induced hypnosis and self-delusion. It seeks momentary euphoria and meaning in tawdry entertainment and acts of violence and destruction, including against people who are demonized and blamed for society’s demise. It hastens its self-immolation while holding up the supposed inevitability of a glorious national resurgence. Idiots and charlatans, the handmaidens of death, lure us into the abyss.
Sunday, July 30, 2017
Saturday, July 29, 2017
SC147-8
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47546.htm
Biological Annihilation on Earth Accelerating
Human beings are now waging war against life itself as we continue to destroy not just individual lives, local populations and entire species in vast numbers but also destroy the ecological systems that make life on Earth possible.
By doing this we are now accelerating the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history and virtually eliminating any prospect of human survival.
In a recently published scientific study ‘Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines’ the authors Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R. Ehrlich and Rodolfo Dirzo document the accelerating nature of this problem.
‘Earth’s sixth mass extinction is more severe than perceived when looking exclusively at species extinctions…. That conclusion is based on analyses of the numbers and degrees of range contraction … using a sample of 27,600 vertebrate species, and on a more detailed analysis documenting the population extinctions between 1900 and 2015 in 177 mammal species.’ Their research found that the rate of population loss in terrestrial vertebrates is ‘extremely high’ – even in ‘species of low concern’.
In their sample, comprising nearly half of known vertebrate species, 32% (8,851 out of 27,600) are decreasing; that is, they have decreased in population size and range. In the 177 mammals for which they had detailed data, all had lost 30% or more of their geographic ranges and more than 40% of the species had experienced severe population declines. Their data revealed that ‘beyond global species extinctions Earth is experiencing a huge episode of population declines and extirpations, which will have negative cascading consequences on ecosystem functioning and services vital to sustaining civilization. We describe this as a “biological annihilation” to highlight the current magnitude of Earth’s ongoing sixth major extinction event.’
Illustrating the damage done by dramatically reducing the historic geographic range of a species, consider the lion. Panthera leo ‘was historically distributed over most of Africa, southern Europe, and the Middle East, all the way to northwestern India. It is now confined to scattered populations in sub-Saharan Africa and a remnant population in the Gir forest of India. The vast majority of lion populations are gone.’
Why is this happening? Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo tell us: ‘In the last few decades, habitat loss, overexploitation, invasive organisms, pollution, toxification, and more recently climate disruption, as well as the interactions among these factors, have led to the catastrophic declines in both the numbers and sizes of populations of both common and rare vertebrate species.’
Further, however, the authors warn ‘But the true extent of this mass extinction has been underestimated, because of the emphasis on species extinction.’ This underestimate can be traced to overlooking the accelerating extinction of local populations of a species.
‘Population extinctions today are orders of magnitude more frequent than species extinctions. Population extinctions, however, are a prelude to species extinctions, so Earth’s sixth mass extinction episode has proceeded further than most assume.’ Moreover, and importantly from a narrow human perspective, the massive loss of local populations is already damaging the services ecosystems provide to civilization (which, of course, are given no value by government and corporate economists).
As Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo remind us: ‘When considering this frightening assault on the foundations of human civilization, one must never forget that Earth’s capacity to support life, including human life, has been shaped by life itself.’ When public mention is made of the extinction crisis, it usually focuses on a few (probably iconic) animal species known to have gone extinct, while projecting many more in future. However, a glance at their maps presents a much more realistic picture: as much as 50% of the number of animal individuals that once shared Earth with us are already gone, as are billions of populations.
Furthermore, they claim that their analysis is conservative given the increasing trajectories of those factors that drive extinction together with their synergistic impacts. ‘Future losses easily may amount to a further rapid defaunation of the globe and comparable losses in the diversity of plants, including the local (and eventually global) defaunation-driven coextinction of plants.’
They conclude with the chilling observation: ‘Thus, we emphasize that the sixth mass extinction is already here and the window for effective action is very short.’
Of course, it is too late for those species of plants, birds, animals, fish, amphibians, insects and reptiles that humans have already driven to extinction or will yet drive to extinction in the future. 200 species yesterday. 200 species today. 200 species tomorrow. 200 species the day after…. And, as Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo emphasize, the ongoing daily extinctions of a myriad local populations.
If you think that the above information is bad enough in assessing the prospects for human survival, you will not be encouraged by awareness or deeper consideration of even some of the many variables adversely impacting our prospects that were beyond the scope of the above study.
While Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo, in addition to the problems they noted which are cited above, also identified the problems of human overpopulation and continued population growth, as well as overconsumption (based on ‘the fiction that perpetual growth can occur on a finite planet’) and even the risks posed by nuclear war, there were many variables that were beyond the scope of their research.
For example, in a recent discussion of that branch of ecological science known as ‘Planetary Boundary Science’, Dr Glen Barry identified ‘at least ten global ecological catastrophes which threaten to destroy the global ecological system and portend an end to human beings, and perhaps all life. Ranging from nitrogen deposition to ocean acidification, and including such basics as soil, water, and air; virtually every ecological system upon which life depends is failing’. See ‘The End of Being: Abrupt Climate Change One of Many Ecological Crises Threatening to Collapse the Biosphere’.
Moreover, apart from the ongoing human death tolls caused by the endless wars and other military violence being conducted across the planet – see, for example, ‘Yemen cholera worst on record & numbers still rising’ – there is catastrophic environmental damage caused too. For some insight, see The Toxic Remnants of War Project.
In addition, the out-of-control methane releases into the atmosphere that are now occurring – see ‘7,000 underground gas bubbles poised to “explode” in Arctic’ and ‘Release of Arctic Methane “May Be Apocalyptic,” Study Warns’ – and the release, each and every day, of 300 tons of radioactive waste from Fukushima into the Pacific Ocean – see ‘Fukushima Radiation Has Contaminated The Entire Pacific Ocean - And It’s Going To Get Worse’ – are having disastrous consequences that will negatively impact life on Earth indefinitely. And they cannot be reversed in any timeframe that is meaningful for human prospects.
Apart from the above, there is a host of other critical issues – such as destruction of the Earth’s rainforests, destruction of waterways and the ocean habitat and the devastating impact of animal agriculture for meat consumption – that international governmental organizations such as the UN, national governments and multinational corporations will continue to refuse to decisively act upon because they are controlled by the insane global elite. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane’ with more fully elaborated explanations in ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’....
Biological Annihilation on Earth Accelerating
Human beings are now waging war against life itself as we continue to destroy not just individual lives, local populations and entire species in vast numbers but also destroy the ecological systems that make life on Earth possible.
By doing this we are now accelerating the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history and virtually eliminating any prospect of human survival.
In a recently published scientific study ‘Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines’ the authors Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R. Ehrlich and Rodolfo Dirzo document the accelerating nature of this problem.
‘Earth’s sixth mass extinction is more severe than perceived when looking exclusively at species extinctions…. That conclusion is based on analyses of the numbers and degrees of range contraction … using a sample of 27,600 vertebrate species, and on a more detailed analysis documenting the population extinctions between 1900 and 2015 in 177 mammal species.’ Their research found that the rate of population loss in terrestrial vertebrates is ‘extremely high’ – even in ‘species of low concern’.
In their sample, comprising nearly half of known vertebrate species, 32% (8,851 out of 27,600) are decreasing; that is, they have decreased in population size and range. In the 177 mammals for which they had detailed data, all had lost 30% or more of their geographic ranges and more than 40% of the species had experienced severe population declines. Their data revealed that ‘beyond global species extinctions Earth is experiencing a huge episode of population declines and extirpations, which will have negative cascading consequences on ecosystem functioning and services vital to sustaining civilization. We describe this as a “biological annihilation” to highlight the current magnitude of Earth’s ongoing sixth major extinction event.’
Illustrating the damage done by dramatically reducing the historic geographic range of a species, consider the lion. Panthera leo ‘was historically distributed over most of Africa, southern Europe, and the Middle East, all the way to northwestern India. It is now confined to scattered populations in sub-Saharan Africa and a remnant population in the Gir forest of India. The vast majority of lion populations are gone.’
Why is this happening? Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo tell us: ‘In the last few decades, habitat loss, overexploitation, invasive organisms, pollution, toxification, and more recently climate disruption, as well as the interactions among these factors, have led to the catastrophic declines in both the numbers and sizes of populations of both common and rare vertebrate species.’
Further, however, the authors warn ‘But the true extent of this mass extinction has been underestimated, because of the emphasis on species extinction.’ This underestimate can be traced to overlooking the accelerating extinction of local populations of a species.
‘Population extinctions today are orders of magnitude more frequent than species extinctions. Population extinctions, however, are a prelude to species extinctions, so Earth’s sixth mass extinction episode has proceeded further than most assume.’ Moreover, and importantly from a narrow human perspective, the massive loss of local populations is already damaging the services ecosystems provide to civilization (which, of course, are given no value by government and corporate economists).
As Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo remind us: ‘When considering this frightening assault on the foundations of human civilization, one must never forget that Earth’s capacity to support life, including human life, has been shaped by life itself.’ When public mention is made of the extinction crisis, it usually focuses on a few (probably iconic) animal species known to have gone extinct, while projecting many more in future. However, a glance at their maps presents a much more realistic picture: as much as 50% of the number of animal individuals that once shared Earth with us are already gone, as are billions of populations.
Furthermore, they claim that their analysis is conservative given the increasing trajectories of those factors that drive extinction together with their synergistic impacts. ‘Future losses easily may amount to a further rapid defaunation of the globe and comparable losses in the diversity of plants, including the local (and eventually global) defaunation-driven coextinction of plants.’
They conclude with the chilling observation: ‘Thus, we emphasize that the sixth mass extinction is already here and the window for effective action is very short.’
Of course, it is too late for those species of plants, birds, animals, fish, amphibians, insects and reptiles that humans have already driven to extinction or will yet drive to extinction in the future. 200 species yesterday. 200 species today. 200 species tomorrow. 200 species the day after…. And, as Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo emphasize, the ongoing daily extinctions of a myriad local populations.
If you think that the above information is bad enough in assessing the prospects for human survival, you will not be encouraged by awareness or deeper consideration of even some of the many variables adversely impacting our prospects that were beyond the scope of the above study.
While Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo, in addition to the problems they noted which are cited above, also identified the problems of human overpopulation and continued population growth, as well as overconsumption (based on ‘the fiction that perpetual growth can occur on a finite planet’) and even the risks posed by nuclear war, there were many variables that were beyond the scope of their research.
For example, in a recent discussion of that branch of ecological science known as ‘Planetary Boundary Science’, Dr Glen Barry identified ‘at least ten global ecological catastrophes which threaten to destroy the global ecological system and portend an end to human beings, and perhaps all life. Ranging from nitrogen deposition to ocean acidification, and including such basics as soil, water, and air; virtually every ecological system upon which life depends is failing’. See ‘The End of Being: Abrupt Climate Change One of Many Ecological Crises Threatening to Collapse the Biosphere’.
Moreover, apart from the ongoing human death tolls caused by the endless wars and other military violence being conducted across the planet – see, for example, ‘Yemen cholera worst on record & numbers still rising’ – there is catastrophic environmental damage caused too. For some insight, see The Toxic Remnants of War Project.
In addition, the out-of-control methane releases into the atmosphere that are now occurring – see ‘7,000 underground gas bubbles poised to “explode” in Arctic’ and ‘Release of Arctic Methane “May Be Apocalyptic,” Study Warns’ – and the release, each and every day, of 300 tons of radioactive waste from Fukushima into the Pacific Ocean – see ‘Fukushima Radiation Has Contaminated The Entire Pacific Ocean - And It’s Going To Get Worse’ – are having disastrous consequences that will negatively impact life on Earth indefinitely. And they cannot be reversed in any timeframe that is meaningful for human prospects.
Apart from the above, there is a host of other critical issues – such as destruction of the Earth’s rainforests, destruction of waterways and the ocean habitat and the devastating impact of animal agriculture for meat consumption – that international governmental organizations such as the UN, national governments and multinational corporations will continue to refuse to decisively act upon because they are controlled by the insane global elite. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane’ with more fully elaborated explanations in ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’....
SC147-7
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47541.htm
New US Sanctions... Bring It On
So the American bully wants to slap more sanctions on Russia over alleged misdeeds. This is blatant temper tantrums by a frustrated US trying to get “its way or no way”.
It’s so absurd. The biggest rogue nation on Earth, illegally bombing and killing civilians in several countries simultaneously, covertly arming terrorist proxies in the Middle East, and a rampant subversive interferer in foreign elections around the world, has the audacity to lecture others about probity, resorting to financial arm twisting that makes a mockery of international laws and trade rules.
Well, after all, the Americans do always declare themselves to be “exceptional”. Never a truer word was spoken, albeit inadvertently.
This week, the US House of Representatives voted overwhelming to approve tougher new sanctions on Russia. The Senate is expected to rubber-stamp the bill and then President Trump will most probably sign into law. He is becoming a lame duck president due to the rampant Russophobia in the US.
Russia’s deputy foreign minister Sergey Ryabkov deplored the latest move to tighten punitive measures on the country’s energy, banking and defense sectors, among others. He said it was a calculated step to destroy any prospect of normalizing ties between the US and Russia. “It is beyond common sense,” said Ryabkov, adding that American legislators “know no restraint in their anti-Russia zeal” and that they are “out of control”. In short, collectively insane.
Few sane people – apart from US politicians and media pundits – would welcome a further deterioration in relations between the world’s two nuclear superpowers. And truth be told, Moscow has up to now shown great patience and amenability to try to improve bilateral ties. But the US political class has shown no interest whatsoever in pursuing any reconciliation. It’s like it has a death-wish.
American lawmakers endorsing the latest sanctions were almost foaming at the mouth, labelling Russia an enemy and citing unhinged accusations against Moscow for meddling in last year’s presidential elections, also for destabilizing Ukraine and, wait for it, “propping up the Assad regime in Syria” – the country where the American CIA has been propping up head-chopping jihadist terrorists for the past six years.
However, let’s step back a moment. Another way of looking at this geopolitical impasse fomented by the US is that it is actually a good thing. US politicians and large sections of the media are so deranged with anti-Russia hysteria and irrational views on international matters, there is simply no chance of engaging them with normal dialogue.
Better to let the American political class consume itself with its own toxic paranoia and delusions about the world, and toward Russia in particular. Let them destroy themselves politically in their isolated paranoid state and endless duplicity.
A sign of the impending American political self-destruction is the furious reaction from Europe over the latest sanctions. The Europeans are at last waking up to the fact – long overdue – that Washington is acting brazenly for its own selfish interests and is prepared to inflict pain on Europe, if needs be.
The European Commission, which oversees EU trade policy, as well as Germany and Austria have expressed outrage over Washington’s “hidden agenda” which is disguised in the self-righteous and disingenuous rhetoric of sanctioning Russia.
Germany’s foreign ministry sharply criticized America of undermining European energy security and using sanctions as “a tool to advance US industrial interests”.
It’s not Russia being sanctioned so much as America sanctioning its own allies.
Of course, this is what the whole American brouhaha over sanctions on Russia is all about. It’s got nothing to do with “disciplining” Russia over alleged misdeeds. How could such pious rhetoric be taken seriously from the planet’s biggest rogue state?
No, it’s all about foisting American energy gas supplies on to a new European market by displacing Russian exports. When Donald Trump was visiting Poland last month, he made an unvarnished sales pitch to the Poles and other Central European countries to buy American gas. Even though the US supply would be much more expensive than Russia’s.
That’s why Trump will likely sign off on the new anti-Russia sanctions. While the president has at times expressed an interest in normalizing ties with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, Trump’s top priority is to promote American trade interests. He wants to reduce the yawning US trade deficit with Europe by forcing the latter to buy American gas, instead of Russian.
So much for American capitalism obeying the rules of “supply and demand”. And so much for the Americans declaring to be an “ally” of Europe acting always “to protect” it from “Russian aggression”.
The delusional, paranoid Americans would be happy to see Europe freeze to death, being cut off from affordable Russia gas. Washington in its short-sighted stupidity would plunge Europe into economic recession, industrial failure and rising unemployment just to sell the continent more of its own expensive gas.
America’s sanctions policy against Russia is a thermometer of grave political ill-health among its politicians and media. If the Americans want to conduct their government business and foreign policy based on delusional hysteria, then let it be. Sooner or later, a nation driven by such crazed thinking will destroy itself and its supposed allies.
The outbreak of anger among European nations toward American self-entitlement to damage European interests is also a temperature reading indicating fever pitch out of control. It is an astounding display of arrogance when Washington is, in effect, attempting to overhaul European energy and trade policy for the naked benefit of US interests.
American sanctions against Russia are more a cry of desperation by the US political class whose economy is tanking and whose standing in the world is sliding to unprecedented low levels. Scrabbling to offset the historical demise, the idiotic American “leaders” are lashing out with anti-Russia hysteria and damaging blows to even their own supposed allies in Europe.
The much-vaunted “transatlantic bond” between the US and Europe was always an over-rated cover for the Americans to lord it over what they considered to be their European vassals. Russia, unfortunately, has been vilified to provide an excuse for this hegemony. But so arrogant, so desperate are the American rulers today that the charade of US-European “partnership” is in danger of unraveling.
If such sanctions help cast a light on the decay of America’s once formidable global empire then bring them on.
There’s a big multi-polar world out there. Russia, Iran, China and the Europeans, if the latter get their act together, must learn to walk away from the American sulking bully and let it fester in its own decadence.
The bankrupt US – morally, politically, economically – has nothing worthwhile to offer the world. Its so-called leadership is a lost cause. Attempting to engage with this parasitic wreckage is only a drain on resources.
....
Comment to article:
" The judgement of the west is upon them and things are only going to get worse from here on in. The same division and animosity they have incited and sown amongst the nations of the world is now manifesting itself among them. The EU is in a mess, currently flooded at the moment with an ever growing wave of refugees which they haven't got a clue how to handle and for which they are directly responsible. Their "ally" across the pond is now holding a gun to their heads to buy US LNG at a much greater cost than they are getting it at the moment from Russia, and does anybody really see America as a reliable supplier in any case ? The Russians have never at any time despite bad relations used energy as a weapon against Europe and the supply was always steady, can anyone see uncle sam doing the same ? I very much doubt it.
Like this article rightly said western economies are tanking and they in their blind stupidity and arrogance are making it worse with their sanctions. The Russian deputy foreign minister has clearly stated for the first time that US actions are forcing Russia to develop alternatives to the dollar based current financial system, in other words dropping the dollar. It is true what they say, those the gods wish to destroy they first drive insane. The west shall not escape its karma. "
New US Sanctions... Bring It On
So the American bully wants to slap more sanctions on Russia over alleged misdeeds. This is blatant temper tantrums by a frustrated US trying to get “its way or no way”.
It’s so absurd. The biggest rogue nation on Earth, illegally bombing and killing civilians in several countries simultaneously, covertly arming terrorist proxies in the Middle East, and a rampant subversive interferer in foreign elections around the world, has the audacity to lecture others about probity, resorting to financial arm twisting that makes a mockery of international laws and trade rules.
Well, after all, the Americans do always declare themselves to be “exceptional”. Never a truer word was spoken, albeit inadvertently.
This week, the US House of Representatives voted overwhelming to approve tougher new sanctions on Russia. The Senate is expected to rubber-stamp the bill and then President Trump will most probably sign into law. He is becoming a lame duck president due to the rampant Russophobia in the US.
Russia’s deputy foreign minister Sergey Ryabkov deplored the latest move to tighten punitive measures on the country’s energy, banking and defense sectors, among others. He said it was a calculated step to destroy any prospect of normalizing ties between the US and Russia. “It is beyond common sense,” said Ryabkov, adding that American legislators “know no restraint in their anti-Russia zeal” and that they are “out of control”. In short, collectively insane.
Few sane people – apart from US politicians and media pundits – would welcome a further deterioration in relations between the world’s two nuclear superpowers. And truth be told, Moscow has up to now shown great patience and amenability to try to improve bilateral ties. But the US political class has shown no interest whatsoever in pursuing any reconciliation. It’s like it has a death-wish.
American lawmakers endorsing the latest sanctions were almost foaming at the mouth, labelling Russia an enemy and citing unhinged accusations against Moscow for meddling in last year’s presidential elections, also for destabilizing Ukraine and, wait for it, “propping up the Assad regime in Syria” – the country where the American CIA has been propping up head-chopping jihadist terrorists for the past six years.
However, let’s step back a moment. Another way of looking at this geopolitical impasse fomented by the US is that it is actually a good thing. US politicians and large sections of the media are so deranged with anti-Russia hysteria and irrational views on international matters, there is simply no chance of engaging them with normal dialogue.
Better to let the American political class consume itself with its own toxic paranoia and delusions about the world, and toward Russia in particular. Let them destroy themselves politically in their isolated paranoid state and endless duplicity.
A sign of the impending American political self-destruction is the furious reaction from Europe over the latest sanctions. The Europeans are at last waking up to the fact – long overdue – that Washington is acting brazenly for its own selfish interests and is prepared to inflict pain on Europe, if needs be.
The European Commission, which oversees EU trade policy, as well as Germany and Austria have expressed outrage over Washington’s “hidden agenda” which is disguised in the self-righteous and disingenuous rhetoric of sanctioning Russia.
Germany’s foreign ministry sharply criticized America of undermining European energy security and using sanctions as “a tool to advance US industrial interests”.
It’s not Russia being sanctioned so much as America sanctioning its own allies.
Of course, this is what the whole American brouhaha over sanctions on Russia is all about. It’s got nothing to do with “disciplining” Russia over alleged misdeeds. How could such pious rhetoric be taken seriously from the planet’s biggest rogue state?
No, it’s all about foisting American energy gas supplies on to a new European market by displacing Russian exports. When Donald Trump was visiting Poland last month, he made an unvarnished sales pitch to the Poles and other Central European countries to buy American gas. Even though the US supply would be much more expensive than Russia’s.
That’s why Trump will likely sign off on the new anti-Russia sanctions. While the president has at times expressed an interest in normalizing ties with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, Trump’s top priority is to promote American trade interests. He wants to reduce the yawning US trade deficit with Europe by forcing the latter to buy American gas, instead of Russian.
So much for American capitalism obeying the rules of “supply and demand”. And so much for the Americans declaring to be an “ally” of Europe acting always “to protect” it from “Russian aggression”.
The delusional, paranoid Americans would be happy to see Europe freeze to death, being cut off from affordable Russia gas. Washington in its short-sighted stupidity would plunge Europe into economic recession, industrial failure and rising unemployment just to sell the continent more of its own expensive gas.
America’s sanctions policy against Russia is a thermometer of grave political ill-health among its politicians and media. If the Americans want to conduct their government business and foreign policy based on delusional hysteria, then let it be. Sooner or later, a nation driven by such crazed thinking will destroy itself and its supposed allies.
The outbreak of anger among European nations toward American self-entitlement to damage European interests is also a temperature reading indicating fever pitch out of control. It is an astounding display of arrogance when Washington is, in effect, attempting to overhaul European energy and trade policy for the naked benefit of US interests.
American sanctions against Russia are more a cry of desperation by the US political class whose economy is tanking and whose standing in the world is sliding to unprecedented low levels. Scrabbling to offset the historical demise, the idiotic American “leaders” are lashing out with anti-Russia hysteria and damaging blows to even their own supposed allies in Europe.
The much-vaunted “transatlantic bond” between the US and Europe was always an over-rated cover for the Americans to lord it over what they considered to be their European vassals. Russia, unfortunately, has been vilified to provide an excuse for this hegemony. But so arrogant, so desperate are the American rulers today that the charade of US-European “partnership” is in danger of unraveling.
If such sanctions help cast a light on the decay of America’s once formidable global empire then bring them on.
There’s a big multi-polar world out there. Russia, Iran, China and the Europeans, if the latter get their act together, must learn to walk away from the American sulking bully and let it fester in its own decadence.
The bankrupt US – morally, politically, economically – has nothing worthwhile to offer the world. Its so-called leadership is a lost cause. Attempting to engage with this parasitic wreckage is only a drain on resources.
....
Comment to article:
" The judgement of the west is upon them and things are only going to get worse from here on in. The same division and animosity they have incited and sown amongst the nations of the world is now manifesting itself among them. The EU is in a mess, currently flooded at the moment with an ever growing wave of refugees which they haven't got a clue how to handle and for which they are directly responsible. Their "ally" across the pond is now holding a gun to their heads to buy US LNG at a much greater cost than they are getting it at the moment from Russia, and does anybody really see America as a reliable supplier in any case ? The Russians have never at any time despite bad relations used energy as a weapon against Europe and the supply was always steady, can anyone see uncle sam doing the same ? I very much doubt it.
Like this article rightly said western economies are tanking and they in their blind stupidity and arrogance are making it worse with their sanctions. The Russian deputy foreign minister has clearly stated for the first time that US actions are forcing Russia to develop alternatives to the dollar based current financial system, in other words dropping the dollar. It is true what they say, those the gods wish to destroy they first drive insane. The west shall not escape its karma. "
SC147-6
http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/the-elites-are-jumping-ship-as-the-financial-collapse-draws-near_07272017
The Elites Are Jumping Ship As The Financial Collapse Draws Near
It’s easy to think of the political and financial elites who run our world as lofty and all powerful. They command dangerous governments that can wield devastating weapons, central banks that treat our economy like a rigged casino, media conglomerates that pacify the minds of the public, and unbelievably wealthy corporations that have concentrated wealth to an unprecedented degree.
However, they’re certainly not invincible, and the systems of control that they’ve created are rapidly diminishing. Most notably, they seem all to aware of the fact that the global economy is headed for a crash. On the rare occasion where you can catch one of the elites in a moment of candor, they’ll tell you that the party is almost over.
Mohamed A. El-Erian is a bona fide member of the global power elite (a former deputy director of the IMF and president of the Harvard Management Co.). Yet he writes in a fairly accessible style on the popular Bloomberg website. When El-Erian talks, we should all listen.
In a recent article he raises serious doubts about the sustainability of the bull market in stocks because of reduced liquidity resulting from simultaneous policy tightening by the Fed, European Central Bank (ECB) and the Bank of England.
He says stocks rose on a sea of liquidity and they may crash when that liquidity is removed. This is a warning to other elites, but it’s also a warning to you.
Their actions are quite telling as well. Sovereign wealth funds, which are largely funded and owned by powerful governments to invest in domestic industries, are jumping ship.
Among sovereign wealth funds, the Government of Singapore Investment Corp. (GIC) is one of the largest, with over $354 billion in assets. So what does the head of GIC say about markets today?
Lim Chow Kiat, CEO of GIC, warns that “valuations are stretched, policy uncertainty is high” and investors are being too complacent.
GIC allocates 40% of its assets to cash or highly liquid bonds and only 27% of its assets to developed economy equities.
Meanwhile, the typical American small retail investor probably has 60% or more of her 401(k) in developed economy equities, mostly U.S.
In other words, the investment arms of wealthy nations are pulling out of the stock market and out of companies in their own economies (developed economy equities), and putting their money into assets that can be quickly turned into cash. It’s practically an admission by the elites, that they think the economy is completely unstable.
But this is just the latest warning sign that the elites are getting nervous. Corporate executives have been selling their stocks at an unprecedented rate for several months. Meanwhile, ordinary people are still placing their faith and their bets on a stock market that most experts agree is completely unsustainable.
And let’s not forget that “luxury bunkers” have become immensely popular, and that the super-wealthy have also been buying remote retreats all over the world. Are they afraid of what the public is going to do to them when their phony economy crashes and leaves everyone broke? Are they positioning themselves for a crash that they know is coming?
All of this suggests that the wealthiest and most connected among us know that chaos is in our future, and they’re getting ready for it. Ignore them at your own peril.
The Elites Are Jumping Ship As The Financial Collapse Draws Near
It’s easy to think of the political and financial elites who run our world as lofty and all powerful. They command dangerous governments that can wield devastating weapons, central banks that treat our economy like a rigged casino, media conglomerates that pacify the minds of the public, and unbelievably wealthy corporations that have concentrated wealth to an unprecedented degree.
However, they’re certainly not invincible, and the systems of control that they’ve created are rapidly diminishing. Most notably, they seem all to aware of the fact that the global economy is headed for a crash. On the rare occasion where you can catch one of the elites in a moment of candor, they’ll tell you that the party is almost over.
Mohamed A. El-Erian is a bona fide member of the global power elite (a former deputy director of the IMF and president of the Harvard Management Co.). Yet he writes in a fairly accessible style on the popular Bloomberg website. When El-Erian talks, we should all listen.
In a recent article he raises serious doubts about the sustainability of the bull market in stocks because of reduced liquidity resulting from simultaneous policy tightening by the Fed, European Central Bank (ECB) and the Bank of England.
He says stocks rose on a sea of liquidity and they may crash when that liquidity is removed. This is a warning to other elites, but it’s also a warning to you.
Their actions are quite telling as well. Sovereign wealth funds, which are largely funded and owned by powerful governments to invest in domestic industries, are jumping ship.
Among sovereign wealth funds, the Government of Singapore Investment Corp. (GIC) is one of the largest, with over $354 billion in assets. So what does the head of GIC say about markets today?
Lim Chow Kiat, CEO of GIC, warns that “valuations are stretched, policy uncertainty is high” and investors are being too complacent.
GIC allocates 40% of its assets to cash or highly liquid bonds and only 27% of its assets to developed economy equities.
Meanwhile, the typical American small retail investor probably has 60% or more of her 401(k) in developed economy equities, mostly U.S.
In other words, the investment arms of wealthy nations are pulling out of the stock market and out of companies in their own economies (developed economy equities), and putting their money into assets that can be quickly turned into cash. It’s practically an admission by the elites, that they think the economy is completely unstable.
But this is just the latest warning sign that the elites are getting nervous. Corporate executives have been selling their stocks at an unprecedented rate for several months. Meanwhile, ordinary people are still placing their faith and their bets on a stock market that most experts agree is completely unsustainable.
And let’s not forget that “luxury bunkers” have become immensely popular, and that the super-wealthy have also been buying remote retreats all over the world. Are they afraid of what the public is going to do to them when their phony economy crashes and leaves everyone broke? Are they positioning themselves for a crash that they know is coming?
All of this suggests that the wealthiest and most connected among us know that chaos is in our future, and they’re getting ready for it. Ignore them at your own peril.
SC147-5
http://peakoil.com/generalideas/extinction-is-the-system-result
Extinction is the System Result
What a spectacle the peasants make, like children at their first circus, they cheered for Trump. A very entertaining pageant of manipulation, and then to watch the retards realize they were fooled once more. “Perhaps the snowflakes were right,” they mutter darkly.
And this thought-piece is not a complaint on my part, the mass manipulation, and then the Reality dawning to crush the hope of countless millions—“Are you not entertained!?”
Sure I am, this is the best entertainment ever, and it’s free. You don’t even have to pay into the Colosseum, just turn on the TV.
Now we should be clear in our thinking—just because the price is free doesn’t mean it’s cost free—I’m just hoping to be dead before the butcher’s bill is paid. My Capitalistic friends share many things in common, certainly mutual respect for one another, but there are other qualities and attributes that they share which I’ll share with you.
First, they always mention their age in private correspondence, and they’re all far older than me. They express implied happiness at being almost dead, at being at the end of their life cycle, that they won’t have to live too much further into the Future. That they’re almost dead is source of personal comfort after they read, and some have written, The Philosophy of Capitalism.
Back to the Colosseum, where the predators are on stage and the prey is the audience. It’s easy to become upset, though it’s best not to be, there really is consolation in understanding—would you prefer false hope over entertainment? I think entertainment is the right answer.
Though the peasant doesn’t choose hope over understanding; the predators are naturally manipulative while the prey have brains that are desperate—projecting their love and hope toward a messiah who’ll deliver an imagined place. A place healed of depression, separatism, riots and war. Wouldn’t you be desperate if your nation was dug into multiple wars? 16 years of war, going on 17, with no hope of resolution.
‘Hope only serves to prolong suffering’ was Nietzsche’s warning to tomorrow’s peasant. Read my warning to Zero Hedgers in October: ‘My contacts with The Families said Trump was being protected, that was months ago.’ It was a warning that went unheeded too. Whereas Hegel was more concerned with the past, which revealed fear as the agent that drove progress toward self awareness—whereby self and self-image became the same—whereby Thought would govern the World via Reason—And so on.
Actually, I’ve come to realize that the limit placed upon self awareness is the absence of virtue, namely the absence of Courage. It takes Courage to deal with Reality. To see it for what it is, in its naked form.
The System is a living thing; the Natural System gives it life. And so it will seek the means to defend itself. It will develop an immune system so to speak; to reject burdens and critiques. Of course it also has instruments to defend itself; the System was designed to serve the Dominant Class who protect it consciously. And then there is Instinct—Any individual who depends upon the System for his survival will defend it instinctively.
Now this Instinct is shared by all insiders so it operates as a force at the System Level—this force is exclusive and seeks to ostracize and make powerless any threats to continuity, e.g. the unemployed, or any nation that favours Gold over the FIAT, that prefers publicly to privately owned banks.
The insiders’ thinking will is aborted as the power of belief, and conformity of thought is required to oppress and demoralize outsiders. The power to suppress any doubt about sustainability or the fairness of outcomes is called for. “Those people are homeless due to their weak character” so to speak, or “The Middle East is a mess because they’re inbred.” Pat Buchanan rails against immigrants, after his friends spent decades making money from desperate labour—demoralised first and then displaced by death squads sent by us, the Dominant Class—to kill anyone trying to make Central America a livable place. Duplicity and delusion are the handmaidens of success in the business of peasant-debt-slave manipulation, right? And that’s not a critique, the status quo has served me well, so thanks Pat.
So there’s no critical thinking at the System Level by those benefiting from the System—though there is feeling; Liberals are prone to guilt for example, and now the retards are ashamed for falling for the appearance of nationalism—This protective Instinct drives the evolution of myth, fantasy, belief and social peer pressure that serves to prolong the System.
Another thing I’ve noted about my friends is that they don’t care about other people, they’re respectively capital- or empire-centric, and anyone who’s not human-centric is ultimately anti-human. I came to this realisation after publishing a post entitled ‘Capitalism Causes us to be Mentally Ill’ and no one read it. Visitors to my site are almost all capitalists, I know this since I can track what site they’ve come from—FT, Zero Hedge mostly—and they also write me. And they refuse to write reviews about our books because they don’t care about society or other readers. It’s almost funny for me; but you need to be mean to remain Dominant, right? So no hard feelings between me and my friends.
Not so much fun for the masses who assumed Trump cared about them. Trump is a Capitalist so he is Capital-centric, thus he doesn’t care about people. But try explaining that to a peasant.
The Fed’s sole mandate is not to help Americans (people) but to protect and preserve the System, which is demonstrably true given recent behaviour. What about the Bank of England? How many Billions is it printing every day? Does any insider care to count? Or check? Or dare to question?
As Marx realised from his studies; it’s hard to change the System. He realised the need for Revolution—the wholesale transformation of society by killing those at the Top who benefit from the System.
His fantasy failed; and interestingly, we also know why. (See Volume 1.)
The System is profit and consumer-centric. But if you can’t consume then you don’t exist, do you?
During a recent debate about the carrying capacity of the planet I mentioned to an American capitalist that there are 7 billion people and he corrected me, correctly. He was leery of the 7 billion figure since many Africans don’t really consume, and so they don’t really exist within the System.
Capitalists live in their own fantasy but my friends chose to deal with Reality. That’s why I respect them, they have Courage.
So what does Reality look like?
There’s no one in control. The System will continue until it kills everyone. Extinction is the System Result.
You want facts to explicitly substantiate that statement? Sure, that’s easy for me. The System framework requires incremental growth in commodity inputs and consumption—both serve to validate the creation of interest bearing debt; the interest is profit—which becomes income for my friends at the top of the Dominant Class.
Incremental Growth in commodity inputs—the result is Depletion. Which calls for wars of aggression, and annihilation. The nukes keep the peace, for now, but they also mean the next big war carries risk of extinction.
So how to change the System? How to manufacture mass desire for a change of the System framework? And such change, is it worthwhile?
At the very minimum; change would require pain on a biblical scale. It takes pain to de-condition the brain, it’s what Pavlov taught us.
One of the often unstated benefits of a First Strike against Russia is that 3 to 4 billion would die from crop failure alone. That’s a lot of pain. And then there’s the Reset—the other option—it can be managed in such a way as to depopulate entire regions. That also carries the risk of extinction (See volume 3).
If the Reset happens and cosmic numbers start starving—then I can guarantee you this—it’s not an accident.
Extinction is the System Result
What a spectacle the peasants make, like children at their first circus, they cheered for Trump. A very entertaining pageant of manipulation, and then to watch the retards realize they were fooled once more. “Perhaps the snowflakes were right,” they mutter darkly.
And this thought-piece is not a complaint on my part, the mass manipulation, and then the Reality dawning to crush the hope of countless millions—“Are you not entertained!?”
Sure I am, this is the best entertainment ever, and it’s free. You don’t even have to pay into the Colosseum, just turn on the TV.
Now we should be clear in our thinking—just because the price is free doesn’t mean it’s cost free—I’m just hoping to be dead before the butcher’s bill is paid. My Capitalistic friends share many things in common, certainly mutual respect for one another, but there are other qualities and attributes that they share which I’ll share with you.
First, they always mention their age in private correspondence, and they’re all far older than me. They express implied happiness at being almost dead, at being at the end of their life cycle, that they won’t have to live too much further into the Future. That they’re almost dead is source of personal comfort after they read, and some have written, The Philosophy of Capitalism.
Back to the Colosseum, where the predators are on stage and the prey is the audience. It’s easy to become upset, though it’s best not to be, there really is consolation in understanding—would you prefer false hope over entertainment? I think entertainment is the right answer.
Though the peasant doesn’t choose hope over understanding; the predators are naturally manipulative while the prey have brains that are desperate—projecting their love and hope toward a messiah who’ll deliver an imagined place. A place healed of depression, separatism, riots and war. Wouldn’t you be desperate if your nation was dug into multiple wars? 16 years of war, going on 17, with no hope of resolution.
‘Hope only serves to prolong suffering’ was Nietzsche’s warning to tomorrow’s peasant. Read my warning to Zero Hedgers in October: ‘My contacts with The Families said Trump was being protected, that was months ago.’ It was a warning that went unheeded too. Whereas Hegel was more concerned with the past, which revealed fear as the agent that drove progress toward self awareness—whereby self and self-image became the same—whereby Thought would govern the World via Reason—And so on.
Actually, I’ve come to realize that the limit placed upon self awareness is the absence of virtue, namely the absence of Courage. It takes Courage to deal with Reality. To see it for what it is, in its naked form.
The System is a living thing; the Natural System gives it life. And so it will seek the means to defend itself. It will develop an immune system so to speak; to reject burdens and critiques. Of course it also has instruments to defend itself; the System was designed to serve the Dominant Class who protect it consciously. And then there is Instinct—Any individual who depends upon the System for his survival will defend it instinctively.
Now this Instinct is shared by all insiders so it operates as a force at the System Level—this force is exclusive and seeks to ostracize and make powerless any threats to continuity, e.g. the unemployed, or any nation that favours Gold over the FIAT, that prefers publicly to privately owned banks.
The insiders’ thinking will is aborted as the power of belief, and conformity of thought is required to oppress and demoralize outsiders. The power to suppress any doubt about sustainability or the fairness of outcomes is called for. “Those people are homeless due to their weak character” so to speak, or “The Middle East is a mess because they’re inbred.” Pat Buchanan rails against immigrants, after his friends spent decades making money from desperate labour—demoralised first and then displaced by death squads sent by us, the Dominant Class—to kill anyone trying to make Central America a livable place. Duplicity and delusion are the handmaidens of success in the business of peasant-debt-slave manipulation, right? And that’s not a critique, the status quo has served me well, so thanks Pat.
So there’s no critical thinking at the System Level by those benefiting from the System—though there is feeling; Liberals are prone to guilt for example, and now the retards are ashamed for falling for the appearance of nationalism—This protective Instinct drives the evolution of myth, fantasy, belief and social peer pressure that serves to prolong the System.
Another thing I’ve noted about my friends is that they don’t care about other people, they’re respectively capital- or empire-centric, and anyone who’s not human-centric is ultimately anti-human. I came to this realisation after publishing a post entitled ‘Capitalism Causes us to be Mentally Ill’ and no one read it. Visitors to my site are almost all capitalists, I know this since I can track what site they’ve come from—FT, Zero Hedge mostly—and they also write me. And they refuse to write reviews about our books because they don’t care about society or other readers. It’s almost funny for me; but you need to be mean to remain Dominant, right? So no hard feelings between me and my friends.
Not so much fun for the masses who assumed Trump cared about them. Trump is a Capitalist so he is Capital-centric, thus he doesn’t care about people. But try explaining that to a peasant.
The Fed’s sole mandate is not to help Americans (people) but to protect and preserve the System, which is demonstrably true given recent behaviour. What about the Bank of England? How many Billions is it printing every day? Does any insider care to count? Or check? Or dare to question?
As Marx realised from his studies; it’s hard to change the System. He realised the need for Revolution—the wholesale transformation of society by killing those at the Top who benefit from the System.
His fantasy failed; and interestingly, we also know why. (See Volume 1.)
The System is profit and consumer-centric. But if you can’t consume then you don’t exist, do you?
During a recent debate about the carrying capacity of the planet I mentioned to an American capitalist that there are 7 billion people and he corrected me, correctly. He was leery of the 7 billion figure since many Africans don’t really consume, and so they don’t really exist within the System.
Capitalists live in their own fantasy but my friends chose to deal with Reality. That’s why I respect them, they have Courage.
So what does Reality look like?
There’s no one in control. The System will continue until it kills everyone. Extinction is the System Result.
You want facts to explicitly substantiate that statement? Sure, that’s easy for me. The System framework requires incremental growth in commodity inputs and consumption—both serve to validate the creation of interest bearing debt; the interest is profit—which becomes income for my friends at the top of the Dominant Class.
Incremental Growth in commodity inputs—the result is Depletion. Which calls for wars of aggression, and annihilation. The nukes keep the peace, for now, but they also mean the next big war carries risk of extinction.
So how to change the System? How to manufacture mass desire for a change of the System framework? And such change, is it worthwhile?
At the very minimum; change would require pain on a biblical scale. It takes pain to de-condition the brain, it’s what Pavlov taught us.
One of the often unstated benefits of a First Strike against Russia is that 3 to 4 billion would die from crop failure alone. That’s a lot of pain. And then there’s the Reset—the other option—it can be managed in such a way as to depopulate entire regions. That also carries the risk of extinction (See volume 3).
If the Reset happens and cosmic numbers start starving—then I can guarantee you this—it’s not an accident.
Friday, July 28, 2017
SC147-4
http://www.postcarbon.org/are-we-doomed-lets-have-a-conversation/
Are We Doomed? Let’s Have a Conversation.
My most recent essay, in which I discussed a highly publicized controversy over the efficacy of plans for a comprehensive transition to an all-renewable energy future, garnered some strong responses. “If you are right,” one Facebook commenter opined, “we are doomed. Fortunately you are not right.” (The commenter didn’t explain why.) What had I said to provoke an expectation of cataclysmic oblivion? Simply that there is probably no technically and financially feasible energy pathway to enable those of us in highly industrialized countries to maintain current levels of energy usage very far into the future.
My piece happened to be published right around the same time New York Magazine released a controversial article titled “The Uninhabitable Earth,” in which author David Wallace Wells portrayed a dire future if the most pessimistic climate change models turn to reality. “It is, I promise, worse than you think,” wrote Wells. “If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today.” Wells’s article drew rebukes from—of all people—climate scientists, who pointed out a few factual errors, but also insisted that scaring the public just doesn’t help. “Importantly, fear does not motivate,” responded Michael Mann with Susan Joy Hassol and Tom Toles, “and appealing to it is often counter-productive as it tends to distance people from the problem, leading them to disengage, doubt and even dismiss it.”
It’s true: apocalyptic warnings don’t move most people. Or, rather, they move most people away from the source of discomfort, so they simply tune out. But it’s also true that people feel a sense of deep, unacknowledged unease when they are fed “solutions” that they instinctively know are false or insufficient.
Others came to Wells’s defense. Margaret Klein Salamon, a clinical psychologist and founder of the climate action group The Climate Mobilization, which advocates for starting a “World War II-scale” emergency mobilization to convert from fossil fuels, writes, “it is OK, indeed imperative, to tell the whole, frightening story. . . . [I]t’s the job of those of us trying to protect humanity and restore a safe climate to tell the truth about the climate crisis and help people process and channel their own feelings—not to preemptively try to manage and constrain those feelings.”
So: Are we doomed if we can’t maintain current and growing energy levels? And are we doomed anyway due to now-inevitable impacts of climate change?
First, the good news. With regard to energy, we should keep in mind the fact that today’s Americans use roughly twice as much per capita as their great-grandparents did in 1925. While people in that era enjoyed less mobility and fewer options for entertainment and communication than we do today, they nevertheless managed to survive and even thrive. And we now have the ability to provide many services (such as lighting) far more efficiently, so it should be possible to reduce per-capita energy usage dramatically while still maintaining a lifestyle that would be considered more than satisfactory by members of previous generations and by people in many parts of the world today. And reducing energy usage would make a whole raft of problems—climate change, resource depletion, the challenge of transitioning to renewable energy sources—much easier to solve.
The main good news with regard to climate change that I can point to (as I did in an essay posted in June) is that economically recoverable fossil fuel reserves are consistent only with lower-emissions climate change scenarios. As BP and other credible sources for coal, oil, and natural gas reserves figures show, and as more and more researchers are pointing out, the worst-case climate scenarios associated with “business as usual” levels of carbon emissions are in fact unrealistic.
Now, the bad news. While we could live perfectly well with less energy, that’s not what the managers of our economy want. They want growth. Our entire economy is structured to require constant, compounded growth of GDP, and for all practical purposes raising the GDP means using more energy. While fringe economists and environmentalists have for years been proposing ways to back away from our growth addiction (for example, by using alternative economic indices such as Gross National Happiness), none of these proposals has been put into widespread effect. As things now stand, if growth falters the economy crashes.
There’s bad climate news as well: even with current levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases, we’re seeing unacceptable and worsening impacts—raging fires, soaring heat levels, and melting icecaps. And there are hints that self-reinforcing feedbacks maybe kicking in: an example is the release of large amounts of methane from thawing tundra and oceanic hydrates, which could lead to a short-term but steep spike in warming. Also, no one is sure if current metrics of climate sensitivity (used to estimate the response of the global climate system to a given level of forcing) are accurate, or whether the climate is actually more sensitive than we have assumed. There’s some worrisome evidence the latter is case.
But let’s step back a bit. If we’re interested in signs of impending global crisis, there’s no need to stop with just these two global challenges. The world is losing 25 billion tons of topsoil a year due to current industrial agricultural practices; if we don’t deal with that issue, civilization will still crash even if we do manage to ace our energy and climate test. Humanity is also over-using fresh water: ancient aquifers are depleting, while other water sources are being polluted. If we don’t deal with our water crisis, we still crash. Species are going extinct at a thousand times the pre-industrial rate; if we don’t deal with the biodiversity dilemma, we still crash. Then there are social and economic problems that could cause nations to crumble even if we manage to protect the environment; this threat category includes the menaces of over-reliance on debt and increasing economic inequality.
If we attack each of these problems piecemeal with technological fixes (for example, with desalination technology to solve the water crisis or geo-engineering to stabilize the climate) we may still crash because our techno-fixes are likely to have unintended consequences, as all technological interventions do. Anyway, the likelihood of successfully identifying and deploying all the needed fixes in time is vanishingly small.
Many problems are converging at once because society is a complex system, and the challenges we have been discussing are aspects of a systemic crisis. A useful way to frame an integrated understanding of the 21st century survival challenge is this: we humans have overshot Earth’s long-term carrying capacity for our species. We’ve been able to do this due to a temporary subsidy of cheap, bountiful energy from fossil fuels, which enabled us to stretch nature’s limits and to support a far larger overall population than would otherwise be possible. But now we are starting to see supply constraints for those fuels, just as the side effects of burning enormous amounts of coal, oil, and natural gas are also coming into view. Meanwhile, using cheap energy to expand resource-extractive and waste-generating economic processes is leading to biodiversity loss; the depletion of soil, water, and minerals; and environmental pollution of many kinds. Just decarbonizing energy, while necessary, doesn’t adequately deal with systemic overshoot. Only a reduction of population and overall resource consumption, along with a rapid reduction in our reliance on fossil fuels and a redesign of industrial systems, can do that.
Economic inequality is a systemic problem too. As we’ve grown our economy, those who were in position to invest in industrial expansion or to loan money to others have reaped the majority of the rewards, while those who got by through selling their time and labor (or whose common cultural heritage was simply appropriated by industrialists) have fallen behind. There’s no technological fix for inequality; dealing with it will require redesigning our economic system and redistributing wealth. Those in wealthy nations would, on average, have to adjust their living standards downward.
Now, can we do all of this without a crash? Probably not. Indeed, many economists would regard the medicine (population reduction, a decline in per-capita energy use, and economic redistribution) as worse than whatever aspects of the disease they are willing to acknowledge. Environmentalists and human rights advocates would disagree. Which is to say, there’s really no way out. Whether we stick with business as usual, or attempt a dramatic multi-pronged intervention, our current “normal” way of life is toast.
Accepting that a crash is more or less inevitable is a big step, psychologically speaking. I call this toxic knowledge: one cannot “un-know” that the current world system hangs by a thread, and this understanding can lead to depression. In some ways, the systemic crisis we face is analogous to the individual existential crisis of life and death, which we each have to confront eventually. Some willfully ignore their own mortality for as long as possible; others grasp at a belief in the afterlife. Still others seek to create meaning and purpose by making a positive difference in the lives of those around them with whatever time they have. Such efforts don’t alter the inevitability of death; however, contributing to one’s community appears to enhance well-being in many ways beyond that of merely prolonging life.
But is a crash the same as doom?
Not necessarily. Our best hope at this point would seem to be a controlled crash that enables partial recovery at a lower level of population and resource use, and that therefore doesn’t lead to complete and utter oblivion (human extinction or close to it). Among those who understand the systemic nature of our problems, the controlled crash option is the subject of what may be the most interesting and important conversation that’s taking place on the planet just now. But only informed people who have gotten over denial and self-delusion are part of it.
This discussion started in the 1970s, though I wasn’t part of it then; I joined a couple of decades later. There is no formal membership; the conversation takes place through and among a patchwork of small organizations and scattered individuals. They don’t all know each other and there is no secret handshake. Some have publicly adopted the stance that a global crash is inevitable; most soft-pedal that message on their organizational websites but are privately plenty worried. During the course of the conversation so far, two (not mutually exclusive) strategies have emerged.
The first strategy envisions convincing the managers and power holders of the world to invest in a no-regrets insurance plan. Some systems thinkers who understand our linked global crises are offering to come up with a back-pocket checklist for policy makers, for moments when financial or environmental crisis hits: how, under such circumstances, might the managerial elite be able to prevent, say, a stock market crash from triggering food, energy, and social crises as well? A set of back-up plans wouldn’t require detailed knowledge of when or how crisis will erupt. It wouldn’t even require much of a systemic understanding of global overshoot. It would simply require willingness on the part of societal power holders to agree that there are real or potential threats to global order, and to accept the offer of help. At the moment, those pursuing this strategy are working mostly covertly, for reasons that are not hard to discern.
The second strategy consists of working within communities to build more societal resilience from the ground up. It is easier to get traction with friends and neighbors than with global power holders, and it’s within communities that political decisions are made closest to where the impact is felt. My own organization, Post Carbon Institute, has chosen to pursue this strategy via a series of books, the Community Resilience Guides; the “Think Resilience” video series; and our forthcoming compendium, The Community Resilience Reader. Rob Hopkins, who originated the Transition Towns movement, has been perhaps the most public, eloquent, and upbeat proponent of the local resilience strategy, but there are countless others scattered across the globe.
Somehow, the work of resilience building (whether top-down or bottom-up) must focus not just on maintaining supplies of food, water, energy, and other basic necessities, but also on sustaining social cohesion—a culture of understanding, tolerance, and inquiry—during times of great stress. While it’s true that people tend to pull together in remarkable ways during wars and natural disasters, sustained hard times can lead to scapegoating and worse.
Most people are not party to the conversation, not aware that it is happening, and unaware even that such a conversation is warranted. Among those who are worried about the state of the world, most are content to pursue or support efforts to keep crises from occurring by working via political parties, religious organizations, or non-profit advocacy orgs on issues such as climate change, food security, and economic inequality. There is also a small but rapidly growing segment of society that feels disempowered as the era of economic growth wanes, and that views society’s power holders as evil and corrupt. These dispossessed—whether followers of ISIS or Infowars—would prefer to “shake things up,” even to the point of bringing society to destruction, rather than suffer the continuation of the status quo. Unfortunately, this last group may have the easiest path of all.
By comparison, the number of those involved in the conversation is exceedingly small, countable probably in the hundreds of thousands, certainly not millions. Can we succeed? It depends on how one defines “success”—as the ability to maintain, for a little longer, an inherently unsustainable global industrial system? Or as the practical reduction in likely suffering on the part of the survivors of the eventual crash? A related query one often hears after environmental lectures is, Are we doing enough? If “Enough” means “enough to avert a system crash,” then the answer is no: it’s unlikely that anyone can deliver that outcome now. The question should be, What can we do—not to save a way of life that is unsalvageable, but to make a difference to the people and other species in harm’s way?
This is not a conversation about the long-term trajectory of human cultural evolution, though that’s an interesting subject for speculation. Assuming there are survivors, what will human society look like following the crises ensuing from climate change and the end of fossil fuels and capitalism? David Fleming’s Surviving the Future and John Michael Greer’s The Ecotechnic Future offer useful thoughts in this regard. My own view is that it’s hard for us to envision what comes next because our imaginations are bounded by the reality we have known. What awaits will likely be as far removed from from modern industrial urban life as Iron-Age agrarian empires were from hunting-and-gathering bands. We are approaching one of history’s great discontinuities. The best we can do under the circumstances is to get our priorities and values straight (protect the vulnerable, preserve the best of what we have collectively achieved, and live a life that’s worthy) and put one foot in front of the other.
The conversation I’m pointing to here is about fairly short-term actions. And it doesn’t lend itself to building a big movement. For that, you need villains to blame and promises of revived national or tribal glory. For those engaged in the conversation, there’s only hard work and the satisfaction of honestly facing our predicament with an attitude of curiosity, engagement, and compassion. For us, threats of doom or promises of utopia are distractions or cop-outs.
Only those drawn to the conversation by temperament and education are likely to take it up. Advertising may not work. But having a few more hands on deck, and a few more resources to work with, can only help.
Are We Doomed? Let’s Have a Conversation.
My most recent essay, in which I discussed a highly publicized controversy over the efficacy of plans for a comprehensive transition to an all-renewable energy future, garnered some strong responses. “If you are right,” one Facebook commenter opined, “we are doomed. Fortunately you are not right.” (The commenter didn’t explain why.) What had I said to provoke an expectation of cataclysmic oblivion? Simply that there is probably no technically and financially feasible energy pathway to enable those of us in highly industrialized countries to maintain current levels of energy usage very far into the future.
My piece happened to be published right around the same time New York Magazine released a controversial article titled “The Uninhabitable Earth,” in which author David Wallace Wells portrayed a dire future if the most pessimistic climate change models turn to reality. “It is, I promise, worse than you think,” wrote Wells. “If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today.” Wells’s article drew rebukes from—of all people—climate scientists, who pointed out a few factual errors, but also insisted that scaring the public just doesn’t help. “Importantly, fear does not motivate,” responded Michael Mann with Susan Joy Hassol and Tom Toles, “and appealing to it is often counter-productive as it tends to distance people from the problem, leading them to disengage, doubt and even dismiss it.”
It’s true: apocalyptic warnings don’t move most people. Or, rather, they move most people away from the source of discomfort, so they simply tune out. But it’s also true that people feel a sense of deep, unacknowledged unease when they are fed “solutions” that they instinctively know are false or insufficient.
Others came to Wells’s defense. Margaret Klein Salamon, a clinical psychologist and founder of the climate action group The Climate Mobilization, which advocates for starting a “World War II-scale” emergency mobilization to convert from fossil fuels, writes, “it is OK, indeed imperative, to tell the whole, frightening story. . . . [I]t’s the job of those of us trying to protect humanity and restore a safe climate to tell the truth about the climate crisis and help people process and channel their own feelings—not to preemptively try to manage and constrain those feelings.”
So: Are we doomed if we can’t maintain current and growing energy levels? And are we doomed anyway due to now-inevitable impacts of climate change?
First, the good news. With regard to energy, we should keep in mind the fact that today’s Americans use roughly twice as much per capita as their great-grandparents did in 1925. While people in that era enjoyed less mobility and fewer options for entertainment and communication than we do today, they nevertheless managed to survive and even thrive. And we now have the ability to provide many services (such as lighting) far more efficiently, so it should be possible to reduce per-capita energy usage dramatically while still maintaining a lifestyle that would be considered more than satisfactory by members of previous generations and by people in many parts of the world today. And reducing energy usage would make a whole raft of problems—climate change, resource depletion, the challenge of transitioning to renewable energy sources—much easier to solve.
The main good news with regard to climate change that I can point to (as I did in an essay posted in June) is that economically recoverable fossil fuel reserves are consistent only with lower-emissions climate change scenarios. As BP and other credible sources for coal, oil, and natural gas reserves figures show, and as more and more researchers are pointing out, the worst-case climate scenarios associated with “business as usual” levels of carbon emissions are in fact unrealistic.
Now, the bad news. While we could live perfectly well with less energy, that’s not what the managers of our economy want. They want growth. Our entire economy is structured to require constant, compounded growth of GDP, and for all practical purposes raising the GDP means using more energy. While fringe economists and environmentalists have for years been proposing ways to back away from our growth addiction (for example, by using alternative economic indices such as Gross National Happiness), none of these proposals has been put into widespread effect. As things now stand, if growth falters the economy crashes.
There’s bad climate news as well: even with current levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases, we’re seeing unacceptable and worsening impacts—raging fires, soaring heat levels, and melting icecaps. And there are hints that self-reinforcing feedbacks maybe kicking in: an example is the release of large amounts of methane from thawing tundra and oceanic hydrates, which could lead to a short-term but steep spike in warming. Also, no one is sure if current metrics of climate sensitivity (used to estimate the response of the global climate system to a given level of forcing) are accurate, or whether the climate is actually more sensitive than we have assumed. There’s some worrisome evidence the latter is case.
But let’s step back a bit. If we’re interested in signs of impending global crisis, there’s no need to stop with just these two global challenges. The world is losing 25 billion tons of topsoil a year due to current industrial agricultural practices; if we don’t deal with that issue, civilization will still crash even if we do manage to ace our energy and climate test. Humanity is also over-using fresh water: ancient aquifers are depleting, while other water sources are being polluted. If we don’t deal with our water crisis, we still crash. Species are going extinct at a thousand times the pre-industrial rate; if we don’t deal with the biodiversity dilemma, we still crash. Then there are social and economic problems that could cause nations to crumble even if we manage to protect the environment; this threat category includes the menaces of over-reliance on debt and increasing economic inequality.
If we attack each of these problems piecemeal with technological fixes (for example, with desalination technology to solve the water crisis or geo-engineering to stabilize the climate) we may still crash because our techno-fixes are likely to have unintended consequences, as all technological interventions do. Anyway, the likelihood of successfully identifying and deploying all the needed fixes in time is vanishingly small.
Many problems are converging at once because society is a complex system, and the challenges we have been discussing are aspects of a systemic crisis. A useful way to frame an integrated understanding of the 21st century survival challenge is this: we humans have overshot Earth’s long-term carrying capacity for our species. We’ve been able to do this due to a temporary subsidy of cheap, bountiful energy from fossil fuels, which enabled us to stretch nature’s limits and to support a far larger overall population than would otherwise be possible. But now we are starting to see supply constraints for those fuels, just as the side effects of burning enormous amounts of coal, oil, and natural gas are also coming into view. Meanwhile, using cheap energy to expand resource-extractive and waste-generating economic processes is leading to biodiversity loss; the depletion of soil, water, and minerals; and environmental pollution of many kinds. Just decarbonizing energy, while necessary, doesn’t adequately deal with systemic overshoot. Only a reduction of population and overall resource consumption, along with a rapid reduction in our reliance on fossil fuels and a redesign of industrial systems, can do that.
Economic inequality is a systemic problem too. As we’ve grown our economy, those who were in position to invest in industrial expansion or to loan money to others have reaped the majority of the rewards, while those who got by through selling their time and labor (or whose common cultural heritage was simply appropriated by industrialists) have fallen behind. There’s no technological fix for inequality; dealing with it will require redesigning our economic system and redistributing wealth. Those in wealthy nations would, on average, have to adjust their living standards downward.
Now, can we do all of this without a crash? Probably not. Indeed, many economists would regard the medicine (population reduction, a decline in per-capita energy use, and economic redistribution) as worse than whatever aspects of the disease they are willing to acknowledge. Environmentalists and human rights advocates would disagree. Which is to say, there’s really no way out. Whether we stick with business as usual, or attempt a dramatic multi-pronged intervention, our current “normal” way of life is toast.
Accepting that a crash is more or less inevitable is a big step, psychologically speaking. I call this toxic knowledge: one cannot “un-know” that the current world system hangs by a thread, and this understanding can lead to depression. In some ways, the systemic crisis we face is analogous to the individual existential crisis of life and death, which we each have to confront eventually. Some willfully ignore their own mortality for as long as possible; others grasp at a belief in the afterlife. Still others seek to create meaning and purpose by making a positive difference in the lives of those around them with whatever time they have. Such efforts don’t alter the inevitability of death; however, contributing to one’s community appears to enhance well-being in many ways beyond that of merely prolonging life.
But is a crash the same as doom?
Not necessarily. Our best hope at this point would seem to be a controlled crash that enables partial recovery at a lower level of population and resource use, and that therefore doesn’t lead to complete and utter oblivion (human extinction or close to it). Among those who understand the systemic nature of our problems, the controlled crash option is the subject of what may be the most interesting and important conversation that’s taking place on the planet just now. But only informed people who have gotten over denial and self-delusion are part of it.
This discussion started in the 1970s, though I wasn’t part of it then; I joined a couple of decades later. There is no formal membership; the conversation takes place through and among a patchwork of small organizations and scattered individuals. They don’t all know each other and there is no secret handshake. Some have publicly adopted the stance that a global crash is inevitable; most soft-pedal that message on their organizational websites but are privately plenty worried. During the course of the conversation so far, two (not mutually exclusive) strategies have emerged.
The first strategy envisions convincing the managers and power holders of the world to invest in a no-regrets insurance plan. Some systems thinkers who understand our linked global crises are offering to come up with a back-pocket checklist for policy makers, for moments when financial or environmental crisis hits: how, under such circumstances, might the managerial elite be able to prevent, say, a stock market crash from triggering food, energy, and social crises as well? A set of back-up plans wouldn’t require detailed knowledge of when or how crisis will erupt. It wouldn’t even require much of a systemic understanding of global overshoot. It would simply require willingness on the part of societal power holders to agree that there are real or potential threats to global order, and to accept the offer of help. At the moment, those pursuing this strategy are working mostly covertly, for reasons that are not hard to discern.
The second strategy consists of working within communities to build more societal resilience from the ground up. It is easier to get traction with friends and neighbors than with global power holders, and it’s within communities that political decisions are made closest to where the impact is felt. My own organization, Post Carbon Institute, has chosen to pursue this strategy via a series of books, the Community Resilience Guides; the “Think Resilience” video series; and our forthcoming compendium, The Community Resilience Reader. Rob Hopkins, who originated the Transition Towns movement, has been perhaps the most public, eloquent, and upbeat proponent of the local resilience strategy, but there are countless others scattered across the globe.
Somehow, the work of resilience building (whether top-down or bottom-up) must focus not just on maintaining supplies of food, water, energy, and other basic necessities, but also on sustaining social cohesion—a culture of understanding, tolerance, and inquiry—during times of great stress. While it’s true that people tend to pull together in remarkable ways during wars and natural disasters, sustained hard times can lead to scapegoating and worse.
Most people are not party to the conversation, not aware that it is happening, and unaware even that such a conversation is warranted. Among those who are worried about the state of the world, most are content to pursue or support efforts to keep crises from occurring by working via political parties, religious organizations, or non-profit advocacy orgs on issues such as climate change, food security, and economic inequality. There is also a small but rapidly growing segment of society that feels disempowered as the era of economic growth wanes, and that views society’s power holders as evil and corrupt. These dispossessed—whether followers of ISIS or Infowars—would prefer to “shake things up,” even to the point of bringing society to destruction, rather than suffer the continuation of the status quo. Unfortunately, this last group may have the easiest path of all.
By comparison, the number of those involved in the conversation is exceedingly small, countable probably in the hundreds of thousands, certainly not millions. Can we succeed? It depends on how one defines “success”—as the ability to maintain, for a little longer, an inherently unsustainable global industrial system? Or as the practical reduction in likely suffering on the part of the survivors of the eventual crash? A related query one often hears after environmental lectures is, Are we doing enough? If “Enough” means “enough to avert a system crash,” then the answer is no: it’s unlikely that anyone can deliver that outcome now. The question should be, What can we do—not to save a way of life that is unsalvageable, but to make a difference to the people and other species in harm’s way?
This is not a conversation about the long-term trajectory of human cultural evolution, though that’s an interesting subject for speculation. Assuming there are survivors, what will human society look like following the crises ensuing from climate change and the end of fossil fuels and capitalism? David Fleming’s Surviving the Future and John Michael Greer’s The Ecotechnic Future offer useful thoughts in this regard. My own view is that it’s hard for us to envision what comes next because our imaginations are bounded by the reality we have known. What awaits will likely be as far removed from from modern industrial urban life as Iron-Age agrarian empires were from hunting-and-gathering bands. We are approaching one of history’s great discontinuities. The best we can do under the circumstances is to get our priorities and values straight (protect the vulnerable, preserve the best of what we have collectively achieved, and live a life that’s worthy) and put one foot in front of the other.
The conversation I’m pointing to here is about fairly short-term actions. And it doesn’t lend itself to building a big movement. For that, you need villains to blame and promises of revived national or tribal glory. For those engaged in the conversation, there’s only hard work and the satisfaction of honestly facing our predicament with an attitude of curiosity, engagement, and compassion. For us, threats of doom or promises of utopia are distractions or cop-outs.
Only those drawn to the conversation by temperament and education are likely to take it up. Advertising may not work. But having a few more hands on deck, and a few more resources to work with, can only help.
SC147-3
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/words-and-deeds/
Words and Deeds
I know I’m not the first to point out how Anthony Scaramucci, President Trump’s brand new Communications Director, is suddenly and eerily carrying on like his namesake, the arch-rascal / buffoon of the Old World Commedia dell’Arte in lashing out at his fellow scamps and bozos in the clown school that the White House has become. Of course, these antics only reflect the astounding violent vulgarity of current US culture in general, especially as it recursively re-amplifies itself in the distorting echo chamber of TV. It’s how we roll nowadays — right up the collective butt-hole of history until some fateful event provokes a last frightful purging of our own bullshit.
Still, it was rather shocking to hear Scaramucci refer to White House Chief of Staff Rance Priebus as “a fucking paranoid schizophrenic” and Trump ultra-insider Steve Bannon as someone “enjoys sucking his own cock.” It’s kind of like Paulie Walnuts of “The Sopranos” wandered into the West Wing of “Veep.” Somebody’s gonna get whacked, and it’ll be a laugh-riot when it happens.
We need a little comic relief in these midsummer horse latitudes of the mind as the ill-starred Trump Show appears to enter its ceremonial death dance. There’s also something satisfyingly Napoleonesque about Scaramucci. Here’s a guy who cuts through the odious blubber of US politics right to the bone of things with a flensing blade of profane righteousness. Personally, I’d like to see him take some whacks at a few more deserving targets, and I can even imagine a somewhat farfetched scenario where the little guy shoves Trump out during a concocted national emergency and manages to declare himself First Citizen, or some such innovative title allowing him to run things for a while — say, until the generals toss him out a window. Or maybe he’ll last less than a week in his current position. I would not be surprised, either, if Mr. Bannon beats little Mooch to death with an Oval Office fireplace poker right in front of the Golden Golem of Greatness himself.
The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine — in this case, inexorably toward the restorative medicine of the 25th amendment. There is, after all, that hoary old artifact called the national interest lurking somewhere offstage aside of all this colorful mummery, especially as the Russian Meddling gambit appears to be dribbling away to nothing. It’s more than self-evident that poor Trump is in so far over his head that he’s come down with something like the bends, a debilitating systemic disorder rendering him unfit to execute the powers of office. Decades from now, they’ll say he had “the tweets.”
This is a melodrama of a type the world has seen before in a hundred royal palaces and other centers of mis-rule. The need to get rid of the head of state becomes so painfully self-evident that idle chatter about it ceases and all intention is signaled in mere eye-rolls, sighs, portentous glances, and other fraught devices of body language. That’s what’s going on now in the senate, the agency executive suites, the terraces of Martha’s Vineyard, and surely the hallowed corridors of the White House itself. One way or another, the knives are coming out.
The most economical script would have Trump graciously “resign” and be allowed to return to his familiar money-grubbing activities in real estate, where he can really only do harm to his own bank accounts and family posterity. Or, he could be dragged kicking and screaming from the premises, shall we say, and thrown to the bloodthirsty beasts of Deep State justice. That will not be pretty. Either outcome could provoke a lot of mischief “out there” among those who voted for him.
In any case, I doubt that the polity can take much more of Trump after Labor Day — and I say all this as one who was never part of the so-called “Resistance.” I’m not even very much convinced that getting rid of Trump and installing his stand-in, Mike Pence, will leave the government any less dysfunctional. After all, the nation is riding a larger and scarier arc of history as the techno-industrial fiesta winds down, with all the awfully disruptive consequences that implies. But at least there’s a chance that we might at least face this predicament seriously instead of feeling trapped in some sort of cosmic sitcom in an alternative universe of endless fucking nonsense.
Words and Deeds
I know I’m not the first to point out how Anthony Scaramucci, President Trump’s brand new Communications Director, is suddenly and eerily carrying on like his namesake, the arch-rascal / buffoon of the Old World Commedia dell’Arte in lashing out at his fellow scamps and bozos in the clown school that the White House has become. Of course, these antics only reflect the astounding violent vulgarity of current US culture in general, especially as it recursively re-amplifies itself in the distorting echo chamber of TV. It’s how we roll nowadays — right up the collective butt-hole of history until some fateful event provokes a last frightful purging of our own bullshit.
Still, it was rather shocking to hear Scaramucci refer to White House Chief of Staff Rance Priebus as “a fucking paranoid schizophrenic” and Trump ultra-insider Steve Bannon as someone “enjoys sucking his own cock.” It’s kind of like Paulie Walnuts of “The Sopranos” wandered into the West Wing of “Veep.” Somebody’s gonna get whacked, and it’ll be a laugh-riot when it happens.
We need a little comic relief in these midsummer horse latitudes of the mind as the ill-starred Trump Show appears to enter its ceremonial death dance. There’s also something satisfyingly Napoleonesque about Scaramucci. Here’s a guy who cuts through the odious blubber of US politics right to the bone of things with a flensing blade of profane righteousness. Personally, I’d like to see him take some whacks at a few more deserving targets, and I can even imagine a somewhat farfetched scenario where the little guy shoves Trump out during a concocted national emergency and manages to declare himself First Citizen, or some such innovative title allowing him to run things for a while — say, until the generals toss him out a window. Or maybe he’ll last less than a week in his current position. I would not be surprised, either, if Mr. Bannon beats little Mooch to death with an Oval Office fireplace poker right in front of the Golden Golem of Greatness himself.
The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine — in this case, inexorably toward the restorative medicine of the 25th amendment. There is, after all, that hoary old artifact called the national interest lurking somewhere offstage aside of all this colorful mummery, especially as the Russian Meddling gambit appears to be dribbling away to nothing. It’s more than self-evident that poor Trump is in so far over his head that he’s come down with something like the bends, a debilitating systemic disorder rendering him unfit to execute the powers of office. Decades from now, they’ll say he had “the tweets.”
This is a melodrama of a type the world has seen before in a hundred royal palaces and other centers of mis-rule. The need to get rid of the head of state becomes so painfully self-evident that idle chatter about it ceases and all intention is signaled in mere eye-rolls, sighs, portentous glances, and other fraught devices of body language. That’s what’s going on now in the senate, the agency executive suites, the terraces of Martha’s Vineyard, and surely the hallowed corridors of the White House itself. One way or another, the knives are coming out.
The most economical script would have Trump graciously “resign” and be allowed to return to his familiar money-grubbing activities in real estate, where he can really only do harm to his own bank accounts and family posterity. Or, he could be dragged kicking and screaming from the premises, shall we say, and thrown to the bloodthirsty beasts of Deep State justice. That will not be pretty. Either outcome could provoke a lot of mischief “out there” among those who voted for him.
In any case, I doubt that the polity can take much more of Trump after Labor Day — and I say all this as one who was never part of the so-called “Resistance.” I’m not even very much convinced that getting rid of Trump and installing his stand-in, Mike Pence, will leave the government any less dysfunctional. After all, the nation is riding a larger and scarier arc of history as the techno-industrial fiesta winds down, with all the awfully disruptive consequences that implies. But at least there’s a chance that we might at least face this predicament seriously instead of feeling trapped in some sort of cosmic sitcom in an alternative universe of endless fucking nonsense.
SC147-2
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-value-of-everything/
The Value of Everything
We are looking more and more like France on the eve of its revolution in 1789. Our classes are distributed differently, but the inequity is just as sharp. America’s “aristocracy,” once based strictly on bank accounts, acts increasingly hereditary as the vapid offspring and relations of “stars” (in politics, showbiz, business, and the arts) assert their prerogatives to fame, power, and riches — think the voters didn’t grok the sinister import of Hillary’s “it’s my turn” message?
What’s especially striking in similarity to the court of the Bourbons is the utter cluelessness of America’s entitled power elite to the agony of the moiling masses below them and mainly away from the coastal cities. Just about everything meaningful has been taken away from them, even though many of the material trappings of existence remain: a roof, stuff that resembles food, cars, and screens of various sizes.
But the places they are supposed to call home are either wrecked — the original small towns and cities of America — or replaced by new “developments” so devoid of artistry, history, thought, care, and charm that they don’t add up to communities, and are so obviously unworthy of affection, that the very idea of “home” becomes a cruel joke.
These places were bad enough in the 1960s and 70s, when the people who lived in them at least were able to report to paying jobs assembling products and managing their distribution. Now those people don’t have that to give a little meaning to their existence, or cover the costs of it. Public space was never designed into the automobile suburbs, and the sad remnants of it were replaced by ersatz substitutes, like the now-dying malls. Everything else of a public and human associational nature has been shoved into some kind of computerized box with a screen on it.
The floundering non-elite masses have not learned the harsh lesson of our time that the virtual is not an adequate substitute for the authentic, while the elites who create all this vicious crap spend millions to consort face-to-face in the Hamptons and Martha’s Vineyard telling each other how wonderful they are for providing all the artificial social programming and glitzy hardware for their paying customers.
The effect of this dynamic relationship so far has been powerfully soporific. You can deprive people of a true home for a while, and give them virtual friends on TV to project their emotions onto, and arrange to give them cars via some financing scam or other to keep them moving mindlessly around an utterly desecrated landscape under the false impression that they’re going somewhere — but we’re now at the point where ordinary people can’t even carry the costs of keeping themselves hostage to these degrading conditions.
The next big entertainment for them will be the financial implosion of the elites themselves as the governing forces of physics finally overcome all the ruses and stratagems of the elites who have been playing games with money. Professional observers never tire of saying that the government can’t run out of money (because they can always print more of it) but they can certainly destroy the value of that money and shred the consensual confidence that allows it to operate as money.
That’s exactly what is about to commence at the end of the summer when the government runs out of cash-on-hand and congress finds itself utterly paralyzed by party animus to patch the debt ceiling problem that disables new borrowing. The elites may be home from the Hamptons and the Vineyard by then, but summers may never be the same for them again.
The Deep State may win its war against the pathetic President Trump, but it won’t win any war against the imperatives of the universe and the way that expresses itself in the true valuation of things. And when the moment of clarification arrives — the instant of cosmic price discovery — the clueless elites will have to really and truly worry about the value of their heads.
The Value of Everything
We are looking more and more like France on the eve of its revolution in 1789. Our classes are distributed differently, but the inequity is just as sharp. America’s “aristocracy,” once based strictly on bank accounts, acts increasingly hereditary as the vapid offspring and relations of “stars” (in politics, showbiz, business, and the arts) assert their prerogatives to fame, power, and riches — think the voters didn’t grok the sinister import of Hillary’s “it’s my turn” message?
What’s especially striking in similarity to the court of the Bourbons is the utter cluelessness of America’s entitled power elite to the agony of the moiling masses below them and mainly away from the coastal cities. Just about everything meaningful has been taken away from them, even though many of the material trappings of existence remain: a roof, stuff that resembles food, cars, and screens of various sizes.
But the places they are supposed to call home are either wrecked — the original small towns and cities of America — or replaced by new “developments” so devoid of artistry, history, thought, care, and charm that they don’t add up to communities, and are so obviously unworthy of affection, that the very idea of “home” becomes a cruel joke.
These places were bad enough in the 1960s and 70s, when the people who lived in them at least were able to report to paying jobs assembling products and managing their distribution. Now those people don’t have that to give a little meaning to their existence, or cover the costs of it. Public space was never designed into the automobile suburbs, and the sad remnants of it were replaced by ersatz substitutes, like the now-dying malls. Everything else of a public and human associational nature has been shoved into some kind of computerized box with a screen on it.
The floundering non-elite masses have not learned the harsh lesson of our time that the virtual is not an adequate substitute for the authentic, while the elites who create all this vicious crap spend millions to consort face-to-face in the Hamptons and Martha’s Vineyard telling each other how wonderful they are for providing all the artificial social programming and glitzy hardware for their paying customers.
The effect of this dynamic relationship so far has been powerfully soporific. You can deprive people of a true home for a while, and give them virtual friends on TV to project their emotions onto, and arrange to give them cars via some financing scam or other to keep them moving mindlessly around an utterly desecrated landscape under the false impression that they’re going somewhere — but we’re now at the point where ordinary people can’t even carry the costs of keeping themselves hostage to these degrading conditions.
The next big entertainment for them will be the financial implosion of the elites themselves as the governing forces of physics finally overcome all the ruses and stratagems of the elites who have been playing games with money. Professional observers never tire of saying that the government can’t run out of money (because they can always print more of it) but they can certainly destroy the value of that money and shred the consensual confidence that allows it to operate as money.
That’s exactly what is about to commence at the end of the summer when the government runs out of cash-on-hand and congress finds itself utterly paralyzed by party animus to patch the debt ceiling problem that disables new borrowing. The elites may be home from the Hamptons and the Vineyard by then, but summers may never be the same for them again.
The Deep State may win its war against the pathetic President Trump, but it won’t win any war against the imperatives of the universe and the way that expresses itself in the true valuation of things. And when the moment of clarification arrives — the instant of cosmic price discovery — the clueless elites will have to really and truly worry about the value of their heads.
Wednesday, July 26, 2017
SC147-1
https://srsroccoreport.com/something-big-bad-and-ugly-is-taking-place-in-the-u-s-retirement-market/
Something Big, Bad And Ugly Is Taking Place In The U.S. Retirement Market
While the highly inflated value of the U.S. Retirement Market reached a new high this year, something is seriously wrong when we look behind the scenes. Of course, Americans have no idea that the U.S. Retirement Market is only a few steps from falling off the cliff, because their eyes are focused on the shiny spinning roulette wheel called the Wall Street Stock Market.
Yes, everyone continues to place their bets, hoping and praying that they will win it big, so they can retire in style. Unfortunately, American gamblers at the casino have no idea that the HOUSE is out of money. The only thing remaining in their backroom vaults is a small stash of cash and a bunch of IOU’s and debts.
According to the ICI – Investment Company Institute, the U.S. Retirement Market hit a new record $26.1 trillion in the first quarter of 2017:
This new record high in U.S. Retirement assets is most certainly a good moral booster for Americans. As their retirement assets continue to increase, this provides them a wonderful incentive to fork over more of their hard-earned monthly income to feed the DARK HOLE I label the U.S. Retirement PAC-MAN Monster.
Regretably, Americans have no idea that their monthly retirement contributions are not being saved or stored in a nice gold vault, rather they are being used to pay the lucky slobs who retired before them Now, when I say SLOBS or POOR SLOBS, I am not being derogatory. However, I am using the word as a Wall Street Banker would label those they prey upon.
Regardless, as the U.S. Retirement Market continued higher over the past several years, the amount of net contributions have gone into negative territory. As I have mentioned before, this is a beginning sign of a Ponzi Scheme in its last stages. In my previous article, WARNING: U.S. Ponzi Retirement Market In Big Trouble, Protect With Precious Metals, I posted the following chart:
As we can see in the chart, the Private Defined Contribution (DC) Plans paid out $28.7 billion more than they took in in 2014…. the last year the Investment Company Institute provided data. Simply, Private DC Plans are mostly 401K’s. If we look up at the first chart with the colorful breakdown in the different U.S. Retirement Plans, DC Plans (mostly 401K’s shown in YELLOW) were valued at $7.3 trillion.
To see U.S. DC plans now paying out more than they receive is certainly bad news… but it isn’t as bad as what is taking place in the U.S. DB – Defined Benefit Plan market. A Defined Benefit Plan is where an employer pays the employee a specific pension payment, based on the employees earning history.
If we look at the U.S. Private DC Plan chart below, we can plainly see what a serious mess it is in:
The GREEN BARS show how much is paid out to retired employees, the BLUE BARS are what is contributed into the DB Plan, and the RED BARS denote how much more is going out than coming in. It doesn’t take much of a brain surgeon to figure out this is not sustainable.
To get a better look at how much RED is going on the U.S. Private Sector DB Plan, I presented the figures in the chart below:
As of the last year the Investment Company Institute published the figures (2014), $123.7 billion more was paid out to employees in the Private Sector DB Plan then came in. While larger payouts have been going out than funds coming in for quite some time, they have also reached a new RECORD HIGH. Ain’t records great?
Okay… let’s bring back the first chart with all the wonderful colors:
The Private Sector DB Plan is shown in the nice GREEN COLOR above at $3 trillion in assets. Again, these are from the Private Sector. If we look at the Government DB Plans in PURPLE, they are valued at $5.5 trillion. Unfortunately, the Government DB Plans (State & Federal) Pension Plans are in much worse shape than the Private Sector DB Plans.
How much worse? Look at the chart below:
The Private Sector DB Plans are underfunded by $500 billion, while the Federal and State-Local DB Plans are underfunded by $3.8 trllion (adding both columns together). Even more amusing is that the Federal DB Pension Plans hold a larger underfunded liability than their total assets. While we have heard in the news that the State Pension Plans are in big trouble, we can plainly see the Federal Govt Pension Plans are in much worse shape… LOL.
That being said, the U.S. Retirement Market is filled with assets that are based on highly inflated values. I took a look at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors Q1 2017 Statistical Review and listed the top Private Sector DB Plans assets in the chart below below:
Of the $3 trillion in total Private Sector DB Plan assets, Corporate Equities (stocks) are valued at $1,085 billion ($1.08 trillion), Debt Securities are $884 billion, Misc Assets are $850 billion and Mutual Fund Shares are $444 billion. Here are my comments on the figures above:
FIRST…. If our eyes are not glued to the TV watching CNBC, we should be able to realize that stocks are highly inflated via their extremely bloated P/E – Price to Earnings ratio. So, that $1.08 trillion of Corporate Equities will most certainly collapse in value in the future. This is bad news for both the poor slobs who have been paying in for decades and those retirees who were counting on that monthly income to pay for their $250,000 RV Motor Coach.
SECOND…. I find it extremely hilarious that “Debt Securities” valued at $884 billion, can be labeled as “Assets.” Yes, I realize that U.S. Treasuries and Foreign Bonds have been assets in the past, but where we are heading… supposed assets will turn into liabilities, quite quickly.
THIRD…. $844 billion in Misc Assets are not something I would feel comfortable being invested in. Sure, I could see possibly $20-$50 billion in Misc Assets, but $884 billion? This reminds me of Misc chicken parts used to make McDonalds high quality Chicken Nuggets.
FOURTH…. Mutual Funds are worse than plain ole stocks… if you ask me. Mutual Funds are claims on claims on stocks. So, this segment of the U.S. Private Sector DB Plan is one that will turn to into vapor quicker than most when fan hits the bull excrement.
While the bloated $3 trillion Private Sector DB Plan Assets are only a small portion of the total U.S. Retirement Market, we can assume the disease has spread throughout the entire $26.1 trillion market.
Lastly, it took me a while to come to this conclusion, but I now realize why the Fed and Central Banks pushed all that PHAT QE Money into Stocks, Bonds and Real Estate. If we are already seeing many sectors of the U.S. Retirement Market paying out more funds than are coming in… what in the living HELL does the U.S. Retirement Market look like when Stock, Bond and Real Estate values plummet?
That’s right….. it’s going to be BIG, BAD & UGLY.
Something Big, Bad And Ugly Is Taking Place In The U.S. Retirement Market
While the highly inflated value of the U.S. Retirement Market reached a new high this year, something is seriously wrong when we look behind the scenes. Of course, Americans have no idea that the U.S. Retirement Market is only a few steps from falling off the cliff, because their eyes are focused on the shiny spinning roulette wheel called the Wall Street Stock Market.
Yes, everyone continues to place their bets, hoping and praying that they will win it big, so they can retire in style. Unfortunately, American gamblers at the casino have no idea that the HOUSE is out of money. The only thing remaining in their backroom vaults is a small stash of cash and a bunch of IOU’s and debts.
According to the ICI – Investment Company Institute, the U.S. Retirement Market hit a new record $26.1 trillion in the first quarter of 2017:
This new record high in U.S. Retirement assets is most certainly a good moral booster for Americans. As their retirement assets continue to increase, this provides them a wonderful incentive to fork over more of their hard-earned monthly income to feed the DARK HOLE I label the U.S. Retirement PAC-MAN Monster.
Regretably, Americans have no idea that their monthly retirement contributions are not being saved or stored in a nice gold vault, rather they are being used to pay the lucky slobs who retired before them Now, when I say SLOBS or POOR SLOBS, I am not being derogatory. However, I am using the word as a Wall Street Banker would label those they prey upon.
Regardless, as the U.S. Retirement Market continued higher over the past several years, the amount of net contributions have gone into negative territory. As I have mentioned before, this is a beginning sign of a Ponzi Scheme in its last stages. In my previous article, WARNING: U.S. Ponzi Retirement Market In Big Trouble, Protect With Precious Metals, I posted the following chart:
As we can see in the chart, the Private Defined Contribution (DC) Plans paid out $28.7 billion more than they took in in 2014…. the last year the Investment Company Institute provided data. Simply, Private DC Plans are mostly 401K’s. If we look up at the first chart with the colorful breakdown in the different U.S. Retirement Plans, DC Plans (mostly 401K’s shown in YELLOW) were valued at $7.3 trillion.
To see U.S. DC plans now paying out more than they receive is certainly bad news… but it isn’t as bad as what is taking place in the U.S. DB – Defined Benefit Plan market. A Defined Benefit Plan is where an employer pays the employee a specific pension payment, based on the employees earning history.
If we look at the U.S. Private DC Plan chart below, we can plainly see what a serious mess it is in:
The GREEN BARS show how much is paid out to retired employees, the BLUE BARS are what is contributed into the DB Plan, and the RED BARS denote how much more is going out than coming in. It doesn’t take much of a brain surgeon to figure out this is not sustainable.
To get a better look at how much RED is going on the U.S. Private Sector DB Plan, I presented the figures in the chart below:
As of the last year the Investment Company Institute published the figures (2014), $123.7 billion more was paid out to employees in the Private Sector DB Plan then came in. While larger payouts have been going out than funds coming in for quite some time, they have also reached a new RECORD HIGH. Ain’t records great?
Okay… let’s bring back the first chart with all the wonderful colors:
The Private Sector DB Plan is shown in the nice GREEN COLOR above at $3 trillion in assets. Again, these are from the Private Sector. If we look at the Government DB Plans in PURPLE, they are valued at $5.5 trillion. Unfortunately, the Government DB Plans (State & Federal) Pension Plans are in much worse shape than the Private Sector DB Plans.
How much worse? Look at the chart below:
The Private Sector DB Plans are underfunded by $500 billion, while the Federal and State-Local DB Plans are underfunded by $3.8 trllion (adding both columns together). Even more amusing is that the Federal DB Pension Plans hold a larger underfunded liability than their total assets. While we have heard in the news that the State Pension Plans are in big trouble, we can plainly see the Federal Govt Pension Plans are in much worse shape… LOL.
That being said, the U.S. Retirement Market is filled with assets that are based on highly inflated values. I took a look at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors Q1 2017 Statistical Review and listed the top Private Sector DB Plans assets in the chart below below:
Of the $3 trillion in total Private Sector DB Plan assets, Corporate Equities (stocks) are valued at $1,085 billion ($1.08 trillion), Debt Securities are $884 billion, Misc Assets are $850 billion and Mutual Fund Shares are $444 billion. Here are my comments on the figures above:
FIRST…. If our eyes are not glued to the TV watching CNBC, we should be able to realize that stocks are highly inflated via their extremely bloated P/E – Price to Earnings ratio. So, that $1.08 trillion of Corporate Equities will most certainly collapse in value in the future. This is bad news for both the poor slobs who have been paying in for decades and those retirees who were counting on that monthly income to pay for their $250,000 RV Motor Coach.
SECOND…. I find it extremely hilarious that “Debt Securities” valued at $884 billion, can be labeled as “Assets.” Yes, I realize that U.S. Treasuries and Foreign Bonds have been assets in the past, but where we are heading… supposed assets will turn into liabilities, quite quickly.
THIRD…. $844 billion in Misc Assets are not something I would feel comfortable being invested in. Sure, I could see possibly $20-$50 billion in Misc Assets, but $884 billion? This reminds me of Misc chicken parts used to make McDonalds high quality Chicken Nuggets.
FOURTH…. Mutual Funds are worse than plain ole stocks… if you ask me. Mutual Funds are claims on claims on stocks. So, this segment of the U.S. Private Sector DB Plan is one that will turn to into vapor quicker than most when fan hits the bull excrement.
While the bloated $3 trillion Private Sector DB Plan Assets are only a small portion of the total U.S. Retirement Market, we can assume the disease has spread throughout the entire $26.1 trillion market.
Lastly, it took me a while to come to this conclusion, but I now realize why the Fed and Central Banks pushed all that PHAT QE Money into Stocks, Bonds and Real Estate. If we are already seeing many sectors of the U.S. Retirement Market paying out more funds than are coming in… what in the living HELL does the U.S. Retirement Market look like when Stock, Bond and Real Estate values plummet?
That’s right….. it’s going to be BIG, BAD & UGLY.
SC146-15
http://kingworldnews.com/greyerz-we-are-now-in-the-frightening-endgame/
Greyerz – We Are Now In The Frightening Endgame
Fear And Propaganda
Egon von Greyerz: “Stock investors are rejoicing about stock markets making new highs in many countries, totally oblivious of the risks or the reasons. It seems that this is an unstoppable rally in a “new normal” market paradigm. No major increase is expected in the inflation rate or the historically low interest rates. The present rally has lasted 8 years since the 2009 low. There is virtually no fear in the stock market so investors see no reason why this favorable climate would not continue for another 8 years at least.
Yes, of course it could. All that is needed is that governments worldwide print another $20-50 trillion at least and that global debt goes up by another $200-500 trillion…
Egon von Greyerz continues: “The gullibility of people today is exacerbated by the power of the internet and social media. Anything we read is accepted as fact or the truth, while a major part of it is just fake news. This is of course nothing new as it has been used by governments for centuries. Goebbels, the Nazi Propaganda Minister, who was an expert at manipulating the German people, said: “If you tell a big lie often enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually believe it.” The power of the internet and other media has facilitated spreading news and propaganda to billions of people and very few can distinguish if they hear or read “real” news or “fake” news.
Anyone in government is incapable of telling the truth. Automatically when someone assumes an elected position their Pinocchio nose grows extremely long since their entire purpose is then to be all things to all people in order to be re-elected. This is why virtually no elected official has a backbone nor any morals or principles. Because if they had, telling the truth would make them unelectable.
My Life As A London Banker (1960s-1970s)
During my early professional years as a banker at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s, I spent some time with a prominent UK Merchant Bank. This is what the old-style Investment Banks used to be called before the Americans came to dominate the sector. The senior bankers used to arrive at work around 10am and then go to lunch at 1pm. The lunch would consist of at least one gin and tonic to start with and then a good three course meal with a bottle of wine or two. Afterwards some Port with cheese and maybe a beer or two at the pub to finish off. Then back to the office at around 3pm for 4-5 hours of work. And this is how the City of London would operate when it was the financial centre of the world.
Any transaction was based on a handshake and a brief contract. Lawyers played a very small role in this process. Deals were based on trust and personal relationships. Banks displayed total loyalty to their staff and employees did not fear for their jobs. Major deals were concluded with a minimum of legal interference and compliance hardly existed. And still there was very little deception or fraud.
Contrast That To Today…
Today the financial world in London and major parts of the world is dominated by the US investment banks, the US legal system and the US government. Trust and loyalty is gone. Handshakes are worth nothing. Lawyers dominate everything and contracts are now running to hundreds of pages. Staff fear for their jobs since the banks have no loyalty to them. The only thing that counts is short term performance. This makes staff totally disloyal as they know they can be fired on a whim.
Investment bankers are now Masters of the Universe and as the former Goldman Sachs CEO said, “Doing God’s work.. Well, one thing is certain, there is certainly no humility in the financial world today or as Michael Lewis said in his book “Liar’s Poker,” major parts of US investment banks are dominated by “Big swinging di–s”. (ALTERNATIVE: traders with very big egos.)
The system we now have is based on Fake News, Fake Money with no morals, no principles and no moral or ethical values. In spite of, or more correctly because of, all the lawyers, government legislation, compliance and regulations, the financial system is today functioning much worse than ever with more fraud, more government intervention and more manipulation of markets. Also, clients today are secondary. Instead, it is all about lining the pockets of the bankers with their multi-billion dollar deals and multi-million dollar bonuses and options. As we experienced in 2006-9, profits are for the bankers and losses for governments and customers. During that time of the Great Financial Crisis, many Investment Bankers received the same bonuses during the crisis years as before, in spite of the fact that most of them would have gone under without the government support they benefitted from to the extent of $25 trillion.
king-world-news-greyerz-we-are-now-in-the-final-endgameWe Are Now In The Frightening Endgame
All of this is proof of the fact that we are at the end of a major financial era that started either with the Renaissance, which came after the Dark Ages, or since the end of the South Sea Bubble in the mid 1700s. I doubt that the cycle is of a smaller degree, like 100 years since the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913. Only future historians will tell us the magnitude of the current cycle.
What is certain is that we are now in the final stages of a major era. It has been clear to me for quite some time that this will end badly. The inevitable implosion of the asset and debt bubbles that the world is now experiencing is guaranteed. But governments and central banks have for some time been able to fool most of the people by telling them that the emperor is wearing a suit of gold when he is actually naked.
We have bubbles in every aspect of society. Stocks are at ridiculous valuations. The Schiller PE is at 30, which is where it was in 1929. Still, it is below the 2000 level which tells us that it could extend for a bit longer.
On many other measures like valuation to GDP or sales revenue, markets are past or near the all-time highs. The graph below shows the margin debt on the New York Stock Exchange which is substantially above the 2000 and 2007 levels.
Not just stocks but virtually all assets are at record levels, whether we talk about the biggest bubble in the world, which is bonds, or property values, which are inflated by interest rates manipulated down to the lowest levels in history.
I have in many previous interviews and articles stressed the problem of both US and global debts which have grown exponentially in the last half a century. These high debts have inflated asset prices, benefitting a small minority and at the same time impoverishing ordinary people.
Just look at the real earnings of a US worker. As the chart below shows, they peaked in 1973 and since then, the perceived improvement of Americans has been achieved with the aid of debt.
The chart below shows that the gap been wages and the standard of living has been filled by an increase in consumer credit. The sad thing is that most Americans or ordinary people in the industrial world do not realize that they are now enslaved by debt which they can never repay.
Sadly, a big number of people in the world will be unemployed within the next few years. At that point, governments will be insolvent and print money which will be worthless. There will be no social security and no pension system. The health care system will also fail in many countries with disastrous consequences.
With most individuals totally unaware of what will hit them in the next few years, they continue to accumulate debt while a small minority continue to speculate to accumulate wealth.
The Biggest Wealth Destruction In History
These speculators don’t realize that most of the wealth they have today is due credit expansion combined with governments printing money. Any future increase in asset prices will merely be due to the music playing faster and louder and will have nothing to do with real economic growth. Very few people realize that soon the music will stop, and at that point, all the assets inflated by debt will implode. This will lead to the biggest wealth destruction in history. But as always happens at the end of a major cycle, it only turns when the maximum number of investors has been sucked in. This is why we could easily see even higher stock prices before it all collapses.
Just look at the Nasdaq in 1999-2000. From January 1999 to March 2000 the Nasdaq went up 2 ½ times. In the final stages of that euphoria, more and more investors were sucked in. The same could very well happen again.
The nearer a peak the market is, the bigger the number of participants. Markets have a horrible tendency to punish as many as possible.
Instead of riding the final rally and then lose 80%, as Nasdaq investors did after the March 2000 peak, now is the time to exit the market and protect your profits. Just look at what happened to the Nasdaq in relation to gold since the Nasdaq 2000 peak. As the chart below shows, the Nasdaq has lost 71% against gold since the 2000 peak.
Don’t Try To Time The Markets
No one can pick the top, and when a market is heavily overbought, this is not necessary either. I am taking the Nasdaq as the extreme example here, but all stock markets are overbought globally. It makes no sense to pick the final rise, if it happens. Now is the time to take protective measures and be concerned about the “Return OF your money rather than the return ON your money.” The perfect wealth preservation asset is of course real assets and especially physical gold and silver, stored safely outside the financial system. For anyone who still wants to speculate in the final stages of a secular bull market, options are the only sensible method – with options losses are limited to the premium paid, which is the only acceptable risk in a bubble market.
In the next 3-5 years most asset classes, be it stocks, bonds, property, or just currencies, are likely to lose 75% to 99% against gold and silver. Certainly not a risk worth taking.”
Greyerz – We Are Now In The Frightening Endgame
Fear And Propaganda
Egon von Greyerz: “Stock investors are rejoicing about stock markets making new highs in many countries, totally oblivious of the risks or the reasons. It seems that this is an unstoppable rally in a “new normal” market paradigm. No major increase is expected in the inflation rate or the historically low interest rates. The present rally has lasted 8 years since the 2009 low. There is virtually no fear in the stock market so investors see no reason why this favorable climate would not continue for another 8 years at least.
Yes, of course it could. All that is needed is that governments worldwide print another $20-50 trillion at least and that global debt goes up by another $200-500 trillion…
Egon von Greyerz continues: “The gullibility of people today is exacerbated by the power of the internet and social media. Anything we read is accepted as fact or the truth, while a major part of it is just fake news. This is of course nothing new as it has been used by governments for centuries. Goebbels, the Nazi Propaganda Minister, who was an expert at manipulating the German people, said: “If you tell a big lie often enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually believe it.” The power of the internet and other media has facilitated spreading news and propaganda to billions of people and very few can distinguish if they hear or read “real” news or “fake” news.
Anyone in government is incapable of telling the truth. Automatically when someone assumes an elected position their Pinocchio nose grows extremely long since their entire purpose is then to be all things to all people in order to be re-elected. This is why virtually no elected official has a backbone nor any morals or principles. Because if they had, telling the truth would make them unelectable.
My Life As A London Banker (1960s-1970s)
During my early professional years as a banker at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s, I spent some time with a prominent UK Merchant Bank. This is what the old-style Investment Banks used to be called before the Americans came to dominate the sector. The senior bankers used to arrive at work around 10am and then go to lunch at 1pm. The lunch would consist of at least one gin and tonic to start with and then a good three course meal with a bottle of wine or two. Afterwards some Port with cheese and maybe a beer or two at the pub to finish off. Then back to the office at around 3pm for 4-5 hours of work. And this is how the City of London would operate when it was the financial centre of the world.
Any transaction was based on a handshake and a brief contract. Lawyers played a very small role in this process. Deals were based on trust and personal relationships. Banks displayed total loyalty to their staff and employees did not fear for their jobs. Major deals were concluded with a minimum of legal interference and compliance hardly existed. And still there was very little deception or fraud.
Contrast That To Today…
Today the financial world in London and major parts of the world is dominated by the US investment banks, the US legal system and the US government. Trust and loyalty is gone. Handshakes are worth nothing. Lawyers dominate everything and contracts are now running to hundreds of pages. Staff fear for their jobs since the banks have no loyalty to them. The only thing that counts is short term performance. This makes staff totally disloyal as they know they can be fired on a whim.
Investment bankers are now Masters of the Universe and as the former Goldman Sachs CEO said, “Doing God’s work.. Well, one thing is certain, there is certainly no humility in the financial world today or as Michael Lewis said in his book “Liar’s Poker,” major parts of US investment banks are dominated by “Big swinging di–s”. (ALTERNATIVE: traders with very big egos.)
The system we now have is based on Fake News, Fake Money with no morals, no principles and no moral or ethical values. In spite of, or more correctly because of, all the lawyers, government legislation, compliance and regulations, the financial system is today functioning much worse than ever with more fraud, more government intervention and more manipulation of markets. Also, clients today are secondary. Instead, it is all about lining the pockets of the bankers with their multi-billion dollar deals and multi-million dollar bonuses and options. As we experienced in 2006-9, profits are for the bankers and losses for governments and customers. During that time of the Great Financial Crisis, many Investment Bankers received the same bonuses during the crisis years as before, in spite of the fact that most of them would have gone under without the government support they benefitted from to the extent of $25 trillion.
king-world-news-greyerz-we-are-now-in-the-final-endgameWe Are Now In The Frightening Endgame
All of this is proof of the fact that we are at the end of a major financial era that started either with the Renaissance, which came after the Dark Ages, or since the end of the South Sea Bubble in the mid 1700s. I doubt that the cycle is of a smaller degree, like 100 years since the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913. Only future historians will tell us the magnitude of the current cycle.
What is certain is that we are now in the final stages of a major era. It has been clear to me for quite some time that this will end badly. The inevitable implosion of the asset and debt bubbles that the world is now experiencing is guaranteed. But governments and central banks have for some time been able to fool most of the people by telling them that the emperor is wearing a suit of gold when he is actually naked.
We have bubbles in every aspect of society. Stocks are at ridiculous valuations. The Schiller PE is at 30, which is where it was in 1929. Still, it is below the 2000 level which tells us that it could extend for a bit longer.
On many other measures like valuation to GDP or sales revenue, markets are past or near the all-time highs. The graph below shows the margin debt on the New York Stock Exchange which is substantially above the 2000 and 2007 levels.
Not just stocks but virtually all assets are at record levels, whether we talk about the biggest bubble in the world, which is bonds, or property values, which are inflated by interest rates manipulated down to the lowest levels in history.
I have in many previous interviews and articles stressed the problem of both US and global debts which have grown exponentially in the last half a century. These high debts have inflated asset prices, benefitting a small minority and at the same time impoverishing ordinary people.
Just look at the real earnings of a US worker. As the chart below shows, they peaked in 1973 and since then, the perceived improvement of Americans has been achieved with the aid of debt.
The chart below shows that the gap been wages and the standard of living has been filled by an increase in consumer credit. The sad thing is that most Americans or ordinary people in the industrial world do not realize that they are now enslaved by debt which they can never repay.
Sadly, a big number of people in the world will be unemployed within the next few years. At that point, governments will be insolvent and print money which will be worthless. There will be no social security and no pension system. The health care system will also fail in many countries with disastrous consequences.
With most individuals totally unaware of what will hit them in the next few years, they continue to accumulate debt while a small minority continue to speculate to accumulate wealth.
The Biggest Wealth Destruction In History
These speculators don’t realize that most of the wealth they have today is due credit expansion combined with governments printing money. Any future increase in asset prices will merely be due to the music playing faster and louder and will have nothing to do with real economic growth. Very few people realize that soon the music will stop, and at that point, all the assets inflated by debt will implode. This will lead to the biggest wealth destruction in history. But as always happens at the end of a major cycle, it only turns when the maximum number of investors has been sucked in. This is why we could easily see even higher stock prices before it all collapses.
Just look at the Nasdaq in 1999-2000. From January 1999 to March 2000 the Nasdaq went up 2 ½ times. In the final stages of that euphoria, more and more investors were sucked in. The same could very well happen again.
The nearer a peak the market is, the bigger the number of participants. Markets have a horrible tendency to punish as many as possible.
Instead of riding the final rally and then lose 80%, as Nasdaq investors did after the March 2000 peak, now is the time to exit the market and protect your profits. Just look at what happened to the Nasdaq in relation to gold since the Nasdaq 2000 peak. As the chart below shows, the Nasdaq has lost 71% against gold since the 2000 peak.
Don’t Try To Time The Markets
No one can pick the top, and when a market is heavily overbought, this is not necessary either. I am taking the Nasdaq as the extreme example here, but all stock markets are overbought globally. It makes no sense to pick the final rise, if it happens. Now is the time to take protective measures and be concerned about the “Return OF your money rather than the return ON your money.” The perfect wealth preservation asset is of course real assets and especially physical gold and silver, stored safely outside the financial system. For anyone who still wants to speculate in the final stages of a secular bull market, options are the only sensible method – with options losses are limited to the premium paid, which is the only acceptable risk in a bubble market.
In the next 3-5 years most asset classes, be it stocks, bonds, property, or just currencies, are likely to lose 75% to 99% against gold and silver. Certainly not a risk worth taking.”
SC146-14
https://dailyreckoning.com/elites-privately-warning-crash/
The Elites Are Privately Warning About a Crash
Many everyday citizens assume powerful global financial elites operate behind closed doors in secret conclaves, like the scene of a Spectre board meeting in the recent James Bond film.
Actually, the opposite is true. Most of what the power elite does is hidden in plain sight in speeches, seminars, webcasts and technical papers. These are readily available from institutional websites and media channels.
It’s true that private meetings occur on the sidelines of Davos, the IMF annual meeting and G-20 summits of the kind just concluded. But the results of even those secret meetings are typically announced or leaked or can be reasonably inferred based on subsequent policy coordination.
What the elites rely on is not secrecy but lack of proficiency by the media.
The elites communicate in an intentionally boring style with lots of technical jargon and publish in channels non-experts have never heard of and are unlikely to find. In effect, the elites are communicating with each other in their own language and hoping that no one else notices.
Still, there are some exceptions. Mohamed A. El-Erian is a bona fide member of the global power elite (a former deputy director of the IMF and president of the Harvard Management Co.). Yet he writes in a fairly accessible style on the popular Bloomberg website. When El-Erian talks, we should all listen.
In a recent article he raises serious doubts about the sustainability of the bull market in stocks because of reduced liquidity resulting from simultaneous policy tightening by the Fed, European Central Bank (ECB) and the Bank of England.
He says stocks rose on a sea of liquidity and they may crash when that liquidity is removed. This is a warning to other elites, but it’s also a warning to you.
But it’s not just El-Erian who’s sounding the alarm…
You’ve heard the expression “the big money.” This is a reference to the largest and most plugged-in investors on Earth. Some are mega-rich individuals and some are large banks and institutional investors with a dense network of contacts and inside information.
At the top of the food chain when it comes to big money are the sovereign wealth funds. These are funds sponsored by mostly wealthy nations to invest a country’s reserves from trade or natural resources in stocks, bonds, private equity and hedge funds.
As a result, sovereign wealth fund managers have the best information networks of any investors. The chief investment officer of a sovereign wealth fund can pick up the phone and speak to the CEO of any major corporation, private equity fund or hedge fund in the world.
Among sovereign wealth funds, the Government of Singapore Investment Corp. (GIC) is one of the largest, with over $354 billion in assets. So what does the head of GIC say about markets today?
Lim Chow Kiat, CEO of GIC, warns that “valuations are stretched, policy uncertainty is high” and investors are being too complacent.
GIC allocates 40% of its assets to cash or highly liquid bonds and only 27% of its assets to developed economy equities.
Meanwhile, the typical American small retail investor probably has 60% or more of her 401(k) in developed economy equities, mostly U.S.
But it may be time for everyday investors to listen to the big money. They are the ones who see financial crashes coming first.
The bottom line is, a financial crisis is certainly coming. In my latest book “The Road to Ruin,” I use 2018 as a target date primarily because the two prior systemic crises, 1998 and 2008, were 10 years apart. I extended the timeline 10 years into the future from the 2008 crisis to maintain the 10-year tempo, and this is how I arrived at 2018.
Yet I make the point in the book that the exact date is unimportant. What is most important is that the crisis is coming and the time to prepare is now. It could happen in 2018, 2019, or it could happen tomorrow. The conditions for collapse are all in place.
Trumped!
A close confidant of President Reagan released an exclusive excerpt from his popular book Trumped! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin and How to Bring it Back. America is at the brink of financial ruin. And these are ten steps the next president needs to take to avoid disaster in the next four years. Sign up for the Daily Reckoning today and receive your FREE report.
We will NOT share your email address
It’s simply a matter of the right catalyst and array of factors in the critical state. Likely triggers could include a major bank failure, a failure to deliver physical gold, a war, a natural disaster, a cyber–financial attack and many other events.
The trigger itself does not really matter. The exact timing does not matter. What matters is that the crisis is inevitable and coming sooner rather than later in my view. That’s why investors need to prepare ahead of time.
The new crisis will be of unprecedented scale. This is because the system itself is of unprecedented scale and interconnectedness. Capital markets and economies are complex systems. Collapse in complex systems is an exponential function of systemic scale.
In complex dynamic systems that reach the critical state, the most catastrophic event that can occur is an exponential function of scale.
This means that if you double the system, you do not double the risk; you increase it by a factor of five or 10.
Since we have vastly increased the scale of the financial system since 2008, with larger banks, greater concentration of banking assets in fewer institutions, larger derivatives positions, and over $70 trillion of new debt, we should expect the next crisis to be much worse than the last.
For these reasons the next crisis will be of unprecedented scale and damage.
The only clean balance sheet and source of liquidity left in the world will be the International Monetary Fund, which can make an emergency issuance of Special Drawing Rights, which you can think of as world money.
Countries around the world are acquiring gold at an accelerated rate in order to diversify their reserve positions. This trend, combined with the huge reserves held by the U.S., Eurozone and the IMF amount to a shadow gold standard.
On the level of the individual investor, losers will fall into two groups when the next crisis strikes…
The first are those who hold wealth in digital form, such as stocks, bonds, money-market funds and bank accounts. This type of wealth is the easiest to freeze in a panic. You will not be able to access this wealth, except perhaps in very small amounts for gas and groceries, in the next panic. The solution is to have hard assets outside the digital system such as gold, silver, fine art, land and private equity where you rely on written contracts and not digital records.
The second group are those who rely on fixed-income returns such as life insurance, annuities, retirement accounts, social security and bank interest. These income streams are likely to lose value, since governments will have to resort to inflation to deal with the overwhelming mountain of debt collapsing upon them.
The solution to this is to allocate 10% of your investable assets to physical gold or silver. That will be your insurance when the time comes.
Meanwhile, demand for secure vaulting space in major financial centers like London and Frankfurt is soaring. There are plenty of bank safe deposit boxes in those cities, but investors are insisting on non-bank vaults because investors understand that the banks cannot be trusted in a panic. As a result, proprietors of non-bank vaults can’t build them fast enough.
This is one indicator that reveals three important facts. The first is that investors feel a panic may be near and the time to act is now. The second is that investors don’t trust banks. And the third is that investors are buying gold to protect themselves since that’s the main tangible that people put in their private vaults. Don’t wait until the panic hits to secure your gold and make arrangements for safe storage.
The time to act is now....
The Elites Are Privately Warning About a Crash
Many everyday citizens assume powerful global financial elites operate behind closed doors in secret conclaves, like the scene of a Spectre board meeting in the recent James Bond film.
Actually, the opposite is true. Most of what the power elite does is hidden in plain sight in speeches, seminars, webcasts and technical papers. These are readily available from institutional websites and media channels.
It’s true that private meetings occur on the sidelines of Davos, the IMF annual meeting and G-20 summits of the kind just concluded. But the results of even those secret meetings are typically announced or leaked or can be reasonably inferred based on subsequent policy coordination.
What the elites rely on is not secrecy but lack of proficiency by the media.
The elites communicate in an intentionally boring style with lots of technical jargon and publish in channels non-experts have never heard of and are unlikely to find. In effect, the elites are communicating with each other in their own language and hoping that no one else notices.
Still, there are some exceptions. Mohamed A. El-Erian is a bona fide member of the global power elite (a former deputy director of the IMF and president of the Harvard Management Co.). Yet he writes in a fairly accessible style on the popular Bloomberg website. When El-Erian talks, we should all listen.
In a recent article he raises serious doubts about the sustainability of the bull market in stocks because of reduced liquidity resulting from simultaneous policy tightening by the Fed, European Central Bank (ECB) and the Bank of England.
He says stocks rose on a sea of liquidity and they may crash when that liquidity is removed. This is a warning to other elites, but it’s also a warning to you.
But it’s not just El-Erian who’s sounding the alarm…
You’ve heard the expression “the big money.” This is a reference to the largest and most plugged-in investors on Earth. Some are mega-rich individuals and some are large banks and institutional investors with a dense network of contacts and inside information.
At the top of the food chain when it comes to big money are the sovereign wealth funds. These are funds sponsored by mostly wealthy nations to invest a country’s reserves from trade or natural resources in stocks, bonds, private equity and hedge funds.
As a result, sovereign wealth fund managers have the best information networks of any investors. The chief investment officer of a sovereign wealth fund can pick up the phone and speak to the CEO of any major corporation, private equity fund or hedge fund in the world.
Among sovereign wealth funds, the Government of Singapore Investment Corp. (GIC) is one of the largest, with over $354 billion in assets. So what does the head of GIC say about markets today?
Lim Chow Kiat, CEO of GIC, warns that “valuations are stretched, policy uncertainty is high” and investors are being too complacent.
GIC allocates 40% of its assets to cash or highly liquid bonds and only 27% of its assets to developed economy equities.
Meanwhile, the typical American small retail investor probably has 60% or more of her 401(k) in developed economy equities, mostly U.S.
But it may be time for everyday investors to listen to the big money. They are the ones who see financial crashes coming first.
The bottom line is, a financial crisis is certainly coming. In my latest book “The Road to Ruin,” I use 2018 as a target date primarily because the two prior systemic crises, 1998 and 2008, were 10 years apart. I extended the timeline 10 years into the future from the 2008 crisis to maintain the 10-year tempo, and this is how I arrived at 2018.
Yet I make the point in the book that the exact date is unimportant. What is most important is that the crisis is coming and the time to prepare is now. It could happen in 2018, 2019, or it could happen tomorrow. The conditions for collapse are all in place.
Trumped!
A close confidant of President Reagan released an exclusive excerpt from his popular book Trumped! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin and How to Bring it Back. America is at the brink of financial ruin. And these are ten steps the next president needs to take to avoid disaster in the next four years. Sign up for the Daily Reckoning today and receive your FREE report.
We will NOT share your email address
It’s simply a matter of the right catalyst and array of factors in the critical state. Likely triggers could include a major bank failure, a failure to deliver physical gold, a war, a natural disaster, a cyber–financial attack and many other events.
The trigger itself does not really matter. The exact timing does not matter. What matters is that the crisis is inevitable and coming sooner rather than later in my view. That’s why investors need to prepare ahead of time.
The new crisis will be of unprecedented scale. This is because the system itself is of unprecedented scale and interconnectedness. Capital markets and economies are complex systems. Collapse in complex systems is an exponential function of systemic scale.
In complex dynamic systems that reach the critical state, the most catastrophic event that can occur is an exponential function of scale.
This means that if you double the system, you do not double the risk; you increase it by a factor of five or 10.
Since we have vastly increased the scale of the financial system since 2008, with larger banks, greater concentration of banking assets in fewer institutions, larger derivatives positions, and over $70 trillion of new debt, we should expect the next crisis to be much worse than the last.
For these reasons the next crisis will be of unprecedented scale and damage.
The only clean balance sheet and source of liquidity left in the world will be the International Monetary Fund, which can make an emergency issuance of Special Drawing Rights, which you can think of as world money.
Countries around the world are acquiring gold at an accelerated rate in order to diversify their reserve positions. This trend, combined with the huge reserves held by the U.S., Eurozone and the IMF amount to a shadow gold standard.
On the level of the individual investor, losers will fall into two groups when the next crisis strikes…
The first are those who hold wealth in digital form, such as stocks, bonds, money-market funds and bank accounts. This type of wealth is the easiest to freeze in a panic. You will not be able to access this wealth, except perhaps in very small amounts for gas and groceries, in the next panic. The solution is to have hard assets outside the digital system such as gold, silver, fine art, land and private equity where you rely on written contracts and not digital records.
The second group are those who rely on fixed-income returns such as life insurance, annuities, retirement accounts, social security and bank interest. These income streams are likely to lose value, since governments will have to resort to inflation to deal with the overwhelming mountain of debt collapsing upon them.
The solution to this is to allocate 10% of your investable assets to physical gold or silver. That will be your insurance when the time comes.
Meanwhile, demand for secure vaulting space in major financial centers like London and Frankfurt is soaring. There are plenty of bank safe deposit boxes in those cities, but investors are insisting on non-bank vaults because investors understand that the banks cannot be trusted in a panic. As a result, proprietors of non-bank vaults can’t build them fast enough.
This is one indicator that reveals three important facts. The first is that investors feel a panic may be near and the time to act is now. The second is that investors don’t trust banks. And the third is that investors are buying gold to protect themselves since that’s the main tangible that people put in their private vaults. Don’t wait until the panic hits to secure your gold and make arrangements for safe storage.
The time to act is now....
Monday, July 24, 2017
SC146-13
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2017/07/22/researchers-have-been-underestimating-the-cost-of-wind-and-solar/
In the comments to the article,
The OIL CRISIS 2020-THIS TIME THE WOLF IS HERE!
The End of the Oil Age is Imminent
Recently, the HSBC oil report stated that 80% of conventional oil fields were declining at a rate of 5-7% per year. This means that there will be an oil shortage of ~30 million(Losing three Saudi Arabia's) barrels per day by 2030 and ~40 million barrels per day by 2040(Losing Four Saudi Arabia's) https://drive.google.com…/0B9wSgViWVAfzUEgzMlBfR3UxNDg/view
What is mentioned far less often is that annual oil discoveries have lagged annual production since the 1980s. Now, this problem has nothing to do with the recent decline in the oil price, which started in 2014. This has been an on-going problem for the past 30 years.
http://www.issuesmagazine.com.au/…/inline_images/08-Fig1.jpg
Now, the IEA is predicting oil shortages by ~2020 due to declining exploration. Here, the IEA blames this problem on the low oil price. But, this problem started in the 1980s. The problem is geological: we are running out of conventional cheap oil. Shale and tar sands are not the answer, either. Those resources are far too expensive, compared to conventional oil, because the global economy is based on cheap conventional oil. Expensive oil is not a replacement for cheap oil.
http://www.nasdaq.com/article/iea-forecasts-oil-shortages-and-sharp-price-rise-by-2020-cm757712 https://www.wsj.com/articles/iea-says-global-oil-discoveries-at-record-low-in-2016-1493244000 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704436004576299421455133398
Society is very reliant on cheap oil.There is projected to be a shortage of cheap oil between 2020-2022
Shale and tar sand oil are very expensive and can never fill the gap left by cheap oil.
Imports are going to be very expensive. Most people will lose their jobs. most people will not be able to pay their debts.
Very little of society can operate on expensive oil. For the last one hundred years, we have created a civilization incredibly reliant on cheap oil.
It is reasonable with the relentless decrease of conventional (meaning cheap) oil our worldwide financial systems will buckle and crash…And then the lights will go out and that will bring to a close the Human Experiment….
In the comments to the article,
The OIL CRISIS 2020-THIS TIME THE WOLF IS HERE!
The End of the Oil Age is Imminent
Recently, the HSBC oil report stated that 80% of conventional oil fields were declining at a rate of 5-7% per year. This means that there will be an oil shortage of ~30 million(Losing three Saudi Arabia's) barrels per day by 2030 and ~40 million barrels per day by 2040(Losing Four Saudi Arabia's) https://drive.google.com…/0B9wSgViWVAfzUEgzMlBfR3UxNDg/view
What is mentioned far less often is that annual oil discoveries have lagged annual production since the 1980s. Now, this problem has nothing to do with the recent decline in the oil price, which started in 2014. This has been an on-going problem for the past 30 years.
http://www.issuesmagazine.com.au/…/inline_images/08-Fig1.jpg
Now, the IEA is predicting oil shortages by ~2020 due to declining exploration. Here, the IEA blames this problem on the low oil price. But, this problem started in the 1980s. The problem is geological: we are running out of conventional cheap oil. Shale and tar sands are not the answer, either. Those resources are far too expensive, compared to conventional oil, because the global economy is based on cheap conventional oil. Expensive oil is not a replacement for cheap oil.
http://www.nasdaq.com/article/iea-forecasts-oil-shortages-and-sharp-price-rise-by-2020-cm757712 https://www.wsj.com/articles/iea-says-global-oil-discoveries-at-record-low-in-2016-1493244000 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704436004576299421455133398
Society is very reliant on cheap oil.There is projected to be a shortage of cheap oil between 2020-2022
Shale and tar sand oil are very expensive and can never fill the gap left by cheap oil.
Imports are going to be very expensive. Most people will lose their jobs. most people will not be able to pay their debts.
Very little of society can operate on expensive oil. For the last one hundred years, we have created a civilization incredibly reliant on cheap oil.
It is reasonable with the relentless decrease of conventional (meaning cheap) oil our worldwide financial systems will buckle and crash…And then the lights will go out and that will bring to a close the Human Experiment….
Friday, July 21, 2017
SC146-12
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47482.htm
Zombies R Us
Romero—a filmmaker hailed as the architect of the zombie genre—is dead at the age of 77, but the zombified police state culture he railed against lives on.
Just take a look around you.
“We the people” have become the walking dead of the American police state.
We’re still plagued by the socio-political evils of cultural apathy, materialism, domestic militarism and racism that Romero depicted in his Night of the Living Dead trilogy.
Romero’s zombies have taken on a life of their own in pop culture, as well.
Indeed, you don’t have to look very far anymore to find them lurking around every corner: wreaking havoc in movie blockbusters, running for their lives in 5K charity races, and putting government agents through their paces in mock military drills arranged by the Dept. of Defense (DOD) and the Center for Disease Control (CDC).
In fact, the CDC put together a zombie apocalypse preparation kit “that details everything you would need to have on hand in the event the living dead showed up at your front door.”
Zombies also embody the government’s paranoia about the citizenry as potential threats that need to be monitored, tracked, surveilled, sequestered, deterred, vanquished and rendered impotent.
Case in point: in AMC’s hit television series The Walking Dead and the spinoff Fear the Walking Dead, it’s not just flesh-eating ghouls and cannibalistic humans that survivors have to worry about but the police state “tasked with protecting the vulnerable” that poses some of the gravest threats to the citizenry.
As David Sims writes for the Atlantic:
More than anything, Fear the Walking Dead is a drama about occupation, the breakdown of society, and the ease with which seemingly decent people can decide that might makes right. Like any dystopian fiction, it’s easy to dismiss as fantasy, but remove the zombies and Fear could be taking place in dozens of real-world locations… This is happening here … but it could happen anywhere.
Why the fascination with zombies?
Perhaps it’s because zombie fiction provides us with a way to “envision how we and our own would thrive if everything went to hell and we lost all our societal supports.” As Time magazine reporter James Poniewozik phrases it, the “apocalyptic drama lets us face the end of the world once a week and live.”
Writing for the New York Times, Terrence Rafferty notes:
In the case of zombie fiction, you have to wonder whether our 21st-century fascination with these hungry hordes has something to do with a general anxiety, particularly in the West, about the planet’s dwindling resources: a sense that there are too many people out there, with too many urgent needs, and that eventually these encroaching masses, dimly understood but somehow ominous in their collective appetites, will simply consume us. At this awful, pinched moment of history we look into the future and see a tsunami of want bearing down on us, darkening the sky. The zombie is clearly the right monster for this glum mood, but it’s a little disturbing to think that these nonhuman creatures, with their slack, gaping maws, might be serving as metaphors for actual people—undocumented immigrants, say, or the entire populations of developing nations—whose only offense, in most cases, is that their mouths and bellies demand to be filled.
In other words, zombies are the personification of our darkest fears.
Fear and paranoia have become hallmarks of the modern American experience, impacting how we as a nation view the world around us, how we as citizens view each other, and most of all how our government views us.
Fear makes people stupid.
Fear is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government. And, as most social commentators recognize, an atmosphere of fear permeates modern America: fear of terrorism, fear of the police, fear of our neighbors and so on.
The propaganda of fear has been used quite effectively by those who want to gain control, and it is working on the American populace.
Despite the fact that we are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack; 11,000 times more likely to die from an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane; 1,048 times more likely to die from a car accident than a terrorist attack, and 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist, we have handed over control of our lives to government officials who treat us as a means to an end—the source of money and power.
We have allowed ourselves to become fearful, controlled, pacified zombies.
Most everyone keeps their heads down these days while staring zombie-like into an electronic screen, even when they’re crossing the street. Families sit in restaurants with their heads down, separated by their screen devices and unaware of what’s going on around them. Young people especially seem dominated by the devices they hold in their hands, oblivious to the fact that they can simply push a button, turn the thing off and walk away.
Indeed, there is no larger group activity than that connected with those who watch screens—that is, television, lap tops, personal computers, cell phones and so on. In fact, a Nielsen study reports that American screen viewing is at an all-time high. For example, the average American watches approximately 151 hours of television per month.
Psychologically, such screen consumption is similar to drug addiction. Research shows that regardless of the programming, viewers’ brain waves slow down, thus transforming them into a more passive, nonresistant state.
Historically, television has been used by those in authority to quiet discontent and pacify disruptive people. “Faced with severe overcrowding and limited budgets for rehabilitation and counseling, more and more prison officials are using TV to keep inmates quiet,” according to Newsweek.
Given that the majority of what Americans watch on television is provided through channels controlled by six mega corporations, what we watch is now controlled by a corporate elite and, if that elite needs to foster a particular viewpoint or pacify its viewers, it can do so on a large scale.
We are being controlled by forces beyond our control.
This is how the police state takes charge.
As the Atlantic notes, “The villains of [Fear the Walking Dead] aren’t the zombies, who rarely appear, but the U.S. military, who sweep into an L.A. suburb to quarantine the survivors. Zombies are, after all, a recognizable threat—but Fear plumbs drama and horror from the betrayal by institutions designed to keep people safe.”
What we are experiencing is a betrayal of the very core values—a love of freedom, an adherence to the rule of law, a spirit of democracy, a commitment to accountability and transparency, and a recognition that civilian rule must always trump military methods—that have guided this nation from its inception.
The challenge is not whether we can hold onto our freedoms in times of peace and prosperity, but whether we can do so when all hell breaks loose.
Fear the Walking Dead drives this point home by setting viewers down in the midst of societal unrest not unlike our own current events (“a bunch of weird incidents, police protests, riots, and … rapid social entropy”). Then, as Forbes reports, “the military showed up and we fast-forwarded into an ad hoc police state with no glimpse at what was happening in the world around our main cast of hapless survivors.”
Anyone who has been paying attention knows that it will not take much for the government—i.e., the military—to lock down the nation in the event of a national disaster.
The government is not out to keep us safe by monitoring our communications, tracking our movements, criminalizing our every action, treating us like suspects, and stripping us of our means of defense while equipping its own personnel with an amazing arsenal of weapons.
No, this is not security. It is an ambush. And it is being carried out in plain sight.
For example, for years now, the government has been carrying out military training drills with zombies as the enemy. In 2011, the DOD created a 31-page instruction manual for how to protect America from a terrorist attack carried out by zombie forces. In 2012, the CDC released a guide for surviving a zombie plague. That was followed by training drills for members of the military, police officers and first responders.
The zombie exercises appeared to be kitschy and fun—government agents running around trying to put down a zombie rebellion—but what if the zombies in the exercises are us, the citizenry, viewed by those in power as mindless, voracious, zombie hordes?
Consider this: the government started playing around with the idea of using zombies as stand-ins for enemy combatants in its training drills right around the time the Army War College issued its 2008 report, warning that an economic crisis in the U.S. could lead to massive civil unrest that would require the military to intervene and restore order.
That same year, it was revealed that the government had amassed more than 8 million names of Americans considered a threat to national security, to be used “by the military in the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of the Constitution or the imposition of martial law.” The program’s name, Main Core, refers to the fact that it contains “copies of the ‘main core’ or essence of each item of intelligence information on Americans produced by the FBI and the other agencies of the U.S. intelligence community.”
Also in 2008, the Pentagon launched the Minerva Initiative, a $75 million military-driven research project focused on studying social behavior in order to determine how best to cope with mass civil disobedience or uprisings. The Minerva Initiative has funded projects such as “Who Does Not Become a Terrorist, and Why?” which “conflates peaceful activists with ‘supporters of political violence’ who are different from terrorists only in that they do not embark on ‘armed militancy’ themselves.”
In 2009, the Dept. of Homeland Security issued its reports on Rightwing and Leftwing Extremism, in which the terms “extremist” and “terrorist” were used interchangeably to describe citizens who were disgruntled or anti-government.
Meanwhile, a government campaign was underway to spy on Americans’ mail, email and cell phone communications. News reports indicate that the U.S. Postal Service has handled more than 150,000 requests by federal and state law enforcement agencies to monitor Americans’ mail, in addition to photographing every piece of mail sent through the postal system.
Fast forward a few years more and you have local police being transformed into extensions of the military, taught to view members of their community as suspects, trained to shoot first and ask questions later, and equipped with all of the technology and weaponry of a soldier on a battlefield.
In 2015, the Obama administration hired a domestic terrorism czar whose job is to focus on anti-government American “extremists” who have been designated a greater threat to America than ISIS or al Qaeda. As part of the government’s so-called war on right-wing extremism, the Obama administration agreed to partner with the United Nations to take part in its Strong Cities Network program, which is training local police agencies across America in how to identify, fight and prevent extremism.
In other words, those who believe in and exercise their rights under the Constitution (namely, the right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share their political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), are now at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.
Earlier this year, it was revealed that the Pentagon has been using a dystopian training video to prepare armed forces to solve future domestic political and social problems which they anticipate arising by 2030. It’s only five minutes long, but the military training video says a lot about the government’s mindset, the way its views the citizenry, and the so-called “problems” that the military must be prepared to address in the near future, which include criminal networks, illicit economies, decentralized syndicates of crime, substandard infrastructure, religious and ethnic tensions, impoverishment, economic inequality, protesters, slums, open landfills, over-burdened sewers, and a “growing mass of unemployed.”
Even more troubling, however, is what this military video doesn’t say about the Constitution, about the rights of the citizenry, and about the dangers of using the military to address political and social problems.
Noticing a pattern yet?
“We the people” or, more appropriately, “we the zombies” are the enemy in the eyes of the government.
So when presented with the Defense Department’s battle plan for defeating an army of the walking dead, you might find yourself tempted to giggle over the fact that a taxpayer-funded government bureaucrat actually took the time to research and write about vegetarian zombies, evil magic zombies, chicken zombies, space zombies, bio-engineered weaponized zombies, radiation zombies, symbiant-induced zombies, and pathogenic zombies.
However, in an age of extreme government paranoia, this is no laughing matter.
The DOD’s strategy for dealing with a zombie uprising, outlined in “CONOP 8888,” is for all intents and purposes a training manual for the government in how to put down a citizen uprising or at least an uprising of individuals “infected” with dangerous ideas about freedom.
Rest assured that the tactics and difficulties outlined in the “fictional training scenario” are all too real, beginning with martial law.
So how does the military plan to put down a zombie (a.k.a. disgruntled citizen) uprising?
The strategy manual outlines five phases necessary for a counter-offensive: shape, deter, seize initiative, dominate, stabilize and restore civil authority. Here are a few details:
Phase 0 (Shape): Conduct general zombie awareness training. Monitor increased threats (i.e., surveillance). Carry out military drills. Synchronize contingency plans between federal and state agencies. Anticipate and prepare for a breakdown in law and order.
Phase 1 (Deter): Recognize that zombies cannot be deterred or reasoned with. Carry out training drills to discourage other countries from developing or deploying attack zombies and publicly reinforce the government’s ability to combat a zombie threat. Initiate intelligence sharing between federal and state agencies. Assist the Dept. of Homeland Security in identifying or discouraging immigrants from areas where zombie-related diseases originate.
Phase 2 (Seize initiative): Recall all military personal to their duty stations. Fortify all military outposts. Deploy air and ground forces for at least 35 days. Carry out confidence-building measures with nuclear-armed peers such as Russia and China to ensure they do not misinterpret the government’s zombie countermeasures as preparations for war. Establish quarantine zones. Distribute explosion-resistant protective equipment. Place the military on red alert. Begin limited scale military operations to combat zombie threats. Carry out combat operations against zombie populations within the United States that were “previously” U.S. citizens.
Phase 3 (Dominate): Lock down all military bases for 30 days. Shelter all essential government personnel for at least 40 days. Equip all government agents with military protective gear. Issue orders for military to kill all non-human life on sight. Initiate bomber and missile strikes against targeted sources of zombie infection, including the infrastructure. Burn all zombie corpses. Deploy military to lock down the beaches and waterways.
Phase 4 (Stabilize): Send out recon teams to check for remaining threats and survey the status of basic services (water, power, sewage infrastructure, air, and lines of communication). Execute a counter-zombie ISR plan to ID holdout pockets of zombie resistance. Use all military resources to target any remaining regions of zombie holdouts and influence. Continue all actions from the Dominate phase.
Phase 5 (Restore civil authority): Deploy military personnel to assist any surviving civil authorities in disaster zones. Reconstitute combat capabilities at various military bases. Prepare to redeploy military forces to attack surviving zombie holdouts. Restore basic services in disaster areas.
Notice the similarities?
Surveillance. Military drills. Awareness training. Militarized police forces. Martial law.
Mind you, the government is not being covert about any of this. It’s all out in the open.
If there is any lesson to be learned, it is simply this: as I point out in my book, Battlefield America: The War on the American People, whether the threat to national security comes in the form of actual terrorists, imaginary zombies or disgruntled American citizens infected with dangerous ideas about freedom, the government’s response to such threats remains the same: detect, deter and annihilate.
It’s time to wake up, America, before you end up with a bullet to the head (the only proven means of killing a zombie).
As television journalist Edward R. Murrow warned in a 1958 speech:
We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent. We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.
Zombies R Us
Romero—a filmmaker hailed as the architect of the zombie genre—is dead at the age of 77, but the zombified police state culture he railed against lives on.
Just take a look around you.
“We the people” have become the walking dead of the American police state.
We’re still plagued by the socio-political evils of cultural apathy, materialism, domestic militarism and racism that Romero depicted in his Night of the Living Dead trilogy.
Romero’s zombies have taken on a life of their own in pop culture, as well.
Indeed, you don’t have to look very far anymore to find them lurking around every corner: wreaking havoc in movie blockbusters, running for their lives in 5K charity races, and putting government agents through their paces in mock military drills arranged by the Dept. of Defense (DOD) and the Center for Disease Control (CDC).
In fact, the CDC put together a zombie apocalypse preparation kit “that details everything you would need to have on hand in the event the living dead showed up at your front door.”
Zombies also embody the government’s paranoia about the citizenry as potential threats that need to be monitored, tracked, surveilled, sequestered, deterred, vanquished and rendered impotent.
Case in point: in AMC’s hit television series The Walking Dead and the spinoff Fear the Walking Dead, it’s not just flesh-eating ghouls and cannibalistic humans that survivors have to worry about but the police state “tasked with protecting the vulnerable” that poses some of the gravest threats to the citizenry.
As David Sims writes for the Atlantic:
More than anything, Fear the Walking Dead is a drama about occupation, the breakdown of society, and the ease with which seemingly decent people can decide that might makes right. Like any dystopian fiction, it’s easy to dismiss as fantasy, but remove the zombies and Fear could be taking place in dozens of real-world locations… This is happening here … but it could happen anywhere.
Why the fascination with zombies?
Perhaps it’s because zombie fiction provides us with a way to “envision how we and our own would thrive if everything went to hell and we lost all our societal supports.” As Time magazine reporter James Poniewozik phrases it, the “apocalyptic drama lets us face the end of the world once a week and live.”
Writing for the New York Times, Terrence Rafferty notes:
In the case of zombie fiction, you have to wonder whether our 21st-century fascination with these hungry hordes has something to do with a general anxiety, particularly in the West, about the planet’s dwindling resources: a sense that there are too many people out there, with too many urgent needs, and that eventually these encroaching masses, dimly understood but somehow ominous in their collective appetites, will simply consume us. At this awful, pinched moment of history we look into the future and see a tsunami of want bearing down on us, darkening the sky. The zombie is clearly the right monster for this glum mood, but it’s a little disturbing to think that these nonhuman creatures, with their slack, gaping maws, might be serving as metaphors for actual people—undocumented immigrants, say, or the entire populations of developing nations—whose only offense, in most cases, is that their mouths and bellies demand to be filled.
In other words, zombies are the personification of our darkest fears.
Fear and paranoia have become hallmarks of the modern American experience, impacting how we as a nation view the world around us, how we as citizens view each other, and most of all how our government views us.
Fear makes people stupid.
Fear is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government. And, as most social commentators recognize, an atmosphere of fear permeates modern America: fear of terrorism, fear of the police, fear of our neighbors and so on.
The propaganda of fear has been used quite effectively by those who want to gain control, and it is working on the American populace.
Despite the fact that we are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack; 11,000 times more likely to die from an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane; 1,048 times more likely to die from a car accident than a terrorist attack, and 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist, we have handed over control of our lives to government officials who treat us as a means to an end—the source of money and power.
We have allowed ourselves to become fearful, controlled, pacified zombies.
Most everyone keeps their heads down these days while staring zombie-like into an electronic screen, even when they’re crossing the street. Families sit in restaurants with their heads down, separated by their screen devices and unaware of what’s going on around them. Young people especially seem dominated by the devices they hold in their hands, oblivious to the fact that they can simply push a button, turn the thing off and walk away.
Indeed, there is no larger group activity than that connected with those who watch screens—that is, television, lap tops, personal computers, cell phones and so on. In fact, a Nielsen study reports that American screen viewing is at an all-time high. For example, the average American watches approximately 151 hours of television per month.
Psychologically, such screen consumption is similar to drug addiction. Research shows that regardless of the programming, viewers’ brain waves slow down, thus transforming them into a more passive, nonresistant state.
Historically, television has been used by those in authority to quiet discontent and pacify disruptive people. “Faced with severe overcrowding and limited budgets for rehabilitation and counseling, more and more prison officials are using TV to keep inmates quiet,” according to Newsweek.
Given that the majority of what Americans watch on television is provided through channels controlled by six mega corporations, what we watch is now controlled by a corporate elite and, if that elite needs to foster a particular viewpoint or pacify its viewers, it can do so on a large scale.
We are being controlled by forces beyond our control.
This is how the police state takes charge.
As the Atlantic notes, “The villains of [Fear the Walking Dead] aren’t the zombies, who rarely appear, but the U.S. military, who sweep into an L.A. suburb to quarantine the survivors. Zombies are, after all, a recognizable threat—but Fear plumbs drama and horror from the betrayal by institutions designed to keep people safe.”
What we are experiencing is a betrayal of the very core values—a love of freedom, an adherence to the rule of law, a spirit of democracy, a commitment to accountability and transparency, and a recognition that civilian rule must always trump military methods—that have guided this nation from its inception.
The challenge is not whether we can hold onto our freedoms in times of peace and prosperity, but whether we can do so when all hell breaks loose.
Fear the Walking Dead drives this point home by setting viewers down in the midst of societal unrest not unlike our own current events (“a bunch of weird incidents, police protests, riots, and … rapid social entropy”). Then, as Forbes reports, “the military showed up and we fast-forwarded into an ad hoc police state with no glimpse at what was happening in the world around our main cast of hapless survivors.”
Anyone who has been paying attention knows that it will not take much for the government—i.e., the military—to lock down the nation in the event of a national disaster.
The government is not out to keep us safe by monitoring our communications, tracking our movements, criminalizing our every action, treating us like suspects, and stripping us of our means of defense while equipping its own personnel with an amazing arsenal of weapons.
No, this is not security. It is an ambush. And it is being carried out in plain sight.
For example, for years now, the government has been carrying out military training drills with zombies as the enemy. In 2011, the DOD created a 31-page instruction manual for how to protect America from a terrorist attack carried out by zombie forces. In 2012, the CDC released a guide for surviving a zombie plague. That was followed by training drills for members of the military, police officers and first responders.
The zombie exercises appeared to be kitschy and fun—government agents running around trying to put down a zombie rebellion—but what if the zombies in the exercises are us, the citizenry, viewed by those in power as mindless, voracious, zombie hordes?
Consider this: the government started playing around with the idea of using zombies as stand-ins for enemy combatants in its training drills right around the time the Army War College issued its 2008 report, warning that an economic crisis in the U.S. could lead to massive civil unrest that would require the military to intervene and restore order.
That same year, it was revealed that the government had amassed more than 8 million names of Americans considered a threat to national security, to be used “by the military in the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of the Constitution or the imposition of martial law.” The program’s name, Main Core, refers to the fact that it contains “copies of the ‘main core’ or essence of each item of intelligence information on Americans produced by the FBI and the other agencies of the U.S. intelligence community.”
Also in 2008, the Pentagon launched the Minerva Initiative, a $75 million military-driven research project focused on studying social behavior in order to determine how best to cope with mass civil disobedience or uprisings. The Minerva Initiative has funded projects such as “Who Does Not Become a Terrorist, and Why?” which “conflates peaceful activists with ‘supporters of political violence’ who are different from terrorists only in that they do not embark on ‘armed militancy’ themselves.”
In 2009, the Dept. of Homeland Security issued its reports on Rightwing and Leftwing Extremism, in which the terms “extremist” and “terrorist” were used interchangeably to describe citizens who were disgruntled or anti-government.
Meanwhile, a government campaign was underway to spy on Americans’ mail, email and cell phone communications. News reports indicate that the U.S. Postal Service has handled more than 150,000 requests by federal and state law enforcement agencies to monitor Americans’ mail, in addition to photographing every piece of mail sent through the postal system.
Fast forward a few years more and you have local police being transformed into extensions of the military, taught to view members of their community as suspects, trained to shoot first and ask questions later, and equipped with all of the technology and weaponry of a soldier on a battlefield.
In 2015, the Obama administration hired a domestic terrorism czar whose job is to focus on anti-government American “extremists” who have been designated a greater threat to America than ISIS or al Qaeda. As part of the government’s so-called war on right-wing extremism, the Obama administration agreed to partner with the United Nations to take part in its Strong Cities Network program, which is training local police agencies across America in how to identify, fight and prevent extremism.
In other words, those who believe in and exercise their rights under the Constitution (namely, the right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share their political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), are now at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.
Earlier this year, it was revealed that the Pentagon has been using a dystopian training video to prepare armed forces to solve future domestic political and social problems which they anticipate arising by 2030. It’s only five minutes long, but the military training video says a lot about the government’s mindset, the way its views the citizenry, and the so-called “problems” that the military must be prepared to address in the near future, which include criminal networks, illicit economies, decentralized syndicates of crime, substandard infrastructure, religious and ethnic tensions, impoverishment, economic inequality, protesters, slums, open landfills, over-burdened sewers, and a “growing mass of unemployed.”
Even more troubling, however, is what this military video doesn’t say about the Constitution, about the rights of the citizenry, and about the dangers of using the military to address political and social problems.
Noticing a pattern yet?
“We the people” or, more appropriately, “we the zombies” are the enemy in the eyes of the government.
So when presented with the Defense Department’s battle plan for defeating an army of the walking dead, you might find yourself tempted to giggle over the fact that a taxpayer-funded government bureaucrat actually took the time to research and write about vegetarian zombies, evil magic zombies, chicken zombies, space zombies, bio-engineered weaponized zombies, radiation zombies, symbiant-induced zombies, and pathogenic zombies.
However, in an age of extreme government paranoia, this is no laughing matter.
The DOD’s strategy for dealing with a zombie uprising, outlined in “CONOP 8888,” is for all intents and purposes a training manual for the government in how to put down a citizen uprising or at least an uprising of individuals “infected” with dangerous ideas about freedom.
Rest assured that the tactics and difficulties outlined in the “fictional training scenario” are all too real, beginning with martial law.
So how does the military plan to put down a zombie (a.k.a. disgruntled citizen) uprising?
The strategy manual outlines five phases necessary for a counter-offensive: shape, deter, seize initiative, dominate, stabilize and restore civil authority. Here are a few details:
Phase 0 (Shape): Conduct general zombie awareness training. Monitor increased threats (i.e., surveillance). Carry out military drills. Synchronize contingency plans between federal and state agencies. Anticipate and prepare for a breakdown in law and order.
Phase 1 (Deter): Recognize that zombies cannot be deterred or reasoned with. Carry out training drills to discourage other countries from developing or deploying attack zombies and publicly reinforce the government’s ability to combat a zombie threat. Initiate intelligence sharing between federal and state agencies. Assist the Dept. of Homeland Security in identifying or discouraging immigrants from areas where zombie-related diseases originate.
Phase 2 (Seize initiative): Recall all military personal to their duty stations. Fortify all military outposts. Deploy air and ground forces for at least 35 days. Carry out confidence-building measures with nuclear-armed peers such as Russia and China to ensure they do not misinterpret the government’s zombie countermeasures as preparations for war. Establish quarantine zones. Distribute explosion-resistant protective equipment. Place the military on red alert. Begin limited scale military operations to combat zombie threats. Carry out combat operations against zombie populations within the United States that were “previously” U.S. citizens.
Phase 3 (Dominate): Lock down all military bases for 30 days. Shelter all essential government personnel for at least 40 days. Equip all government agents with military protective gear. Issue orders for military to kill all non-human life on sight. Initiate bomber and missile strikes against targeted sources of zombie infection, including the infrastructure. Burn all zombie corpses. Deploy military to lock down the beaches and waterways.
Phase 4 (Stabilize): Send out recon teams to check for remaining threats and survey the status of basic services (water, power, sewage infrastructure, air, and lines of communication). Execute a counter-zombie ISR plan to ID holdout pockets of zombie resistance. Use all military resources to target any remaining regions of zombie holdouts and influence. Continue all actions from the Dominate phase.
Phase 5 (Restore civil authority): Deploy military personnel to assist any surviving civil authorities in disaster zones. Reconstitute combat capabilities at various military bases. Prepare to redeploy military forces to attack surviving zombie holdouts. Restore basic services in disaster areas.
Notice the similarities?
Surveillance. Military drills. Awareness training. Militarized police forces. Martial law.
Mind you, the government is not being covert about any of this. It’s all out in the open.
If there is any lesson to be learned, it is simply this: as I point out in my book, Battlefield America: The War on the American People, whether the threat to national security comes in the form of actual terrorists, imaginary zombies or disgruntled American citizens infected with dangerous ideas about freedom, the government’s response to such threats remains the same: detect, deter and annihilate.
It’s time to wake up, America, before you end up with a bullet to the head (the only proven means of killing a zombie).
As television journalist Edward R. Murrow warned in a 1958 speech:
We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent. We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.
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