https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/forecast-2023-get-out-of-the-way-if-you-cant-lend-a-hand/
Forecast 2023 — Get Out of the Way if You Can’t Lend a Hand
“The powerful are panicking, and so they should. Their secrets are leaking.” —Miranda Devine
“It’s all just snake oil. We want to save the planet, and the life
upon it, but we’re not willing to pay the price and bear the
consequences. So we make up a narrative that feels good and run with
it.” — Raul Ilargi Meier
“2023 could be a pivotal year for the USA
if the pervasive lying can be exposed, digested, and believed. All that
exposure has to happen amidst continuing boondoggles toward the Great
Reset agenda.” – Truman Verdun
“More borrowing only ever makes sense if you are expecting a larger
economy in the future. All economic expansion is based on energy.
Countries with energy can expand, those without cannot.” — Chris Martenson
“To be an enemy to America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.” — Henry Kissinger
“The incorrect narrative provided by mainstream media (MSM) is that
climate change is our worst problem. To lessen this problem, citizens
need to move quickly away from fossil fuels and transition to
renewables. The real narrative is that we are running short of fossil
fuels that can be profitably extracted, and renewables are not adequate
substitutes. However, this narrative is too worrisome for most people to
handle.” — Ugo Bardi
It’s hard to contemplate 2023 without
spiraling into nausea, tachycardia, and cold sweat. But it is an
inescapable duty here to lay out the probabilities ahead. I’ve been
doing this forecast thing for some years now, and, of course, I am often
wrong, so take some solace in that and relax. Maybe the new year will
be all unicorns, rainbows, talking gerbils, and candied violets.
2022 sure was a cold shower. The long emergency
I talk so much about finally got up to cruising speed, with the
ectoplasmic “Joe Biden” revving our country into economic, political,
and cultural collapse — a hat-trick of calamity — and he did it more
swiftly and directly than any emperor managed in late-day Rome, with
policies and actions 180-degrees contra to America’s public interest —
cheered on by a thinking class that had obviously lost it consensual
mind.
Was the governing strategy simply to
do the opposite of what the loathed and detested Mr. Trump would do?
Could it be that simple or that automatic? The thinking class’s eyes
have a zombified glaze these days. It’s obvious, you might agree, that
“Joe Biden” is not in charge of anything, really. He’s an animatronic
figure programmed to read a teleprompter and not much else. Half the
time, he can’t even find his way off-stage after doing that one trick.
The claque pulling his strings just may be the crew you see around him
(you know, WYSIWYG): Susan Rice, Ron Klain, Jake Sullivan, Antony
Blinken, Victoria Nuland, and company. Ms. Rice has kept herself
completely hidden backstage at the White House for two years. Nobody
ever hears about her or sees her. Weird, a little bit, for the Director
of the Domestic Policy Council.
Or else, are there puppeteers deeper
in the shadows, say, “JB’s” former boss Barack Obama, Der Schwabenklaus
and his WEF retinue, Bill Gates and other tech billionaires, the
“systemically important” bankers, George Soros…? Or some coven of
super-elite warlocks we’d never heard of? The US leadership dynamic is
truly mystifying and has been for two whole years. Will mysteries be
revealed in 2023? Personally, I think so. Things are lining up in that
direction, though who knows whether the damage can even be reversed at
this point. And now onto the shape of things to come….
Economy
All you can really say is that the
folks running things have hijacked every module of our nation’s
interests and tilted them down into decadence and ruin. They’ve tanked
whatever’s left of the US economy with an array of surefire idiotic
maneuvers. By spending trillions of dollars that don’t exist to buy
votes, they’ve inflated away our money’s purchasing power — an Econ 101
level mistake. The “Green New Deal” is a swindle, an out-front,
in-your-face nefarious operation to subvert Western Civ by the WEF, and
its stooges — laid out explicitly in its house publications.
There is no way we can run our society
as currently outfitted on any combination of alt.energies. All the
Greenies can really accomplish with this crusade is to destroy the
complex systems we rely on faster than would happen in the normal course
of things, foreclosing any chance of an orderly retreat to a plausibly
downscaled arrangement for daily life. We are exiting the current system
anyway, like it or not — the longstanding thesis of The Long Emergency.
This gets to the heart of the conundrum we face. Ill-intentioned as the WEF and its allies may be, the world is
heading toward a Great Re-set. The catch is, it won’t be the WEF’s
version of it, their schematic techno-nirvana with a tiny comfortable
elite lording over the bug-eating hoi-polloi. They somehow miss the
glaring point that the energy required to run their precious transhuman
tech won’t be there. By the way, the WEF’s core idea of central control
by a coordinated world government is at odds with the core reality of
the times ahead, which is that life is about to get much more local and
downscaled — the exact opposite of centralized. Everything organized at
the giant scale is veering into failure: empires, global corporations,
hypertrophic cities, giant universities, giant farms, you name it. Their
business models are broken. The activities these things represent have
to get smaller, finer, and more regional. Depending on what we’re able
to salvage and re-purpose from the fabricated leftovers of Modernity,
we’ll be lucky to land back in life lived at the level of the early
1800s. Or else, if we really mess up, we’ll plunge haplessly into a dark
age in a resource-stripped world.
The “Green New Deal,” based on a
combination of wishful thinking and self-destructive malice, includes
the deliberate undermining of what’s left of America’s oil industry by
cancelling pipelines, drilling licenses on public lands, draining the
strategic petroleum reserve, and other efforts to sabotage what’s left.
America still has a lot of oil in the ground, yet much of it is hard to
get at and uneconomical to produce at the scale required. It’s a
money-loser, and losing money consistently doesn’t pencil out for any
real business.
This hard reality is especially true
of shale oil, which had a good run production-wise 2009 to 2022, though
the producers could barely make a dime at it. The shale oil “miracle”
was largely a byproduct of near-zero interest rates. Investors flocked
to it after 2009 because they couldn’t get any yield from
bonds. Shale oil was played-up as a sure thing. It took investors a
decade, and over a hundred oil company bankruptcies, to catch on — and
now shale oil can’t attract enough new investment to keep up the giant
operations at scale. The main shale oil regions, the Permian Basin in
Texas and the Bakken fields of North Dakota, have entered permanent
decline as they run out of “sweet spots” to drill and frack. Considering
the new era of capital scarcity ahead, money for shale oil companies
will be even harder to get and we’ll get less shale oil every year,
while conventional oil continues its own remorseless decline. The catch
here is that oil prices are just as likely to go down as up because the
foundering economy creates substantial demand destruction — meaning that
customers drop out of the market.
Natural gas involves similar
dynamics. There seems to be a lot of it for now in the Marcellus
formation spread over Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, and into New
York (where fracking has been prohibited for years). Natgas is very
useful for electric generation, home heating, and some manufacturing,
but not so much for transportation. Shale gas production is also based
on “sweet spots” for drilling and there are fewer of them every year.
The depletion curve for natgas is even more extreme than it is for oil:
the flow stops all at once. The early shale gas plays in the southern US
— Haynesville, Fayetteville, Barnett — have been in decline for years.
As with shale oil, producing shale gas is expensive, with all the trucks
ceaselessly delivering sand, water, and fracking chemicals to the
drilling pads, and then transporting waste liquids off-site. Prediction:
in 2023, we’ll hear the first rumblings about “nationalizing the oil
industry,” which will be a giant step toward killing it altogether,
given the all-around incompetence of government.
The strategy of changing out
oil-based cars and trucks for electric vehicles (EVs) is a loser on
several counts beyond the disruption and instability facing US oil
production. One, it’s premised on the fantasy that we can continue
living in a suburban sprawl arrangement by other means. Two, the
electric grid is too inadequate and fragile to support the charging of
so many millions of EVs in addition to everything else we ask it to do.
Three, the middle class is being decimated, so there are fewer
credit-worthy customers for cars priced out of their shrinking budgets
anyway. Four, far less capital will be available for consumer loans. The
car industry itself may not survive the re-possession orgy coming in
2023 for defaulted auto loans. That shortfall will infect banking, too.
The economy is already hurting. The “Green New Deal” will cut its wobbly
legs off.
Similarly, the new mandates against
the use of nitrogenous fertilizers (made from natgas). European
countries are already on-board with this WEF folly. The Netherlands,
Europe’s leading food producer, is going so far as to forcibly shut down
thousands of farms and limit fertilizer use on the remaining ones.
Germany is likewise limiting fertilizers. Canada fell in line next.
Prediction: in early 2023, “Joe Biden” will set in motion
anti-fertilizer policies in the US. There will be plenty of squawking in
the big farming states, rising to angry protests. The tractor convoys
may invade Washington. The situation sets up a grim prospect for the US
food supply: scarcity, high prices, and hunger ahead.
The Ukraine bread-basket is out of
the picture in 2023, unless military action ends well before planting
season. Thanks to “Joe B’s” stupid sanctions policy, a more vulnerable
Europe can’t depend on Russia, another world-leading grain producer. By
summer, the projected harvests all over Western Civ will be inadequate
to feed the existing populations. Routine grain exports to the poor
nations of the “global south” will stop and a lot of people will starve
in those countries. By then, it will be too late to fix anything. The
price of food will soar throughout Western Civ, aggravating other
economic crises that will amount to metastasizing poverty. Populations
will get very restless. Governments will fall (candidates: France,
Germany, UK, Australia, the USA). In some places they will not recover
in their prior form.
As a general proposition, Globalism is
done. That got that underway in earnest with the Covid shut-downs. Now,
geopolitical friction gets worse and trade relations deteriorate
further. There will still be trade between nations, but much reduced.
Global supply chains are already wrecked, especially for specialized
mechanical replacement parts and electronic components. It will be
harder to fix cars, trucks, turbines, really any sort of machine,
including computers and things run by them. A lot of commercial activity
will just stop.
Europe has already blundered into
buying its one-way ticket to Palookaville. Germany and the rest paid for
that ticket by going along with feckless US policy to “weaken” Russia
with sanctions (mission not accomplished). The coup de grace was the US
wrecking the Nord Stream pipelines. So, Euroland has inadvertently
decided to ditch its industrial base, which means they go medieval or
worse. They have committed economic suicide. They’d better hope
reincarnation is for-real. Anyway, they’re not coming back from this
fiasco the way they went into it, that is, the way things were. When the
shock of winter is over in early 2023, strife will be the new leitmotif
in the Old World. People grow desperate in the six-weeks-wont of springtime. Nations crack up.
America’s economy largely hinges on
finance now that financialization replaced manufacturing as the basis
for prosperity. Alas, financialized prosperity is false prosperity,
since it consists mainly of borrowing ever greater amounts of money to
keep up the mere appearance of prosperity. In real life, prosperity
requires producing things of value, not just trading increasingly
abstract financial instruments purporting to represent money. I’ve
discussed this enough in books, prior blogs, and previous forecasts.
Suffice it to say we’ve run out the string on this stunt. All we’re left
with now is the debt markers, documents that purport to represent
wealth. The collateral is all the stuff we produced previously that is
still standing: buildings, developed properties, public works. A lot of
this stuff is deteriorating quickly, losing its value — for instance the
tens of millions of suburban houses built with shitty, short-lived
materials like strand-board and vinyl… all the cars….
Financialization led to the current
inflation in our debt-based money system. More borrowing becomes more
money going into existence, chasing a declining amount of goods as
production falls off and supply lines choke. Services also suffer.
People can’t afford to eat out, get acupuncture, visit hair-dressers.
When the inflation is bad enough, say more than ten percent annually, it
will cause enough economic damage to provoke a big contraction in
activity, bringing on a deluge of loan defaults on mortgages, car
payments, and corporate obligations. Loan defaults cause money to
disappear from the system. This flips inflation into deflation. The
bond-market is blowing up as this occurs, because bonds are debts and
they’re not being serviced or paid-off. The imploding bond market
infects the stock markets and they crash, too.
Before long, nobody has money, except
people who invested in gold and silver. Prediction: the change-over
from inflation to deflation comes in summer of 2023 and gathers momentum
into the fall. The implosion leads to economic conditions worse than
the Great Depression of the 1930s because our social and family
arrangements have disintegrated along with our towns and cities. Civil
disorder ignites. The government attempts lockdowns, but this time
without a disease to blame it on. It’s no longer safe to be a
politician.
The Covid-19 Story Backfires Badly and Hell Breaks Loose
Against the backdrop of a developing
economic depression, the public can no longer avoid seeing the calamity
that the mRNA vaccines have instigated. Early death is in the news daily
now and from exactly the adverse effects that have been
derided as “conspiracy theory” by public health experts since 2021:
myocarditis, blood clots, organ damage, neurological illness, unusually
aggressive cancers, damaged immune systems. Meanwhile, America’s public
health aristocracy — Dr. Tony Fauci, Rochelle Walensky, Francis Collins,
Deborah Birx, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and many, many others will
be compelled to testify under oath before newly re-constituted House
committees and finally answer for all their dishonesty in the Covid-19
response saga. They lied about everything, especially the “vaccines?” It
will go worse for them as public sentiment turns from submission to
official bullshit to rage over a deadly fraud.
By then, the past efforts of this
gang to mislead the public on Twitter and other social media will be
well-documented. The exposed slime-trail of money and corruption between
Pharma and federal bureaucrats will finally make an impression on the
long-bamboozled nation. The mainstream media will be dragged into this
morass and the public will begin to understand how the newspaper editors
and TV news producers, too, were bought off by Pharma and controlled by
the national security state to pimp for the Democratic Party and
globalist interests outside the USA. This exposure could be the end of
the great legacy news organs, The New York Times and the rest
of the gang. Their executives will have to testify along with everyone
else. They might not be prosecuted — in a gesture of respect for the
First Amendment — but rather will suffer badly from their loss of
credibility.
All of this will aggravate the animus
against the government and the Democrat Party’s “Joe Biden” regime —
which will be under assault from separate inquiries into the Hunter
Biden laptop and its abundant evidence of bribery and treason, and
hearings about the wide-open border, payments to Ukraine, and the
gestapo-like behavior of the FBI.
Here’s a scenario for you: The Justice
Department will be drowning in criminal referrals. The FBI will be in a
state of paralysis, unable to carry out more insults against US citizens
as its systematic crimes are revealed. When the DOJ dithers about
bringing action, the public will be even more enraged. The current
Attorney General, Merrick Garland, gets dragged into Congress to answer
for his misconduct and the resulting humiliation will run him out of
office. “Joe Biden” may be forced to resign, drowned in a sea of
troubles and scandals revealed. A deal will be made to let Veep Kamala
Harris off the hook in exchange for her resignation.
That will leave the Republican
Speaker of the House, whoever it is, to become president. He will fire
every political appointee in the executive branch and replace them with
people who will follow the law. It will look like a promising return to
decency and the rule of law. But the damage to America’s prestige will
have been so gross by then that the federal government has lost
legitimacy. The financial crisis, meanwhile, puts the government into
something that smells like bankruptcy. The country is in a ferocious
depression, the people have no money, but neither does the government.
Real authority devolves to states and localities. The playing out of
these dynamics also depends on what is happening outside the USA.
Europe in Macro
Don’t forget, Europe, the west end of
the Eurasian landmass, used to be an important part of the world, with
an aggregate GDP greater than even the USA’s or China’s. Europe is the
birthplace of Western Civ, a division of the human project the past few
thousand years that yielded tremendous advances in science, art, music,
philosophy, and organized intelligence generally. Now it is on the
rocks. Europe, in the aggregate, as represented, say, by the European
Union, or NATO, made a grave error going along with the USA’s foolish
Neocon project to make a heap trouble in Ukraine in order to “weaken”
Russia.
Russia was no longer a threat to the
USA after 1991. Once the USSR was done as a political entity, and after
Russia recovered from the daze of collapse, it wanted to be treated by
the West as a normal European nation. Russia became a market economy,
like all the others in Europe. It held elections like the others, had a
legislature, a new body of property law, a private news media, regular
banks, and all the other trappings of modern political normality. Russia
even requested early-on to become a member of NATO. The USA and Europe
refused NATO membership, but also refused to admit Russia into European
normality. Instead, led by the USA, the West conducted an asset
stripping operation which hampered Russia’s redevelopment.
Otherwise, the West mostly ignored
Russia, and in spite of all that Russia got back on its feet, got some
industries going, especially oil-and-gas, and enjoyed two decades of
relative stability. Russia eventually began reaching out in the world
and made trade agreements with other countries. It built those Nord
Stream gas pipelines. It organized a regional “customs union” among its
Eurasian neighbors that functioned rather like the Eurozone.
As that was all happening — pay
attention — around 2010 then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sat on a
State Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States
(CFIUS) that threatened to block the sale of a Canadian company,
Uranium One, to Rosatom, the Russian State Atomic Energy Corporation, on
the grounds that Uranium One’s assets included 20-percent of the USA’s
uranium supply. Selling all that American uranium to Russia looked kind
of bad, you’d think, and you’d be right. But then, suddenly, about
$150-million dollars poured into the Clinton Foundation — much of it
from Uranium One’s owner, one Frank Giustra — plus Bill Clinton happened
to get a half-million dollar speaking gig in Russia, and… whaddaya
know, CFIUS ended up approving the sale. The public hardly heard a peep
about it. (Where was the US new media?)
During that same period, Hillary
Clinton also helped facilitate the transfer of American bio-medical,
nuclear, and Info technology to the high-tech consortium called
Skolkovo, Russia’s version of Silicon Valley. Much of the tech at issue
was dual-use, good for civilian and military applications. Again, tens
of millions of dollars gushed into the Clinton Foundation from the
corporate participants in the Skolkovo deal. Crickets from the news
media again.
In 2011, relations between the US and
Russia soured when President Putin accused the US of fomenting protests
in Russia over its parliamentary elections. And from there, our State
Department decided that Russia and the USA could not even pretend to be
friendly.
Jump ahead to 2014: Neocons in the
Obama administration figured it was time to cut Russia back down to
size. That effort crystalized around the former Soviet province,
Ukraine, and blossomed into the US-sponsored-and-organized Maidan
Revolution, utilizing Ukraine’s sizeable Stepan Bandara legacy Nazi
forces in the vanguard, to foment violence in Kiev’s main city square.
The US shoved out elected Ukraine President Yanukovych — who angered
America by pledging to join Russia’s Custom’s Union instead of the EU —
and installed its own puppet Yatsenyuk, who was ultimately replaced by
the candy tycoon, Poroshenko, replaced by the Ukrainian TV star,
comedian Volodymyr Zelensky. Ha Ha. Who’s laughing now? (Nobody.)
From 2014-on, Ukraine, with America’s
backing, did everything possible to antagonize Russia, especially
showering the eastern provinces of Ukraine, called the Donbas, with
artillery, rockets, and bombs to harass the Russia-leaning population
there. After eight years of that, and continued American insults (the
Steele Dossier, 2016 election interference), and renewed threats to drag
Ukraine into NATO, Mr. Putin had enough and launched his “Special
Military Operation” to discipline Ukraine. Once that started, American
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stated explicitly to the world that
America’s general policy now was to “weaken Russia.”
That declaration was accompanied by
America’s policy to isolate Russia economically with ever more
sanctions. Didn’t work. Russia just turned eastward to the enormous
Asian market to sell its oil and gas and utilized an alternate
electronic trade-clearance system to replace America’s SWIFT system.
Sanctions also gave Russia a reason to aggressively pursue an
import-replacement economic strategy — manufacturing stuff that they had
been buying from the West, for instance, German machine tools critical
for industry.
Russia did sacrifice more than
$50-billion in financial assets stranded in the US banking system — we
just confiscated it — but, ultimately, that only harmed the US banking
system’s reputation as a safe place to park money, and made foreign
investors much more wary of stashing capital in American banks. Net
effect: the value of the ruble increased and stabilized, and Russia
found new ways to neutralize American economic bullying.
Europe was the big loser in all that.
For a while, Europe could pretend to go along with the US / NATO
project, pouring arms and money into Ukraine, and at the same time
depend on Russian oil and gas imports. Eight months into the
Ukraine-Russia conflict, the US blew up the Nord Stream One and Two
pipelines, and that was the end of Europe’s supply of affordable natgas,
to heat homes and power industry. In a sane world, that sabotage would
have been considered an act of war against Germany by the USA. It
invested heavily in wind and solar installations, which fell so short of
adequacy they were a joke, and it closed down its nuke-powered electric
generation plants so as to appear ecologically correct.....So now, Germany, and many other EU
member states, teeter on the edge of leaving Modernity behind. They
managed to scramble and fill their gas reserves sufficiently this fall
to perhaps squeak through winter without freezing to death, but not
without a lot of sacrifice, chopping down Europe’s forests, and wearing
their coats indoors. Now, only a few days into Winter, it remains to be
seen how that will work out. We’ll know more in March of the new year.
France had been the exception in Europe, due to its large fleet of
atomic energy plants. But many of them have now aged-out, some shut down
altogether, and “green” politics stood in the way of replacing them, so
France, too, will find itself increasingly subject to affordable energy
shortages.
Prediction: Europe’s industry will
falter and close down by painful increments. The EU will not withstand
the economic stress of de-industrialization. It will shatter and leave
Europe once again a small continent of many small fractious nations with
longstanding grudges. Some of these countries may break-up into smaller
entities in turn, as Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Russia did in the
1990s. Keep in mind, the macro trend world-wide will be downscaling and
localization as affordable energy recedes for everyone. Since the end of
World War Two, Europe was the world’s tourist theme park. Now it could
go back to being a slaughterhouse. The Euro currency will have to be
phased out as sovereign bankruptcies make the EU financial system
untenable, and animosities and hostilities arise. Each country will have
to return to its traditional money. Gold and silver will play a larger
role in that.
The USA poured over $100-billion into
Ukraine in arms, goods, and cash in 2022. That largesse will not
continue as America sinks into its Second Great Depression. In any case,
much of that schwag was fobbed off with. The arms are spent, the
launchers destroyed. A lot of weapons were trafficked around to other
countries and non-state actors. Russia is going to prevail in Ukraine.
The news emanating from American media about Ukraine’s military triumphs
has been all propaganda. There was hardly ever any real doubt that
Russia dominated the war zone strategically and tactically. Even its
withdrawals from one city or another were tactically intelligent and
worthwhile, sparing Russian lives. The Special Military Operation wasn’t
a cakewalk because Russia wanted to avoid killing civilians and refrain
from destroying infrastructure that would leave Ukraine a gutted,
failed state. Over time, the USA proved itself to be
negotiation-unworthy, and Ukraine’s president Zelensky refused to
entertain rational terms for settling the crisis. So, now the gloves are
off in Ukraine. As of December 29, Russia shut off the lights in Kiev
and Lvov.
The open questions: how much
punishment does Ukraine seek to suffer before it capitulates? Will
Zelensky survive? (Even if he runs off to Miami, he may not survive.)
What exactly will be left of Ukraine? In 2023 Russia will decide the
disposition of things on-the-ground. Failed states make terrible
neighbors. One would imagine that Russia’s main goal is to set up a rump
Ukraine that can function, but cease to be an annoying pawn of its
antagonists. Ukraine will no longer enjoy access to the Black Sea; it
will be landlocked. The best case would be for Ukraine to revert to the
agricultural backwater it was for centuries before the mighty
disruptions of the modern era. Perhaps Russia will take it over
altogether and govern it as it had ever since the 1700s — except for
Ukraine’s brief interlude post-USSR as one of the world’s most corrupt
and mal-administered sovereign states.
Bottom line: Ukraine is and always was
within Russia’s sphere-of-influence, and will remain so. The USA has no
business there and it will be best for all concerned when we bug out.
Let’s hope that happens without America triggering a nuclear World War
Three. (Yeah, “hope” is not a plan. Try prayer, then.) Mr. Putin’s
challenge going into 2023 is to conclude the Ukraine hostilities without
humiliating the USA to the degree that we do something really stupid.
Asia
The enormous region where most of
the world’s people live is swirling with quickly changing dynamics. It’s
hard to tell what kind of shape China is actually in at the close of
2022. The CCP capitulated on its extreme lockdown policy and now the
country seems gripped by a new and severe outbreak of the Covid virus.
It’s killing a lot of people, including quite a few higher-ups in the
CCP. The world saw the beginning of a popular revolt in China through
the fall of 2022 as demonstrations erupted. The political side remains
opaque.
The economic side, less so. China’s
wealth since year 2000 has derived from its immense factory capacity and
cheap labor force. Globalism is wobbling, and with that the world’s
supply line network. If trade relations with the USA continue to sour,
both China and the USA will suffer. China will find itself at
over-capacity, even for the giant Asian market. And they are competing
with several other quickly-industrialized nations in the south, plus
India, plus the old stalwarts South Korea and Japan.
The main problem for China, and
indeed all the Pacific Rim nations on the Asian side: energy. China
doesn’t have very much oil in the ground and is utterly dependent on
imports. It has a lot of low-quality coal. It’s building coal and nuke
plants like mad. Will that suffice? Electricity is great, but you need
fossil fuels to run heavy industries. In the great shiftings of 2022,
China made deals for getting more oil and gas from Russia. That might
work for a while. But Russia’s energy resources are probably near peak
production now. What happens on the way down from that peak? Maybe
Russia will be less avid for sharing its fossil fuels with its
neighbors. Maybe that will cause political friction. Maybe a desperate
China will reach out and try to grab resources from Russia’s vast
Siberian territories? Not next year, though….
The Neocon-led US foreign policy establishment is insane for sure, but the CCP is only not-crazy
during times of great stability. Throw in some popular dissent and some
economic distress, and the CCP could go cuckoo. Uncle Xi shows very
Mao-like tendencies for creative despotism. The party must have a long
game for Taiwan, but a distressed and crazed CCP, and an agitated Uncle
Xi, could turn that into a short game out of desperation — and then
what? We’d have two really crazed governments, the USA and China,
ginning up the Eastern theater of World War Three. The upshot of
predicament depends to some extent on how delicately Mr. Putin can
organize America’s exit from Ukraine.
Prediction: For 2023 internal friction
will preoccupy China as it attempts to square its operations with those
pressing trends of our time: downscaling and relocalization. All this
could easily lead to regional strife in China. For decades, the CCP has
been the glue between its disparate peoples. It may prove to not be
superglue.
Japan remains as enigmatic as ever. It
has drifted economically for nearly forty years. Now it looks like it’s
drifting into a sovereign bankruptcy as it loses control of its
deeply-gamed bond markets. I’ll stick to my old predication that Japan
is en route to going medieval. Its pre-industrial culture was very
charming and worked well for long periods of history. Industrial
modernity demoralized them. Japan imports all its oil. Without it, you
can’t even begin to run a modern war machine, so there won’t be a second
reaching-out for resources as in the 20th century. The Japanese will not be alone in the new medievalism when this era completes itself.
The Deep State, an Appreciation
America is at a crossroads, a
threshold, a tipping point. Every vital institution in the land has been
at least partially wrecked, most especially the ones in charge of the
rule of law, which was the best thing we had going for us. The Deep
State is for real — the weaponization of a national bureaucracy against
the nation itself. Yet, it’s certainly not just an American thing; it’s
happening across Western Civ. Is it some natural process of
self-destruction? An auto-immune disorder of a giant cultural organism,
with parts attacking the whole? The USA, Great Britain, Canada, and
Australia took such special pride in being open societies and now they
are consumed in censorious lunacy. Continental Europe had a sketchier
history with liberty, the enlightened individualism of Everyman, though
they actually birthed its principles. But now the whole works is
infected and ailing, and by what? It’s as if some cosmic spike protein
came among us all and got into our hearts.
Most major religions feature some
version of the idea of death-and-rebirth, and it’s a fact that we see
ourselves embedded in cycles, especially seasons. Things turn and
return, are born, develop, degenerate, pass away. This was the brilliant
application of Strauss and Howe’s Fourth Turning theory to the
study of history, and by those terms we are have entered a deep secular
winter of the human project. One can appreciate how the onset of winter
spooked our prehistoric ancestors. They developed their prayerful
ceremonies for bringing back the sun, and warmth, and new growth,
dancing around the fire in the skins of animals, often making blood
sacrifices to the mysterious forces in charge of… everything. The modern
way of reenacting all that seems to be industrial-strength warfare.
Many of us are praying right now that we don’t have to go through that.
More likely, I think, we’ll forego
the nuclear fire and simply go through a collapse of the socioeconomic
organization that our governance rests on, and the Deep State illness
with it. It’ll come with plenty of hardship, but it will purge the
poisons that have disordered us, and when we get through it, we’ll make
new arrangements for daily life. For some years, I’ve been calling this
process a long emergency, and now we seem to be right in the thick of it. I believe in the natural process called emergence.
Systems transform themselves organically from one state to another when
acted upon by the circumstances of time and place. The outcome is
usually a surprise, and not all surprises are bad. So, adios 2022 and
hello little baby 2023. Lead us where you will and let’s go forward into
it bravely. As Bob said so many years ago, it’s all right, Ma. It’s life and life only….
....
https://scheerpost.com/2022/12/30/fbi-cointelpro-is-back-and-worse-than-ever/
FBI Cointelpro Is Back and Worse Than Ever
Elon Musk has opened the floodgates to expose
the FBI’s latest war on Americans’ freedom of speech. The FBI massively
intervened to pressure Twitter to suppress accounts and tweets from
individuals the FBI disapproved, including parody accounts. The FBI and
other federal agencies also browbeat Facebook, Instagram, and many
other tech companies.
Thus far, most of the American media has ignored or downplayed the
story, known as the Twitter Files. Since many of the individuals who the
FBI got squelched were pro-Trump, the violation of their rights is a
non-issue – or a cause for quiet celebration. At this point, it is
difficult to know whether the scant reaction to the Twitter Files is the
result of political bias, collective amnesia, or simply a total
ignorance of American history.
The history of the FBI provides perhaps the best guide to the abuses
that may be now occurring. From 1956 to 1971, the FBI carried out “a secret war against those citizens it considers threats to the established order,” a 1976 Senate report noted. The FBI’s Operation COINTELPRO involved thousands of covert operations to incite street
warfare between violent groups, to get people fired, to portray
innocent people as government informants, to destroy activists’
marriages, and to cripple or destroy left-wing, black, communist, white
racist, and anti-war organizations. The FBI let no corner of American
life escape its vigilance; it even worked to expose and discredit
“communists who are secretly operating in legitimate organizations and
employments, such as the Young Men’s Christian Association and Boy
Scouts.”
While many people are aware of how the FBI hounded Martin Luther
King, Jr., and pressured him to commit suicide, that was not even the
tip of the iceberg of the FBI’s racial persecution. Almost any black
organization could be targeted for illegal wiretaps. One black leader
was monitored largely because he had “recommended the possession of
firearms by members for their self-protection.” At that time, some
southern police departments and sheriffs were notorious for attacking
blacks who stood up for their civil rights.
The FBI office in San Diego instigated violence between the local
Black Panthers and a rival black organization, US (United Slaves Inc.).
Agents sent forged letters making accusations and threats to the groups
purportedly from their rivals, along with crude cartoons and drawings
meant to enrage the recipients. Three Black Panthers and one member of
the rival group were killed during the time the FBI was fanning the
flames. A few days after shootings in which two Panthers were wounded
and one was killed, and in which the U.S. headquarters was bombed, the
FBI office reported to headquarters: “Efforts are being made to
determine how this situation can be capitalized upon for the benefit of
the Counterintelligence Program.” The FBI office bragged shortly
thereafter: “Shootings, beatings, and a high degree of unrest continues
to prevail in the ghetto area of southeast San Diego…. it is felt that a
substantial amount of the unrest is directly attributable to this [FBI]
program.”
The FBI set up a Ghetto Informant Program that continued after
COINTELPRO and that had 7,402 informants, including proprietors of candy
stores and barbershops, as of September 1972. The informants served as
“listening posts” “to identify extremists passing through or locating in
the ghetto area, to identify purveyors of extremist literature,” and to
keep an eye on “Afro-American type bookstores” (including obtaining the
names of the bookstores’ “clientele”). The informants’ reports were
stockpiled in the FBI’s Racial Intelligence Unit. The FBI also created a
national “Rabble Rouser” Index, a “major intelligence program . . . to
identify ‘demagogues.’”
The FBI targeted the women’s liberation movement, resulting in
“intensive reporting on the identities and opinions of women who
attended” women’s lib meetings. One FBI informant reported to
headquarters of a meeting in New York: “Each woman at this meeting
stated why she had come to the meeting and how she felt oppressed,
sexually or otherwise… They are mostly against marriage, children, and
other states of oppression caused by men.” Women’s lib informants were
instructed to “go to meetings, write up reports… to try to identify the
background of every person there… [and] who they were sleeping with.”
The Senate report noted that “the intensive FBI investigation of the
Women’s Liberation Movement was predicated on the theory that the
activities of women in that Movement might lead to demonstrations and
violence.”
The FBI took a shotgun approach toward protesters partly because of
its “belief that dissident speech and association should be prevented
because they were incipient steps toward the possible ultimate
commission of an act which might be criminal.” Some FBI agents may have
viewed dissident speech or protests as a “gateway drug” to blowing up
the Washington Monument. The Senate report noted that the clearest FBI
COINTELPRO constitutional violations consisted of “targeting speakers,
teachers, writers or publications, and meetings or peaceful
demonstrations…. The cases include attempts (sometimes successful) to
get university and high school teachers fired… to prevent the
distribution of books, newspapers, or periodicals; to disrupt peaceful
demonstrations, including… most of the large antiwar marches.”
The FBI especially loathed any opposition to the Vietnam War. The FBI
ordered field offices in 1968 to gather information illustrating the
“scurrilous and depraved nature of many of the characters, activities,
habits, and living conditions representative of New Left adherents.”
FBI agents were told: “Every avenue of possible embarrassment must be
vigorously and enthusiastically explored. It cannot be expected that
information of this type will be easily obtained, and an imaginative
approach by your personnel is imperative to its success.” One FBI
internal newsletter encouraged FBI agents to conduct more interviews
with antiwar activists “for plenty of reasons, chief of which are it
will enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and will further
serve to get the point across that there is an FBI agent behind every
mailbox.”
An FBI memo warned that “the anarchist activities of a few can
paralyze institutions of learning, [conscription] induction centers,
cripple traffic, and tie the arms of law enforcement officials, all to
the detriment of our society.” The FBI declared: “The New Left has on
many occasions viciously and scurrilously attacked the Director [J.
Edgar Hoover] and the Bureau in an attempt to hamper our investigation
of it and to drive us off the college campuses.”
Other federal agencies also trampled citizens’ privacy, rights, and
lives during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The IRS used COINTELPRO
leads to launch audits against thousands of suspected political enemies
of the Nixon administration. The U.S. Army set up its own surveillance
program, creating files on 100,000 Americans and targeting domestic
organizations such as the Young Americans for Freedom, the John Birch
Society, and the Anti-Defamation League of B’Nai B’rith. Nixon aide Tom
Charles Huston, testifying to Congress in 1973, lamented the FBI’s
tendency “to move from the kid with a bomb to the kid with a picket
sign, and from the kid with the picket sign to the kid with the bumper
sticker of the opposing candidate. And you just keep going down the
line.”
Throughout the COINTELPRO era, presidents, congressmen, and other
high-ranking federal officials assured Americans that the federal
government was obeying the law and upholding the Constitution. It took a
burglary of an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, to break the biggest
scandal in the history of federal law enforcement. After hundreds of
pages of confidential records were commandeered, the “Citizen’s
Commission to Investigate the FBI” began passing out the incriminating
documents to the media. The shocking material sparked congressional and
news investigations that eventually (temporarily) shattered the FBI’s
legendary ability to control its own image.
The Senate report on COINTELPRO concluded: “Only a combination of
legislative prohibition and Departmental control can guarantee that
COINTELPRO will not happen again.” But the Ford administration derailed
legislative reforms by promising an administrative fix. In 2002,
Attorney General John Ashcroft threw out many of those reforms as part
of “a concerted effort to free the [FBI] field agents… from the
bureaucratic, organizational, and operational restrictions” imposed
after their prior abuses. Ashcroft declared: “In its 94-year history,
the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been… the tireless protector of
civil rights and civil liberties for all Americans.” The same tripe has
been uttered by many Democrats and liberals in the last five years.
The FBI’s latest war on wrong-thinking Americans took off after the
FBI helped fabricate the 2016 RussiaGate fraud. The 1976 Senate report
noted that COINTELPRO’s origins “are rooted in the Bureau’s jurisdiction
to investigate hostile foreign intelligence activities on American
soil” and that the FBI used the “techniques of wartime.” William
Sullivan, former assistant to the FBI director, declared, “No holds were
barred…. We have used [these techniques] against Soviet agents…. [The
same methods were] brought home against any organization against which
we were targeted. We did not differentiate.” Senate investigators
warned in 1976 that the “FBI intelligence system developed to a point where no one inside or outside the bureau was willing or able to tell the difference between legitimate national security or law enforcement information and purely political intelligence.”
In our time, FBI officials pressured Twitter to suppress Americans
based on false claims of fighting foreign influence. The same pretext
was used by the Department of Homeland Security to massively suppress Americans’
criticism of election procedures (especially mail-in ballots) for the
2020 presidential election. As the covert war against “misinformation”
expands, the list of federally prohibited online thoughts is
snowballing. DHS is targeting “inaccurate information on the… U.S.
withdrawal from Afghanistan and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine,”
The Intercept reported. How many other foreign policy debacles are
Americans not learning about thanks to federal censorship?
One of the biggest “misses” in the media coverage of the Twitter
Files is the stunning failure of Congress to expose the abuses that Elon
Musk is revealing. A few months ago, FBI director Christopher Wray,
facing vigorous questioning from Sen. Charles Grassley and others,
walked out of a Senate oversight hearing, claiming that he had an urgent
appointment he must keep. It was later revealed that Wray’s
“appointment” was hopping on an FBI jet for a family vacation. Congress
punished the FBI with a $570 million budget increase, plowing $11.3
billion into its coffers in the coming year.
Is Congress terrified of the FBI nowadays like congressmen were in
the COINTELPRO era? In 1971, House Majority Leader Hale Boggs revealed
the shameless kowtowing on Capitol Hill: “Our very fear of speaking out
[against the FBI] … has watered the roots and hastened the growth of a
vine of tyranny…. Our society cannot survive a planned and programmed
fear of its own government bureaus and agencies.” Boggs vindicated a
1924 American Civil Liberties Union warning that the FBI had become “a
secret police system of a political character.”
But old quotes provide no protection against new depredations. The
Twitter Files prove that G-men have been off the leash for years. We
still have no idea how far the FBI and other federal agencies have gone
to suppress our freedom of speech. Until federal abuses are fully
exposed, Americans would be damn fools to believe their constitutional
rights are safe.
