http://www.blacklistednews.com/Congress_To_Vote_On_Declaration_of_Worldwide_Perpetual_War;_No_Borders,_No_Clear_Enemies_/13906/0/0/0/Y/M.html
Congress To Vote On Declaration of Worldwide Perpetual War; No Borders, No Clear Enemies
The legislation authorizes the President of the United States to take unilateral military action against all nations, organizations, and persons — both domestically and abroad — who are alleged to be currently, (or in the past) engaged in hostilities, or who have provided aid in support of hostilities against the United States or any of its coalition allies.
The legislation removes the requirement of Congressional approval for the use of military force and instead gives the President totalitarian dictatorial authority to engage in any and all military actions for an indefinite period of time.
It even authorizes the President the authority to launch attacks against American citizens inside the United States with no Congressional oversight whatsoever.
Just to recap, because that was a mouthful:
Endless War – The war will continue until all hostilities are terminated, which will never happen.
No Borders – The president will have the full authority to launch military strikes against any country, organization or person, including against U.S citizens on U.S soil.
Unilateral Military Action – Full authority to invade any nation at any time with no congressional approval required.
No Clearly Defined Enemy – The US can declare or allege anyone a terrorist or allege they are or have been supporting “hostilities” against the US and attack at will.
Authorization To Invade Several Countries – The president would have full authority to invade Iran, Syria, North Korea, along with several other nations in Africa and the Middle East and even Russia and China under the legislation all of which are “known” to have supported and aided hostilities against the United States.
The American Civil Liberties Union writes:
New Authorization of Worldwide War Without End?
Congress may soon vote on a new declaration of worldwide war without end, and without clear enemies. A “sleeper provision” deep inside defense bills pending before Congress could become the single biggest hand-over of unchecked war authority from Congress to the executive branch in modern American history.
President Obama has not sought new war authority. In fact, his administration has made clear that it believes it already has all of the authority that it needs to fight terrorism.
But Congress is considering monumental new legislation that would grant the president – and all presidents after him – sweeping new power to make war almost anywhere and everywhere. Unlike previous grants of authority for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the proposed legislation would allow a president to use military force wherever terrorism suspects are present in the world, regardless of whether there has been any harm to U.S. citizens, or any attack on the United States, or any imminent threat of an attack. The legislation is broad enough to permit a president to use military force within the United States and against American citizens. The legislation contains no expiration date, and no criteria to determine when a president’s authority to use military force would end.
Of all of the powers that the Constitution assigns to Congress, no power is more fundamental or important than the power “to declare War.” That is why, in 2002, when Congress was considering whether to authorize war in Iraq, it held fifteen hearings, and passed legislation that cited specific harms, set limits, and defined a clear objective. Now, Congress is poised to give unchecked authority to the executive branch to use military force worldwide, with profoundly negative consequences for our fundamental democratic system of checks and balances. Once Congress expands the president’s war power, it will be nearly impossible to rein it back in. The ACLU strongly opposes a wholesale turnover of war power from Congress to the president – and all of his successors.
Coalition Memo to the House Committee on Armed Services Regarding a Proposed New Declaration of War
Comparison of 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force and Proposed Expanded Authorization
The offending text uses doublespeak to declare perpetual war.
Specifically, the text uses the phrase “affirms” armed conflict which is the terminology used by congress to declare war in every instance since World War 2.
Congress affirms that —
(1) the United States is engaged in an armed conflict with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces and that those entities continue to pose a threat to the United States and its citizens, both domestically and abroad;
(2) the President has the authority to use all necessary and appropriate force during the current armed conflict with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107–40; 50 U.S.C. 1541 note);
(3) the current armed conflict includes nations, organization, and persons who—
(A) are part of, or are substantially supporting, al‐Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners; or
(B) have engaged in hostilities or have directly supported hostilities in aid of a nation, organization, or person described in subparagraph (A); and
(4) the President’s authority pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107–40; 50 U.S.C. 1541 note) includes the authority to detain belligerents, including persons described in paragraph (3), until the termination of hostilities.
Indeed, the moment we all feared has come before us, as Congress is set to give the President absolute power over the military, including the authority to launch military strikes within the United States against U.S. citizens.
With the assassination of Osama Bin Laden on Pakistan soil many were naive enough to believe that the War on Terror would come to an end.
Instead, the reported success of the raid to kill Osama bin Laden is being used as a crutch to push through new legislation in the defense bills which literally authorize World War 3, an endless war with no defined enemies and no borders.
The whole Osama Bin Laden staged media spectacle was put forward not only in order to install TSA in train stations, malls, and all major public events; it is also being used to convince the public to support endless war all in the name of security.
Short of committing genocide, the termination of the hostilities will never come and as such the war will never come to end.
We have already learned that officials falsified reports that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction to justify the invasion of Iraq for the “prize” of oil.
If a whole government of top officials can not be trusted, then surely a single president cannot be trusted either.
We have seen the U.S Government turn Nazi and buy and burn every copy of a book that had evidence of a 9/11 cover up. The Department of Justice has already published a memo calling constitutionalists and survivalists potential terrorists.
Is it not bad enough that U.S courts have already legalized the abduction of U.S citizens along with their indefinite detention and torture in overseas prison camps? Or that the U.S Government openly admits to gunning down, kidnapping and torturing American college students?
Under the definition of the legislation, the president could authorize the military to attack the ACLU building because they have supported the “terrorists” by arguing for their civil rights.
How long will it take before this moves towards assassinating activists?
The have already labeled conspiracy theories as “dangerous thoughts that could lead to violence” and have even specifically called The Intel Hub, which routinely publishes my articles, an echo chamber pushing out “dangerous thoughts that could lead to violence”.
Uncle Sam openly admits to turning its multi-billion dollar espionage network against U.S citizens which has produced such great fruits as innocent activists exercising their first amendment rights being placed on the terrorist watch list by the FBI and Department of Homeland Security.
Just remember that as long as we are in a state of war your civil liberties and constitutional rights are pretty much null and void, only enforceable if the Government allows you to have them.
Even then, they can declare you a terrorist, an enemy combatant, or a threat to national security to revoke your constitutional rights immediately. They then can play the national security card when they are asked to explain their allegations.
This is rotten all around, and the first step to getting our rights back is to end the perpetual wars.
Contact your congressman and tell them NO WAY to this egregious bill!!
Thursday, June 2, 2011
SC106-5
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24654
Dancing on the Grave of 9/11. Osama and "The Big Lie"
The Obama administration and the corporate media are concocting an ever-more elaborate and spectacular theater around the “heroic” murder of the CIA intelligence myth/CIA asset Osama bin Laden. Not content to simply to exploit the 9/11 atrocity for political gain, the administration is heaping new layers of lie and cover-up to the original crime.
The growing cover-up
The desperation is palpable. Just days since the “big announcement”, Obama administration officials have already been forced to backpedal, issuing multiple corrections, adding to the confusion over the location of the killing, whether bin Laden was armed or unarmed, whether there was a “fire fight”, if an alleged wife was involved, the burial at sea, whether to release “graphic photos”, etc. The mainstream corporate media---following approved CIA/White House narratives---is spewing and regurgitating a tidal wave of red herrings that add to the inconsistencies.
Seasoned observers will not be fooled, no matter how many Obama lies, doctored photos, fake footage, lurid new testimonials and CIA pronouncements are pushed forth. As put simply by Paul Craig Roberts:
“As the alleged body has been dumped into the ocean, nothing remains but the word of the US government, which lied about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and al Qaeda connections, about yellowcake, about Iranian nukes, and, according to thousands of experts, about 9/11. Suddenly the government is telling us the truth about bin Laden’s death? If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I’ll let you have for a good price.”
The “war on terrorism” is a fabrication, war propaganda that continues to serve as the eternal pretext for global resource war. That 9/11 was a false flag operation---that the official story is a lie and cover-up---has been definitively proven in numerous investigations, such as Mike Ruppert’s Crossing the Rubicon, Michel Chossudovsky’s America’s “War on Terrorism”, the work of Paul Thompson, and others.
Osama bin Laden is a product and asset of the CIA. "Al-Qaeda" is a covert operation, a "database" of intelligence legends, exhaustively detailed in the work of Chaim Kupferberg (Part 1 and Part Two). Pakistan’s ISI, a virtual branch of the CIA, was central to 9/11 and a player in subsequent “terror” operations. It is not surprising that Pakistan and the ISI is at the heart of the “death of bin Laden” as well.
The “death of bin Laden” changes nothing about the factual record that indicts (among others) Bush/Cheney, Anglo-American military-intelligence, and elite war/oil interests.
Tragically, none of this matters. The minority of individuals with unscrambled brains is not the target of this imperial charade.
Euphoria, brainwashing, and “imperial mobilization”
To borrow from the lexicon of world planner Zbigniew Brzezinski, 9/11 was a successful attack “on the order of Pearl Harbor” that “united” the American people behind an “imperial mobilization”---the “war on terrorism” for oil. With 9/11, the masses fully supported nearly a decade of war, atrocities, subversion, and unprecedented government criminality.
The militant and unquestioning public embrace of “war on terrorism” lies underscores how that the 9/11 has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of the Anglo-American war criminals who orchestrated it.
Now Barack Obama, who has spoken incessantly over the years about wanting to “unite” America again “just as it was after 9/11”, has been granted his moment to “unite” the masses again, but do an even better job of population control than Bush/Cheney (who, in their clumsiness and hubris, partially “squandered” their “political capital”). The swaggering Obama will “get it right”. He is a better actor, the more devious and mendacious corporatist who was selected for this specific purpose.
Obama has been itching to be the "Osama killer" since before he was elected.
The 9/11 “shock effect” remains fully potent, as evidenced by the frenzy, euphoria, and stomach-turning jubilation of crowds of Americans joining in celebration orgies over a fictional murder of the fictional Osama bin Laden, a fictional revenge. Even the “intellectuals” and “experts” are treating this charade as if it is real. Corporate media headlines have declared that “the world has changed”, and the masses love it.
The post-9/11 era has spawned an entire generation of vicious and ignorant drones, whose moral compass has been shaped by war, lies, violent entertainment, and brainwashing. The future American police state will be built upon this new culture of thuggery. This is "Obama's Animal Farm".
To Obama, this is “what makes America great”.
Rescripting reality
In Orwellian fashion, the legend of the death of Bin Laden changes nothing in reality, but turns the mass perception of this reality upside down.
Suddenly, an unpopular Obama and his failing presidency are recast, in true Bush/Cheney fashion, as a heroic---and now successful--- “war president”. He is now Obama the 9/11 avenger, protector of the American people, and the great military master.
This burnished new image, which is preposterous as the one given to George W. Bush during his reign of terror, grants Obama his own new “political capital”. Two years of flummoxing and failure, wiped out. Attacks from all sides, stopped. Obama has a political weapon to fend off attacks from the right-wing. They can no longer attack Obama for being weak on foreign policy. At the same time, Obama’s corporate liberals (who care only about gaining political points on the Republicans) can return to deluding themselves about Obama’s populism, appeal and effectiveness, despite two years of absolute failure and purposely broken campaign promises. With one stroke, Obama is being handed the 2012 election.
Suddenly, Obama is not only just as “great” as Bush, but an even “cooler customer”, who singlehandedly ordered and carried out a covert operation that Bush/Cheney could not.
(This writer had expected the “I Killed Osama” prize to be granted to Bush/Cheney. Apparently, their handling of Iraq/Afghanistan did not earn them the permission.)
What real objectives will be met with this new propaganda? As noted by Paul Craig Roberts:
“My initial interpretation of the faked bin Laden death was that Obama needed closure of the Afghan war and occupation in order to deal with the US budget deficit. Subsequent statements from Obama regime officials suggest that the agenda might be to give Americans a piece of war victory in order to boost their lagging enthusiasm. The military/security complex will become richer and more powerful, and Americans will be rewarded with vicarious pleasure in victory over enemies.”
Just as the Nixon administration declared a false “victory” in aborting the disastrous war in Vietnam, Obama can declare a similar “mission accomplished” with his “Osama Kill”. This will allow the administration to redeploying forces from Afghanistan to elsewhere in the region. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and other critical oil-related geography remain in US cross-hairs. The new image of Obama the “heroic anti-terrorist” will convince at least some international leaders to cooperate with the administration. The mass resistance to the US-backed regimes in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia will be at least partially neutered.
The CIA, soon to be under the command of Iraq/Afghanistan war criminal David Petraeus, is also given a new green light to continue their “war on terrorism” atrocities. This massive criminal mafia is viewed as a heroic protector of America.
A redeployment of forces back to the US is long overdue, for the continued buildup of "Obama's Animal Farm" within US borders. The militarization of the US homeland will be ratcheted up, in order to stop domestic unrest, union protests, and popular responses to the continuing collapse of the US economy.
“Al-Qaeda”, under new leadership, will be continue to be unleashed. The next phase of the CIA deception is likely to involve the legend of jihadists avenging Osama bin Laden, including, if necessary, “new 9/11s”.The so-called Al-Qaeda number two man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who himself has “died” multiple times, will be the new boogeyman, along with other recently named "operational chiefs" such as Adnan Shukrijumah.
The final atrocity
To add a grotesque and sickening final insult, the swaggering Barack Obama will grandstand at New York’s Ground Zero, in a staged celebration of a fictional murder, on the hallowed ground where thousands of people actually died at the hands of the US government and its covert operatives.
Obama even invited George W. Bush to share his “victory lap”.
This act of exploitation will dispel all illusions about the criminal nature of this liar who has done Bush/Cheney one better by stooping even lower into the depths of depravity.
The original Big Lie gets its bookend Big Lie.
Dancing on the Grave of 9/11. Osama and "The Big Lie"
The Obama administration and the corporate media are concocting an ever-more elaborate and spectacular theater around the “heroic” murder of the CIA intelligence myth/CIA asset Osama bin Laden. Not content to simply to exploit the 9/11 atrocity for political gain, the administration is heaping new layers of lie and cover-up to the original crime.
The growing cover-up
The desperation is palpable. Just days since the “big announcement”, Obama administration officials have already been forced to backpedal, issuing multiple corrections, adding to the confusion over the location of the killing, whether bin Laden was armed or unarmed, whether there was a “fire fight”, if an alleged wife was involved, the burial at sea, whether to release “graphic photos”, etc. The mainstream corporate media---following approved CIA/White House narratives---is spewing and regurgitating a tidal wave of red herrings that add to the inconsistencies.
Seasoned observers will not be fooled, no matter how many Obama lies, doctored photos, fake footage, lurid new testimonials and CIA pronouncements are pushed forth. As put simply by Paul Craig Roberts:
“As the alleged body has been dumped into the ocean, nothing remains but the word of the US government, which lied about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and al Qaeda connections, about yellowcake, about Iranian nukes, and, according to thousands of experts, about 9/11. Suddenly the government is telling us the truth about bin Laden’s death? If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I’ll let you have for a good price.”
The “war on terrorism” is a fabrication, war propaganda that continues to serve as the eternal pretext for global resource war. That 9/11 was a false flag operation---that the official story is a lie and cover-up---has been definitively proven in numerous investigations, such as Mike Ruppert’s Crossing the Rubicon, Michel Chossudovsky’s America’s “War on Terrorism”, the work of Paul Thompson, and others.
Osama bin Laden is a product and asset of the CIA. "Al-Qaeda" is a covert operation, a "database" of intelligence legends, exhaustively detailed in the work of Chaim Kupferberg (Part 1 and Part Two). Pakistan’s ISI, a virtual branch of the CIA, was central to 9/11 and a player in subsequent “terror” operations. It is not surprising that Pakistan and the ISI is at the heart of the “death of bin Laden” as well.
The “death of bin Laden” changes nothing about the factual record that indicts (among others) Bush/Cheney, Anglo-American military-intelligence, and elite war/oil interests.
Tragically, none of this matters. The minority of individuals with unscrambled brains is not the target of this imperial charade.
Euphoria, brainwashing, and “imperial mobilization”
To borrow from the lexicon of world planner Zbigniew Brzezinski, 9/11 was a successful attack “on the order of Pearl Harbor” that “united” the American people behind an “imperial mobilization”---the “war on terrorism” for oil. With 9/11, the masses fully supported nearly a decade of war, atrocities, subversion, and unprecedented government criminality.
The militant and unquestioning public embrace of “war on terrorism” lies underscores how that the 9/11 has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of the Anglo-American war criminals who orchestrated it.
Now Barack Obama, who has spoken incessantly over the years about wanting to “unite” America again “just as it was after 9/11”, has been granted his moment to “unite” the masses again, but do an even better job of population control than Bush/Cheney (who, in their clumsiness and hubris, partially “squandered” their “political capital”). The swaggering Obama will “get it right”. He is a better actor, the more devious and mendacious corporatist who was selected for this specific purpose.
Obama has been itching to be the "Osama killer" since before he was elected.
The 9/11 “shock effect” remains fully potent, as evidenced by the frenzy, euphoria, and stomach-turning jubilation of crowds of Americans joining in celebration orgies over a fictional murder of the fictional Osama bin Laden, a fictional revenge. Even the “intellectuals” and “experts” are treating this charade as if it is real. Corporate media headlines have declared that “the world has changed”, and the masses love it.
The post-9/11 era has spawned an entire generation of vicious and ignorant drones, whose moral compass has been shaped by war, lies, violent entertainment, and brainwashing. The future American police state will be built upon this new culture of thuggery. This is "Obama's Animal Farm".
To Obama, this is “what makes America great”.
Rescripting reality
In Orwellian fashion, the legend of the death of Bin Laden changes nothing in reality, but turns the mass perception of this reality upside down.
Suddenly, an unpopular Obama and his failing presidency are recast, in true Bush/Cheney fashion, as a heroic---and now successful--- “war president”. He is now Obama the 9/11 avenger, protector of the American people, and the great military master.
This burnished new image, which is preposterous as the one given to George W. Bush during his reign of terror, grants Obama his own new “political capital”. Two years of flummoxing and failure, wiped out. Attacks from all sides, stopped. Obama has a political weapon to fend off attacks from the right-wing. They can no longer attack Obama for being weak on foreign policy. At the same time, Obama’s corporate liberals (who care only about gaining political points on the Republicans) can return to deluding themselves about Obama’s populism, appeal and effectiveness, despite two years of absolute failure and purposely broken campaign promises. With one stroke, Obama is being handed the 2012 election.
Suddenly, Obama is not only just as “great” as Bush, but an even “cooler customer”, who singlehandedly ordered and carried out a covert operation that Bush/Cheney could not.
(This writer had expected the “I Killed Osama” prize to be granted to Bush/Cheney. Apparently, their handling of Iraq/Afghanistan did not earn them the permission.)
What real objectives will be met with this new propaganda? As noted by Paul Craig Roberts:
“My initial interpretation of the faked bin Laden death was that Obama needed closure of the Afghan war and occupation in order to deal with the US budget deficit. Subsequent statements from Obama regime officials suggest that the agenda might be to give Americans a piece of war victory in order to boost their lagging enthusiasm. The military/security complex will become richer and more powerful, and Americans will be rewarded with vicarious pleasure in victory over enemies.”
Just as the Nixon administration declared a false “victory” in aborting the disastrous war in Vietnam, Obama can declare a similar “mission accomplished” with his “Osama Kill”. This will allow the administration to redeploying forces from Afghanistan to elsewhere in the region. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and other critical oil-related geography remain in US cross-hairs. The new image of Obama the “heroic anti-terrorist” will convince at least some international leaders to cooperate with the administration. The mass resistance to the US-backed regimes in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia will be at least partially neutered.
The CIA, soon to be under the command of Iraq/Afghanistan war criminal David Petraeus, is also given a new green light to continue their “war on terrorism” atrocities. This massive criminal mafia is viewed as a heroic protector of America.
A redeployment of forces back to the US is long overdue, for the continued buildup of "Obama's Animal Farm" within US borders. The militarization of the US homeland will be ratcheted up, in order to stop domestic unrest, union protests, and popular responses to the continuing collapse of the US economy.
“Al-Qaeda”, under new leadership, will be continue to be unleashed. The next phase of the CIA deception is likely to involve the legend of jihadists avenging Osama bin Laden, including, if necessary, “new 9/11s”.The so-called Al-Qaeda number two man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who himself has “died” multiple times, will be the new boogeyman, along with other recently named "operational chiefs" such as Adnan Shukrijumah.
The final atrocity
To add a grotesque and sickening final insult, the swaggering Barack Obama will grandstand at New York’s Ground Zero, in a staged celebration of a fictional murder, on the hallowed ground where thousands of people actually died at the hands of the US government and its covert operatives.
Obama even invited George W. Bush to share his “victory lap”.
This act of exploitation will dispel all illusions about the criminal nature of this liar who has done Bush/Cheney one better by stooping even lower into the depths of depravity.
The original Big Lie gets its bookend Big Lie.
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
SC106-4
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/
The Downside of Dependence
I’m not sure if last week’s Archdruid Report post hit a nerve, or if thoughts similar to the ones I discussed there have been busy all by themselves stirring up nightmares in the deep places of our collective imagination, but it’s been fascinating to note how many blog posts over the past few days have taken issue with the core point my post raised. That point, for those who readers who are just joining us, is that using less – less energy, less resources, less stuff of every kind – is the hallmark of any serious response to the predicament facing industrial civilization
Typical of the responses, if that’s what they were, was a blog post by Forbes blogger Roger Kay. It’s a clever post, to be sure, and Kay’s an engaging writer. He imagines beer yeast in a vat of wort – for those of you who aren’t yet initiated into the mysteries of brewing, that’s what you call the stuff that turns into beer before it turns into beer – faced with the inevitable problem that beer yeast face in a vat of wort: once the alcohol produced by their own life processes reaches a certain level, it poisons the yeast and they die.
Kay goes on to imagine a yeast cell with a conscience, who decides not to consume the sugars in the wort, and points out that the only thing that results from the moral yeast’s decision is that the other, less scrupulous yeast cells eat all the sugar, and all the yeasts die anyway. His conclusion is that we might as well wallow in our fossil-fueled lifestyles while we can, since everyone else is going to do that anyway, and the only hope he offers is that technology might save us before the consequences hit.
George Monbiot, who’s carved out a niche for himself as the staff pseudoenvironmentalist of The Guardian, had a blog post of his own on much the same theme. His argument is simply that most people in today’s industrial societies are not going to accept anything short of continued economic growth, and so a strategy based on using less is simply a waste of time.
Like many people these days who worry about global warming, he dismisses the issues surrounding peak oil out of hand – the problem we face, he insists, is not that we have too little fossil fuel, but too much – and as evidence for this, he points to the recent announcement from the IEA that world production of petroleum peaked in 2006. Since industrial civilization hasn’t collapsed yet, he tells us, peak oil clearly isn’t a problem. I suppose if you ignore drastic and worsening economic troubles in the world’s industrial nations, food riots and power shortages spreading across the Third World, and all the other symptoms of the rising spiral of peak-driven crisis now under way, you might be able to make that claim. Still, there’s a deeper illogic here.
It’s an illogic that seems highly plausible to many people. That’s because the fallacy that forms the core of the argument made by Kay, Monbiot, and so many others is a common feature of today’s conventional wisdom. An alternative metaphor – one at least as familiar to the peak oil blogosphere as Roger Kay’s yeas – might help to clarify the nature of the failed logic they’re retailing.
Imagine, then, that you’re on the proverbial ocean liner at sea, and it’s just hit the proverbial iceberg. Water is rising belowdecks and the deck is beginning to tilt, but nobody has drowned yet. Aware of the danger, you strap on a life preserver and head for the lifeboats. As you leave your stateroom, though, the guy in the stateroom next to yours gives you an incredulous look. "Are you nuts?" he says. "If you leave the ship now, somebody else will just take your cabin, and get all the meals and drinks you’ve paid for!"
Your fellow passenger in the metaphor, like Kay and Monbiot in the real world, has failed to notice a crucial fact about what’s happening: when a situation is unsustainable in the near term, the benefits that might be gained by clinging to it very often come with a prodigious cost, and the costs that have to be paid to abandon it very often come with considerable benefits. It’s far more pleasant to walk down to the cruise ship’s bar, order a couple of dry martinis, and sit there listening to the Muzak, to be sure, than it is to scramble into a lifeboat and huddle there on one of the thwarts as the waves toss you around, the spray soaks you, and the wind chills you to the bone. Two hours later, however, the passenger who went to the bar is a pallid corpse being gently nibbled by fishes, and the passenger who climbed into the lifeboat and put up with the seasickness and the spray is being hauled safely aboard the first freighter that happened to be close enough to answer the distress call.
The metaphor can usefully be taken a little further, because it points up a useful way of looking at the equivalent situation in the real world. As a passenger on board the ship, your relation to the ship is a relation of dependence. You depend on the integrity of the hull to keep you from drowning, on the fuel and engines to get you to your destination, on the food supply and the galley to keep you fed, and so on. That dependence has very real advantages, but it has a potentially drastic downside: if the systems you rely on should fail, and you don’t have an alternative, your dependence on them can kill you.
It’s this downside of dependence that Kay and Monbiot miss completely. Imagine, to approach the same argument from a different angle, that Kay’s yeast metaphor left out two crucial points. The first is that the yeast cells have choices other than either eating the sugar or not eating the sugar. They can, let’s say, evolve the capacity to live on starch rather than sugar. Starch isn’t as rich an energy source as sugar, and it’s harder and costlier in energy terms to digest, but (let’s say, for the sake of the metaphor) yeast who eat starch don’t produce alcohol and so don’t poison themselves. A yeast that evolves the ability to digest starch thus has to accept a far less lavish lifestyle involving a lot more work, but it’s an option that doesn’t result in guaranteed death.
The second point Kay’s metaphor left out is that the wort in the beer vat doesn’t actually contain that much sugar. The brewer, let’s say, didn’t do an adequate job of malting the barley, and so most of what’s in the wort is starch rather than sugar. As a result, the thing the yeast need to worry about isn’t poisoning themselves by the products of their own digestion; it’s starving to death when the sugar runs out. Given these two conditions, a yeast cell that shrugs and goes back to eating sugar, trusting that the Great Brewer in the Sky will dump more sugar into the wort before it starves, isn’t making a rational choice; it’s allowing the immediate benefits of a temporary abundance to blind it to the fact that the downside of depending on that abundance includes an early and miserable death.
That, pace George Monbiot, is more or less the situation we’re in right now. We have a small and very rapidly depleting supply of highly concentrated, easy-to use "sugar" – that is, petroleum, natural gas, and the better grades of coal – and a much larger supply of diffuse, difficult-to-use "starch" – that is, renewable energy sources such as sunlight and wind, along with diffuse nonrenewable sources such as low-grade coal, uranium ore, and the like. Industrial society has evolved to use sugar, and even its forays into the starch supply are dependent on using up a great deal of sugar to make starch into a sugar substitute – consider the vast amount of natural gas that’s burnt to process tar sands into ersatz petroleum, or the natural gas (used to produce electricity) and diesel fuel that goes into manufacturing, installing, and maintaining today’s gargantuan wind turbines.
The coming of "peak sugar" has two implications for our modern industrial yeast. First, it means that the increasing comsumption of sugar has reached the limits of supply; there’s still sugar left, but as we near the end of the bumpy plateau that ordinary stochastic noise imposes on the smooth theoretical arc of the Hubbert curve, we’re getting closer and closer to the point at which yeast start to die of hunger because there’s not enough sugar to go around. Second, it means that trying to deal with that predicament by pursuing existing strategies – that is, by burning sugar to convert various kinds of starch into an edible form – is going to make the situation worse rather than better, because it’s going to decrease the supply of available sugar just as yeast cells begin to die for lack of it.
All this imposes a hard choice on the yeast cells that make up modern industrial civilization, collectively and as individuals. We know already what the collective decision has been – keep gobbling sugar and hope for the best – and though it might be possible to make a different choice collectively even this late in the game, the costs would be appalling and the political will to make such a decision clearly isn’t there. What remains are decisions on the part of individual yeast cells to go along with the collective choice or not. Those who reject the collective choice face the hard work of evolving to feed on starch that hasn’t been converted into a sugar substitute, knowing that in doing so, they’re exchanging a lavish but temporary lifestyle for a more difficult but more enduring one.
That latter choice is the one this blog has been advocating for most of a year now: using the proven appropriate-tech toolkit of the Seventies era to dramatically reduce individual, family, and community dependence on concentrated energy supplies, and make use of diffuse energy sources – primarily sunlight – that can be collected and used right where you are. Most people in today’s industrial societies have shown no interest in considering that option; they’ve made the other choice, and seem to be sticking to it even as the downside of their dependence on a collapsing human ecology is beginning to become visible. Some may change their minds, but there’s another factor that has to be taken into account, the factor of time.
One of the many comments I fielded on last week’s post pointed straight to that factor, though I don’t think the person who wrote the comment realized that. According to his comment, he’s an unemployed union carpenter with thirty years of now-useless experience, who’s about to reach the end of his 99 weeks of unemployment benefits and become one of the growing mass of America’s economic nonpersons. His children are struggling with the same scenario. Wrapping insulation around his pipes, he pointed out, won’t fix the predicament he’s in.
He’s quite right, if "fixing the predicament" means enabling him to return to what has been, until now, a normal American middle class existence. Millions of Americans right now are finding themselves shut out of that existence, and few if any of them will ever find a way back into it. Over the years to come, more and more Americans will undergo the same profoundly unwelcome shift, until what used to be the normal middle class existence becomes a thing of the past for everybody. That’s the inevitable shape of our future, because of the awkward fact I mentioned last week – there is no way to make a middle class American lifestyle sustainable – and its corollary, which is that if something can’t be made sustainable, it won’t be sustained.
That doesn’t mean that we’re all going to move into cozy lifeboat ecovillages, or any of the other green-painted Levittowns that fill so much space in so many middle class fantasies today. It means, rather, that in the decades ahead of us, something like half the American population will most likely end up in shantytowns on the model of Latin America’s favelas, without electricity, running water or sewers, caught up in a scramble for survival that many of them will inevitably lose. It means that most of the others will likely face a reduction in their standards of living to levels not too different from the one that the poorest Americans experience today, while the rich of that time, if they’re smart, ruthless, and lucky, may be able to scrape together some of the luxuries a middle class American family can count on today, and may even be able to hold onto them for a while.
Does the picture I’ve just painted seem unbelievable? It’s simply the equivalent of saying that the United States will become a Third World nation in the not too distant future. It’s also the equivalent of saying that the United States will undergo the usual pattern of severe economic contraction that’s a normal part of the decline and fall of an empire, or of a civilization. Neither of those are improbable statements just now; it’s simply that most people shy away from thinking about the implications.
What all this implies, in turn, is that those people who make the shift to a low-energy lifestyle in advance, before the sheer pressure of circumstances forces them to do so, will have options closed to those who cling to the unsustainable until it’s dragged out of their grip. Those who downshift hard, fast, and soon, cutting their dependence on fossil fuels and the goods and services that fossil fuels make available, will have a much less difficult time paying off debts, finding the money to learn new skills, and navigating the challenging economic conditions of life in a near-bankrupt society. Had the unemployed carpenter whose comment I mentioned above wrapped insulation around his pipes ten years ago, he’d have spent less money on energy for the last decade, and could have used that extra money to get ready for the hard times to come; had he wrapped his pipes, insulated his walls, slashed his energy bills, recognized the dependence of his income on a totally unsustainable housing bubble and gotten into a different if less lucrative line of work – and there were people who did these things at the time, and are doing them now – he’d likely be fine today.
These are the kinds of steps that leave people in possession of a home, a garden, a career doing something people need or want badly enough to pay for even in a depression, and other desiderata of hard economic times. These are also the kinds of steps that make it easier for people to offer help to their families, friends, and neighbors, to teach vital skills to those who are willing to learn them, and preserve precious cultural legacies through the crises of the present to they can be handed on to the future. That’s the payoff for living with less; it’s a lot easier to avoid getting trapped by the downside of dependence on a society moving steadily deeper into systems failure.
These considerations aren’t the sort of thing you can expect to read in the pages of Forbes and The Guardian, to be sure. You’ll have a hard time, for that matter, finding them anywhere in our collective conversation about the future of industrial society. Even among those who haven’t tried to squirm away from the unwelcome realities of our present predicament, there seems to be a tendency to avoid talking about exactly what the landscape of the American future looks like. It’s understandable; science fiction scenarios and apocalyptic fireworks are so much more exciting than the future of mass impoverishment, infrastructure breakdown, sociopolitical disintegration, and ragged population decline that the misguided choices of the last few decades have handed us.
It’s true, in other words, that huddling in a lifeboat, tossed by waves and soaked by spray, is no fun. It’s a lot less fun than sitting in a cruise ship bar chugging martinis, even if the reason why you’re chugging the martinis is that you’re trying to pretend not to notice that the deck is slowly tilting under your feet and the waves are a lot closer to the porthole than they used to be. There’s every reason to think that a great many people will choose this latter option or, more precisely, that they have chosen it, and are continuing to reaffirm that choice – sometimes, like Kay and Monbiot, at the top of their lungs. Still, those aren’t the people for whom these posts are written, and I’m encouraged by the number of people who are making a different choice.
The Downside of Dependence
I’m not sure if last week’s Archdruid Report post hit a nerve, or if thoughts similar to the ones I discussed there have been busy all by themselves stirring up nightmares in the deep places of our collective imagination, but it’s been fascinating to note how many blog posts over the past few days have taken issue with the core point my post raised. That point, for those who readers who are just joining us, is that using less – less energy, less resources, less stuff of every kind – is the hallmark of any serious response to the predicament facing industrial civilization
Typical of the responses, if that’s what they were, was a blog post by Forbes blogger Roger Kay. It’s a clever post, to be sure, and Kay’s an engaging writer. He imagines beer yeast in a vat of wort – for those of you who aren’t yet initiated into the mysteries of brewing, that’s what you call the stuff that turns into beer before it turns into beer – faced with the inevitable problem that beer yeast face in a vat of wort: once the alcohol produced by their own life processes reaches a certain level, it poisons the yeast and they die.
Kay goes on to imagine a yeast cell with a conscience, who decides not to consume the sugars in the wort, and points out that the only thing that results from the moral yeast’s decision is that the other, less scrupulous yeast cells eat all the sugar, and all the yeasts die anyway. His conclusion is that we might as well wallow in our fossil-fueled lifestyles while we can, since everyone else is going to do that anyway, and the only hope he offers is that technology might save us before the consequences hit.
George Monbiot, who’s carved out a niche for himself as the staff pseudoenvironmentalist of The Guardian, had a blog post of his own on much the same theme. His argument is simply that most people in today’s industrial societies are not going to accept anything short of continued economic growth, and so a strategy based on using less is simply a waste of time.
Like many people these days who worry about global warming, he dismisses the issues surrounding peak oil out of hand – the problem we face, he insists, is not that we have too little fossil fuel, but too much – and as evidence for this, he points to the recent announcement from the IEA that world production of petroleum peaked in 2006. Since industrial civilization hasn’t collapsed yet, he tells us, peak oil clearly isn’t a problem. I suppose if you ignore drastic and worsening economic troubles in the world’s industrial nations, food riots and power shortages spreading across the Third World, and all the other symptoms of the rising spiral of peak-driven crisis now under way, you might be able to make that claim. Still, there’s a deeper illogic here.
It’s an illogic that seems highly plausible to many people. That’s because the fallacy that forms the core of the argument made by Kay, Monbiot, and so many others is a common feature of today’s conventional wisdom. An alternative metaphor – one at least as familiar to the peak oil blogosphere as Roger Kay’s yeas – might help to clarify the nature of the failed logic they’re retailing.
Imagine, then, that you’re on the proverbial ocean liner at sea, and it’s just hit the proverbial iceberg. Water is rising belowdecks and the deck is beginning to tilt, but nobody has drowned yet. Aware of the danger, you strap on a life preserver and head for the lifeboats. As you leave your stateroom, though, the guy in the stateroom next to yours gives you an incredulous look. "Are you nuts?" he says. "If you leave the ship now, somebody else will just take your cabin, and get all the meals and drinks you’ve paid for!"
Your fellow passenger in the metaphor, like Kay and Monbiot in the real world, has failed to notice a crucial fact about what’s happening: when a situation is unsustainable in the near term, the benefits that might be gained by clinging to it very often come with a prodigious cost, and the costs that have to be paid to abandon it very often come with considerable benefits. It’s far more pleasant to walk down to the cruise ship’s bar, order a couple of dry martinis, and sit there listening to the Muzak, to be sure, than it is to scramble into a lifeboat and huddle there on one of the thwarts as the waves toss you around, the spray soaks you, and the wind chills you to the bone. Two hours later, however, the passenger who went to the bar is a pallid corpse being gently nibbled by fishes, and the passenger who climbed into the lifeboat and put up with the seasickness and the spray is being hauled safely aboard the first freighter that happened to be close enough to answer the distress call.
The metaphor can usefully be taken a little further, because it points up a useful way of looking at the equivalent situation in the real world. As a passenger on board the ship, your relation to the ship is a relation of dependence. You depend on the integrity of the hull to keep you from drowning, on the fuel and engines to get you to your destination, on the food supply and the galley to keep you fed, and so on. That dependence has very real advantages, but it has a potentially drastic downside: if the systems you rely on should fail, and you don’t have an alternative, your dependence on them can kill you.
It’s this downside of dependence that Kay and Monbiot miss completely. Imagine, to approach the same argument from a different angle, that Kay’s yeast metaphor left out two crucial points. The first is that the yeast cells have choices other than either eating the sugar or not eating the sugar. They can, let’s say, evolve the capacity to live on starch rather than sugar. Starch isn’t as rich an energy source as sugar, and it’s harder and costlier in energy terms to digest, but (let’s say, for the sake of the metaphor) yeast who eat starch don’t produce alcohol and so don’t poison themselves. A yeast that evolves the ability to digest starch thus has to accept a far less lavish lifestyle involving a lot more work, but it’s an option that doesn’t result in guaranteed death.
The second point Kay’s metaphor left out is that the wort in the beer vat doesn’t actually contain that much sugar. The brewer, let’s say, didn’t do an adequate job of malting the barley, and so most of what’s in the wort is starch rather than sugar. As a result, the thing the yeast need to worry about isn’t poisoning themselves by the products of their own digestion; it’s starving to death when the sugar runs out. Given these two conditions, a yeast cell that shrugs and goes back to eating sugar, trusting that the Great Brewer in the Sky will dump more sugar into the wort before it starves, isn’t making a rational choice; it’s allowing the immediate benefits of a temporary abundance to blind it to the fact that the downside of depending on that abundance includes an early and miserable death.
That, pace George Monbiot, is more or less the situation we’re in right now. We have a small and very rapidly depleting supply of highly concentrated, easy-to use "sugar" – that is, petroleum, natural gas, and the better grades of coal – and a much larger supply of diffuse, difficult-to-use "starch" – that is, renewable energy sources such as sunlight and wind, along with diffuse nonrenewable sources such as low-grade coal, uranium ore, and the like. Industrial society has evolved to use sugar, and even its forays into the starch supply are dependent on using up a great deal of sugar to make starch into a sugar substitute – consider the vast amount of natural gas that’s burnt to process tar sands into ersatz petroleum, or the natural gas (used to produce electricity) and diesel fuel that goes into manufacturing, installing, and maintaining today’s gargantuan wind turbines.
The coming of "peak sugar" has two implications for our modern industrial yeast. First, it means that the increasing comsumption of sugar has reached the limits of supply; there’s still sugar left, but as we near the end of the bumpy plateau that ordinary stochastic noise imposes on the smooth theoretical arc of the Hubbert curve, we’re getting closer and closer to the point at which yeast start to die of hunger because there’s not enough sugar to go around. Second, it means that trying to deal with that predicament by pursuing existing strategies – that is, by burning sugar to convert various kinds of starch into an edible form – is going to make the situation worse rather than better, because it’s going to decrease the supply of available sugar just as yeast cells begin to die for lack of it.
All this imposes a hard choice on the yeast cells that make up modern industrial civilization, collectively and as individuals. We know already what the collective decision has been – keep gobbling sugar and hope for the best – and though it might be possible to make a different choice collectively even this late in the game, the costs would be appalling and the political will to make such a decision clearly isn’t there. What remains are decisions on the part of individual yeast cells to go along with the collective choice or not. Those who reject the collective choice face the hard work of evolving to feed on starch that hasn’t been converted into a sugar substitute, knowing that in doing so, they’re exchanging a lavish but temporary lifestyle for a more difficult but more enduring one.
That latter choice is the one this blog has been advocating for most of a year now: using the proven appropriate-tech toolkit of the Seventies era to dramatically reduce individual, family, and community dependence on concentrated energy supplies, and make use of diffuse energy sources – primarily sunlight – that can be collected and used right where you are. Most people in today’s industrial societies have shown no interest in considering that option; they’ve made the other choice, and seem to be sticking to it even as the downside of their dependence on a collapsing human ecology is beginning to become visible. Some may change their minds, but there’s another factor that has to be taken into account, the factor of time.
One of the many comments I fielded on last week’s post pointed straight to that factor, though I don’t think the person who wrote the comment realized that. According to his comment, he’s an unemployed union carpenter with thirty years of now-useless experience, who’s about to reach the end of his 99 weeks of unemployment benefits and become one of the growing mass of America’s economic nonpersons. His children are struggling with the same scenario. Wrapping insulation around his pipes, he pointed out, won’t fix the predicament he’s in.
He’s quite right, if "fixing the predicament" means enabling him to return to what has been, until now, a normal American middle class existence. Millions of Americans right now are finding themselves shut out of that existence, and few if any of them will ever find a way back into it. Over the years to come, more and more Americans will undergo the same profoundly unwelcome shift, until what used to be the normal middle class existence becomes a thing of the past for everybody. That’s the inevitable shape of our future, because of the awkward fact I mentioned last week – there is no way to make a middle class American lifestyle sustainable – and its corollary, which is that if something can’t be made sustainable, it won’t be sustained.
That doesn’t mean that we’re all going to move into cozy lifeboat ecovillages, or any of the other green-painted Levittowns that fill so much space in so many middle class fantasies today. It means, rather, that in the decades ahead of us, something like half the American population will most likely end up in shantytowns on the model of Latin America’s favelas, without electricity, running water or sewers, caught up in a scramble for survival that many of them will inevitably lose. It means that most of the others will likely face a reduction in their standards of living to levels not too different from the one that the poorest Americans experience today, while the rich of that time, if they’re smart, ruthless, and lucky, may be able to scrape together some of the luxuries a middle class American family can count on today, and may even be able to hold onto them for a while.
Does the picture I’ve just painted seem unbelievable? It’s simply the equivalent of saying that the United States will become a Third World nation in the not too distant future. It’s also the equivalent of saying that the United States will undergo the usual pattern of severe economic contraction that’s a normal part of the decline and fall of an empire, or of a civilization. Neither of those are improbable statements just now; it’s simply that most people shy away from thinking about the implications.
What all this implies, in turn, is that those people who make the shift to a low-energy lifestyle in advance, before the sheer pressure of circumstances forces them to do so, will have options closed to those who cling to the unsustainable until it’s dragged out of their grip. Those who downshift hard, fast, and soon, cutting their dependence on fossil fuels and the goods and services that fossil fuels make available, will have a much less difficult time paying off debts, finding the money to learn new skills, and navigating the challenging economic conditions of life in a near-bankrupt society. Had the unemployed carpenter whose comment I mentioned above wrapped insulation around his pipes ten years ago, he’d have spent less money on energy for the last decade, and could have used that extra money to get ready for the hard times to come; had he wrapped his pipes, insulated his walls, slashed his energy bills, recognized the dependence of his income on a totally unsustainable housing bubble and gotten into a different if less lucrative line of work – and there were people who did these things at the time, and are doing them now – he’d likely be fine today.
These are the kinds of steps that leave people in possession of a home, a garden, a career doing something people need or want badly enough to pay for even in a depression, and other desiderata of hard economic times. These are also the kinds of steps that make it easier for people to offer help to their families, friends, and neighbors, to teach vital skills to those who are willing to learn them, and preserve precious cultural legacies through the crises of the present to they can be handed on to the future. That’s the payoff for living with less; it’s a lot easier to avoid getting trapped by the downside of dependence on a society moving steadily deeper into systems failure.
These considerations aren’t the sort of thing you can expect to read in the pages of Forbes and The Guardian, to be sure. You’ll have a hard time, for that matter, finding them anywhere in our collective conversation about the future of industrial society. Even among those who haven’t tried to squirm away from the unwelcome realities of our present predicament, there seems to be a tendency to avoid talking about exactly what the landscape of the American future looks like. It’s understandable; science fiction scenarios and apocalyptic fireworks are so much more exciting than the future of mass impoverishment, infrastructure breakdown, sociopolitical disintegration, and ragged population decline that the misguided choices of the last few decades have handed us.
It’s true, in other words, that huddling in a lifeboat, tossed by waves and soaked by spray, is no fun. It’s a lot less fun than sitting in a cruise ship bar chugging martinis, even if the reason why you’re chugging the martinis is that you’re trying to pretend not to notice that the deck is slowly tilting under your feet and the waves are a lot closer to the porthole than they used to be. There’s every reason to think that a great many people will choose this latter option or, more precisely, that they have chosen it, and are continuing to reaffirm that choice – sometimes, like Kay and Monbiot, at the top of their lungs. Still, those aren’t the people for whom these posts are written, and I’m encouraged by the number of people who are making a different choice.
SC106-3
http://kulturcritic.wordpress.com/posts/a-stricken-empire-%e2%80%93-the-shadow-of-our-hegemony/
A Stricken Empire – The Shadow of Our Hegemony
Like a ghostly soldier of fortune, the shadow of our hegemony has been casting its pall over the earth for more than two centuries now; but it is growing thin, its pulse weakening, its days numbered. The American empire – this great experiment in freedom and prosperity – is apparently approaching its end; but the would-be corpse is still breathing, battling like a mythic hero desperate to stay alive.
Early indications of this eventuality were foreshadowed in global projections of peak oil along with the empire’s continued environmental abuse and degradation. More recently, the hard-fall of its financial markets and idling of its economic engines betrayed undeniable signs that collapse was on course: the road of infinite progress and universal affluence picking up speed in a stunning reversal, now the road to perdition.
Barack Obama’s selection signaled the rising of the curtain on possibly the final act, as another charismatic emperor struts onstage promising a new dawn with more growth, orchestrated around an ever-expanding imperial vision, with America again “ready to lead the world.” (I’m sure I was not the only one who choked when those words left his lips). Even the least perceptive among the rag-tag proletariat out in the hinterlands could read the tea-leaves; America’s weariness exposed, a looming archetypal battle brewing among forces of hegemonic expansion, contraction, and those instigating for something whispered only softly in kitchens and back alleys, its disintegration. Many began already back then to look for a safe exit.
Additional signs of collapse were the palpable, almost visceral reaction of individual States, recoiling from the growing burden of a constantly expanding Federal mandate. Perhaps the governors finally had enough, recognizing the insidiousness of this creeping imperial disease – relentlessly clawing its way forward – as clearly as others around the globe have seen our national character for more than a century. No less than two dozen States have challenged health care overhaul and just this week urged a U.S. Appeals Court to strike down the legislation, arguing that it far exceeds the federal government’s constitutional powers.
Additional evidence of national disintegration has been unmistakable over the past two years: a renewed defense of the 10th amendment – States seeking to safeguard their rights, vociferously refusing federal stimulus funds, with some backdoor chatter of secession in various quarters. And all this was coupled with an almost magically self-induced splintering strife haunting both factions (Democrat and Republican) of the controlling political hegemony.
It appears that much of this early maneuvering by the States arose in direct response to the Obama administration’s move to curtail the second amendment’s right to bear arms, nationalize certain commercial enterprises, make ‘hand-cuff’ loans to the States, and continue to support its multinational corporate sponsors’ investments through expanded military campaigns globally. Well, you get the picture! More big government! More imperial control! More power!
President Obama tipped his hand early in his tenure during a visit to the Kremlin (of all places) not long after ascending to the high seat. Speaking to graduates of the New Economic School in Moscow in 2009, he stated, “The pursuit of power is no longer a zero-sum game… Progress must be shared.” To clarify, the issue raised by such a bold admission is not whether this “pursuit” is a zero or positive sum game; but simply, that power is the name of the game plain and simple – a game played by hegemons for ensuring their global influence and driving their imperialist designs. The real import of his remark was not merely acknowledging that continual expansion is a cornerstone of nation building, but that the real game is the pursuit of power globally (we can worry later about win, lose or draw).
And, as we have seen, our imperialist elites will stop at nothing to gain the upper hand. They will sleep with, take orders from, or eliminate anybody in order to expand their reach and enrich themselves, no matter what the cost to the earth, our citizenry, or other cultures: conspiring with the likes of BP, Goldman Sachs, Gaddafi, Mubarak, Saddam Hussein, and bin Laden, to name just a few. Anyone can become a pawn to be used, supported, and then despised or eliminated, depending upon the needs of imperial expansion and global hegemony.
The latest instantiation of trouble in our increasingly troubling imperialistic drive was betrayed by recent events and commentary surrounding the apparent assassination of Osama bin Laden, America’s latest version of the incarnate face of Evil! And the talking points have been reiterated non-stop by media idiots and other paid counter-conspiracy theory pundits.
The fact is that we were beside-ourselves with joy to support the master terrorist when he was fighting the Evil Empire, as those Soviet Commies were attempting to “liberate” Afghanistan from the unwashed Islamic hordes. With prodding from our CIA, we supplied Osama and his “freedom fighters” with the know-how and weaponry to stave off the unholy aggressors and defend their homeland. We used him as a puppet in our Cold War battle against the great Soviet Bear. He was our fair-haired Muslim boy, our bearded savior from the holy land. But then, when our own creeping assault upon the sacred soil became more clearly manifest, defiling and despoiling the sacred spaces as we moved – from Kuwait and Iraq to Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and now Libya – bin Laden quickly recognized that Uncle Sam and our hegemonic designs were the real threat to his holy land, to their religious and cultural traditions, as we sought to gain control of their liquid gold, the OIL that maintains our unsustainable and deluded, infidel lifestyle.
But the USA also needed a reason to increase its incursions into MENA, so perhaps the CIA was tapped again to call upon its old friend Osama to wreak some havoc on our own soils (9/11), and get the American populace behind a larger war of occupation and control in the Middle East and the Arabian Peninsula. Given the history of our covert operations, deceptions and machinations (as Wikileaks has clearly demonstrated), it is not entirely out of the question. Perhaps this is why conspiracy theories still run rampant; and why this Administration (in the person of Dr. ‘Sunny’ Sunstein) wants to squelch them pronto. And perhaps that is why we finally had to pop Osama - “Geronimo” – quickly and quietly, without trial or public discussion, because the wholly/holy Evil One knew too much.
With our relentless assaults in that region and the rest of the globe, we continue to increase our military budgets exponentially for imperial expansion and the goodies it promises to deliver – oil, markets, and slave-wage labor. All the while taking our own social programs to the killing floor of the abattoir, seeking to disembowel senior citizens and the poor, and perhaps then, the middle class. (Katie, bar the doors!!)
So what is happening here? Well, disenfranchised socialists, libertarians and communists all smell blood in the water. Yet the larger body politic – the proletariat or petite bourgeoisie (depending upon your perspective) – is not so quick to jump on any of these tired bandwagons. In fact, many among the masses are exploring alternative solutions concerning the trajectory and velocity of change necessary to avert the direst of outcomes. And among them are voices loosely crying for a retreat or even the termination of the executioner… death to the State and its alien authority.
These calls come from the would-be anarchists of today… not because they want chaos to reign; rather, because they feel the archaic pull of a more primal autonomy, some feral memory trace that was lost with the establishment of kingdoms, nations, empires, legislators, and other anonymous, impersonal hierarchies.
Yes, a revolution seems imminent. But it does not promise to be soft or unifying; rather, it looks to be one of disintegration. And while the secessionist movements may have gained serious momentum among certain left-leaning elements during the second coming of the Burning Bush era, this revolution may not be led by liberals or progressives, but rather by conservatives and independents, perhaps by the slap-happy-gun-tottin’-Tea-partiers themselves; those who prefer limited federal authority and minimal government in general. And now, the GOP (a.k.a. Sister Sarah) is looking to create further divisions within the USA over the “Osama Kill.”
But when the divisiveness escalates, and fists (err… bullets) start to fly, with a few States perhaps attempting secession from the Union, these new anarchists may begin to make their own moves, taking advantage of the vulnerability of both the Union and the States.
As heir-apparent of Western progress with constantly expanding hierarchies of social, political, and economic complexity, the self-described beacon of hope to the rest of humanity, this American landscape is now a fitting body-politic for a complete reversal of course; the rejection of hierarchy, of legislative control, and the complexity of the civilized state. It appears increasingly to be the unlikely harbinger of the recovery of a more primal, instinctual freedom. (What did Freud call it, “the return of the repressed?”)
America is a land ripe for cultural, economic and political disintegration in the interests of recovering some lost simplicity. All hinges upon the nature, dynamics and momentum of the revolutionary spirit, and to what extent it can overcome the inertia of standing cultural and political hegemonic forces. But the fairytales we tell ourselves, and the myths we have come to believe in, simply to maintain this ignorance and our loyalty to this dream-turned-nightmare, carry too great a price for even people like Sarah-know-nothing or Joe-nobody to put up with and stay their hand much longer.
Will the coming end of the American empire have us running in retreat from a world populated by the likes of Mad Max, a war of all against all? Or will it be the highly anticipated coming of the Kingdom of God on earth? Neither I think! If revolutionary forces succeed in mobilizing this passion for disintegration, and if such passion can fuel the anarchist’s vision for community without authority, without a head of state, then perhaps this hegemony can be dismantled and “we, the people,” can rediscover a renewed form of community — real communities built upon simple respect for the other (including the earth), an appreciation of self-sufficiency born of cooperation, and an expansive sense of kinship – both consanguineal and affine relations. But let’s not hope for it; there’s already been too much of that “hopey” thing lately.
A Stricken Empire – The Shadow of Our Hegemony
Like a ghostly soldier of fortune, the shadow of our hegemony has been casting its pall over the earth for more than two centuries now; but it is growing thin, its pulse weakening, its days numbered. The American empire – this great experiment in freedom and prosperity – is apparently approaching its end; but the would-be corpse is still breathing, battling like a mythic hero desperate to stay alive.
Early indications of this eventuality were foreshadowed in global projections of peak oil along with the empire’s continued environmental abuse and degradation. More recently, the hard-fall of its financial markets and idling of its economic engines betrayed undeniable signs that collapse was on course: the road of infinite progress and universal affluence picking up speed in a stunning reversal, now the road to perdition.
Barack Obama’s selection signaled the rising of the curtain on possibly the final act, as another charismatic emperor struts onstage promising a new dawn with more growth, orchestrated around an ever-expanding imperial vision, with America again “ready to lead the world.” (I’m sure I was not the only one who choked when those words left his lips). Even the least perceptive among the rag-tag proletariat out in the hinterlands could read the tea-leaves; America’s weariness exposed, a looming archetypal battle brewing among forces of hegemonic expansion, contraction, and those instigating for something whispered only softly in kitchens and back alleys, its disintegration. Many began already back then to look for a safe exit.
Additional signs of collapse were the palpable, almost visceral reaction of individual States, recoiling from the growing burden of a constantly expanding Federal mandate. Perhaps the governors finally had enough, recognizing the insidiousness of this creeping imperial disease – relentlessly clawing its way forward – as clearly as others around the globe have seen our national character for more than a century. No less than two dozen States have challenged health care overhaul and just this week urged a U.S. Appeals Court to strike down the legislation, arguing that it far exceeds the federal government’s constitutional powers.
Additional evidence of national disintegration has been unmistakable over the past two years: a renewed defense of the 10th amendment – States seeking to safeguard their rights, vociferously refusing federal stimulus funds, with some backdoor chatter of secession in various quarters. And all this was coupled with an almost magically self-induced splintering strife haunting both factions (Democrat and Republican) of the controlling political hegemony.
It appears that much of this early maneuvering by the States arose in direct response to the Obama administration’s move to curtail the second amendment’s right to bear arms, nationalize certain commercial enterprises, make ‘hand-cuff’ loans to the States, and continue to support its multinational corporate sponsors’ investments through expanded military campaigns globally. Well, you get the picture! More big government! More imperial control! More power!
President Obama tipped his hand early in his tenure during a visit to the Kremlin (of all places) not long after ascending to the high seat. Speaking to graduates of the New Economic School in Moscow in 2009, he stated, “The pursuit of power is no longer a zero-sum game… Progress must be shared.” To clarify, the issue raised by such a bold admission is not whether this “pursuit” is a zero or positive sum game; but simply, that power is the name of the game plain and simple – a game played by hegemons for ensuring their global influence and driving their imperialist designs. The real import of his remark was not merely acknowledging that continual expansion is a cornerstone of nation building, but that the real game is the pursuit of power globally (we can worry later about win, lose or draw).
And, as we have seen, our imperialist elites will stop at nothing to gain the upper hand. They will sleep with, take orders from, or eliminate anybody in order to expand their reach and enrich themselves, no matter what the cost to the earth, our citizenry, or other cultures: conspiring with the likes of BP, Goldman Sachs, Gaddafi, Mubarak, Saddam Hussein, and bin Laden, to name just a few. Anyone can become a pawn to be used, supported, and then despised or eliminated, depending upon the needs of imperial expansion and global hegemony.
The latest instantiation of trouble in our increasingly troubling imperialistic drive was betrayed by recent events and commentary surrounding the apparent assassination of Osama bin Laden, America’s latest version of the incarnate face of Evil! And the talking points have been reiterated non-stop by media idiots and other paid counter-conspiracy theory pundits.
The fact is that we were beside-ourselves with joy to support the master terrorist when he was fighting the Evil Empire, as those Soviet Commies were attempting to “liberate” Afghanistan from the unwashed Islamic hordes. With prodding from our CIA, we supplied Osama and his “freedom fighters” with the know-how and weaponry to stave off the unholy aggressors and defend their homeland. We used him as a puppet in our Cold War battle against the great Soviet Bear. He was our fair-haired Muslim boy, our bearded savior from the holy land. But then, when our own creeping assault upon the sacred soil became more clearly manifest, defiling and despoiling the sacred spaces as we moved – from Kuwait and Iraq to Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and now Libya – bin Laden quickly recognized that Uncle Sam and our hegemonic designs were the real threat to his holy land, to their religious and cultural traditions, as we sought to gain control of their liquid gold, the OIL that maintains our unsustainable and deluded, infidel lifestyle.
But the USA also needed a reason to increase its incursions into MENA, so perhaps the CIA was tapped again to call upon its old friend Osama to wreak some havoc on our own soils (9/11), and get the American populace behind a larger war of occupation and control in the Middle East and the Arabian Peninsula. Given the history of our covert operations, deceptions and machinations (as Wikileaks has clearly demonstrated), it is not entirely out of the question. Perhaps this is why conspiracy theories still run rampant; and why this Administration (in the person of Dr. ‘Sunny’ Sunstein) wants to squelch them pronto. And perhaps that is why we finally had to pop Osama - “Geronimo” – quickly and quietly, without trial or public discussion, because the wholly/holy Evil One knew too much.
With our relentless assaults in that region and the rest of the globe, we continue to increase our military budgets exponentially for imperial expansion and the goodies it promises to deliver – oil, markets, and slave-wage labor. All the while taking our own social programs to the killing floor of the abattoir, seeking to disembowel senior citizens and the poor, and perhaps then, the middle class. (Katie, bar the doors!!)
So what is happening here? Well, disenfranchised socialists, libertarians and communists all smell blood in the water. Yet the larger body politic – the proletariat or petite bourgeoisie (depending upon your perspective) – is not so quick to jump on any of these tired bandwagons. In fact, many among the masses are exploring alternative solutions concerning the trajectory and velocity of change necessary to avert the direst of outcomes. And among them are voices loosely crying for a retreat or even the termination of the executioner… death to the State and its alien authority.
These calls come from the would-be anarchists of today… not because they want chaos to reign; rather, because they feel the archaic pull of a more primal autonomy, some feral memory trace that was lost with the establishment of kingdoms, nations, empires, legislators, and other anonymous, impersonal hierarchies.
Yes, a revolution seems imminent. But it does not promise to be soft or unifying; rather, it looks to be one of disintegration. And while the secessionist movements may have gained serious momentum among certain left-leaning elements during the second coming of the Burning Bush era, this revolution may not be led by liberals or progressives, but rather by conservatives and independents, perhaps by the slap-happy-gun-tottin’-Tea-partiers themselves; those who prefer limited federal authority and minimal government in general. And now, the GOP (a.k.a. Sister Sarah) is looking to create further divisions within the USA over the “Osama Kill.”
But when the divisiveness escalates, and fists (err… bullets) start to fly, with a few States perhaps attempting secession from the Union, these new anarchists may begin to make their own moves, taking advantage of the vulnerability of both the Union and the States.
As heir-apparent of Western progress with constantly expanding hierarchies of social, political, and economic complexity, the self-described beacon of hope to the rest of humanity, this American landscape is now a fitting body-politic for a complete reversal of course; the rejection of hierarchy, of legislative control, and the complexity of the civilized state. It appears increasingly to be the unlikely harbinger of the recovery of a more primal, instinctual freedom. (What did Freud call it, “the return of the repressed?”)
America is a land ripe for cultural, economic and political disintegration in the interests of recovering some lost simplicity. All hinges upon the nature, dynamics and momentum of the revolutionary spirit, and to what extent it can overcome the inertia of standing cultural and political hegemonic forces. But the fairytales we tell ourselves, and the myths we have come to believe in, simply to maintain this ignorance and our loyalty to this dream-turned-nightmare, carry too great a price for even people like Sarah-know-nothing or Joe-nobody to put up with and stay their hand much longer.
Will the coming end of the American empire have us running in retreat from a world populated by the likes of Mad Max, a war of all against all? Or will it be the highly anticipated coming of the Kingdom of God on earth? Neither I think! If revolutionary forces succeed in mobilizing this passion for disintegration, and if such passion can fuel the anarchist’s vision for community without authority, without a head of state, then perhaps this hegemony can be dismantled and “we, the people,” can rediscover a renewed form of community — real communities built upon simple respect for the other (including the earth), an appreciation of self-sufficiency born of cooperation, and an expansive sense of kinship – both consanguineal and affine relations. But let’s not hope for it; there’s already been too much of that “hopey” thing lately.
SC106-2
Britain’s Royal Wedding: A Big Day For The Global Oligarchy
A Celebration of the Dictatorship of Global Capital over Democracy
The British royal wedding can be seen as a modern-day repeat of the “bread and circuses” policy of ancient Rome. In the waning days of that empire, the rulers sought to distract the masses from their grinding misery and the unwieldy wealth and corruption of the elite by sporadically throwing scraps of bread to the hungry public while saturating them with spectacles of gore and bloodlust at the Colosseum.
Today, the British public – grinding under massive austerity budget cuts, unemployment, poverty wages, social deprivations and crumbling services – are thrown scraps of feelgood comfort from the much-hyped wedding between Prince William and his girlfriend Kate Middleton. William is the grandson of Queen Elizabeth II and son of the heir apparent to the British throne, Prince Charles. Fawning media coverage will present it as a day of romance, nationhood, nostalgia and pride.
Meanwhile, the spectacles of gore and bloodlust – admittedly despite much public opposition – are located thousands of kilometers away in the Middle East, Iraq, Central Asia, Afghanistan, where over a million civilians have been killed in British-backed “wars against terror” that have yet to be sated even after eight and 10 years of butchery, respectively; and now the latest spectacle opens in North Africa, Libya, where over the past six weeks Royal Air Force warplanes have been bombing and killing civilians in the name of “peace” and “humanitarian concern”. The day before the wedding, the British government announced that troops are to be dispatched to the borders of Libya to provide “humanitarian corridors” for displaced civilians – many of whom will have been displaced by RAF ground attack aircraft.
Of course, the British Empire has long ago waned as a singular entity and its elite is not alone in lording over their masses. The same bread and circuses charade is being played out in varied ways by the other Western powers, the US, France, Germany, Italy, that comprise today’s global Empire of Capital.
But what should be appreciated from the display in Britain is the revelation – albeit unintended – of raw state power. Behind the translucent wedding veil, what can be seen is raw state power that blows away any vestige of illusions of parliamentary democracy, illusions that are not just peculiar to Britain, but to all the Western powers. In short, the empire of corporate and financial aristocracy that has emerged in late capitalism is now asserting itself increasingly and more blatantly as a dictatorship of Capital.
All political parties, whether Conservative, Liberal or Labour in Britain, or Republican, Democrat in the US etc., are seen to be willing servants of this dictatorship.
Bear in mind that London’s royal pageant is being imposed, without any public question, at an estimated cost of some $70 million, most of that for state security against any sign of popular protest. When the wider cost to the economy of the British government’s declared “public holiday” is factored in, the total cost may be $10 billion – this as the British exchequer is embarking on implementing austerity budget cuts of $130 billion. The bill for the royal wedding will be footed by the British public through future deeper cuts in jobs, education and health services, and social welfare programmes. This as the British government unilaterally adds to the public debt the cost of RAF bombing sorties in Libya, estimated at over $1 billion a month, and its other even more costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So where is the democracy in that? Austerity budgets imposed against public will, a deficit substantially increased from a royal pageant imposed without democratic consultation, and war expenses loaded on to the suffering public – even though these wars are opposed by the majority of voters.
That is dictatorship by elite government for an unelected elite. The same dictatorship manifests in the US and other Western powers. Ordinary Americans in particular may look at the British royal wedding pageant with mild fascination as some kind of “old Europe curiosity”. But in spite of its supposed revolution against European monarchs, the US has today reinvented its own corporate and financial aristocracy that rules and plunders without democratic accountability in alliance with the oligarchies of Europe.
The real world nexus for our global oligarchy is seen graphically in the power of oil companies and the transnational banking system. Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, one of the world’s top 10 richest individuals, has a personal fortune that is reckoned to far exceed her country’s $130 billion deficit cuts. She is a major shareholder in Royal Dutch Shell and British Petroleum – these companies along with Exxon and Chevron make up the “four horsemen” of global Big Oil.
As Dean Henderson, author of Big Oil and Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf, points out:
“The Four Horsemen have interlocking directorates with the international mega-banks. Exxon Mobil shares board members with JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Royal Bank of Canada and Prudential. Chevron Texaco has interlocks with Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase. BP Amoco shares directors with JP Morgan Chase. RD/Shell has ties with Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, N. M. Rothschild & Sons and Bank of England.”
Henderson continues: “Information on RD/Shell is harder to obtain since they are registered in the UK and Holland and are not required to file 10K reports. It is 60% owned by Royal Dutch Petroleum of Holland and 40% owned by Shell Trading & Transport of the UK. The company has only 14,000 stockholders and few directors. The consensus from researchers is that Royal Dutch/Shell is still controlled by the Rothschild, Oppenheimer, Nobel and Samuel families along with the British House of Windsor and the Dutch House of Orange.” [1]
Such global connections bestow on the British monarch the epithet of “the world’s ultimate insider trader”.
Scott Thompson writes: “[T]he Queen is the world's ultimate ‘insider trader’. She not only gets tips from British financiers, but also has access to all the state secrets, through the [Privy Council] ‘boxes’. Thus, if the Queen learns from among all public and private British Empire intelligence and economic warfare entities reporting to her, for example, that Nigeria is about to be destabilized, she can immediately call her broker. Under the secrecy laws of the British Empire, it would be unthinkable for anyone to consider pressing charges of insider trading and conflict of interest against the sovereign: In fact, only a handful of trusted advisers would ever know.” [2]
To put these connections of the House of Windsor to the global Empire of Capital in a real world context, we should factor in the following:
1. The war in Iraq, according to recent revelations from Wikileaks, and others, was most certainly about gaining access for Big Oil and British Big Oil in particular, despite the arrogant assertions by former British prime minister Tony Blair that such claims made at the time of the US/British invasion of Iraq in 2003 were “absurd”. [3]
2. The present NATO war in Libya has an uncanny resemblance to British and French war planning for that country several months before any sign of alleged popular uprising. [4]
3. NATO’s military intervention in Libya was precipitated by Muammar Gaddafi’s move to put a financial squeeze on Big Oil to compensate for more than $2 billion in reparations extracted from that country over a frame-up for the Lockerbie bombing in 1988, according to former US intelligence asset Susan Lindauer.
4. The subjugation and integration of Libya’s independent financial system within the global banking system, the same system in which the British monarch is a major shareholder. [5]
5. Libya’s vast untapped oil wealth – the largest in Africa – was impeded by a leader considered unreliable to the long-term interests of Big Oil.
6. The reconquest of Libya by Western militarism provides a strategic bridgehead for global Capital to thwart pro-democracy uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa – uprising that represent threats to the profit interests of Big Oil and its shareholders, including the House of Windsor.
On the last point, it should be noted that Western governments have been aided and abetted by dictatorial monarchs from the Persian Gulf, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait. The Persian Gulf monarchs are among the guest list attending the Big Day for the British royals. The delegation from the House of Saud is particularly noteworthy, given in its ongoing involvement in the vicious repression of the pro-democracy movement in Britain’s former colony of Bahrain.
But the royal wedding is not just a peculiar Big Day for the seemingly quaint House of Windsor. It is in many ways a celebration of the dictatorship of global Capital over democracy in Britain and elsewhere around the world, including the ‘Republic of the USA”. As the assorted global dictators assembled in London’s Westminster Abbey might say in harmony with the happy couple: “Till death do us part”.
A Celebration of the Dictatorship of Global Capital over Democracy
The British royal wedding can be seen as a modern-day repeat of the “bread and circuses” policy of ancient Rome. In the waning days of that empire, the rulers sought to distract the masses from their grinding misery and the unwieldy wealth and corruption of the elite by sporadically throwing scraps of bread to the hungry public while saturating them with spectacles of gore and bloodlust at the Colosseum.
Today, the British public – grinding under massive austerity budget cuts, unemployment, poverty wages, social deprivations and crumbling services – are thrown scraps of feelgood comfort from the much-hyped wedding between Prince William and his girlfriend Kate Middleton. William is the grandson of Queen Elizabeth II and son of the heir apparent to the British throne, Prince Charles. Fawning media coverage will present it as a day of romance, nationhood, nostalgia and pride.
Meanwhile, the spectacles of gore and bloodlust – admittedly despite much public opposition – are located thousands of kilometers away in the Middle East, Iraq, Central Asia, Afghanistan, where over a million civilians have been killed in British-backed “wars against terror” that have yet to be sated even after eight and 10 years of butchery, respectively; and now the latest spectacle opens in North Africa, Libya, where over the past six weeks Royal Air Force warplanes have been bombing and killing civilians in the name of “peace” and “humanitarian concern”. The day before the wedding, the British government announced that troops are to be dispatched to the borders of Libya to provide “humanitarian corridors” for displaced civilians – many of whom will have been displaced by RAF ground attack aircraft.
Of course, the British Empire has long ago waned as a singular entity and its elite is not alone in lording over their masses. The same bread and circuses charade is being played out in varied ways by the other Western powers, the US, France, Germany, Italy, that comprise today’s global Empire of Capital.
But what should be appreciated from the display in Britain is the revelation – albeit unintended – of raw state power. Behind the translucent wedding veil, what can be seen is raw state power that blows away any vestige of illusions of parliamentary democracy, illusions that are not just peculiar to Britain, but to all the Western powers. In short, the empire of corporate and financial aristocracy that has emerged in late capitalism is now asserting itself increasingly and more blatantly as a dictatorship of Capital.
All political parties, whether Conservative, Liberal or Labour in Britain, or Republican, Democrat in the US etc., are seen to be willing servants of this dictatorship.
Bear in mind that London’s royal pageant is being imposed, without any public question, at an estimated cost of some $70 million, most of that for state security against any sign of popular protest. When the wider cost to the economy of the British government’s declared “public holiday” is factored in, the total cost may be $10 billion – this as the British exchequer is embarking on implementing austerity budget cuts of $130 billion. The bill for the royal wedding will be footed by the British public through future deeper cuts in jobs, education and health services, and social welfare programmes. This as the British government unilaterally adds to the public debt the cost of RAF bombing sorties in Libya, estimated at over $1 billion a month, and its other even more costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So where is the democracy in that? Austerity budgets imposed against public will, a deficit substantially increased from a royal pageant imposed without democratic consultation, and war expenses loaded on to the suffering public – even though these wars are opposed by the majority of voters.
That is dictatorship by elite government for an unelected elite. The same dictatorship manifests in the US and other Western powers. Ordinary Americans in particular may look at the British royal wedding pageant with mild fascination as some kind of “old Europe curiosity”. But in spite of its supposed revolution against European monarchs, the US has today reinvented its own corporate and financial aristocracy that rules and plunders without democratic accountability in alliance with the oligarchies of Europe.
The real world nexus for our global oligarchy is seen graphically in the power of oil companies and the transnational banking system. Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, one of the world’s top 10 richest individuals, has a personal fortune that is reckoned to far exceed her country’s $130 billion deficit cuts. She is a major shareholder in Royal Dutch Shell and British Petroleum – these companies along with Exxon and Chevron make up the “four horsemen” of global Big Oil.
As Dean Henderson, author of Big Oil and Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf, points out:
“The Four Horsemen have interlocking directorates with the international mega-banks. Exxon Mobil shares board members with JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Royal Bank of Canada and Prudential. Chevron Texaco has interlocks with Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase. BP Amoco shares directors with JP Morgan Chase. RD/Shell has ties with Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, N. M. Rothschild & Sons and Bank of England.”
Henderson continues: “Information on RD/Shell is harder to obtain since they are registered in the UK and Holland and are not required to file 10K reports. It is 60% owned by Royal Dutch Petroleum of Holland and 40% owned by Shell Trading & Transport of the UK. The company has only 14,000 stockholders and few directors. The consensus from researchers is that Royal Dutch/Shell is still controlled by the Rothschild, Oppenheimer, Nobel and Samuel families along with the British House of Windsor and the Dutch House of Orange.” [1]
Such global connections bestow on the British monarch the epithet of “the world’s ultimate insider trader”.
Scott Thompson writes: “[T]he Queen is the world's ultimate ‘insider trader’. She not only gets tips from British financiers, but also has access to all the state secrets, through the [Privy Council] ‘boxes’. Thus, if the Queen learns from among all public and private British Empire intelligence and economic warfare entities reporting to her, for example, that Nigeria is about to be destabilized, she can immediately call her broker. Under the secrecy laws of the British Empire, it would be unthinkable for anyone to consider pressing charges of insider trading and conflict of interest against the sovereign: In fact, only a handful of trusted advisers would ever know.” [2]
To put these connections of the House of Windsor to the global Empire of Capital in a real world context, we should factor in the following:
1. The war in Iraq, according to recent revelations from Wikileaks, and others, was most certainly about gaining access for Big Oil and British Big Oil in particular, despite the arrogant assertions by former British prime minister Tony Blair that such claims made at the time of the US/British invasion of Iraq in 2003 were “absurd”. [3]
2. The present NATO war in Libya has an uncanny resemblance to British and French war planning for that country several months before any sign of alleged popular uprising. [4]
3. NATO’s military intervention in Libya was precipitated by Muammar Gaddafi’s move to put a financial squeeze on Big Oil to compensate for more than $2 billion in reparations extracted from that country over a frame-up for the Lockerbie bombing in 1988, according to former US intelligence asset Susan Lindauer.
4. The subjugation and integration of Libya’s independent financial system within the global banking system, the same system in which the British monarch is a major shareholder. [5]
5. Libya’s vast untapped oil wealth – the largest in Africa – was impeded by a leader considered unreliable to the long-term interests of Big Oil.
6. The reconquest of Libya by Western militarism provides a strategic bridgehead for global Capital to thwart pro-democracy uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa – uprising that represent threats to the profit interests of Big Oil and its shareholders, including the House of Windsor.
On the last point, it should be noted that Western governments have been aided and abetted by dictatorial monarchs from the Persian Gulf, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait. The Persian Gulf monarchs are among the guest list attending the Big Day for the British royals. The delegation from the House of Saud is particularly noteworthy, given in its ongoing involvement in the vicious repression of the pro-democracy movement in Britain’s former colony of Bahrain.
But the royal wedding is not just a peculiar Big Day for the seemingly quaint House of Windsor. It is in many ways a celebration of the dictatorship of global Capital over democracy in Britain and elsewhere around the world, including the ‘Republic of the USA”. As the assorted global dictators assembled in London’s Westminster Abbey might say in harmony with the happy couple: “Till death do us part”.
SC105-15
http://www.fcnp.com/commentary/national/9081-the-peak-oil-crisis-dimming-of-the-globe.html
The peak oil crisis: Dimming of the globe
Late last month a newly enhanced web site, www.energyshortage.org, dedicated to collecting articles concerning energy shortages around the world reappeared on the web after an absence of some months. The stories deal with coal, electricity and natural gas shortages as well as oil. In the course of the past month the web site has located and linked to nearly 200 stories that deal with some aspect of the developing global energy shortage. Most of these stories come from local paper and taken together paint a distressing picture of looming societal breakdown in many parts of the world that is not as yet generally appreciated by the public.
Most of the problems reported on deal with electricity shortages - which in several countries have deteriorated to the point where economies are threatened with collapse. In South Asia - Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and later in India - a combination of too many people, hydro-power reducing droughts, depleting fossil fuel reserves and inadequate investment in infrastructure raises the possibility that many urban areas may soon be uninhabitable.
In Pakistan the electricity is now turned off for 18-20 hours some days in many cities and 20 hours in rural villages. The onset of summer temperatures, shortages of fuel oil for thermal generation and falling water levels have increased the power shortfall to record levels. Without electricity to run the pumps urban water supplies quickly shut down. Without power to run the mills, exports are falling, leaving the country without money to import oil. In short we are seeing a classical downward spiral. The lack of electricity to sell is creating serious hardships for electricity companies which can no longer afford to pay for energy - coal, oil, or natural gas - and are being shut off by suppliers.
Pakistan is hoping that increased imports of liquefied natural gas which is for now is relatively plentiful, transportable, and affordable will be a short term solution for economic survival. Over the longer run natural gas pipelines from Iran and Turkmenistan may help someday provided the numerous dissident groups in the area don't blow them up. Demand for electricity in Pakistan is growing at 6-7 percent a year and all agree that building more dams is the best long term solution. This of course requires prodigious amounts of capital and the cooperation of Mother Nature to supply the necessary rains in an era of rapidly changing climatic conditions.
At the other side of the subcontinent is Bangladesh, a country of 158 million people and minimal natural resources. The country is currently generating 4,000 megawatts vs. a demand of 5,500 resulting in rolling blackouts across the country. The real problem however comes in keeping the fresh water flowing. Only half of Dhaka's 577 water pumps are equipped with back-up generators. Falling water tables and falling energy supplies suggest that major humanitarian disasters are not far away.
In the center of the sub-continent lies Nepal. Here the problem is 14 hours a day without power coupled with the inability to pay the Indian oil company for imported oil and gas. The Indians recently reduced fuel supplies to Nepal by 60 percent until the 1.25 billion rupee fuel bill is paid. There is no obvious way out of this situation.
Finally we get to India with its 1.2 billion people and 8 percent annual GDP growth. Although the country has sizeable reserves of coal, oil and natural gas, these are not adequate for a country of this size and rate of growth. Domestic coal production is not meeting the needs of a rapidly growing economy. This year the coal shortfall may be as much as 142 million tons as compared to needs. A few years from now it could be 250 million tons. Rolling blackouts have begun in some parts of the country and the projected demand for ever increasing amounts of expensive imported coal extends into the indefinite future.
China too seems to be facing coal and oil shortages this summer. Despite coal production of 3.2 billion tons a year, this is not sufficient to support the demand for electricity which is increasing at circa 11 percent a year. Beijing, of course, can afford to import all the coal, oil, and natural gas it needs and probably will. The problem will come with local shortages that may force companies to resort to emergency diesel power generation and thereby increase China's demand for imported oil.
From the underdeveloped parts of Africa, Latin America, and many island nations come a stream of reports of rolling black outs and other power shortages. Most of these problems can be attributed to the inability to pay for oil at $125 a barrel. None of these problems are going away. In many parts of the world fossil fuel energy has already become unaffordable for many and as time goes on, nearly all of us will slip into this category.
In a few places blackouts are being caused by governmental incompetence, with Venezuela at the top of the list. Despite its status as a major oil exporter, Caracas has been plagued with serious country-wide blackouts in recent days. They seem to be so bad that even the precious oil production and exports are being affected. Here the problem is not money, drought, or the availability of fuel, but government's inability to keep its national grid functioning.
With the exception of Japan, which is feeling serious consequences from the recent earthquake/tsunami/nuclear meltdown, most developed countries do not seem to be suffering any significant shortages at this time. There are of course slowly mounting problems from increasing temperatures. As summers become increasing uncomfortable, the demand for air conditioning, which consumes prodigious quantities of electricity and puts strains on even the best managed power grids, will grow. Only the richest of countries will have the capital available to rebuild power grids to meet the demands of higher temperatures. For the rest, the immediate future is likely to be one of increasing power shortages and longer blackouts.
The peak oil crisis: Dimming of the globe
Late last month a newly enhanced web site, www.energyshortage.org, dedicated to collecting articles concerning energy shortages around the world reappeared on the web after an absence of some months. The stories deal with coal, electricity and natural gas shortages as well as oil. In the course of the past month the web site has located and linked to nearly 200 stories that deal with some aspect of the developing global energy shortage. Most of these stories come from local paper and taken together paint a distressing picture of looming societal breakdown in many parts of the world that is not as yet generally appreciated by the public.
Most of the problems reported on deal with electricity shortages - which in several countries have deteriorated to the point where economies are threatened with collapse. In South Asia - Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and later in India - a combination of too many people, hydro-power reducing droughts, depleting fossil fuel reserves and inadequate investment in infrastructure raises the possibility that many urban areas may soon be uninhabitable.
In Pakistan the electricity is now turned off for 18-20 hours some days in many cities and 20 hours in rural villages. The onset of summer temperatures, shortages of fuel oil for thermal generation and falling water levels have increased the power shortfall to record levels. Without electricity to run the pumps urban water supplies quickly shut down. Without power to run the mills, exports are falling, leaving the country without money to import oil. In short we are seeing a classical downward spiral. The lack of electricity to sell is creating serious hardships for electricity companies which can no longer afford to pay for energy - coal, oil, or natural gas - and are being shut off by suppliers.
Pakistan is hoping that increased imports of liquefied natural gas which is for now is relatively plentiful, transportable, and affordable will be a short term solution for economic survival. Over the longer run natural gas pipelines from Iran and Turkmenistan may help someday provided the numerous dissident groups in the area don't blow them up. Demand for electricity in Pakistan is growing at 6-7 percent a year and all agree that building more dams is the best long term solution. This of course requires prodigious amounts of capital and the cooperation of Mother Nature to supply the necessary rains in an era of rapidly changing climatic conditions.
At the other side of the subcontinent is Bangladesh, a country of 158 million people and minimal natural resources. The country is currently generating 4,000 megawatts vs. a demand of 5,500 resulting in rolling blackouts across the country. The real problem however comes in keeping the fresh water flowing. Only half of Dhaka's 577 water pumps are equipped with back-up generators. Falling water tables and falling energy supplies suggest that major humanitarian disasters are not far away.
In the center of the sub-continent lies Nepal. Here the problem is 14 hours a day without power coupled with the inability to pay the Indian oil company for imported oil and gas. The Indians recently reduced fuel supplies to Nepal by 60 percent until the 1.25 billion rupee fuel bill is paid. There is no obvious way out of this situation.
Finally we get to India with its 1.2 billion people and 8 percent annual GDP growth. Although the country has sizeable reserves of coal, oil and natural gas, these are not adequate for a country of this size and rate of growth. Domestic coal production is not meeting the needs of a rapidly growing economy. This year the coal shortfall may be as much as 142 million tons as compared to needs. A few years from now it could be 250 million tons. Rolling blackouts have begun in some parts of the country and the projected demand for ever increasing amounts of expensive imported coal extends into the indefinite future.
China too seems to be facing coal and oil shortages this summer. Despite coal production of 3.2 billion tons a year, this is not sufficient to support the demand for electricity which is increasing at circa 11 percent a year. Beijing, of course, can afford to import all the coal, oil, and natural gas it needs and probably will. The problem will come with local shortages that may force companies to resort to emergency diesel power generation and thereby increase China's demand for imported oil.
From the underdeveloped parts of Africa, Latin America, and many island nations come a stream of reports of rolling black outs and other power shortages. Most of these problems can be attributed to the inability to pay for oil at $125 a barrel. None of these problems are going away. In many parts of the world fossil fuel energy has already become unaffordable for many and as time goes on, nearly all of us will slip into this category.
In a few places blackouts are being caused by governmental incompetence, with Venezuela at the top of the list. Despite its status as a major oil exporter, Caracas has been plagued with serious country-wide blackouts in recent days. They seem to be so bad that even the precious oil production and exports are being affected. Here the problem is not money, drought, or the availability of fuel, but government's inability to keep its national grid functioning.
With the exception of Japan, which is feeling serious consequences from the recent earthquake/tsunami/nuclear meltdown, most developed countries do not seem to be suffering any significant shortages at this time. There are of course slowly mounting problems from increasing temperatures. As summers become increasing uncomfortable, the demand for air conditioning, which consumes prodigious quantities of electricity and puts strains on even the best managed power grids, will grow. Only the richest of countries will have the capital available to rebuild power grids to meet the demands of higher temperatures. For the rest, the immediate future is likely to be one of increasing power shortages and longer blackouts.
Monday, April 25, 2011
SC105-14
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27943.htm
Velkommen to Banktopia
Let's talk turkey. The dollar is getting hammered by the day. And the dollar is getting hammered by design, because the Fed wants a weaker currency to boost exports and lower the real burden of debt on the banks. (Yes, Martha, the banks are still insolvent) So, down goes the greenback, lower and lower, pushing up gas and food prices while the buying power of the average US worker vanishes down the plughole. And this process will continue for the foreseeable future because--as Obama stated earlier in the year--Washington is committed to "doubling exports in the next 5 years." Think about that: "the next 5 years". That's the same as saying that the American worker will be reduced to third-world poverty in a half decade or so. It's a death sentence.
And none of this has anything to do with lowering unemployment or raising GDP. In fact, the revisions of first quarter GDP reveal the lies behind the policy. The first announcement from the Commerce Department put GDP at 3.2%. Remember that? Now we've slipped to 1.4% and some predict the final revision could actually show negative growth. This is from the New York Times:
"Earlier this week we wrote that several prominent economic forecasters had lowered their estimates of gross domestic product growth in the first quarter of this year. Today saw even further declines. Macroeconomic Advisers, a forecasting firm, lowered its estimate to just 1.4 percent annualized, when just a few months ago they had pegged the number at 4.1 percent.
Capital Economics likewise brought its estimate down to 1 percent, writing in a client note:
Every data release last week seemed to necessitate a further downward revision to our first-quarter GDP growth forecast. By the end of the week when the dust had finally settled, that estimate was down to only 1% at an annualized pace. Indeed, there is now even a decent outside chance that the economy contracted outright." ("G.D.P. Estimates Slide Further", New York Times)
So, it's all baloney. The economy isn't growing. How could it be? Wages are flat, credit is still shrinking, (excluding student loans) and the only reason the unemployment numbers keep dropping is because more and more people are falling off the unemployment rolls. Everyone knows that. So, while there may be a slight uptick in consumption and retail; don't be fooled. It's just because it costs more to put food on the table or drive to work, not because people are scarfing up trinkets at the mall or living the highlife.
And the American people know what's going; they can see through this "green shoots" charade. That's why the latest survey from the New York Times showed that the "Nation’s Mood (is) at the Lowest Level in Two Years" and that "Americans are more pessimistic about the nation’s economic outlook and overall direction than they have been at any time since President Obama’s first two months in office when the country was still officially ensnared in the Great Recession." ("Nation’s Mood at Lowest Level in Two Years, Poll Shows, New York Times)
People have lost faith in Obama, the congress, and the political process itself. They can see that the system is broken and no longer responds to the will of the people, which is why they're throwing up their hands and giving up. It's obvious. Gallup found the same thing. Here's a clip from their recent poll:
"Americans' optimism about the future direction of the U.S. economy plunged in March for the second month in a row, as the percentage of Americans saying the economy is "getting better" fell to 33% -- down from 41% in January....Optimism about the future of the economy declined across all political parties during the first quarter....Gallup's Economic Confidence Index, which includes the economic optimism measure, also plunged in March..." ("U.S. Economic Optimism Plummets in March", Gallup)
So, all the "happy-times" propaganda has had zilch effect. The public's not buying it. They know we're in a Depression. How could they not know? They're underwater on their mortgages, they can't get a loan, their kids and Uncle Arnie can't find work, and the guy in the Oval Office won't do a damn thing to help out. Is it any wonder why so many people are giving up on capitalism entirely. Just take a look at this survey from Globescan for a real shocker:
"American public support for the free market economy has dropped sharply in the past year, and is now lower than in China, according to a GlobeScan poll released today.....When GlobeScan began tracking views in 2002, four in five Americans (80%) saw the free market as the best economic system for the future—the highest level of support among tracking countries. Support started to fall away in the following years and recovered slightly after the financial crisis in 2007/8, but has plummeted since 2009, falling 15 points in a year so that fewer than three in five (59%) now see free market capitalism as the best system for the future.
GlobeScan Chairman Doug Miller commented: “America is the last place we would have expected to see such a sharp drop in trust in the free enterprise system. This is not good news for business.”
The results mean that a number of the world’s major emerging economies have now matched or overtaken the USA in their enthusiasm for the free market. The Chinese and Brazilians, 67 per cent of whom regard the free market system as the best on offer, are now more positive about capitalism than Americans." ("Sharp Drop in American Enthusiasm for Free Market, Poll Shows", GlobeScan)
Can you believe it? The Chinese like capitalism better than Americans. How's that for irony? And, don't kid yourself, the average working slob isn't spending his evenings thumbing through the Communist Manifesto while strumming L'Internationale on his 6-string. That's nonsense. Americans are practical people. They know they're getting screwed by both parties which is why their support for capitalism has eroded even faster under Obama. It fell "15 points in a year" since 2009. Way to go, Barry.
And things will only get worse when congress starts hacking away at the budget deficits, eliminating popular programs and services. That will just add more fuel to the fire and convince people that the system is beyond repair. Bottom line: Conditions will steadily deteriorate, activity will slow, and economy will enter a period of protracted stagflation.
But that doesn't mean Wall Street will suffer. Hell, no. The markets will continue to bubble ever-higher fueled by lavish injections of monetary stimulus from the Fed just as they have for the last 3 years. As Bloomberg reported earlier in the week, Bernanke does not plan to end QE2 at the end of June as scheduled, but will continue to recycle the proceeds from maturing mortgage-backed securities (MBS) into bond purchases to ensure that the Blue Chips continue to post record profits while 42 million workers scrape by on food-stamps, and a couple million more wait to get booted out of their homes. Sounds fair, doesn't it?
So, if it seems like the big banks are writing the policy; it's because they are. Think of it like this: The US government keeps two sets of books. One is a record of all the public's revenues and debts. The other is an off-balance sheet operation run by the Fed. When congress spends money, it must be approved through the normal democratic process. When the Fed spends money, it simply writes a check on an account backed by "the full faith and credit of the US Treasury" without any oversight or supervision. And, the debts that it rings-up, do not add to the budget deficits or force policymakers to impose constraints on the banks. No way. The $2 trillion in junk mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and other handouts the Fed has given to Wall Street since Lehman collapsed, should have sent the deficits into the stratosphere and forced the resolution (bankruptcy) of the nation's largest banks. But they didn't, because the Fed's losses are kept "off-budget", where they don't attract congress's scrutiny. So, anything goes. The only problem is that the Fed's trillion dollar Bank Welfare Project has led to diminished buying power and a plunging dollar. So, it would be more accurate to call QE2 a stealth tax on working people, instead of "monetary stimulus".(which it is not.) The truth is, Bernanke is deliberately flogging the dollar to help his underwater bank buddies stay afloat and to keep stocks "frothy". But the net-result is a huge loss of personal wealth for everyone else. These are the real losers in Bernanke's QE shell game.
Looking ahead, it will be more of the same. Stocks will continue to rally, the red ink on the Fed's balance sheet will continue to build, and the dollar will continue its agonizing descent into oblivion.
The Fed is running the whole shooting match now and the rest of us are just bystanders with no say-so. Velkommen to Banktopia.
Velkommen to Banktopia
Let's talk turkey. The dollar is getting hammered by the day. And the dollar is getting hammered by design, because the Fed wants a weaker currency to boost exports and lower the real burden of debt on the banks. (Yes, Martha, the banks are still insolvent) So, down goes the greenback, lower and lower, pushing up gas and food prices while the buying power of the average US worker vanishes down the plughole. And this process will continue for the foreseeable future because--as Obama stated earlier in the year--Washington is committed to "doubling exports in the next 5 years." Think about that: "the next 5 years". That's the same as saying that the American worker will be reduced to third-world poverty in a half decade or so. It's a death sentence.
And none of this has anything to do with lowering unemployment or raising GDP. In fact, the revisions of first quarter GDP reveal the lies behind the policy. The first announcement from the Commerce Department put GDP at 3.2%. Remember that? Now we've slipped to 1.4% and some predict the final revision could actually show negative growth. This is from the New York Times:
"Earlier this week we wrote that several prominent economic forecasters had lowered their estimates of gross domestic product growth in the first quarter of this year. Today saw even further declines. Macroeconomic Advisers, a forecasting firm, lowered its estimate to just 1.4 percent annualized, when just a few months ago they had pegged the number at 4.1 percent.
Capital Economics likewise brought its estimate down to 1 percent, writing in a client note:
Every data release last week seemed to necessitate a further downward revision to our first-quarter GDP growth forecast. By the end of the week when the dust had finally settled, that estimate was down to only 1% at an annualized pace. Indeed, there is now even a decent outside chance that the economy contracted outright." ("G.D.P. Estimates Slide Further", New York Times)
So, it's all baloney. The economy isn't growing. How could it be? Wages are flat, credit is still shrinking, (excluding student loans) and the only reason the unemployment numbers keep dropping is because more and more people are falling off the unemployment rolls. Everyone knows that. So, while there may be a slight uptick in consumption and retail; don't be fooled. It's just because it costs more to put food on the table or drive to work, not because people are scarfing up trinkets at the mall or living the highlife.
And the American people know what's going; they can see through this "green shoots" charade. That's why the latest survey from the New York Times showed that the "Nation’s Mood (is) at the Lowest Level in Two Years" and that "Americans are more pessimistic about the nation’s economic outlook and overall direction than they have been at any time since President Obama’s first two months in office when the country was still officially ensnared in the Great Recession." ("Nation’s Mood at Lowest Level in Two Years, Poll Shows, New York Times)
People have lost faith in Obama, the congress, and the political process itself. They can see that the system is broken and no longer responds to the will of the people, which is why they're throwing up their hands and giving up. It's obvious. Gallup found the same thing. Here's a clip from their recent poll:
"Americans' optimism about the future direction of the U.S. economy plunged in March for the second month in a row, as the percentage of Americans saying the economy is "getting better" fell to 33% -- down from 41% in January....Optimism about the future of the economy declined across all political parties during the first quarter....Gallup's Economic Confidence Index, which includes the economic optimism measure, also plunged in March..." ("U.S. Economic Optimism Plummets in March", Gallup)
So, all the "happy-times" propaganda has had zilch effect. The public's not buying it. They know we're in a Depression. How could they not know? They're underwater on their mortgages, they can't get a loan, their kids and Uncle Arnie can't find work, and the guy in the Oval Office won't do a damn thing to help out. Is it any wonder why so many people are giving up on capitalism entirely. Just take a look at this survey from Globescan for a real shocker:
"American public support for the free market economy has dropped sharply in the past year, and is now lower than in China, according to a GlobeScan poll released today.....When GlobeScan began tracking views in 2002, four in five Americans (80%) saw the free market as the best economic system for the future—the highest level of support among tracking countries. Support started to fall away in the following years and recovered slightly after the financial crisis in 2007/8, but has plummeted since 2009, falling 15 points in a year so that fewer than three in five (59%) now see free market capitalism as the best system for the future.
GlobeScan Chairman Doug Miller commented: “America is the last place we would have expected to see such a sharp drop in trust in the free enterprise system. This is not good news for business.”
The results mean that a number of the world’s major emerging economies have now matched or overtaken the USA in their enthusiasm for the free market. The Chinese and Brazilians, 67 per cent of whom regard the free market system as the best on offer, are now more positive about capitalism than Americans." ("Sharp Drop in American Enthusiasm for Free Market, Poll Shows", GlobeScan)
Can you believe it? The Chinese like capitalism better than Americans. How's that for irony? And, don't kid yourself, the average working slob isn't spending his evenings thumbing through the Communist Manifesto while strumming L'Internationale on his 6-string. That's nonsense. Americans are practical people. They know they're getting screwed by both parties which is why their support for capitalism has eroded even faster under Obama. It fell "15 points in a year" since 2009. Way to go, Barry.
And things will only get worse when congress starts hacking away at the budget deficits, eliminating popular programs and services. That will just add more fuel to the fire and convince people that the system is beyond repair. Bottom line: Conditions will steadily deteriorate, activity will slow, and economy will enter a period of protracted stagflation.
But that doesn't mean Wall Street will suffer. Hell, no. The markets will continue to bubble ever-higher fueled by lavish injections of monetary stimulus from the Fed just as they have for the last 3 years. As Bloomberg reported earlier in the week, Bernanke does not plan to end QE2 at the end of June as scheduled, but will continue to recycle the proceeds from maturing mortgage-backed securities (MBS) into bond purchases to ensure that the Blue Chips continue to post record profits while 42 million workers scrape by on food-stamps, and a couple million more wait to get booted out of their homes. Sounds fair, doesn't it?
So, if it seems like the big banks are writing the policy; it's because they are. Think of it like this: The US government keeps two sets of books. One is a record of all the public's revenues and debts. The other is an off-balance sheet operation run by the Fed. When congress spends money, it must be approved through the normal democratic process. When the Fed spends money, it simply writes a check on an account backed by "the full faith and credit of the US Treasury" without any oversight or supervision. And, the debts that it rings-up, do not add to the budget deficits or force policymakers to impose constraints on the banks. No way. The $2 trillion in junk mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and other handouts the Fed has given to Wall Street since Lehman collapsed, should have sent the deficits into the stratosphere and forced the resolution (bankruptcy) of the nation's largest banks. But they didn't, because the Fed's losses are kept "off-budget", where they don't attract congress's scrutiny. So, anything goes. The only problem is that the Fed's trillion dollar Bank Welfare Project has led to diminished buying power and a plunging dollar. So, it would be more accurate to call QE2 a stealth tax on working people, instead of "monetary stimulus".(which it is not.) The truth is, Bernanke is deliberately flogging the dollar to help his underwater bank buddies stay afloat and to keep stocks "frothy". But the net-result is a huge loss of personal wealth for everyone else. These are the real losers in Bernanke's QE shell game.
Looking ahead, it will be more of the same. Stocks will continue to rally, the red ink on the Fed's balance sheet will continue to build, and the dollar will continue its agonizing descent into oblivion.
The Fed is running the whole shooting match now and the rest of us are just bystanders with no say-so. Velkommen to Banktopia.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
