http://carolynbaker.net/2012/07/10/four-fiscal-cliffs-ahead-and-a-jobs-war-by-paul-farrell/
Four Fiscal Cliffs Ahead And A Jobs War
Election wars are masking the fiscal cliff that America is destined to drop off in early 2013, warns the Congressional Budget Office. History tells us our politicians will slowly drive America off the fiscal cliff and into a mid-1930s-style sinkhole. Why? Because no matter who’s elected, our dysfunctional government will continue to be driven by secretive super-PAC billionaires obsessed about either holding on to or regaining the presidency in 2016.
America’s fiscal cliff is actually four cliffs. And any one can easily trigger the other three. By 2013 the public will wake up to discover America is still a political war zone facing a recession no politician can solve, igniting further rage with warring politicians and their billionaire buddies.
The fiscal cliff includes four dangerous cliffs:
1.The health-care cliff: Admit it, it’s a systemic failure. And repealing or tweaking Obamacare won’t stop the hemorrhaging. Costs will keep rising, no matter who’s chief.
2.The taxes/spending cliff: The CBO says that allowing the Bush-era tax cuts to expire, combined with agreed-upon spending cuts, would reduce GDP by 1.3%. That deal is certain to get renegotiated. But until then, uncertainty, and if politicians just kick the can down the road again, new interest costs will increase the deficit, increasing long-term problems.
3.The military budget cliff: Do nothing and the Pentagon automatically gets $55 billion cut in 2013, more over the next decade. In addition, Romney’s on record to increase military spending, even as two wars wind down. U.S. Representative Paul Ryan, Republican from Wisconsin, has said the same.
4.The social programs cliff: Along with military cuts, the same deal negotiated last year included automatic cuts to domestic social-program spending by $492 billion over the next decade. Cuts will intensify stress on the poor and middle-class jobless.
Obviously there are global threats that could kill recovery: euro-land sinking, China slowing, emerging markets stalling. But the bottom line is that America’s at war with itself, most noticeably visible in gridlocked Washington, less visible in our billionaires’ super-PAC anarchy.
Job wars are far bigger threat than all four fiscal cliffs
The real financial cliff is measured in jobs, warns Jim Clifton, chief executive of Gallup, the polling firm, in his new book “The Coming Jobs War.”
Not just in America, but all nations worldwide. Get it? The lack of jobs is a bigger threat to America than government spending, debt, the environment and terrorism. “If countries fail at creating jobs, their societies will fall apart,” warns Clifton, “experience suffering, instability, chaos, and eventually revolutions.”
Warning: The jobs war will defeat us from within. The U.S. has 8% unemployment, officially. In fact, it’s more like 20% unemployed and underemployed, 30 million. We’re outsourcing too many jobs. We need 5 million net new jobs today, 10 million during the next presidential term according to Gallup’s research.
But unfortunately, our divisive politicians don’t get it. They’re not only making matters worse this year, but little will change from 2013 through 2016, no matter who’s elected president. Why? Because the secret wars of the billionaires’ super-PACs will keep running our government long after the elections, pushing off cliff after cliff after cliff. America is now an anarchy.
In fact, my guess is that whoever loses the 2012 presidential election, he and his party will be secretly relieved, because the pit after the coming fiscal cliffs are so incredibly, irrationally, absurdly deep, that little more will get done in Washington in the next four years than in the last four. In short, the jobs wars will intensify.
America’s ‘worst decade’ now faces ‘double-dip depression’ risk
Racing toward the fiscal cliff reminds me of our earlier prediction of “America’s Worst Decade.” Financial historian Niall Ferguson warns in Newsweek of a “double-dip depression…We forget that the Great Depression was like a soccer match, there were two halves.” The 1929 crash kicked off the first half. But what “made the depression truly ‘great’ …began with the European banking crisis of 1931.”
Likewise, our November elections will push America into the second half of a new era. But it doesn’t matter whether Romney or Obama is our quarterback, the goal posts just keep moving further away.
As Ferguson puts it: “To understand what has been happening in our own borderline depression, you need to know this history. But hardly anyone does.” Get it? He says America’s already in a “depression,” with clueless leaders and no real solutions, much as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson were clueless in 2008. Worse, no one appears able to stop our depression from turning into another Great Depression.
More bad news: Back in December 2011, the first year of this “Worst Decade in American History,” economist and longtime Forbes columnist Gary Shilling had just issued his semiannual outlook: “Global Recession Likely” for 2012. Now, in his midyear update, it’s worse: “Recent data makes that forecast more probable.”
Recapping some predictions for ‘America’s Worst Decade Ever’
A look back, then ahead: Over the past decade we predicted the 2000 crash, the 2008 meltdown, the 2009 bottom and rally. Historians like Ferguson and others already see the 2011-2020 decade developing as “America’s Worst Decade.” Yet totally predictable. And totally denied. So here’s our update of some of the economic and market predictions in a historical context that will continue unfolding for years:
2012: Billionaires solidify absolute power over our political system
In 2010, the Supreme Court legalized anonymous political bribery, turning America into a superrich anarchy. Now billions flow from billionaires to lobbyists to politicians and super-PACs with one goal: to get favors for special interests.
Meanwhile, the middle class is in a rapid trickle-down to third-world status. So the inequality gap will keep widening as billionaires tighten control of state and the federal governments.
2013: Global population bubble exploding, rapidly wasting resources
America’s superrich capitalists keep siphoning trillions from the middle class. And ironically they also see the world’s population growth of roughly 100 million annually not as wasting the planet’s scarce resources, but as an expanding market for increased wealth-building, proving “more is never enough” as environmental warnings are denied.
2014: Pentagon’s global commodity wars accelerate toward 2020 peak
Near the start of the Iraq war, Fortune reported on a Pentagon report predicting “climate could change radically and fast” as “the mother of all national security issues.” And billions of new people will spread unrest worldwide as “massive droughts, turning farmland into dust bowls and forests to ashes” as world population exploded to 10 billion, with “warfare defining human life.”
2015: ‘Gilded Age’ globalization explodes America’s global empire
About the same time the Pentagon was predicting “global warfare” by 2020, former Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips warned in “Wealth & Democracy” that “most great nations, at the peak of their economic power, become arrogant and wage great world wars at great cost, wasting vast resources, taking on huge debt, and ultimately burning themselves out.”
Niall Ferguson made similar warnings in “Colossus: The Rise and Fall of The American Empire,” that we are in denial, thinking “about the political process in seasonal, cyclical terms.”
2016: Free-market capitalism self-destructs, crashes, bank bankruptcies
The 2016 elections may be too late to plan for what’s ahead. “What if history is not cyclical and slow-moving but arrhythmic?” Ferguson asks. “What if collapse does not arrive over a number of centuries but comes suddenly,” too rapid to respond in time, especially if the president keeps ignoring the lessons of history?
Wake up America. There’s a deadly time bomb ticking. You are living in “ America’s Worst Decade Ever .” Go back and read the remaining years till 2020. See why our nation and the whole world will continue deteriorating no matter who’s president, because this drama will accelerate. As politicians and billionaires continue fighting like grade-school kids at recess, they’ll keep pushing America off the four fiscal cliffs. They fight because “more really is never enough” for America’s narcissistic, obsessed, heartless free-market capitalists.
Wake up and listen to Clifton on the “Coming Jobs Wars” … to environmentalists warning “it may already be too late” … to historians warning of a “rapid collapse of the American empire” … to the Pentagon warning that by 2020 “warfare will define human life” … to a lone hedge-fund manager telling you to “think Swiss Family Robinson” as you nudge yourself closer to the fiscal cliffs.
Saturday, July 14, 2012
Thursday, July 5, 2012
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http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31749
Death of the US Constitution: Can Americans Escape the Deception?
Recently Washington reduced the “collateral damage” count by declaring every murdered male of military age to have been a Taliban fighter or terrorist. Obviously, Washington has no way of knowing whether they were or not, but Washington’s declaration is intended as a green light to murder Afghan males of military age.
Scores of top level demolition experts and experts on the design, engineering, and construction of high rise steel structures provide the scientific, architectural, and engineering reasons that the three World Trade Center buildings came down only with the assistance of explosives that were placed and timed to remove the powerful structural support and permit the sudden collapse of the buildings. As the buildings were engineered and constructed according to known and tested principles that absolutely prevent rapid collapse, fire and structural damage that two of the three skyscrapers suffered from airliners could not possibly have caused the sudden disintegration of the three buildings.
The film was shown at the 7 Stages Theater on Euclid Avenue, the former Euclid Theater to which 65 years ago we kids used to ride our bikes to see Tarzan battle giant reptiles and ride elephants to victory over evil black tribesmen or evil white hunters, or to watch Randolph Scott bring justice with his six-shooter to a town ruled by black hats, or to witness the brave American soldiers liberate Europe from the Nazis. We never dreamed that we, residents of the “land of the free” would be menaced by a gestapo police state.
Death of the US Constitution: Can Americans Escape the Deception?
Hot Air Day is upon us. On July 4 hot air will spew forth all over the country as dignitaries deliver homilies to our “freedom and democracy” and praise “our brave troops” who are protecting our freedom by “killing them over there before they come over here.”
Not a single one of these speeches will contain one word of truth. No speaker will lament the death of the US Constitution or urge his audience to action to restore the only document that protects their liberty. No speaker will acknowledge that in the 21st century the Bush/Obama Regime, with the complicity of the Department of Justice, federal courts, Congress, presstitute media, law schools, bar associations, and an insouciant public have murdered the Constitution in the name of the “war on terror.”
As in medieval times, American citizens can be thrown into dungeons and never accounted for. No evidence or charges need be presented to a court. No trial is required, and no conviction.
As in tyrannies, US citizens can be executed at the sole discretion of the despot in the Oval Office, who sits there drawing up lists of people to be murdered.
Protestors exercising their constitutionally guaranteed rights to freedom of speech and freedom of association are attacked by armed police, beaten, tasered, tear-gassed, pepper sprayed, and arrested.
Whistleblowers who report the government’s crimes are prosecuted despite the statute that protects them.
US soldier Bradley Manning, who allegedly gave Wikileaks the documents revealing US war crimes, including the video of US soldiers in a helicopter gunship enjoying themselves murdering civilians walking along the street as if the soldiers were playing a video game, has been arrested and held in conditions of torture while the government tries to invent a case against him.
According to the US Military Code, US soldiers are required to make war crimes known. However, the law on the books provided no protection to Bradley Manning, and conservative Republicans whom I know are foaming at the mouth for Manning to be executed for letting out the truth. The truth, what is mere truth compared to the “exceptionalism of the great american people”? America has carte blanche to do whatever it wishes to the unexceptional peoples. Manning deserves to die, they say, because he took the side of the oppressed and not the side of the amerikan oppressors.
After the Swedish prosecutorial office dropped the case against Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, ruling that the charges of rape had no foundation, another prosecutor, many believe at the urging of the US government, demanded Assange be extradited from England in order to be questioned. Normally, extradition only applies to those who have been charged with a crime and for whom a warrant has been issued, which is most certainly not the case with Assange. But, of course, if Washington wants Assange, Washington will be sure every law is broken or bent until they get him. The Swedish puppet will do the exceptional country’s will and be paid well for its service.
Peace activists in several states had their homes invaded by FBI, computers and personal records taken, and a grand jury was convened in an attempt to indict them for supporting terrorism by their protests of Washington’s illegal wars, wars that are war crimes under the Nuremberg standard established by the US government itself.
None of this will be mentioned in July 4 patriotic speeches. The inebriated masses will be wrapped in the flag and return home full of the hubris that despises lesser foreigners, such as Muslims, Arabs, Chinese, and the French.
And no dignitary will mention that those that “we are killing over there” are mainly women, children, village elders, and aid workers. The US troops seem to specialize in soft targets like weddings, funerals, kids’ soccer games, farm houses, and schools.
Recently Washington reduced the “collateral damage” count by declaring every murdered male of military age to have been a Taliban fighter or terrorist. Obviously, Washington has no way of knowing whether they were or not, but Washington’s declaration is intended as a green light to murder Afghan males of military age.
Currently, Washington has wars underway, or occupations, or is violating the sovereignty of countries with drones and/or troops in seven Muslim countries, and is
arming rebels in Syria. All of this is being done without the constitutionally-required authorization by Congress, allegedly the people’s representatives. What a joke!
In short, in “freedom and democracy” america, the people have no voice and no rights and no representatives.
Yet, this huge deficit of democracy and liberty will pass unmentioned by July 4th orators.
The crimes against humanity, the dismantling of the US Constitution and the lawlessness both domestic and international that define 21st century amerika are the results of September 11, 2001.
Washington’s account of 9/11 is the wildest conspiracy theory known to mankind. The absurdity of Washington’s account is as follows: A few Saudi Arabians without any government’s backing or that of any intelligence service outwitted not only the CIA and the FBI but all 16 US intelligence agencies, even the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, together with the intelligence agencies of all of Washington’s NATO allies and Israel’s Mossad, which has infiltrated every radical Muslim group.
These humble Saudis of no known distinction or powers also simultaneously outwitted the National Security Council, NORAD, the Pentagon, Air Traffic Control, and caused Airport Security to fail four times in one hour on the same morning.
In other words, every part of America’s defenses failed at the same moment.
Think about that for a minute. If such a thing had actually happened, the President, Vice President, Congress, and media would have been demanding to know how such universal failure of every aspect of the national security state was possible. An investigation would have started immediately, not over a year later as a result of pressure from 9/11 families who could not be bought off with monetary payments. Such complete and total failure of every aspect of US security would mean that americans were not safe one single minute during the 40-year stand-off with the Soviet Union. At any moment the Soviets could have utterly destroyed the US and we would never have known what hit us.
In a real investigation, the 9/11 evidence would not have been illegally destroyed, and the investigation would have been conducted by experts, not by government agencies assigned a cover-up and by political hacks. The NIST report is abject nonsense. It explains nothing. It is a fabricated computer simulation of a non-event. The co-chairmen and legal counsel of the 9/11 Commission later wrote books in which they stated that information was withheld from the commission, the military lied to the commission, and the commission “was set up to fail.” Yet, these astounding admissions by the leaders of the 9/11 Commission had no impact on Congress, the presstitute media, or the public. All heads were in the sand. Please, whatever you do, don’t make us emotional weaklings face the facts.
More than one hundred firefighters, police, first responders, and building maintenance personnel report hearing and experiencing scores of explosions in the twin towers, including powerful explosions in the sub-basements prior to the collapse of the towers.
Distinguished scientists, authors of many peer-reviewed scientific papers, report finding unreacted nano-thermite in the dust from the towers, tested it for its explosive and high-heat producing ability, and reported the unequivocal results.
Seventeen hundred architects and engineers have testified in a petition to Congress that the three World Trade Center buildings were not brought down by fire and airplanes and have demanded a real scientific investigation of the cause of the buildings’ destruction.
Yet, we are left with the paradox that scientific opinion based on careful examination of the remaining evidence has been designated by the ignorant and unwashed as a “conspiracy theory,” while Washington’s absurd conspiracy theory stands as the truth of the event.
Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth headed by high-rise architect Richard Gage has driven the final nail in the coffin of Washington’s concocted conspiracy theory with its new film: “9/11: Explosive Evidence -- Experts Speak Out,” and they do speak out.
Scores of top level demolition experts and experts on the design, engineering, and construction of high rise steel structures provide the scientific, architectural, and engineering reasons that the three World Trade Center buildings came down only with the assistance of explosives that were placed and timed to remove the powerful structural support and permit the sudden collapse of the buildings. As the buildings were engineered and constructed according to known and tested principles that absolutely prevent rapid collapse, fire and structural damage that two of the three skyscrapers suffered from airliners could not possibly have caused the sudden disintegration of the three buildings.
I saw the film in Atlanta on July 2. Atlanta was a stop on the 32-city premier of the film.
The film was shown at the 7 Stages Theater on Euclid Avenue, the former Euclid Theater to which 65 years ago we kids used to ride our bikes to see Tarzan battle giant reptiles and ride elephants to victory over evil black tribesmen or evil white hunters, or to watch Randolph Scott bring justice with his six-shooter to a town ruled by black hats, or to witness the brave American soldiers liberate Europe from the Nazis. We never dreamed that we, residents of the “land of the free” would be menaced by a gestapo police state.
America’s descent into a gestapo police state could be arrested, perhaps, if americans were not so ignorant of science or were capable of even realizing that what they see with their own eyes when they watch videos of the twin towers’ destruction is buildings blowing up, not buildings falling down from structural damage. Building 7’s destruction is the total and complete picture of controlled demolition.
At the end of the powerful film, psychologists explain why the majority of a population lacks the mental and emotional strength to confront highly disturbing facts. A government that so thoroughly spies on its population as Washington does obviously knows its population’s profile and sees nothing but weakness and fear that can be manipulated.
What fact is more disturbing than the likely fact that 9/11 was a false flag event designed to provide the neoconservatives with their “new Pearl Harbor” in order to launch Washington’s Wars of Hegemony in the Middle East, and from there to Iran and to the nuclear powers: Russia and China, which are being encircled, as Iran has been, with US military bases?
What we are experiencing is a replay of the French Revolution, this time on a world stage. Napoleon, the inheritor of the French Revolution, conquered Europe several times in the effort to expand the New Order in France to all of Europe. The French Revolution was the first claim of a New World Order, but at that time the world was Europe.
Washington’s “wars of liberation” are wars of world hegemony and wars of massive profits for the military/security complex. The combination of power and money that are the motives for Washington’s concocted wars are hidden motives, wrapped in the flag, patriotic sentiments, and fear of dark-skinned demonized Muslims.
Can Architects and Engineers for 9/11 truth or any truth break through and liberate americans from the artificial reality created by government liars and a corrupt presstitute media, or are americans doomed to expire in the Matrix that has been created for them?
Perhaps the hope is that the economy will collapse under the would-be hegemons, and people who will not fight for principles and their liberty will fight for their economic survival.
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
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http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/
The Twilight of Investment
The Twilight of Investment
It’s been a few weeks since the conversation on this blog veered away from the decline and fall of American empire to comment on points raised by the recent Age of Limits conference. Glancing back over the detour, I feel it was worth making, but it’s time to circle back to that earlier theme and take it one step further—that is, to shift from how we got here and where we are to where we are headed and why.
That’s a timely topic just at the moment, because events on the other side of the Atlantic have placed some of the crucial factors in high relief. A diversity of forces have come together to turn Europe into the rolling economic debacle it is today, and not all of them are shared by industrial civilization as a whole. Still, a close look at the European crisis will make it possible to make sense of the broader predicament of the industrial world, on the one hand, and the way that predicament will likely play out in the collapse of what remains of the American economy on the other.
Let’s begin with an overview. During the global real estate bubble of the last decade, European banks invested heavily and recklessly in a great many dubious projects, and were hit hard when the bubble burst and those projects moved abruptly toward their real value, which in most cases was somewhere down close to zero. Only one European nation, Iceland, did the intelligent thing, allowed its insolvent banks to fail, paid out to those depositors who were covered by deposit insurance, and drew a line under the problem. Everywhere else, governments caved in to pressure from the rentier class—the people whose income depends on investments rather than salaries, wages, or government handouts—and from foreign governments, and assumed responsibility for all the debts of their failed banks without exception.
Countries that did so, however, found that the interest rates they had to pay to borrow in credit markets quickly soared to ruinous levels, as investors sensibly backed away from countries that were too deeply in debt. Ireland and Greece fell into this trap, and turned to the IMF and the financial agencies of the European Union for help, only to discover the hard way that the "help" consisted of loans at market rates—that is, adding more debt on top of an already crushing debt burden—with conditions attached: specifically, the conditions that were inflicted on a series of Third World countries in the wake of the 1998 financial crash, with catastrophic results.
It used to be called the Washington Consensus, though nobody’s using that term now for the "austerity measures" currently being imposed on the southern half of Europe. Basically, it amounts to the theory that the best therapy for a nation over its head in debt consists of massive cuts to government spending and the enthusiastic privatization, at fire-sale prices, of government assets. In theory, again, debtor countries that embrace this set of prescriptions are supposed to return promptly to prosperity. In practice—and it’s been tried on well over two dozen countries over the last three decades or so, so there’s an ample body of experience—debtor countries that embrace this set of prescriptions are stripped to the bare walls by their creditors and remain in an economic coma until populist politicians seize power, tell the IMF where it can put its economic ideology, and default on their unpayable debts. That’s what Iceland did, as Russia, Argentina, and any number of other countries did earlier, and it’s the only way for an overindebted country to return to prosperity.
That reality, though, is not exactly welcome news to those nations profiting off the modern form of wealth pump, in which unpayable loans usually play a large role. Whenever you see the Washington Consensus being imposed on a country, look for the nations that are advocating it most loudly and it’s a safe bet that they’ll be the countries most actively engaged in stripping assets from the debtor nation. In today’s European context, that would be Germany. It’s one of the mordant ironies of contemporary history that Europe fought two of the world’s most savage wars in the firt half of the twentieth century to deny Germany a European empire, then spent the second half of the same century allowing Germany to attain peacefully nearly every one of its war aims short of overseas colonies and a victory parade down the Champs Élysées.
Since the foundation of the Eurozone, in particular, European economic policy has been managed for German benefit even—as happens tolerably often—at the expense of other European nations. The single currency itself is an immense boon to the German economy, which spent decades struggling with exchange rates that made German exports more expensive, and foreign imports more affordable, to Germany’s detriment. The peseta, the lira, the franc and other European currencies can no longer respond to trade imbalances by losing value relative to the deutschmark now that it’s all one currency. The resulting system—combined with the free trade regulations demanded by economic orthodoxy and enforced by bureaucrats in Brussels—has functioned as a highly efficient wealth pump, and has allowed Germany and a few of its northern European neighbors to prosper while southern Europe stumbles deeper into economic collapse.
In one sense, then, it’s no wonder that German governmental officials are insisting at the top of their lungs that other European countries have to bail out failing banks and then use tax revenues to pay off the resulting debt, even if that requires those countries to follow what amounts to a recipe for national economic suicide. The end of the wealth pump might not mean the endgame for Germany’s current prosperity, but it would certainly make matters much more difficult for the German economy, and thus for the future prospects not only of Angela Merkel but of a great many other German politicians. Now even the most blinkered politician ought to recognize that trying to squeeze the last drop of wealth out of southern Europe is simply going to speed up the arrival of the populist politicians mentioned a few paragraphs back, but I suppose it’s possible that this generation of German politicians are too clueless or too harried to think of that.
Still, there may be more going on, because all these disputes are taking place in a wider context.
The speculative bubble that popped so dramatically in 2008 was by most measures the biggest in human history, considerably bigger than the one that blew the global economy to smithereens in 1929. Even so, the events of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed it remain the gold standard of economic crisis, and the managers of the world’s major central banks in 2008 were not unaware of the factors that turned the 1929 crash into what remains, even by today’s standards, the worst economic trauma of modern times. Most of those factors amount to catastrophic mistakes on the part of central bankers, so it’s just as well that today’s central bankers are paying attention.
The key to understanding the Great Depression lies in understanding what exactly it was that went haywire in 1929. In the United States, for example, all the factors that made for ample prosperity in the 1920s were still solidly in place in 1930. Nothing had gone wrong with the farms, factories, mines and oil wells that undergirded the American economy, nor was there any shortage of laborers ready to work or consumers eager to consume. What happened was that the money economy—the system of abstract tokens that industrial societies use to allocate goods and services among people—had frozen up. Since most economic activity in an industrial society depends on the flow of money, and there are no systems in place to take over from the money economy if that grinds to a halt, a problem with the distribution and movement of money made it impossible for the real economy of goods and services to function.
That was what the world’s central bankers were trying to prevent in 2008 and the years immediately afterward, and it’s what they’re still trying to prevent today. That’s what the trillions of dollars that were loaned into existence by the Fed, the Bank of England, and other central banks, and used to prop up failing financial institutions, were meant to do, and it may well be part what’s behind the frantic attempts already mentioned to stave off defaults and prevent banks from paying the normal price for the resoundingly stupid investments of the former boom—though of course the unwillingness of bankers to pay that price with their own careers, and the convenience of large banks as instruments of wealth pumping, also have large roles there.
In 1929 and 1930, panic selling in the US stock market erased millions of dollars in notional wealth—yes, that was a lot of money then—and made raising capital next to impossible for businesses and individuals alike. In 1931, the crisis spread into the banking industry, kicking off a chain reaction of bank failures that pushed the global money system into cardiac arrest and forced the economies of the industrial world to their knees. The world’s central bankers set out to prevent a repeat of that experience. It’s considered impolite in many circles to mention this, but by and large they succeeded; the global economy is still in a world of hurt, no question, but the complete paralysis of the monetary system that made the Great Depression what it was has so far been avoided.
There’s a downside to that, however, which is that keeping the monetary system from freezing up has done nothing to deal with the underlying problem driving the current crisis, the buildup of an immense dead weight of loans and other financial instruments that are supposed to be worth something, and aren’t. Balance sheets throughout the global economy are loaded to the bursting point with securitized loans that will never be paid back, asset-backed securities backed by worthless assets, derivatives of derivatives of derivatives wished into being by what amounts to make-believe, and equally valuable financial exotica acquired during the late bubble by people who were too giddy with paper profits to notice their actual value, which in most cases is essentially zero.
What makes this burden so lethal is that financial institutions of all kinds are allowed to treat this worthless paper as though it still has some approximation of its former theoretical value, even though everyone in the financial industry knows how much it’s really worth. Forcing firms to value it at market rates would cause a catastrophic string of bankruptcies; even forcing firms to admit to how much of it they have, and of what kinds, could easily trigger bank runs and financial panic; while it remains hidden, though, nobody knows when enough of it will blow up and cause another financial firm to implode—and so the trust that’s essential to the functioning of a money economy goes away in a hurry. Nobody wants to loan money to a firm whose other assets might suddenly turn into twinkle dust; for that matter, nobody wants to let their own cash reserves decline, in case their other assets turn into the same illiquid substance; and so the flow of money through the economy slows to a creep, and fails to do the job it’s supposed to do of facilitating the production and exchange of goods and services.
That’s the risk you take when you try to stop a financial panic without tackling the underlying burden of worthless assets generated by the preceding bubble. Much more often than not, in the past, it’s been a risk worth running; if you can only hold on until the impact of the panic fades, economic growth in some nonfinancial sector of the economy picks up, the financial industry can replace its bogus assets with something different and presumably better, and away you go. That’s what happened in the wake of the tech-stock panic of 2000 and 2001: the Fed dropped interest rates, made plenty of money available to financial firms in trouble, and did everything else it could think of to postpone bankruptcies until the housing bubble started boosting the economy again. It doesn’t always work—Japan has been stuck in permanent recession in the wake of its gargantuan 1990 stock market crash, precisely because it didn’t work—but in American economic history, at least, it’s tended to work more often than not.
Still, there was a major warning sign in the wake of the tech-stock fiasco that should have been heeded, and was not: what boosted the economy anew wasn’t an economic expansion in some nonfinancial sector, but a second and even larger speculative bubble in the financial sphere. I discussed in posts late last year (here and here) ecological economist Herman Daly’s comments about shortages of "bankable projects"—that is, projects that are likely to bring in enough of a return on investment to pay back loans with interest and still make a profit for somebody. In an expanding economy, bankable projects are easy to find, since it’s precisely the expansion of an expanding economy that makes a positive return on investment the normal way of things. If you flood your economy with cheap credit to counter the aftermath of a speculative bubble, and the only thing that comes out of it is an even bigger speculative bubble, something significant has happened to the mechanisms of economic growth.
More specifically, something other than a paralysis of the money system has happened to the mechanisms of economic growth. That’s the unlearned lesson of the last decade. In the wake of the 2001 tech stock crash, and then again in the aftermath of 2008’s even larger financial panic, the Fed flooded the American economy with quantities of cheap credit so immense that any viable project for producing goods and services ought to have been able to find ample capital to get off the ground. Instead of an entrepreneurial boom, though, both periods saw money pile up in the financial industry, because there was a spectacular shortage of viable projects outside it. Outside of manipulating money and gaming the system, there simply isn’t much that makes a profit any more.
Next week we’ll discuss why that is happening. In the meantime, though, it’s important to note what the twilight of investment means for the kick-the-can strategy that’s guiding the Fed and other central banks in their efforts to fix the world economy. That strategy depends on the belief that sooner or later, even the most battered economy will finally begin to improve, and the upswing will make it possible to replace the temporary patches on the economy with something more solid. It’s been a viable strategy fairly often in the past, but it worked poorly in 2001 and it doesn’t appear to be working at all at this point. Thus it’s probable that the Fed is treading water, waiting for a rescue that isn’t on its way; what will happen as that latter point becomes clear is something we’ll be exploring at length later on in this series of posts.
Monday, June 11, 2012
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http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/
Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush
I’m not sure how many people outside the writer’s trade realize how much of writing is a cooperative process. That’s as true of those of us who write late at night in the privacy of a silent room as it is of the more gregarious sort of writer, the kind you can expect to find in a crowded café, surrounded by voices and music and the clatter of street noises coming in the door: every writer is simply one voice in an ongoing conversation that includes many other voices, some living, some dead and some not yet born.
As I write this week’s post, for example, it’s difficult not to notice some of the other voices in this particular conversation. The bookshelf an easy reach to my left has a row of brightly colored trade paperbacks by some of my fellow peak oil authors—William Catton, Richard Heinberg, Jim Kunstler, Sharon Astyk, Dmitry Orlov, Carolyn Baker and more. Close by, the rolling brown landscape of Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History, all ten volumes, confronts the twin black monoliths of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, while Giambattista Vico’s New Science offers an ironic Italian commentary from one side. Other shelves elsewhere in the room contribute other voices: biology and ecology textbooks from my college days; appropriate tech manuals from the Seventies brimfull of unfulfilled hopes; old texts on the magical philosophy that forms the usually unmentioned foundation from which all my thinking unfolds; and a great deal more. Poets, as often as not, these days: Robinson Jeffers, William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot. Without the contributions of all these other voices, the conversation and thus my contributions to it would not be what it is.
Still, there are times when the conversational nature of what I’m doing becomes more obvious and more direct than usual, and one of those happened the weekend before last, at the Age of Limits conference I discussed in last week’s post. One of my presentations to that conference was a talk entitled "How Civilizations Fall;" longtime readers of this blog will know from the title that what I was talking about that afternoon was the theory of catabolic collapse, which outlines the way that human societies on the way down cannibalize their own infrastructure, maintaining themselves for the present by denying themselves a future. I finished talking about catabolic collapse and started fielding questions, of which there were plenty, and somewhere in the conversation that followed one of the other participants made a comment. I don’t even remember the exact words, but it was something like, "So what you’re saying is that what we need to do, individually, is to go through collapse right away."
"Exactly," I said. "Collapse now, and avoid the rush."
Outside of that conversation, I doubt I would have thought of the phrase at all. By the end of the conference, though, it was on the lips of a good many of the attendees, and for good reason: I can’t think of a better way to sum up the work ahead of us right now, as industrial society lurches down the far side of its trajectory through time. Longtime readers of this blog know most of the reasoning behind that suggestion, but it may be worth walking through it again step by step.
First, industrial society was only possible because our species briefly had access to an immense supply of cheap, highly concentrated fuel with a very high net energy—that is, the amount of energy needed to extract the fuel was only a very small fraction of the energy the fuel itself provided. Starting in the 18th century, fossil fuels—first coal, then coal and petroleum, then coal, petroleum and natural gas—gave us that energy source. All three of these fossil fuels represent millions of years of stored sunlight, captured by the everyday miracle of photosynthesis and concentrated within the earth by geological processes that took place long before our species evolved. They are nonrenewable over any time scale that matters to human beings, and we are using them up at astonishing rates.
Second, while it’s easy to suggest that we can simply replace fossil fuels with some other energy source and keep industrial civilization running along its present course, putting that comfortable notion into practice has turned out to be effectively impossible. No other energy source available to our species combines the high net energy, high concentration, and great abundance that a replacement for fossil fuel would need. Those energy sources that are abundant (for example, solar energy) are diffuse and yield little net energy, while those that are highly concentrated (for example, fissionable uranium) are not abundant, and also have serious problems with net energy. Abundant fossil fuels currently provide an "energy subsidy" to alternative energy sources that make them look more efficient than they are—there would be far fewer wind turbines, for example, if they had to be manufactured, installed, and maintained using wind energy. Furthermore, our entire energy infrastructure is geared to use fossil fuels and would have to be replaced, at a cost of countless trillions of dollars, in order to replace fossil fuels with something else.
Third, these problems leave only one viable alternative, which is to decrease our energy use, per capita and absolutely, to get our energy needs down to levels that could be maintained over the long term on renewable sources. The first steps in this process were begun in the 1970s, with good results, and might have made it possible to descend from the extravagant heights of industrialism in a gradual way, keeping a great many of the benefits of the industrial age intact as a gift for the future. Politics closed off that option in the decade that followed, however, and the world’s industrial nations went hurtling down a different path, burning through the earth’s remaining fossil fuel reserves at an accelerating pace and trusting that economic abstractions such as the free market would suspend the laws of physics and geology for their benefit. At this point, more than three decades after that misguided choice, industrial civilization is so far into overshoot that a controlled descent is no longer an option; the only path remaining is the familiar historical process of decline and fall.
Fourth, while it’s fashionable these days to imagine that this process will take the form of a sudden cataclysm that will obliterate today’s world overnight, all the testimony of history and a great many lines of evidence from other sources suggests that this is the least likely outcome of our predicament. Across a wide range of geographical scales and technological levels, civilizations take an average of one to three centuries to complete the process of decline and fall, and there is no valid reason to assume that ours will be any exception. The curve of decline, to be sure, is anything but smooth; it has a fractal structure, taking the form of a succession of crises on many different scales, affecting different regions, social classes, and communities in different ways, interspersed with periods of stabilization and even partial recovery that are equally variable in scale, duration, and relevance to different places and groups. This ragged arc of decline is already under way; it can be expected to accelerate in the months, years, and decades to come; and it defines the deindustrial age ahead of us.
Fifth, individuals, families, and communities faced with this predicament still have choices left. The most important of those choices parallels the one faced, or more precisely not faced, at the end of the 1970s: to make the descent in a controlled way, beginning now, or to cling to their current lifestyles until the system that currently supports those lifestyles falls away from beneath their feet. The skills, resources, and lifeways needed to get by in a disintegrating industrial society are radically different from those that made for a successful and comfortable life in the prosperous world of the recent past, and a great many of the requirements of an age of decline come with prolonged learning curves and a high price for failure. Starting right away to practice the skills, assemble the resources, and follow the lifeways that will be the key to survival in a deindustrializing world offers the best hope of getting through the difficult years ahead with some degree of dignity and grace.
Collapse now, in other words, and avoid the rush.
There’s a fair amount of subtlety to the strategy defined by those words. As our society stumbles down the ragged curve of its decline, more and more people are going to lose the ability to maintain what counts as a normal lifestyle—or, rather, what counted as a normal lifestyle in the recent past, and is no longer quite so normal today as it once was. Each new round of crisis will push more people further down the slope; minor and localized crises will affect a relatively smaller number of people, while major crises affecting whole nations will affect a much larger number. As each crisis hits, though, there will be a rush of people toward whatever seems to offer a way out, and as each crisis recedes, there will be another rush of people toward whatever seems to offer a way back to what used to be normal. The vast majority of people who join either rush will fail. Remember the tens of thousands of people who applied for a handful of burger-flipping jobs during the recent housing crash, because that was the only job opening they could find? That’s the sort of thing I mean.
The way to avoid the rush is simple enough: figure out how you will be able to live after the next wave of crisis hits, and to the extent that you can, start living that way now. If you’re worried about the long-term prospects for your job—and you probably should be, no matter what you do for a living—now is the time to figure out how you will get by if the job goes away and you have to make do on much less money. For most people, that means getting out of debt, making sure the place you live costs you much less than you can afford, and picking up some practical skills that will allow you to meet some of your own needs and have opportunities for barter and informal employment. It can mean quite a bit more, depending on your situation, needs, and existing skills. It should certainly involve spending less money—and that money, once it isn’t needed to pay off any debts you have, can go to weatherizing your home and making other sensible preparations that will make life easier for you later on.
For the vast majority of people, it probably needs to be said, collapsing now does not mean buying a survival homestead somewhere off in the country. That’s a popular daydream, and in some well-off circles it’s long been a popular way to go have a midlife crisis, but even if you have the funds—and most of us don’t—if you don’t already have the dizzyingly complex skill set needed to run a viable farm, or aren’t willing to drop everything else to apprentice with an organic farmer right now, it’s not a realistic option. In all likelihood you’ll be experiencing the next round of crises where you are right now, so the logical place to have your own personal collapse now, ahead of the rush, is right there, in the place where you live, with the people you know and the resources you have to hand.
Now of course the strategy of collapsing ahead of the rush is not going to be a popular thing to suggest. When I’ve brought it up, as of course I’ve done more than once, I’ve inevitably fielded a flurry of protests, by turns angry and anguished, insisting that it’s not reasonable to expect anybody to do that, and how can I be so heartless as to suggest it? Fair enough; let’s take a look at the alternatives.
One alternative strategy that gets brought up now and then has at least the advantage of utter honesty. It has two parts. The first part, while the benefits of industrial society are still available, is to enjoy them; the second, when those benefits go away, is to die. Often, though not always, the people who bring up this option have serious health conditions that will probably be fatal in a deindustrial world. I have no quarrel with those who choose this path; it’s an honest response to a very challenging predicament—though I admit I wonder how many people who say they’ve chosen it will be comfortable with their choice once part one gives way to part two.
The problem with most other proposed strategies for dealing with our predicament is that whatever they claim to do in theory, in practice, they amount to these same two steps. Consider the very widely held notion that advocating for some alternative energy technology is a workable response to the twilight of fossil fuels. I have no quarrel, again, with people who are actually doing something concrete to get some alternative energy technology into use—for example, the people whose enthusiasm for the Bussard fusion reactor leads them to build a prototype in their basement, or to help fund one of the half dozen or so experimenters who have already done this—but that’s rarely what this approach entails; rather, it seems to consist mostly of posting long screeds on the internet insisting that thorium reactors, or algal biodiesel, or what have you, will solve all our energy problems.
As Zen masters like to say, talk does not cook the rice, and blog posts do not build reactors; with every day that passes, despite any amount of online debate, more oil, coal, and natural gas are extracted from the planet’s dwindling endowment, and the next round of crises comes closer. In the same way, those who put their hopes on grand political transformations, or conveniently undefinable leaps of consciousness, or the timely arrival of Jesus or the space brothers or somebody else who will spare us the necessity of inhabiting a future that is the exact result of our own collective actions, are not doing anything that hasn’t been tried over and over again in the decades just past, without doing anything to slow the headlong rush into overshoot or the opening stages of decline and fall.
Check out the glossy magazines and well-funded websites dedicated to portraying "positive futures" and you can find the same sort of thinking taken to its logical extreme: soothing pablum about this or that person doing this or that wonderful thing, and this or that deep thinker coming up with this or that wonderful idea, all of it reminiscent of nothing so much as the cheerful tunes the Titanic’s band played to keep the passengers calm as water poured into the hull. There’s quite a lot of money to be made these days insisting that we can have a shiny new future despite all evidence to the contrary, and pulling factoids out of context to defend that increasingly dubious claim; as industrial society moves down the curve of decline, I suspect, this will become even more popular, since it will make it easier for those who haven’t yet had their own personal collapse to pretend that it can’t happen to them.
The same principle applies to the people who donate to environmental causes and put solar panels on their roofs in the same spirit that led medieval Christians to buy high-priced indulgences from the Church to cancel out their sins. T.S. Eliot countered that sort of attitude unanswerably when he described salvation as "a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything". What we’re discussing belongs to a much less exalted plane, but the same rule applies: if you’re trying to exempt yourself from the end of the industrial age, nothing you can do can ever be enough. Let go, let yourself fall forward into the deindustrial future, and matters are different.
It’s difficult to think of anything more frightening, or more necessary. "In order to arrive at what you do not know"—that’s Eliot again—"you must go by a way which is the way of ignorance. In order to possess what you do not possess, you must go by the way of dispossession." Which is to say: collapse now, and avoid the rush.
Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush
I’m not sure how many people outside the writer’s trade realize how much of writing is a cooperative process. That’s as true of those of us who write late at night in the privacy of a silent room as it is of the more gregarious sort of writer, the kind you can expect to find in a crowded café, surrounded by voices and music and the clatter of street noises coming in the door: every writer is simply one voice in an ongoing conversation that includes many other voices, some living, some dead and some not yet born.
As I write this week’s post, for example, it’s difficult not to notice some of the other voices in this particular conversation. The bookshelf an easy reach to my left has a row of brightly colored trade paperbacks by some of my fellow peak oil authors—William Catton, Richard Heinberg, Jim Kunstler, Sharon Astyk, Dmitry Orlov, Carolyn Baker and more. Close by, the rolling brown landscape of Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History, all ten volumes, confronts the twin black monoliths of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, while Giambattista Vico’s New Science offers an ironic Italian commentary from one side. Other shelves elsewhere in the room contribute other voices: biology and ecology textbooks from my college days; appropriate tech manuals from the Seventies brimfull of unfulfilled hopes; old texts on the magical philosophy that forms the usually unmentioned foundation from which all my thinking unfolds; and a great deal more. Poets, as often as not, these days: Robinson Jeffers, William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot. Without the contributions of all these other voices, the conversation and thus my contributions to it would not be what it is.
Still, there are times when the conversational nature of what I’m doing becomes more obvious and more direct than usual, and one of those happened the weekend before last, at the Age of Limits conference I discussed in last week’s post. One of my presentations to that conference was a talk entitled "How Civilizations Fall;" longtime readers of this blog will know from the title that what I was talking about that afternoon was the theory of catabolic collapse, which outlines the way that human societies on the way down cannibalize their own infrastructure, maintaining themselves for the present by denying themselves a future. I finished talking about catabolic collapse and started fielding questions, of which there were plenty, and somewhere in the conversation that followed one of the other participants made a comment. I don’t even remember the exact words, but it was something like, "So what you’re saying is that what we need to do, individually, is to go through collapse right away."
"Exactly," I said. "Collapse now, and avoid the rush."
Outside of that conversation, I doubt I would have thought of the phrase at all. By the end of the conference, though, it was on the lips of a good many of the attendees, and for good reason: I can’t think of a better way to sum up the work ahead of us right now, as industrial society lurches down the far side of its trajectory through time. Longtime readers of this blog know most of the reasoning behind that suggestion, but it may be worth walking through it again step by step.
First, industrial society was only possible because our species briefly had access to an immense supply of cheap, highly concentrated fuel with a very high net energy—that is, the amount of energy needed to extract the fuel was only a very small fraction of the energy the fuel itself provided. Starting in the 18th century, fossil fuels—first coal, then coal and petroleum, then coal, petroleum and natural gas—gave us that energy source. All three of these fossil fuels represent millions of years of stored sunlight, captured by the everyday miracle of photosynthesis and concentrated within the earth by geological processes that took place long before our species evolved. They are nonrenewable over any time scale that matters to human beings, and we are using them up at astonishing rates.
Second, while it’s easy to suggest that we can simply replace fossil fuels with some other energy source and keep industrial civilization running along its present course, putting that comfortable notion into practice has turned out to be effectively impossible. No other energy source available to our species combines the high net energy, high concentration, and great abundance that a replacement for fossil fuel would need. Those energy sources that are abundant (for example, solar energy) are diffuse and yield little net energy, while those that are highly concentrated (for example, fissionable uranium) are not abundant, and also have serious problems with net energy. Abundant fossil fuels currently provide an "energy subsidy" to alternative energy sources that make them look more efficient than they are—there would be far fewer wind turbines, for example, if they had to be manufactured, installed, and maintained using wind energy. Furthermore, our entire energy infrastructure is geared to use fossil fuels and would have to be replaced, at a cost of countless trillions of dollars, in order to replace fossil fuels with something else.
Third, these problems leave only one viable alternative, which is to decrease our energy use, per capita and absolutely, to get our energy needs down to levels that could be maintained over the long term on renewable sources. The first steps in this process were begun in the 1970s, with good results, and might have made it possible to descend from the extravagant heights of industrialism in a gradual way, keeping a great many of the benefits of the industrial age intact as a gift for the future. Politics closed off that option in the decade that followed, however, and the world’s industrial nations went hurtling down a different path, burning through the earth’s remaining fossil fuel reserves at an accelerating pace and trusting that economic abstractions such as the free market would suspend the laws of physics and geology for their benefit. At this point, more than three decades after that misguided choice, industrial civilization is so far into overshoot that a controlled descent is no longer an option; the only path remaining is the familiar historical process of decline and fall.
Fourth, while it’s fashionable these days to imagine that this process will take the form of a sudden cataclysm that will obliterate today’s world overnight, all the testimony of history and a great many lines of evidence from other sources suggests that this is the least likely outcome of our predicament. Across a wide range of geographical scales and technological levels, civilizations take an average of one to three centuries to complete the process of decline and fall, and there is no valid reason to assume that ours will be any exception. The curve of decline, to be sure, is anything but smooth; it has a fractal structure, taking the form of a succession of crises on many different scales, affecting different regions, social classes, and communities in different ways, interspersed with periods of stabilization and even partial recovery that are equally variable in scale, duration, and relevance to different places and groups. This ragged arc of decline is already under way; it can be expected to accelerate in the months, years, and decades to come; and it defines the deindustrial age ahead of us.
Fifth, individuals, families, and communities faced with this predicament still have choices left. The most important of those choices parallels the one faced, or more precisely not faced, at the end of the 1970s: to make the descent in a controlled way, beginning now, or to cling to their current lifestyles until the system that currently supports those lifestyles falls away from beneath their feet. The skills, resources, and lifeways needed to get by in a disintegrating industrial society are radically different from those that made for a successful and comfortable life in the prosperous world of the recent past, and a great many of the requirements of an age of decline come with prolonged learning curves and a high price for failure. Starting right away to practice the skills, assemble the resources, and follow the lifeways that will be the key to survival in a deindustrializing world offers the best hope of getting through the difficult years ahead with some degree of dignity and grace.
Collapse now, in other words, and avoid the rush.
There’s a fair amount of subtlety to the strategy defined by those words. As our society stumbles down the ragged curve of its decline, more and more people are going to lose the ability to maintain what counts as a normal lifestyle—or, rather, what counted as a normal lifestyle in the recent past, and is no longer quite so normal today as it once was. Each new round of crisis will push more people further down the slope; minor and localized crises will affect a relatively smaller number of people, while major crises affecting whole nations will affect a much larger number. As each crisis hits, though, there will be a rush of people toward whatever seems to offer a way out, and as each crisis recedes, there will be another rush of people toward whatever seems to offer a way back to what used to be normal. The vast majority of people who join either rush will fail. Remember the tens of thousands of people who applied for a handful of burger-flipping jobs during the recent housing crash, because that was the only job opening they could find? That’s the sort of thing I mean.
The way to avoid the rush is simple enough: figure out how you will be able to live after the next wave of crisis hits, and to the extent that you can, start living that way now. If you’re worried about the long-term prospects for your job—and you probably should be, no matter what you do for a living—now is the time to figure out how you will get by if the job goes away and you have to make do on much less money. For most people, that means getting out of debt, making sure the place you live costs you much less than you can afford, and picking up some practical skills that will allow you to meet some of your own needs and have opportunities for barter and informal employment. It can mean quite a bit more, depending on your situation, needs, and existing skills. It should certainly involve spending less money—and that money, once it isn’t needed to pay off any debts you have, can go to weatherizing your home and making other sensible preparations that will make life easier for you later on.
For the vast majority of people, it probably needs to be said, collapsing now does not mean buying a survival homestead somewhere off in the country. That’s a popular daydream, and in some well-off circles it’s long been a popular way to go have a midlife crisis, but even if you have the funds—and most of us don’t—if you don’t already have the dizzyingly complex skill set needed to run a viable farm, or aren’t willing to drop everything else to apprentice with an organic farmer right now, it’s not a realistic option. In all likelihood you’ll be experiencing the next round of crises where you are right now, so the logical place to have your own personal collapse now, ahead of the rush, is right there, in the place where you live, with the people you know and the resources you have to hand.
Now of course the strategy of collapsing ahead of the rush is not going to be a popular thing to suggest. When I’ve brought it up, as of course I’ve done more than once, I’ve inevitably fielded a flurry of protests, by turns angry and anguished, insisting that it’s not reasonable to expect anybody to do that, and how can I be so heartless as to suggest it? Fair enough; let’s take a look at the alternatives.
One alternative strategy that gets brought up now and then has at least the advantage of utter honesty. It has two parts. The first part, while the benefits of industrial society are still available, is to enjoy them; the second, when those benefits go away, is to die. Often, though not always, the people who bring up this option have serious health conditions that will probably be fatal in a deindustrial world. I have no quarrel with those who choose this path; it’s an honest response to a very challenging predicament—though I admit I wonder how many people who say they’ve chosen it will be comfortable with their choice once part one gives way to part two.
The problem with most other proposed strategies for dealing with our predicament is that whatever they claim to do in theory, in practice, they amount to these same two steps. Consider the very widely held notion that advocating for some alternative energy technology is a workable response to the twilight of fossil fuels. I have no quarrel, again, with people who are actually doing something concrete to get some alternative energy technology into use—for example, the people whose enthusiasm for the Bussard fusion reactor leads them to build a prototype in their basement, or to help fund one of the half dozen or so experimenters who have already done this—but that’s rarely what this approach entails; rather, it seems to consist mostly of posting long screeds on the internet insisting that thorium reactors, or algal biodiesel, or what have you, will solve all our energy problems.
As Zen masters like to say, talk does not cook the rice, and blog posts do not build reactors; with every day that passes, despite any amount of online debate, more oil, coal, and natural gas are extracted from the planet’s dwindling endowment, and the next round of crises comes closer. In the same way, those who put their hopes on grand political transformations, or conveniently undefinable leaps of consciousness, or the timely arrival of Jesus or the space brothers or somebody else who will spare us the necessity of inhabiting a future that is the exact result of our own collective actions, are not doing anything that hasn’t been tried over and over again in the decades just past, without doing anything to slow the headlong rush into overshoot or the opening stages of decline and fall.
Check out the glossy magazines and well-funded websites dedicated to portraying "positive futures" and you can find the same sort of thinking taken to its logical extreme: soothing pablum about this or that person doing this or that wonderful thing, and this or that deep thinker coming up with this or that wonderful idea, all of it reminiscent of nothing so much as the cheerful tunes the Titanic’s band played to keep the passengers calm as water poured into the hull. There’s quite a lot of money to be made these days insisting that we can have a shiny new future despite all evidence to the contrary, and pulling factoids out of context to defend that increasingly dubious claim; as industrial society moves down the curve of decline, I suspect, this will become even more popular, since it will make it easier for those who haven’t yet had their own personal collapse to pretend that it can’t happen to them.
The same principle applies to the people who donate to environmental causes and put solar panels on their roofs in the same spirit that led medieval Christians to buy high-priced indulgences from the Church to cancel out their sins. T.S. Eliot countered that sort of attitude unanswerably when he described salvation as "a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything". What we’re discussing belongs to a much less exalted plane, but the same rule applies: if you’re trying to exempt yourself from the end of the industrial age, nothing you can do can ever be enough. Let go, let yourself fall forward into the deindustrial future, and matters are different.
It’s difficult to think of anything more frightening, or more necessary. "In order to arrive at what you do not know"—that’s Eliot again—"you must go by a way which is the way of ignorance. In order to possess what you do not possess, you must go by the way of dispossession." Which is to say: collapse now, and avoid the rush.
Sunday, June 10, 2012
SC111-13
http://survivalacres.com/blog/some-things-you-may-not-know/#more-3124
Some Things You May Not Know
I’ve rerun the numbers and have once again, determined that less then 1/10 of 1% of the population of the United States is adequately preparing for collapse.
Less then 3,000,000 Americans are making sufficient preparations for the future, despite the accelerating evidence that the collapse is gaining significant momentum.
Another way to represent this figure is 99.99% of the people remain totally dependent upon the whole of the system to provide them with the basic requirements for their daily existence.
This is the true meaning of the off-abused “we are the 99%“: whole system co-dependents. Apply this to “Occupy” and it still fits perfectly.
Other points to ponder: 1/10 of 1% cannot possibly assist the remaining 99.99% in crisis, nor can they even protect themselves from the 99.99%.
The 99.99% survive (exist) not because of all the other 99% co-dependents — but because of a very tiny fraction of actual “providers” (food, fuel, energy, water, etc.) that make life possible for them. Most, if not all these providers are themselves are whole system co-dependents.
The whole of society exists because this tiny fraction is engaged in cooperative enterprises for the basic necessities you need (they provide it, you buy it).
This means that a very high percentage of the 99.99% are not needed (don’t shoot the messenger). Ponder now why so many lives are simply wasted so easily and you will start to understand how life has become so cheap.
A society built upon this design cannot endure anything very long. Even in a perfect world, it is a recipe for disaster.
This shows up virtually everywhere you care to look. Homelessness, indebtedness, bankruptcy, poverty, inequality, war (competition for resources), inflation, injustice and tyranny.
The “haves” of this design become the plantation owners and control virtually everything — food, water, government, media, education, resources, supplies, production, war, propaganda — virtually everything. The rest are all indentured co-dependent slaves begging for crumbs.
The 99% have zero “voice” or effect (despite many efforts) — and remain utterly ignored as bleating cattle in a stockyard.
——–
All efforts to become independent of this life-penalizing paradigm are swiftly crushed and extinguished. A “third party”, or “free state” or even tiny efforts to try and bypass the corporate / federal symbiosis level of “consumer protection” (control) through direct marketing or efforts brings down the wrath of the Corporate State.
Tyranny and oppression of free expression, independence and autonomy swiftly crushes any budding opposition.
Tyranny perpetuates the oppressive cycle “total dependency and reliance” of the 99%, who for the most part, cannot even comprehend any other type or form of existence. Most become their own jailers, in perpetual bondage to unenlightened belief systems.
——–
The gatekeepers of this “Great Society” take on all roles and responsibilities for the daily existence of their prisoners. Wars must be repetitively fought against manufactured “enemies”, providing the illusion that the “society” is just, true and “chosen” and therefore “worth protecting”.
Enemies are manufactured as required. Anything that does not fully identify with the Great Society is demonized, debased and dehumanized leading to war.
Wars also serve to establish new territory and control over people, nations and resources, furthering the co-dependency and “justification” for even more war and control.
——–
Entire generations must pass to allow the people to “forget” who and what they once were. Suppressing knowledge, history and culture become common practices, ensuring that only sanctioned and approved history and “beliefs” are passed from generation to generation.
Eventually (now), all this becomes completely unmanageable and uncontrollable, as various factions fight and vie for control in the upper echelons of the plantation. The 99% are thrown to the wolves, over and over again, losing “rights”, freedom, liberty, independence and “choice”.
Many, many “requirements” are forced upon the 99% through newly enacted fiat, executive orders, laws, regulations, permits, fees, licenses and restrictions.
The gatekeepers employ vast standing armies of police, military and “security” personnel to enforce these restrictions upon the 99%, who in turn like all jailers, begin to abuse the people, assuming additional self-appointed roles and “responsibilities”.
This leads to growing dissent and division, conflict and crime with the 99%. The duplicity practiced (double-standard) is obvious to all, but the people have become totally incapacitated and helpless, entirely dependent upon virtually everything for their daily existence and can offer little meaningful resistance.
Eventually the dissent and division leads to civil conflict, a force of arms (guns and assassinations), which is often delayed through distractions (sports, television, entertainment) but not forever, resulting in much bloodshed and suffering.
The whole of the people suffer as the conflicts escalate, resentment and dissent, division grows and retribution and repression is enacted.
The 99% are a vast, seething mob by now, uncontrollable, nearly inconsolable and incapable of self-government or sufficiency. They still remain co-dependents but will blindly wreck this relationship in their ignorance.
Society collapses as things spiral out of control, rebuilds from the ashes and reasserts itself once again, following nearly identical the same patterns as before.
Climate / environment collapse is now accelerating this decline, exaberating the dependency, and dramatically increasing the likelihood that “rebuilding” anything like before as extremely unlikely.
Resource depletion will also make rebuilding anything like before very unlikely and even unreachable.
This will lead to an even worse societal arrangement on orders of magnitude worse. Concepts such as freedom, liberty, democracy, justice, fairness and individual expression do not survive under extreme conditions of crisis, they are swiftly extinguished.
The near-total co-dependency of the 99% will mean that only the most brutal, violent and viscous will survive, elevating themselves to the new “gatekeepers” of the new society (of what remains) to exercise control over the rest.
———
The desired peaceful transition to self-sufficiency, alternative energy, agrarian community is very unlikely, mostly due in part to the refusal of the 99% to take these necessary steps now, or to support those who are trying.
The current gatekeepers are suppressing the knowledge and awareness of these requirements and the likely outcome of what this means. They are now “victims” of their own propaganda and are the architects of their own destruction.
The stage has now been set, the players put into motion and the script is fully written. It’s actually an old story and will play out as before, except we now have climate / resource collapse to spice things up.
Technology will be mostly employed to manage and control the 99%, restricting their declining freedom and options even further. A sizable percentage will be killed and imprisoned as long as resources allow.
Every effort will be made to preserve the gatekeepers, convincing even the 99% that this is right and just to do so. Most will agree and cooperate, supporting the imprisonment and death of “dissenters”.
——–
This future is a guarantee — the end-result of removing the independence and self-sufficiency of the whole of the people worldwide into the hands of the few, controlling and abusing all of the resources and the planetary environment.
The aggregated accumulation of resource depletion, environmental collapse and climate collapse is now so severe that this will all occur within a single generation.
——–
Optimism is not warranted in the face of mounting evidence. A precipitous decline of 85% of Americans engaged in personal preparations has already occurred (this year). The “blame” for this is irrelevant. The meaning is not.
We are just 7% away from critical “state shifts” within the planetary environment. Only fools would believe that the present inertia in motion could be stopped in time. Global governments are incapable of acting swiftly or responsibly. Corporate control is increasing, not decreasing. Abuse of the planetary environment is accelerating, not decelerating. Evidence and facts are also increasing, yet denial, ignorance and disbelief (cognitive dissonance) is increasing, not decreasing.
The world’s top scientist are warning that failure to listen to the results and analysis being obtained now spell doom for the world’s civilization. They have further widely acknowledged that a “near-total failure” conditions exists on the climate and the environment, despite numerous (tens of thousands) of studies and analysis.
The world is not preparing within the 99%, yet evidence exist that the 1% is fully aware of what is happening, furiously preparing. It should not come as startling news that none of you are being included in their plans. Do not forget that a very high percentage of the 99% are not needed.
Some Things You May Not Know
I’ve rerun the numbers and have once again, determined that less then 1/10 of 1% of the population of the United States is adequately preparing for collapse.
Less then 3,000,000 Americans are making sufficient preparations for the future, despite the accelerating evidence that the collapse is gaining significant momentum.
Another way to represent this figure is 99.99% of the people remain totally dependent upon the whole of the system to provide them with the basic requirements for their daily existence.
This is the true meaning of the off-abused “we are the 99%“: whole system co-dependents. Apply this to “Occupy” and it still fits perfectly.
Other points to ponder: 1/10 of 1% cannot possibly assist the remaining 99.99% in crisis, nor can they even protect themselves from the 99.99%.
The 99.99% survive (exist) not because of all the other 99% co-dependents — but because of a very tiny fraction of actual “providers” (food, fuel, energy, water, etc.) that make life possible for them. Most, if not all these providers are themselves are whole system co-dependents.
The whole of society exists because this tiny fraction is engaged in cooperative enterprises for the basic necessities you need (they provide it, you buy it).
This means that a very high percentage of the 99.99% are not needed (don’t shoot the messenger). Ponder now why so many lives are simply wasted so easily and you will start to understand how life has become so cheap.
A society built upon this design cannot endure anything very long. Even in a perfect world, it is a recipe for disaster.
This shows up virtually everywhere you care to look. Homelessness, indebtedness, bankruptcy, poverty, inequality, war (competition for resources), inflation, injustice and tyranny.
The “haves” of this design become the plantation owners and control virtually everything — food, water, government, media, education, resources, supplies, production, war, propaganda — virtually everything. The rest are all indentured co-dependent slaves begging for crumbs.
The 99% have zero “voice” or effect (despite many efforts) — and remain utterly ignored as bleating cattle in a stockyard.
——–
All efforts to become independent of this life-penalizing paradigm are swiftly crushed and extinguished. A “third party”, or “free state” or even tiny efforts to try and bypass the corporate / federal symbiosis level of “consumer protection” (control) through direct marketing or efforts brings down the wrath of the Corporate State.
Tyranny and oppression of free expression, independence and autonomy swiftly crushes any budding opposition.
Tyranny perpetuates the oppressive cycle “total dependency and reliance” of the 99%, who for the most part, cannot even comprehend any other type or form of existence. Most become their own jailers, in perpetual bondage to unenlightened belief systems.
——–
The gatekeepers of this “Great Society” take on all roles and responsibilities for the daily existence of their prisoners. Wars must be repetitively fought against manufactured “enemies”, providing the illusion that the “society” is just, true and “chosen” and therefore “worth protecting”.
Enemies are manufactured as required. Anything that does not fully identify with the Great Society is demonized, debased and dehumanized leading to war.
Wars also serve to establish new territory and control over people, nations and resources, furthering the co-dependency and “justification” for even more war and control.
——–
Entire generations must pass to allow the people to “forget” who and what they once were. Suppressing knowledge, history and culture become common practices, ensuring that only sanctioned and approved history and “beliefs” are passed from generation to generation.
Eventually (now), all this becomes completely unmanageable and uncontrollable, as various factions fight and vie for control in the upper echelons of the plantation. The 99% are thrown to the wolves, over and over again, losing “rights”, freedom, liberty, independence and “choice”.
Many, many “requirements” are forced upon the 99% through newly enacted fiat, executive orders, laws, regulations, permits, fees, licenses and restrictions.
The gatekeepers employ vast standing armies of police, military and “security” personnel to enforce these restrictions upon the 99%, who in turn like all jailers, begin to abuse the people, assuming additional self-appointed roles and “responsibilities”.
This leads to growing dissent and division, conflict and crime with the 99%. The duplicity practiced (double-standard) is obvious to all, but the people have become totally incapacitated and helpless, entirely dependent upon virtually everything for their daily existence and can offer little meaningful resistance.
Eventually the dissent and division leads to civil conflict, a force of arms (guns and assassinations), which is often delayed through distractions (sports, television, entertainment) but not forever, resulting in much bloodshed and suffering.
The whole of the people suffer as the conflicts escalate, resentment and dissent, division grows and retribution and repression is enacted.
The 99% are a vast, seething mob by now, uncontrollable, nearly inconsolable and incapable of self-government or sufficiency. They still remain co-dependents but will blindly wreck this relationship in their ignorance.
Society collapses as things spiral out of control, rebuilds from the ashes and reasserts itself once again, following nearly identical the same patterns as before.
Climate / environment collapse is now accelerating this decline, exaberating the dependency, and dramatically increasing the likelihood that “rebuilding” anything like before as extremely unlikely.
Resource depletion will also make rebuilding anything like before very unlikely and even unreachable.
This will lead to an even worse societal arrangement on orders of magnitude worse. Concepts such as freedom, liberty, democracy, justice, fairness and individual expression do not survive under extreme conditions of crisis, they are swiftly extinguished.
The near-total co-dependency of the 99% will mean that only the most brutal, violent and viscous will survive, elevating themselves to the new “gatekeepers” of the new society (of what remains) to exercise control over the rest.
———
The desired peaceful transition to self-sufficiency, alternative energy, agrarian community is very unlikely, mostly due in part to the refusal of the 99% to take these necessary steps now, or to support those who are trying.
The current gatekeepers are suppressing the knowledge and awareness of these requirements and the likely outcome of what this means. They are now “victims” of their own propaganda and are the architects of their own destruction.
The stage has now been set, the players put into motion and the script is fully written. It’s actually an old story and will play out as before, except we now have climate / resource collapse to spice things up.
Technology will be mostly employed to manage and control the 99%, restricting their declining freedom and options even further. A sizable percentage will be killed and imprisoned as long as resources allow.
Every effort will be made to preserve the gatekeepers, convincing even the 99% that this is right and just to do so. Most will agree and cooperate, supporting the imprisonment and death of “dissenters”.
——–
This future is a guarantee — the end-result of removing the independence and self-sufficiency of the whole of the people worldwide into the hands of the few, controlling and abusing all of the resources and the planetary environment.
The aggregated accumulation of resource depletion, environmental collapse and climate collapse is now so severe that this will all occur within a single generation.
——–
Optimism is not warranted in the face of mounting evidence. A precipitous decline of 85% of Americans engaged in personal preparations has already occurred (this year). The “blame” for this is irrelevant. The meaning is not.
We are just 7% away from critical “state shifts” within the planetary environment. Only fools would believe that the present inertia in motion could be stopped in time. Global governments are incapable of acting swiftly or responsibly. Corporate control is increasing, not decreasing. Abuse of the planetary environment is accelerating, not decelerating. Evidence and facts are also increasing, yet denial, ignorance and disbelief (cognitive dissonance) is increasing, not decreasing.
The world’s top scientist are warning that failure to listen to the results and analysis being obtained now spell doom for the world’s civilization. They have further widely acknowledged that a “near-total failure” conditions exists on the climate and the environment, despite numerous (tens of thousands) of studies and analysis.
The world is not preparing within the 99%, yet evidence exist that the 1% is fully aware of what is happening, furiously preparing. It should not come as startling news that none of you are being included in their plans. Do not forget that a very high percentage of the 99% are not needed.
Sunday, May 27, 2012
SC111-12
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/
Night Thoughts in Hagsgate
There are times, at least for me, when the fate in store for industrial society can be seen with more than the usual clarity. I’m thinking just now of the time I looked out a train window and saw an abandoned factory, not yet twenty years old, with foot-high saplings rising incongruously from the gutter around the roof; or of another time, in a weekend flea market here in Cumberland, when I found a kid’s book on space travel I’d loved as a child, flipped through the pages, and found myself face to face with the gap between the shining future we were supposed to have by now and the mess that was actually waiting for us when we got here.
I’m pondering another of those moments now, but the trigger this time isn’t a trackside glimpse or a memento in a repurposed warehouse. It’s the current flood of news stories, opinion pieces, and public statements by pundits of various kinds, all focused on one theme—the supposed irrelevance of peak oil.
Those of my readers who have managed to miss that torrent so far may find it helpful to spare a glance at this typical example of the species, which was forwarded to me by one of this blog’s readers (tip of the archdruidical hat to Hereward). The author, Timothy Worstall, is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London, and a specialist in rare earth elements; he starts off by complaining that he doesn’t understand peak oil, goes on to demonstrate that fact in impressive detail, and finishes up with the sort of whopper that normally earns an F on a freshman paper in Geology 101. (No, Mr. Worstall, kerogen shales such as the Green River formation are not at all the same thing as oil-bearing shales such as the Bakken formation, and nobody yet has a viable way to extract oil from kerogen shales; I trust you provide better information to clients who ask your advice about rare earth elements.)
I wish I could say that this is an extreme example, but it’s not. Worstall has at least grasped the fact that peak oil has to do the rate at which oil can be produced, which is more than most critics of the concept manage, and his confusion between kerogen shales and oil-bearing shales—though it could have been cleared up by five minutes of research—is common among people who are poorly informed about petroleum geology. Look at other efforts to dismiss peak oil and you’ll find worse. The question I’d like to raise is why this outpouring of misinformation and denial happens to be in full flood right now.
It’s a very odd time for peak oil to be dismissed, all things considered. Back in the late 1990s, when the first peak oil researchers began to exchange data and forecasts, several leading figures in the newborn movement made very straightforward predictions about what was going to happen. They predicted that global production of crude oil would peak in the near future, and decline thereafter; they predicted that this would cause the price of oil and petroleum products to skyrocket, imposing severe costs on the global economy and triggering economic contraction; some, though this was controversial, predicted that attempts to replace petroleum with alternative energy sources would fail because of net energy and other noneconomic factors.
These assertions were rejected with quite some heat by the few people outside the scene who bothered to notice. Critics of peak oil insisted, first, that increasing demand for petroleum would make additional capital available for the hunt for new oil fields, which would of course be found, and thus allow petroleum production to grow indefinitely; second, that if the price of oil did rise sharply, that would simply make other energy sources viable, releasing a flood of energy onto the market that would drive prices back down; and third, that human ingenuity, the free market, or some other allegedly omnipotent force would certainly be able to find limitless new energy resources and prove all the pessimists wrong.
A decade and a half later, it’s instructive to see how those predictions turned out. The short form is that the peak oil researchers were correct while their critics were shoveling smoke. The production of crude oil peaked in 2005; the price of oil spiked to levels that pundits insisted it could never reach, and has moved raggedly upward since the initial spike and crash to today’s value well above $100 a barrel; the global economy proceeded to lurch into serious trouble, and remains in a state of perpetual crisis that nobody in charge seems to be able to understand or fix; and a series of boomlets in hydrogen, ethanol, algal biodiesel and other much-hyped alternative energy sources rose and crashed as it turned out that no matter what oil cost, they cost more.
The current bubble in shale gas is to some extent an exception to that last rule, but it’s hardly the bonanza that the media likes to claim. Partly, shale gas production is simply a side effect of the fact that natural gas liquids, which occur in some shale gas deposits, can be sold as a petroleum substitute at very good prices; partly, shale gas has morphed in recent years into what Wall Street aficionados call a pump-and-dump operation—a bit of dubious marketing in which operators boost the price of a stock, then sell it at the inflated price to suckers, who are sure the price will go up further and are therefore left holding the bag when it goes down instead. (I trust none of my readers have put their life savings into shale gas companies.)
Still, there’s another factor to the shale gas bubble, and also to the boom in oil-bearing shale that has filled so many glowing headlines in recent years, and will fill so many gloomy headlines a few years further on. Both are being ballyhooed as game-changing breakthroughs, even though they’re nothing of the kind—hydrofracturing ("fracking") has been a common practice for forty years, and the Bakken shale was discovered long ago. The fracking boom is simply one of the many ways in which the world is scraping low-grade fuels out of the bottom of the barrel, just as peak oil researchers have predicted it would. Their breakthrough status is entirely a product of hype. Behind that hype, I’ve come to think, and the comparable hype that surrounded the hydrogen economy, corn ethanol, and all the other failed pseudosolutions to our predicament, lies a very specific motive: the desire to find some reason, however fatuous, to insist that it’s all right to keep on wallowing in the benefits of today’s wildly unsustainable energy and resource consumption, instead of getting ready for the far less lavish world that’s going to follow in short order.
That motive shapes a dizzyingly large share of the collective conversation of our time. Consider the book review I critiqued in last week’s post. One of the bits of rhetoric the reviewer used to dismiss my suggestion that social change has to be founded in personal change was the claim that "you can’t end rape [just] by not raping anyone." Perhaps so, but as one of my readers pointed out (tip of the archdruidical hat here to Ozark Chinquapin), someone who claimed to oppose rape would normally be expected to demonstrate that commitment by, at the very least, not raping anyone; an antirape movement that claimed that rapes committed by its members didn’t matter, because it was working to end rape everywhere, would rightly be dismissed as an exercise in extreme hypocrisy. Yet you’ll hear the identical logic from people in a good deal of the environmental movement, who insist that they can’t be bothered to lighten the burden their lifestyles place on the planet because they’re going to save the Earth all at once.
Work out the practical implications of that argument, in other words, and it amounts to a justification for clinging to the comforts and privileges of the modern industrial lifestyle even at the expense of one’s supposed ideals. That’s also the implication of the denunciations of peak oil I discussed at the beginning of this post, of course, and there are plenty of other ways of cloaking that same desire. Whether you expect solar power, thorium reactors, algal biodiesel or some other exciting new energy source to save the day; whether you anticipate the imminent arrival of the Rapture, the Singularity, the Space Brothers, a world-ending cataclysm, or a great leap of consciousness to some higher plane; or whether you simply tell yourself, as so many Americans do these days, "I’m sure they’ll think of something"—if you look at that belief honestly, dear reader, doesn’t it work out to an excuse that lets you claim that it really is okay for you to keep enjoying whatever you see as your share of the goodies churned out by the industrial machine?
It’s here, in turn, that I glance down and see the void opening up beneath the foundations of that same machine—and it’s also here that I find myself remembering a harrowing detail from one of the favorite books of my teen years, Peter Beagle’s brilliant fantasy The Last Unicorn.
I’m not even going to try to sketch out the plot of the book as a whole. The point that’s relevant here centers on a place, the town of Hagsgate, and its people, who are very rich. They live in the kingdom ruled by King Haggard, the villain of the story; they profit mightily from his rule, and are exquisitely careful not to notice anything that bears too closely on the terrifying evil that lies at the heart of his realm. They are also, as it happens, under a witch’s curse.
It occurs to me that some of my readers may not be familiar with the structure and function of curses. (What do they teach children these days?) The sort of thing you get in bad modern remakes of fairy tales, where someone inoffensive gets burdened with a dire fate that would not otherwise befall them, is strictly amateur stuff. Professionals know that the curses that matter are the kind that unfold by their own inexorable logic from the actions and attitudes of the accursed. The witch or wizard who finds it necessary or appropriate to pronounce a curse doesn’t have to make anything happen; he or she simply says aloud the unmentionable realities of the situation, states the necessary consequences, and leaves. The efforts of the accursed to avoid falling victim to the curse, without actually changing the things that make the curse inevitable, then proceed to drive the curse to its fulfillment.
The witch who cursed Hagsgate was a thoroughly competent professional. Here’s what she said:
You whom Haggard holds in thrall,
Share his feast and share his fall.
You shall see your fortune flower
Till the torrent takes the tower.
Yet none but one of Hagsgate town
May bring the castle swirling down.
You’ll notice that, like any good curse, this one includes an escape hatch: skip Haggard’s feast and you skip the fall, too. Beagle’s story doesn’t mention anyone who used the escape hatch, but there will have been somebody. There always is; whether we’re talking about Númenor, the City of Destruction, the warren of the shining wire, or some other place where a curse is at work, someone’s going to walk away. That sounds very heroic in retrospect, but that’s not the way it works in practice. In practice, those who walk away are as often as not weeping hysterically, torn between the fear of giving up everything they know and the knowledge that leaving is the only choice left for them, and trying without much success not to listen to the taunts or feel the stones flung by those who stay behind.
If, as Ursula LeGuin says in one of her best stories, they seem to know where they are going, it’s because "anywhere but here" is an easy course to chart at first. Mind you, some never even make it out the city gates; some come stumbling back to town a few days or weeks or years later; some are never seen again, and pebbles will grow into moss-covered boulders before anybody finds out exactly what happened to them; still, there’s always one, or a few, or nine tall ships sailing from Andunië with stormwinds howling in the rigging, who leave and do something less foredoomed with their lives.
It’s the ones who stay behind, though, who are more relevant to the point I want to make. It’s very easy to stay behind. Early on, when walking away is an easy thing, the threat of the curse is so far off that it’s seductive to think you can stay in Hagsgate for just a little while longer and still escape. Later on, you’ve come to enjoy the practical benefits that being a citizen of Hagsgate has to offer; you’ve got personal and financial ties to the place, and so you come up with ornate theories packed with dubious logic and cherrypicked data to convince yourself that the curse isn’t real or that it will only affect other people. As the curse begins to work, in turn, you start making excuses, insisting that you did everything you could reasonably be expected to do, and it’s all somebody else’s fault anyway. Finally, when the full reality of your fate stares you in the face and your last chance of escape is almost gone, comes the terrible temptation to treat the price you’re about to pay as a measure of the value of what you’ve gotten by staying in Hagsgate, and you cling to it ever more frantically as it drags you down.
Now of course a witch didn’t actually put a curse on industrial society—at least, if one did, I haven’t heard about it—but fairy tales keep their hold on our collective imagination because they contain a wealth of valid wisdom, wrapped up in a compact and memorable form. To say that there’s a curse on industrial society is simply to use an archaic metaphor for a point I’ve been discussing in these essays since The Archdruid Report began six years ago, which is that the consequences of industrial society’s mismanagement of its relations with the planet will not go away just because we don’t want to deal with them. That metaphor has a range of relevant features, and one of them is that any effective response to the curse—or, if you will, the predicament of our time—has to begin by taking stock of the ways that each of us, as individuals, contributes by our own attitudes and actions to the mess we’re in, and then making appropriate changes.
After six years, I shouldn’t even have to say that daydreaming about running off to some conveniently unaffordable eco-homestead in the country doesn’t count. Unless you’re in a position to do that, and the vast majority of us aren’t, that’s simply another evasion. What’s required instead is the less romantic but far more productive task of adapting in place: figuring out how, living where you live now, you can place much less of a burden on the biosphere, and help other people do the same thing. It probably has to be said that perfection isn’t a reasonable expectation here—there’s a long learning curve, and our culture and built environment place significant obstacles in the way—but a great deal can be done nonetheless That can easily lead into activism of various kinds, for those who feel called to do that specific kind of work; it can also lead in plenty of other constructive directions.
Still, that’s not a popular message just now, and I’m guessing that it’s going to become a great deal more unpopular as industrial civilization stumbles deeper into crisis. It doesn’t require a witch’s curse to make people cling frantically to exactly those things that are destroying them and their future, just the psychology of previous investment and a few other standard self-defeating habits of the human mind. Still, there’s the choice: share the feast and share the fall, or wake up and walk away. Which will you do?
Night Thoughts in Hagsgate
There are times, at least for me, when the fate in store for industrial society can be seen with more than the usual clarity. I’m thinking just now of the time I looked out a train window and saw an abandoned factory, not yet twenty years old, with foot-high saplings rising incongruously from the gutter around the roof; or of another time, in a weekend flea market here in Cumberland, when I found a kid’s book on space travel I’d loved as a child, flipped through the pages, and found myself face to face with the gap between the shining future we were supposed to have by now and the mess that was actually waiting for us when we got here.
I’m pondering another of those moments now, but the trigger this time isn’t a trackside glimpse or a memento in a repurposed warehouse. It’s the current flood of news stories, opinion pieces, and public statements by pundits of various kinds, all focused on one theme—the supposed irrelevance of peak oil.
Those of my readers who have managed to miss that torrent so far may find it helpful to spare a glance at this typical example of the species, which was forwarded to me by one of this blog’s readers (tip of the archdruidical hat to Hereward). The author, Timothy Worstall, is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London, and a specialist in rare earth elements; he starts off by complaining that he doesn’t understand peak oil, goes on to demonstrate that fact in impressive detail, and finishes up with the sort of whopper that normally earns an F on a freshman paper in Geology 101. (No, Mr. Worstall, kerogen shales such as the Green River formation are not at all the same thing as oil-bearing shales such as the Bakken formation, and nobody yet has a viable way to extract oil from kerogen shales; I trust you provide better information to clients who ask your advice about rare earth elements.)
I wish I could say that this is an extreme example, but it’s not. Worstall has at least grasped the fact that peak oil has to do the rate at which oil can be produced, which is more than most critics of the concept manage, and his confusion between kerogen shales and oil-bearing shales—though it could have been cleared up by five minutes of research—is common among people who are poorly informed about petroleum geology. Look at other efforts to dismiss peak oil and you’ll find worse. The question I’d like to raise is why this outpouring of misinformation and denial happens to be in full flood right now.
It’s a very odd time for peak oil to be dismissed, all things considered. Back in the late 1990s, when the first peak oil researchers began to exchange data and forecasts, several leading figures in the newborn movement made very straightforward predictions about what was going to happen. They predicted that global production of crude oil would peak in the near future, and decline thereafter; they predicted that this would cause the price of oil and petroleum products to skyrocket, imposing severe costs on the global economy and triggering economic contraction; some, though this was controversial, predicted that attempts to replace petroleum with alternative energy sources would fail because of net energy and other noneconomic factors.
These assertions were rejected with quite some heat by the few people outside the scene who bothered to notice. Critics of peak oil insisted, first, that increasing demand for petroleum would make additional capital available for the hunt for new oil fields, which would of course be found, and thus allow petroleum production to grow indefinitely; second, that if the price of oil did rise sharply, that would simply make other energy sources viable, releasing a flood of energy onto the market that would drive prices back down; and third, that human ingenuity, the free market, or some other allegedly omnipotent force would certainly be able to find limitless new energy resources and prove all the pessimists wrong.
A decade and a half later, it’s instructive to see how those predictions turned out. The short form is that the peak oil researchers were correct while their critics were shoveling smoke. The production of crude oil peaked in 2005; the price of oil spiked to levels that pundits insisted it could never reach, and has moved raggedly upward since the initial spike and crash to today’s value well above $100 a barrel; the global economy proceeded to lurch into serious trouble, and remains in a state of perpetual crisis that nobody in charge seems to be able to understand or fix; and a series of boomlets in hydrogen, ethanol, algal biodiesel and other much-hyped alternative energy sources rose and crashed as it turned out that no matter what oil cost, they cost more.
The current bubble in shale gas is to some extent an exception to that last rule, but it’s hardly the bonanza that the media likes to claim. Partly, shale gas production is simply a side effect of the fact that natural gas liquids, which occur in some shale gas deposits, can be sold as a petroleum substitute at very good prices; partly, shale gas has morphed in recent years into what Wall Street aficionados call a pump-and-dump operation—a bit of dubious marketing in which operators boost the price of a stock, then sell it at the inflated price to suckers, who are sure the price will go up further and are therefore left holding the bag when it goes down instead. (I trust none of my readers have put their life savings into shale gas companies.)
Still, there’s another factor to the shale gas bubble, and also to the boom in oil-bearing shale that has filled so many glowing headlines in recent years, and will fill so many gloomy headlines a few years further on. Both are being ballyhooed as game-changing breakthroughs, even though they’re nothing of the kind—hydrofracturing ("fracking") has been a common practice for forty years, and the Bakken shale was discovered long ago. The fracking boom is simply one of the many ways in which the world is scraping low-grade fuels out of the bottom of the barrel, just as peak oil researchers have predicted it would. Their breakthrough status is entirely a product of hype. Behind that hype, I’ve come to think, and the comparable hype that surrounded the hydrogen economy, corn ethanol, and all the other failed pseudosolutions to our predicament, lies a very specific motive: the desire to find some reason, however fatuous, to insist that it’s all right to keep on wallowing in the benefits of today’s wildly unsustainable energy and resource consumption, instead of getting ready for the far less lavish world that’s going to follow in short order.
That motive shapes a dizzyingly large share of the collective conversation of our time. Consider the book review I critiqued in last week’s post. One of the bits of rhetoric the reviewer used to dismiss my suggestion that social change has to be founded in personal change was the claim that "you can’t end rape [just] by not raping anyone." Perhaps so, but as one of my readers pointed out (tip of the archdruidical hat here to Ozark Chinquapin), someone who claimed to oppose rape would normally be expected to demonstrate that commitment by, at the very least, not raping anyone; an antirape movement that claimed that rapes committed by its members didn’t matter, because it was working to end rape everywhere, would rightly be dismissed as an exercise in extreme hypocrisy. Yet you’ll hear the identical logic from people in a good deal of the environmental movement, who insist that they can’t be bothered to lighten the burden their lifestyles place on the planet because they’re going to save the Earth all at once.
Work out the practical implications of that argument, in other words, and it amounts to a justification for clinging to the comforts and privileges of the modern industrial lifestyle even at the expense of one’s supposed ideals. That’s also the implication of the denunciations of peak oil I discussed at the beginning of this post, of course, and there are plenty of other ways of cloaking that same desire. Whether you expect solar power, thorium reactors, algal biodiesel or some other exciting new energy source to save the day; whether you anticipate the imminent arrival of the Rapture, the Singularity, the Space Brothers, a world-ending cataclysm, or a great leap of consciousness to some higher plane; or whether you simply tell yourself, as so many Americans do these days, "I’m sure they’ll think of something"—if you look at that belief honestly, dear reader, doesn’t it work out to an excuse that lets you claim that it really is okay for you to keep enjoying whatever you see as your share of the goodies churned out by the industrial machine?
It’s here, in turn, that I glance down and see the void opening up beneath the foundations of that same machine—and it’s also here that I find myself remembering a harrowing detail from one of the favorite books of my teen years, Peter Beagle’s brilliant fantasy The Last Unicorn.
I’m not even going to try to sketch out the plot of the book as a whole. The point that’s relevant here centers on a place, the town of Hagsgate, and its people, who are very rich. They live in the kingdom ruled by King Haggard, the villain of the story; they profit mightily from his rule, and are exquisitely careful not to notice anything that bears too closely on the terrifying evil that lies at the heart of his realm. They are also, as it happens, under a witch’s curse.
It occurs to me that some of my readers may not be familiar with the structure and function of curses. (What do they teach children these days?) The sort of thing you get in bad modern remakes of fairy tales, where someone inoffensive gets burdened with a dire fate that would not otherwise befall them, is strictly amateur stuff. Professionals know that the curses that matter are the kind that unfold by their own inexorable logic from the actions and attitudes of the accursed. The witch or wizard who finds it necessary or appropriate to pronounce a curse doesn’t have to make anything happen; he or she simply says aloud the unmentionable realities of the situation, states the necessary consequences, and leaves. The efforts of the accursed to avoid falling victim to the curse, without actually changing the things that make the curse inevitable, then proceed to drive the curse to its fulfillment.
The witch who cursed Hagsgate was a thoroughly competent professional. Here’s what she said:
You whom Haggard holds in thrall,
Share his feast and share his fall.
You shall see your fortune flower
Till the torrent takes the tower.
Yet none but one of Hagsgate town
May bring the castle swirling down.
You’ll notice that, like any good curse, this one includes an escape hatch: skip Haggard’s feast and you skip the fall, too. Beagle’s story doesn’t mention anyone who used the escape hatch, but there will have been somebody. There always is; whether we’re talking about Númenor, the City of Destruction, the warren of the shining wire, or some other place where a curse is at work, someone’s going to walk away. That sounds very heroic in retrospect, but that’s not the way it works in practice. In practice, those who walk away are as often as not weeping hysterically, torn between the fear of giving up everything they know and the knowledge that leaving is the only choice left for them, and trying without much success not to listen to the taunts or feel the stones flung by those who stay behind.
If, as Ursula LeGuin says in one of her best stories, they seem to know where they are going, it’s because "anywhere but here" is an easy course to chart at first. Mind you, some never even make it out the city gates; some come stumbling back to town a few days or weeks or years later; some are never seen again, and pebbles will grow into moss-covered boulders before anybody finds out exactly what happened to them; still, there’s always one, or a few, or nine tall ships sailing from Andunië with stormwinds howling in the rigging, who leave and do something less foredoomed with their lives.
It’s the ones who stay behind, though, who are more relevant to the point I want to make. It’s very easy to stay behind. Early on, when walking away is an easy thing, the threat of the curse is so far off that it’s seductive to think you can stay in Hagsgate for just a little while longer and still escape. Later on, you’ve come to enjoy the practical benefits that being a citizen of Hagsgate has to offer; you’ve got personal and financial ties to the place, and so you come up with ornate theories packed with dubious logic and cherrypicked data to convince yourself that the curse isn’t real or that it will only affect other people. As the curse begins to work, in turn, you start making excuses, insisting that you did everything you could reasonably be expected to do, and it’s all somebody else’s fault anyway. Finally, when the full reality of your fate stares you in the face and your last chance of escape is almost gone, comes the terrible temptation to treat the price you’re about to pay as a measure of the value of what you’ve gotten by staying in Hagsgate, and you cling to it ever more frantically as it drags you down.
Now of course a witch didn’t actually put a curse on industrial society—at least, if one did, I haven’t heard about it—but fairy tales keep their hold on our collective imagination because they contain a wealth of valid wisdom, wrapped up in a compact and memorable form. To say that there’s a curse on industrial society is simply to use an archaic metaphor for a point I’ve been discussing in these essays since The Archdruid Report began six years ago, which is that the consequences of industrial society’s mismanagement of its relations with the planet will not go away just because we don’t want to deal with them. That metaphor has a range of relevant features, and one of them is that any effective response to the curse—or, if you will, the predicament of our time—has to begin by taking stock of the ways that each of us, as individuals, contributes by our own attitudes and actions to the mess we’re in, and then making appropriate changes.
After six years, I shouldn’t even have to say that daydreaming about running off to some conveniently unaffordable eco-homestead in the country doesn’t count. Unless you’re in a position to do that, and the vast majority of us aren’t, that’s simply another evasion. What’s required instead is the less romantic but far more productive task of adapting in place: figuring out how, living where you live now, you can place much less of a burden on the biosphere, and help other people do the same thing. It probably has to be said that perfection isn’t a reasonable expectation here—there’s a long learning curve, and our culture and built environment place significant obstacles in the way—but a great deal can be done nonetheless That can easily lead into activism of various kinds, for those who feel called to do that specific kind of work; it can also lead in plenty of other constructive directions.
Still, that’s not a popular message just now, and I’m guessing that it’s going to become a great deal more unpopular as industrial civilization stumbles deeper into crisis. It doesn’t require a witch’s curse to make people cling frantically to exactly those things that are destroying them and their future, just the psychology of previous investment and a few other standard self-defeating habits of the human mind. Still, there’s the choice: share the feast and share the fall, or wake up and walk away. Which will you do?
Monday, May 7, 2012
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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31265.htm
The American Character
Fareed Zakaria warns the war on terror will never end. Obama and Romney still won't debate our surveillance state
Fareed Zakaria, normally a reliable and pleasant purveyor of conventional “centrist” wisdom, has a genuinely good and surprisingly confrontational CNN column today, in which he disputes the widespread belief that America is ending its War on Terror and explains what this reflects about the American character:
While we will leave the battlefields of the greater Middle East, we are firmly committed to the war on terror at home. What do I mean by that? Well, look at the expansion of federal bureaucracies to tackle this war.
Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has created or reconfigured at least 263 organizations to tackle some aspect of the war on terror. Thirty-three new building complexes have been built for the intelligence bureaucracies alone, occupying 17 million square feet – the equivalent of 22 U.S. Capitols or three Pentagons. The largest bureaucracy after the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs is now the Department of Homeland Security, which has a workforce of 230,000 people.
The rise of this national security state has entailed a vast expansion in the government’s powers that now touch every aspect of American life, even when seemingly unrelated to terrorism. Some 30,000 people, for example, are now employed exclusively to listen in on phone conversations and other communications within the United States. . . .
In the past, the U.S. government has built up for wars, assumed emergency authority and sometimes abused that power, yet always demobilized after the war. But this is, of course, a war without end. . . . We don’t look like people who have won a war. We look like scared, fearful, losers.
What Zakaria is describing here, of course, is a permanent, sprawling Surveillance State, one that has been inexorably built over the course of six decades but which has massively accelerated under two different administrations in the post-9/11 era and which has no end in sight. Quite the opposite.
One of the reasons I loathe Election Years — which actually endures for 18 months — is because the vast bulk of the most consequential political issues are completely ignored by virtue of enjoying full bipartisan consensus. The transformation of America into a full-scale Surveillance State is, on every level, indescribably significant; as Zakaria put it, it “now touches every aspect of American life.” Its never-ending growth results in a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary citizens to the private sector corporations which operate it; it empowers unaccountable public and private sector factions which surveil and store massive amounts of private information about the citizenry; it is conducted entirely in the dark and thus further eliminates notions of transparency and accountability; and it destroys any remnant of personal privacy, the indispensable attribute which fosters and enables creativity, dissent and challenges to orthodoxy and has thus long been viewed as the most central right, the one that anchors all the others.
But like almost all of the most consequential and destructive policies — endless war, the Drug War, the sprawling and barbaric American prison state — the domestic Surveillance State expands with equal fervor under both Democratic and Republicans administrations, and opposing it thus affords no partisan gain and it is therefore entirely off the table of debate. In lieu of any dispute over these types of actually consequential government policies, we instead endure a series of trivial weekly scandals that numb the brain, distract attention, and produce acrimony as virulent and divisive as it is petty.
Even for those issues that are actually significant and receive election-year attention — such as, say, America’s oligarchy and the economic policies that sustain it — the differences are largely symbolic, just substantive enough to keep tribal loyalties high and to maintain the illusion of real choices (watch how often Obama supporters defend him from GOP attacks not by rejecting their premises but by insisting that he’s adopting conservative policies). The differences which are genuinely stark — Supreme Court choices, reproductive rights, marriage equality — are relegated to mere sideshows, exploited as tactics for maintaining acute cultural divisions and keeping certain base factions loyal, invested, and energized.
So here we have one of America’s most conventional pundits correctly warning of America’s soon-to-be-irreversible transformation into a limitless domestic Surveillance State, and none of that will even be acknowledged, let alone debated, in our election. Zakaria is absolutely correct that this is the behavior of a nation of ”scared, fearful, losers,” but those feelings will be rectified by six more months of ritualistic, chest-beating dances over the body of Osama bin Laden and the constant hailing by Democrats of the stalwart, pulsating courage of our Commander-in-Chief for having safely sat in the White House, surrounded by layers of security greater than that enjoyed by any of history’s emperors, and ordering that bullets be pummeled into the skull of an unarmed man and his corpse thereafter dumped into the ocean. That — along with throbbing celebrations over the pile of other corpses he has produced — will make the sensations of weakness and helplessness highlighted by Zakaria blissfully disappear.
As we learned from the bloodthirsty need for war over the last decade among America’s chickenhawks (or, similarly, from the violent homophobic attacks of closeted, self-hating gay men), sensations of weakness and impotence — the defining attributes of what Zakaria calls “scared, fearful losers” — are typically compensated with the vicarious feelings of power, nobility and bravery that come from celebrations of state violence and other forms of risk-free aggression. Adam Smith lamented this mental affliction back in 1776:
In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. . . .They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war.
Hence, the political faction that has long been derided for wimpy weakness (progressives) will spend the remainder of the year flexing self-admiringly in front of a mirror and basking in the war glory draped on them by all the deaths their leader has caused, while the country that is so petrified of its own shadow that it begs the government to monitor and surveil every last one of its communications will seize on these same deaths to feel purposeful, strong and proud. There is a direct correlation between the fear and impotence Zakaria bemoans and the fact that America’s greatest and proudest achievement over the past four years is its “success” in blowing people up from the sky or summarily executing them.
When it comes to fear and passivity, America’s establishment media, as usual, simultaneously leads the way and dutifully follows. Long-time journalist Edward Wasserman has a great column today in The Miami Herald castigating his media colleagues for their fearful silence in the face of the Obama administration’s systematic, unprecedented attack on whistleblowing:
When President Obama addressed the American Society of News Editors convention last month, the real news was what didn’t happen. The watchdogs didn’t bark. No discouraging word from the gathering of 1,000 of the country’s top news people, facing a president whose administration has led a vigorous attack on journalism’s most indispensable asset — its sources.
Obama took office pledging tolerance and even support for whistleblowers, but instead is prosecuting them with a zeal that’s historically unprecedented . . . .
What’s behind the administration’s fervor isn’t clear, but the news media have largely rolled over and yawned. A big reason is that prosecutors aren’t hassling reporters as they once did. Thanks to the post-9/11 explosion in government intercepts, electronic surveillance, and data capture of all imaginable kinds — the NSA is estimated to have intercepted 15-20 trillion communications in the past decade — the secrecy police have vast new ways to identify leakers.
So they no longer have to force journalists to expose confidential sources. As a national security representative told Lucy Dalglish, director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, “We’re not going to subpoena reporters in the future. We don’t need to. We know who you’re talking to” . . . .
[T]hat silence constitutes an abdication of the media’s role as a voice in shaping public policy. After all, the ultimate purpose of reporter shield laws and the defiant tradition of protecting confidential sources isn’t to make writing stories easier for reporters, it’s to ensure that publicly significant information comes to light.
If the news media publish sensitive information, fully believing it ought to be made public, how can they stand by without protest when the government punishes the people who furnished it?
Just think about that: issuing subpoenas to journalists to force them to reveal their sources is now obsolete — unnecessary — because the U.S. Government’s Surveillance State is so vast, so comprehensive, that it already knows who is talking to whom. It now subpoenas and harasses reporters simply to force them to confirm in court what they have already learned through surveillance, but the limitless Surveillance State it has created has rendered undetected whistleblowing — or undetected anything — virtually impossible.
This attack on whistleblowers is directly related to the limitless Surveillance State which Zakaria denounces: for full-scale control, it’s just as necessary for a government to shield its own actions from any transparency and scrutiny as it is to know everything which citizens are doing and saying. That’s the one-way mirror which all authoritarian regimes attempt to construct: those in power know everything about the conduct of those who are ruled, while those who are ruled know nothing about the conduct of those in power. That’s what keeps the power dynamic so imbalanced in one direction. But this unprecedented attack on whistleblowers, as obviously significant as it is, also enjoys full bipartisan support (as well as the indifference of a supremely passive media), and so it, too, will be completely ignored by the grand Election-Year clash of America’s two great and oh-so-fundamentally-different political parties.
UPDATE: Obviously related to each point raised here: two separate NATO attacks in Afghanistan today reportedly killed numerous civilians, up to — according to one report — 20 civilians, including a mother and her five children.
The American Character
Fareed Zakaria warns the war on terror will never end. Obama and Romney still won't debate our surveillance state
Fareed Zakaria, normally a reliable and pleasant purveyor of conventional “centrist” wisdom, has a genuinely good and surprisingly confrontational CNN column today, in which he disputes the widespread belief that America is ending its War on Terror and explains what this reflects about the American character:
While we will leave the battlefields of the greater Middle East, we are firmly committed to the war on terror at home. What do I mean by that? Well, look at the expansion of federal bureaucracies to tackle this war.
Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has created or reconfigured at least 263 organizations to tackle some aspect of the war on terror. Thirty-three new building complexes have been built for the intelligence bureaucracies alone, occupying 17 million square feet – the equivalent of 22 U.S. Capitols or three Pentagons. The largest bureaucracy after the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs is now the Department of Homeland Security, which has a workforce of 230,000 people.
The rise of this national security state has entailed a vast expansion in the government’s powers that now touch every aspect of American life, even when seemingly unrelated to terrorism. Some 30,000 people, for example, are now employed exclusively to listen in on phone conversations and other communications within the United States. . . .
In the past, the U.S. government has built up for wars, assumed emergency authority and sometimes abused that power, yet always demobilized after the war. But this is, of course, a war without end. . . . We don’t look like people who have won a war. We look like scared, fearful, losers.
What Zakaria is describing here, of course, is a permanent, sprawling Surveillance State, one that has been inexorably built over the course of six decades but which has massively accelerated under two different administrations in the post-9/11 era and which has no end in sight. Quite the opposite.
One of the reasons I loathe Election Years — which actually endures for 18 months — is because the vast bulk of the most consequential political issues are completely ignored by virtue of enjoying full bipartisan consensus. The transformation of America into a full-scale Surveillance State is, on every level, indescribably significant; as Zakaria put it, it “now touches every aspect of American life.” Its never-ending growth results in a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary citizens to the private sector corporations which operate it; it empowers unaccountable public and private sector factions which surveil and store massive amounts of private information about the citizenry; it is conducted entirely in the dark and thus further eliminates notions of transparency and accountability; and it destroys any remnant of personal privacy, the indispensable attribute which fosters and enables creativity, dissent and challenges to orthodoxy and has thus long been viewed as the most central right, the one that anchors all the others.
But like almost all of the most consequential and destructive policies — endless war, the Drug War, the sprawling and barbaric American prison state — the domestic Surveillance State expands with equal fervor under both Democratic and Republicans administrations, and opposing it thus affords no partisan gain and it is therefore entirely off the table of debate. In lieu of any dispute over these types of actually consequential government policies, we instead endure a series of trivial weekly scandals that numb the brain, distract attention, and produce acrimony as virulent and divisive as it is petty.
Even for those issues that are actually significant and receive election-year attention — such as, say, America’s oligarchy and the economic policies that sustain it — the differences are largely symbolic, just substantive enough to keep tribal loyalties high and to maintain the illusion of real choices (watch how often Obama supporters defend him from GOP attacks not by rejecting their premises but by insisting that he’s adopting conservative policies). The differences which are genuinely stark — Supreme Court choices, reproductive rights, marriage equality — are relegated to mere sideshows, exploited as tactics for maintaining acute cultural divisions and keeping certain base factions loyal, invested, and energized.
So here we have one of America’s most conventional pundits correctly warning of America’s soon-to-be-irreversible transformation into a limitless domestic Surveillance State, and none of that will even be acknowledged, let alone debated, in our election. Zakaria is absolutely correct that this is the behavior of a nation of ”scared, fearful, losers,” but those feelings will be rectified by six more months of ritualistic, chest-beating dances over the body of Osama bin Laden and the constant hailing by Democrats of the stalwart, pulsating courage of our Commander-in-Chief for having safely sat in the White House, surrounded by layers of security greater than that enjoyed by any of history’s emperors, and ordering that bullets be pummeled into the skull of an unarmed man and his corpse thereafter dumped into the ocean. That — along with throbbing celebrations over the pile of other corpses he has produced — will make the sensations of weakness and helplessness highlighted by Zakaria blissfully disappear.
As we learned from the bloodthirsty need for war over the last decade among America’s chickenhawks (or, similarly, from the violent homophobic attacks of closeted, self-hating gay men), sensations of weakness and impotence — the defining attributes of what Zakaria calls “scared, fearful losers” — are typically compensated with the vicarious feelings of power, nobility and bravery that come from celebrations of state violence and other forms of risk-free aggression. Adam Smith lamented this mental affliction back in 1776:
In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. . . .They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war.
Hence, the political faction that has long been derided for wimpy weakness (progressives) will spend the remainder of the year flexing self-admiringly in front of a mirror and basking in the war glory draped on them by all the deaths their leader has caused, while the country that is so petrified of its own shadow that it begs the government to monitor and surveil every last one of its communications will seize on these same deaths to feel purposeful, strong and proud. There is a direct correlation between the fear and impotence Zakaria bemoans and the fact that America’s greatest and proudest achievement over the past four years is its “success” in blowing people up from the sky or summarily executing them.
When it comes to fear and passivity, America’s establishment media, as usual, simultaneously leads the way and dutifully follows. Long-time journalist Edward Wasserman has a great column today in The Miami Herald castigating his media colleagues for their fearful silence in the face of the Obama administration’s systematic, unprecedented attack on whistleblowing:
When President Obama addressed the American Society of News Editors convention last month, the real news was what didn’t happen. The watchdogs didn’t bark. No discouraging word from the gathering of 1,000 of the country’s top news people, facing a president whose administration has led a vigorous attack on journalism’s most indispensable asset — its sources.
Obama took office pledging tolerance and even support for whistleblowers, but instead is prosecuting them with a zeal that’s historically unprecedented . . . .
What’s behind the administration’s fervor isn’t clear, but the news media have largely rolled over and yawned. A big reason is that prosecutors aren’t hassling reporters as they once did. Thanks to the post-9/11 explosion in government intercepts, electronic surveillance, and data capture of all imaginable kinds — the NSA is estimated to have intercepted 15-20 trillion communications in the past decade — the secrecy police have vast new ways to identify leakers.
So they no longer have to force journalists to expose confidential sources. As a national security representative told Lucy Dalglish, director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, “We’re not going to subpoena reporters in the future. We don’t need to. We know who you’re talking to” . . . .
[T]hat silence constitutes an abdication of the media’s role as a voice in shaping public policy. After all, the ultimate purpose of reporter shield laws and the defiant tradition of protecting confidential sources isn’t to make writing stories easier for reporters, it’s to ensure that publicly significant information comes to light.
If the news media publish sensitive information, fully believing it ought to be made public, how can they stand by without protest when the government punishes the people who furnished it?
Just think about that: issuing subpoenas to journalists to force them to reveal their sources is now obsolete — unnecessary — because the U.S. Government’s Surveillance State is so vast, so comprehensive, that it already knows who is talking to whom. It now subpoenas and harasses reporters simply to force them to confirm in court what they have already learned through surveillance, but the limitless Surveillance State it has created has rendered undetected whistleblowing — or undetected anything — virtually impossible.
This attack on whistleblowers is directly related to the limitless Surveillance State which Zakaria denounces: for full-scale control, it’s just as necessary for a government to shield its own actions from any transparency and scrutiny as it is to know everything which citizens are doing and saying. That’s the one-way mirror which all authoritarian regimes attempt to construct: those in power know everything about the conduct of those who are ruled, while those who are ruled know nothing about the conduct of those in power. That’s what keeps the power dynamic so imbalanced in one direction. But this unprecedented attack on whistleblowers, as obviously significant as it is, also enjoys full bipartisan support (as well as the indifference of a supremely passive media), and so it, too, will be completely ignored by the grand Election-Year clash of America’s two great and oh-so-fundamentally-different political parties.
UPDATE: Obviously related to each point raised here: two separate NATO attacks in Afghanistan today reportedly killed numerous civilians, up to — according to one report — 20 civilians, including a mother and her five children.
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