http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-media-consensus-behind-militarism/5330780
The Media Consensus Behind Militarism
While the U.S. media has some spirited debate over politics and social issues – i.e. Fox News vs. MSNBC – there remains a broad consensus about foreign adversaries whose behavior is almost always cast in the harshest light, a reality that colors how America reacts to the world.
I spent years as a political pundit on mainstream TV – at CNN, Fox News and MSNBC. I was outnumbered, outshouted, red-baited and finally terminated. Inside mainstream media, I saw that major issues were not only dodged, but sometimes not even acknowledged to exist.
Today there’s an elephant in the room: a huge, yet ignored, issue that largely explains why Social Security is now on the chopping block. And why other industrialized countries have free college education and universal healthcare, but we don’t. It’s arguably our country’s biggest problem – a problem that Martin Luther King Jr. focused on before he was assassinated 45 years ago, and has only worsened since then (which was the height of the Vietnam War).
That problem is U.S. militarism and perpetual war.
In 1967, King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” – and said, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
Nowadays MSNBC hosts yell at Fox News hosts, and vice versa, about all sorts of issues – but when the Obama administration expanded the bloody war in Afghanistan, the shouting heads at both channels went almost silent. When Obama’s drone war expanded, there was little shouting. Not at MSNBC, not at Fox. Nor at CNN, CBS, ABC or so-called public broadcasting.
We can have raging debates in mainstream media about issues like gun control and gay marriage and minimum wage, but when the elites of both parties agree on military intervention – as they so often do – debate is nearly nonexistent. Anyone in the mainstream who goes out on a limb to loudly question this oversized creature in the middle of the room known as militarism or interventionism is likely to disappear faster than you can say “Phil Donahue.”
I know something about mainstream journalists being silenced for questioning bipartisan military adventures because I worked with Phil Donahue at MSNBC in 2002/03 when Bush was revving up the Iraq invasion with the support of Democratic leaders like Joe Biden, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and Harry Reid. That’s when MSNBC terminated us for the crime of JWI. Not DWI, but JWI – Journalism duringWartime while Independent.
JWI may be a crime in mainstream media, but it’s exactly the kind of unauthorized, unofficial coverage you get from quality independent media today and from un-embedded journalists like Jeremy Scahill, Dahr Jamail and Glenn Greenwald.
Unfortunately, many liberal journalists who were vocal about war, human rights and civil liberties during the Bush era lost their voices as Obama continued and, in some cases, expanded Bush’s “War on Terror” policies. It says something about the lack of serious national debate on so-called national security that last month one of the loudest mainstream TV news questioners of the president’s right to assassinate Americans was Sean Hannity on Fox. That’s obscene.
And it says something about mainstream TV that the toughest, most consistent questioners of militarism and defenders of civil liberties are not on a news channel – they’re on the comedy channel. A few weeks ago, I watched a passionate Jon Stewart taking on the U.S. military budget: “We already spend more on defense than the next 12 countries combined, including China, including Russia. We’re like the lady on Jerry Springer who can’t stop getting breast implants.” (On screen was a photo of the Springer guest.)
What our mainstream media so obediently call the “War on Terror” is experienced in other countries as a U.S. war OF terror – kidnappings, night raids, torture, drone strikes, killing and maiming of innocent civilians – that creates new enemies for our country. Interestingly, you can easily find that reality in mainstream media of allied countries in Europe, but not in the mainstream media of our country. Needless to say, it’s our country that’s waging this global perpetual war.
In a democracy, war must be subjected to questioning and debate. And not just on the comedy channel.
Sunday, April 14, 2013
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
SC116-9
http://carolynbaker.net/2013/04/07/the-five-stages-of-collapse-by-dmitry-orlov-reviewed-by-carolyn-baker/
The Five Stages Of Collapse
Many of us who have been researching collapse for a decade or more repeatedly use the word in writing, speaking, and daily conversation, but few of us have the opportunity to define it with such precision or personal experience as one finds in Dmitry Orlov’s forthcoming book Five Stages of Collapse: A Survivor’s Toolkit (New Society Publishers, 281 pages). I first heard of Dmitry when I was writing for From The Wilderness in 2005 after FTW published “Post-Soviet Lessons For A Post-American Century,” one of Orlov’s first articles in the United States naming our predicament and likely outcome.
Since then I have been a huge fan of Dmitry’s work, and I must concur with Richard Heinberg who says, “Even if I believed collapse were impossible I’d still read everything Dmitry Orlov writes: he’s that entertaining.” Incisive articulation of reality tempered with irrepressible humor and sarcasm define his writing style and not only compel us to stay with what some describe as a “dark Russian perspective,” but reveal a man who has found a way to live with what is so and navigate it with buoyant humanity.
The Five Stages of Collapse is nothing less than a definitive textbook for a hypothetical course entitled “The Collapse Of Industrial Civilization 101” or perhaps a bible of sorts for an imaginary “Institute of Collapse Studies.” While to my knowledge no such courses or organizations presently exist, this book would be an essential aspect of any such entity’s credibility.
Early on, Orlov clearly and cogently defines collapse in general then proceeds to demonstrate the five stages or aspects of civilization in which it is almost certain to unfold: Finance, commerce, politics, society, and culture. In addition, he provides a variety of options for how these aspects of collapse might be navigated, attended by an actual case history relevant to each one. His intention in writing the book can best be summarized by a statement made in the book’s Afterword: “There is no agenda here — just the assumption that collapse will happen, the conjecture that it can be analyzed as unfolding in five distinct phases and, based on quite a bit of research, the conclusion that each phase will require a different set of adaptations from those who wish to survive it.”
Prior to launching into the Five Stages, Orlov states that before arguing for imminent collapse, we must be convinced of the finitude of fossil fuels and other resources, and we must understand that as resources become increasingly scarce, the capacity for global industrial growth ultimately vanishes. And while coming to terms with these two realities overwhelmingly advances the certainty of collapse, nothing persuades us like our own personal experience.
Once we have realized the extent of our predicament and the compelling likelihood of the collapse of industrial civilization, we exit exclusively mental territory and enter the psychological realm, for as Orlov says, “the main impediment to grasping its significance is not intellectual but psychological.”
Enter then the Five Stages of Grief as articulated by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross or the Five Stages of Peak Oil explained by John Michael Greer in his recent book Not The Future We Ordered: Peak Oil, Psychology, And The Myth of Progress or the stages outlined by Linda Buzzell and Sarah Edwards in “The Waking Up Syndrome.” However, Orlov makes clear that what he wishes to provide in this book is not another list of emotional stages but a taxonomy or “mental milestones.” In other words, “Rather than tying each phase to a particular emotion, as in the Kübler-Ross model, the proposed taxonomy ties each of the five stages to the breaching of a specific level of trust, or faith, in the status quo.” His intention is to help us gauge our own collapse preparedness by knowing the Five Stages and how they are likely to play out, then acting accordingly.
I believe that Orlov’s taxonomy is essential, and at the same time, I do not believe enough has yet been articulated about the emotional stages of collapse. I have provided an extensive toolkit of emotional and spiritual preparation in my 2011 book Navigating The Coming Chaos: A Handbook For Inner Transition, but as collapse unfolds, much more work needs to be done on the emotional stages of it, and two of my forthcoming books Collapsing Consciously:Transformative Truths For Turbulent Times and Love In The Long Emergency will endeavor to offer even more comprehensive insights. I cannot overstate the fact that every stage of collapse is and will be fraught with myriad emotions, and assuming that one can weather them without an enormous commitment to emotional and spiritual preparation is naïve at best and foolhardy at worst.
Financial Collapse
This is a time when “faith in ‘business as usual’ is lost. The future is no longer assumed to resemble the past in any way that allows risk to be assessed and financial assets to be guaranteed. Financial institutions become insolvent; savings are wiped out and access to capital is lost.” Essentially, says Orlov, the way in which the financial aspect of collapse has been dealt with is through “extend and pretend” which does not address the root of the problem, usury. Yet, as he does with all of the stages of collapse, Orlov presents options for cashing out and at the end of the section on financial collapse, offers a vignette of his own family weathering the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s as well as a case history related to the financial collapse of Iceland.
Certainly, whether it be in financial markets or the loss of one’s employment or the vanishing of one’s retirement pension, the undermining of trust is ubiquitous. Of this Orlov says:
A cultural flip is needed to change from impersonal, commercial relationships to personal relationships based on trust, and the first hurdle, for many people, is in understanding what trust actually is,because there is no innate human quality called trustworthiness, possessed by some people, lacking in others. Rather, it is more along the lines of a generalization concerning a given individual’s behavior over time, within a given relationship. Trust is transactional: a person needs a reason to trust you, and you need a reason to trust that person. There is, however, such a quality as trustfulness: this is the property of small children, tame animals and, most unfortunately for them, many regular, salt-of-the-earth, mainstream Americans. It is of negative survival value in the context of financial collapse.
Referring to the writing of Russian scientist and anarchist, Peter Kropotkin, Orlov emphasizes that humans are social creatures who “thrive through cooperation,” and it seems that the smaller the scale, the more likely that trust will actually function without major conflict.
Ultimately, in financial collapse, decisions must be made about the viability of larger players and who benefits by continually propping them up. According to Orlov, “Iceland’s approach was to let financial companies go bankrupt rather than prop them up with public funds….But a further case can be made that the failure of financial institutions can be a good thing, because it frees up resources for productive activities that benefit the entire society rather than just the rentier class and the über-rich.”
Commercial Collapse
Financial collapse leads to commercial collapse which then leads to political collapse, and the effect of each shock is to make the system as a whole less resilient. In this section Orlov distinguishes the three kinds of commerce that function in the current commercial milieu: trade, barter/tribute, and gift. As financial, commercial, and political collapse exacerbate, Orlov sees trade, the dominant function in industrial societies, being superseded by gift. Whereas “barter involves an external conflict between two conflicting sets of interests that is resolved through negotiation, gift internalizes this conflict in each person. Explicitly and publicly one never gives gifts expecting to get something back. But gift also presupposes a debt of gratitude that is discharged through reciprocity. Nevertheless, with gifts one’s social status is based on one’s generosity and is destroyed by any explicit expectation of reciprocation.”
Orlov’s perspective on gift echoes Charles Eisenstein’s “gift economy” as explained in his groundbreaking book, Sacred Economics. In a video published by The Guardian, Eisenstein argues that, “such a model aims to bring about a workforce driven by passion rather than coerced by money and profit, and he highlights certain co-operative schemes already proving the ideal can be made real.” Eisenstein’s work offers one model for how communities and individuals might respond to financial and commercial collapse and provides an opportunity to begin practicing this strategy in current time.
Most importantly in preparing for commercial collapse, according to Orlov, “you can work on reducing your dependence on impersonal relationships and institutions. You can learn to avoid relying on money and monetary equivalents, and instead learn to rely on gifts and the various extensions and generalizations of gifts. You can create new custom and ritual, laying the foundation for a new culture that is right side up.”
Political Collapse
Following on the heels of financial and commercial collapse is political collapse which is a different animal altogether, and leaves the society open to chaos.
Realistically, however, the police, the military, and the bureaucrats will not quietly go away and “allow the people to self-organize, experiment and come together as autonomous new groups adapted to the new environment in their composition and patterns of self-governance.” The greatest fear of the hierarchy, and of the general population who are terrified of anarchy, is the lack of order. And of course, eventually the nation state itself will vanish. According to Orlov:
In its stead will come a myriad of tiny polities, some squabbling with their neighbors, some living side by side peaceably, but all incapable of launching a single aircraft carrier, never mind starting a world war. But they might be able to build some beautiful cathedrals and opera houses, lavish resources on the arts and on schools of philosophy and use artisanal methods to produce everyday items that will put to shame the mass-produced plastic rubbish of today.
Much of this depends, however, on the issue of scale. The smaller the scale, the greater the likelihood of sustained success. As political collapse exacerbates, state services go away, and we have only to consider some dramatic examples in the United States such as Flint, Michigan, Camden, New Jersey, and Fall River, Massachusetts to see what wider-spread collapse will look like.
What is certain is that law and order will disappear. “Once central authority does collapse,” says Orlov, “an area may lapse into chaos and warlordism for a time, disrupting both licit and illicit trade. Eventually new forms of governance begin to emerge.” Certainly, we can then expect to see mini-mafias proliferate which will opportunistically provide some kind of societal structure and do so with a certain amount of appearance of honesty and fairness without which they could not succeed.
For Orlov, attempting to effect political change in a collapsing society is more than futile. Not only is political collapse unavoidable, but as resources further deplete, the methods of communication on which we have relied for so long will eventually vanish. He suggests that we could make better use of our time by learning some effective ways of communication that do not rely on the Internet. Of this he says: “And so, if you want to achieve a serious political effect, my suggestion is that you sit back Buddha-like, fold your arms, and do some deep breathing exercises. Then you should work on developing someinterpersonal skills that don’t need to be mediated by electronics.”
This contention also reinforces mine, namely that emotional preparation/inner work/communication skills are every bit as urgent as the logistical preparations we are making in terms of food, water, shelter, security, and health maintenance.
Social Collapse
For Orlov, in social collapse: “Faith that ‘your people will take care of you’ is lost, as local social institutions, be they charities or other groups that rush in to fill the power vacuum, run out of resources or fail through internal conflict.” For this reason, community organizing is futile because “the central problem with community organizing is that the sort of community that stands a chance post-collapse is simply unacceptable pre-collapse: it is illegal, it is uncomfortable and it is unsafe. No reasonable person would want any part of it.”
The old rules must be supplanted by new ones. There will be no time or resources for the rules by which society currently operates to be changed through lobbying, deliberation, legislation, and litigation. Again, one can anticipate obstacles from the vested interests:
By default, the procedure for those who wish to survive will be to universally disregard the old rules and to make up new rules as they go along, but this is bound to cause mayhem and much loss of life. The best-case scenario is that the old rules are consigned to oblivion quickly and decisively. The public at large will not be the major impediment to making the necessary changes. Rather, it will be the vested interests at every level — the political class, the financial elite, professional associations, property and business owners and, last but not least, the lawyers — who will try to block them at every turn. They will not release their grip on society voluntarily, so it is best to make plans to forestall and thwart their efforts….The old rules will not work, but the new ones might, depending on what they are. You might want to give the new rules some thought ahead of time, perhaps even test themout under the guise of emergency preparation training.
Here Orlov reminds us that as jobs and services go away, people will have much more time on their hands, and people will begin engaging with others who are in a similar situation so that the spontaneous regeneration of the community will automatically be engendered by the construction of new rules made by ordinary people who are no longer invested in the consumeristic system.
Some help can come from religious groups or communities and charitable organizations (many of which are religious). Historically, many of them have weathered extremely troubled times and have ensured the survival of their own and surrounding communities. In a disintegrating, corrupt, and unreformable political system, why fight battles that have already been won? Working with religious institutions or communities could prove extremely useful in making new rules and regenerating communities.
Like Orlov, I believe that collapse will not unfold in a monolithic, standardized manner. I am fond of saying that it will play out in a “lumpy” fashion with some regions looking very different from others. In some communities, people will come together and cooperate, and in other communities they will not.
Cultural Collapse
Orlov defines cultural collapse in this way: “Faith in the goodness of humanity is lost. People lose their capacity for ‘kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion, charity.’ Families disband and compete as individuals for scarce resources. The new motto becomes ‘May you die today so that I can die tomorrow’.”
He suggests that we must consciously widen our circle of trust by beginning to trust people outside it in small ways and then deepening that trust when they prove trustworthy. To accomplish this, we need to swim upstream against the culture’s prevailing attitude of not recognizing or not seeing others. Let other know that you see them, and begin trusting in small ways.
Additionally, we must also preserve the knowledge we deem worth preserving by speaking it orally to each other and to our children. This is especially important in a collapsing world where electronic information, libraries, and many forms of written information may disappear. The second-best means of preserving this knowledge is by writing it down and teaching it to children.
In societal collapse, the family will become increasingly important. Orlov argues that “the family can be viewed as a microcosm of society — or society as a meta-family. This line of reasoning leads to a radical conclusion: that family is society, while larger groups are illusory. At the rock bottom of human survival, there is no individual and there is no state; there is only the family, or, if there isn’t, there is something that’s not quite human — or there is nothing at all.”
Orlov ends the book with an invitation to his readers to allow their absorption of collapse information to give them a “secret post-collapse identity” that will profoundly alter how they live their lives. Eventually, the reader will meet others who have adapted their own post-collapse identities, and very rich conversations might ensue. But of course, that will be all about trust, and trust, as Orlov reminds us, is built on actions, not words. Moreover, he cautions the reader not even to trust him “just because,” but rather he asserts, “you should think for yourself, act on your thoughts and, if that works for you, learn to trust yourself. All I want to do is give you a gentle nudge in that direction.”
Most importantly, Dmitry Orlov leaves us with perhaps the most profound and pivotal sentence of the book: “Collapse is not a nightmare scenario to be avoided at all costs but part of the normal, unalterable ebb and flow of human history, and the widespread tendency to block it out of our worldview is, to put it very mildly, maladaptive.” The Five Stages of Collapse, I believe, is required reading for long-term, strategic collapse preparation.
The Five Stages Of Collapse
Many of us who have been researching collapse for a decade or more repeatedly use the word in writing, speaking, and daily conversation, but few of us have the opportunity to define it with such precision or personal experience as one finds in Dmitry Orlov’s forthcoming book Five Stages of Collapse: A Survivor’s Toolkit (New Society Publishers, 281 pages). I first heard of Dmitry when I was writing for From The Wilderness in 2005 after FTW published “Post-Soviet Lessons For A Post-American Century,” one of Orlov’s first articles in the United States naming our predicament and likely outcome.
Since then I have been a huge fan of Dmitry’s work, and I must concur with Richard Heinberg who says, “Even if I believed collapse were impossible I’d still read everything Dmitry Orlov writes: he’s that entertaining.” Incisive articulation of reality tempered with irrepressible humor and sarcasm define his writing style and not only compel us to stay with what some describe as a “dark Russian perspective,” but reveal a man who has found a way to live with what is so and navigate it with buoyant humanity.
The Five Stages of Collapse is nothing less than a definitive textbook for a hypothetical course entitled “The Collapse Of Industrial Civilization 101” or perhaps a bible of sorts for an imaginary “Institute of Collapse Studies.” While to my knowledge no such courses or organizations presently exist, this book would be an essential aspect of any such entity’s credibility.
Early on, Orlov clearly and cogently defines collapse in general then proceeds to demonstrate the five stages or aspects of civilization in which it is almost certain to unfold: Finance, commerce, politics, society, and culture. In addition, he provides a variety of options for how these aspects of collapse might be navigated, attended by an actual case history relevant to each one. His intention in writing the book can best be summarized by a statement made in the book’s Afterword: “There is no agenda here — just the assumption that collapse will happen, the conjecture that it can be analyzed as unfolding in five distinct phases and, based on quite a bit of research, the conclusion that each phase will require a different set of adaptations from those who wish to survive it.”
Prior to launching into the Five Stages, Orlov states that before arguing for imminent collapse, we must be convinced of the finitude of fossil fuels and other resources, and we must understand that as resources become increasingly scarce, the capacity for global industrial growth ultimately vanishes. And while coming to terms with these two realities overwhelmingly advances the certainty of collapse, nothing persuades us like our own personal experience.
Once we have realized the extent of our predicament and the compelling likelihood of the collapse of industrial civilization, we exit exclusively mental territory and enter the psychological realm, for as Orlov says, “the main impediment to grasping its significance is not intellectual but psychological.”
Enter then the Five Stages of Grief as articulated by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross or the Five Stages of Peak Oil explained by John Michael Greer in his recent book Not The Future We Ordered: Peak Oil, Psychology, And The Myth of Progress or the stages outlined by Linda Buzzell and Sarah Edwards in “The Waking Up Syndrome.” However, Orlov makes clear that what he wishes to provide in this book is not another list of emotional stages but a taxonomy or “mental milestones.” In other words, “Rather than tying each phase to a particular emotion, as in the Kübler-Ross model, the proposed taxonomy ties each of the five stages to the breaching of a specific level of trust, or faith, in the status quo.” His intention is to help us gauge our own collapse preparedness by knowing the Five Stages and how they are likely to play out, then acting accordingly.
I believe that Orlov’s taxonomy is essential, and at the same time, I do not believe enough has yet been articulated about the emotional stages of collapse. I have provided an extensive toolkit of emotional and spiritual preparation in my 2011 book Navigating The Coming Chaos: A Handbook For Inner Transition, but as collapse unfolds, much more work needs to be done on the emotional stages of it, and two of my forthcoming books Collapsing Consciously:Transformative Truths For Turbulent Times and Love In The Long Emergency will endeavor to offer even more comprehensive insights. I cannot overstate the fact that every stage of collapse is and will be fraught with myriad emotions, and assuming that one can weather them without an enormous commitment to emotional and spiritual preparation is naïve at best and foolhardy at worst.
Financial Collapse
This is a time when “faith in ‘business as usual’ is lost. The future is no longer assumed to resemble the past in any way that allows risk to be assessed and financial assets to be guaranteed. Financial institutions become insolvent; savings are wiped out and access to capital is lost.” Essentially, says Orlov, the way in which the financial aspect of collapse has been dealt with is through “extend and pretend” which does not address the root of the problem, usury. Yet, as he does with all of the stages of collapse, Orlov presents options for cashing out and at the end of the section on financial collapse, offers a vignette of his own family weathering the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s as well as a case history related to the financial collapse of Iceland.
Certainly, whether it be in financial markets or the loss of one’s employment or the vanishing of one’s retirement pension, the undermining of trust is ubiquitous. Of this Orlov says:
A cultural flip is needed to change from impersonal, commercial relationships to personal relationships based on trust, and the first hurdle, for many people, is in understanding what trust actually is,because there is no innate human quality called trustworthiness, possessed by some people, lacking in others. Rather, it is more along the lines of a generalization concerning a given individual’s behavior over time, within a given relationship. Trust is transactional: a person needs a reason to trust you, and you need a reason to trust that person. There is, however, such a quality as trustfulness: this is the property of small children, tame animals and, most unfortunately for them, many regular, salt-of-the-earth, mainstream Americans. It is of negative survival value in the context of financial collapse.
Referring to the writing of Russian scientist and anarchist, Peter Kropotkin, Orlov emphasizes that humans are social creatures who “thrive through cooperation,” and it seems that the smaller the scale, the more likely that trust will actually function without major conflict.
Ultimately, in financial collapse, decisions must be made about the viability of larger players and who benefits by continually propping them up. According to Orlov, “Iceland’s approach was to let financial companies go bankrupt rather than prop them up with public funds….But a further case can be made that the failure of financial institutions can be a good thing, because it frees up resources for productive activities that benefit the entire society rather than just the rentier class and the über-rich.”
Commercial Collapse
Financial collapse leads to commercial collapse which then leads to political collapse, and the effect of each shock is to make the system as a whole less resilient. In this section Orlov distinguishes the three kinds of commerce that function in the current commercial milieu: trade, barter/tribute, and gift. As financial, commercial, and political collapse exacerbate, Orlov sees trade, the dominant function in industrial societies, being superseded by gift. Whereas “barter involves an external conflict between two conflicting sets of interests that is resolved through negotiation, gift internalizes this conflict in each person. Explicitly and publicly one never gives gifts expecting to get something back. But gift also presupposes a debt of gratitude that is discharged through reciprocity. Nevertheless, with gifts one’s social status is based on one’s generosity and is destroyed by any explicit expectation of reciprocation.”
Orlov’s perspective on gift echoes Charles Eisenstein’s “gift economy” as explained in his groundbreaking book, Sacred Economics. In a video published by The Guardian, Eisenstein argues that, “such a model aims to bring about a workforce driven by passion rather than coerced by money and profit, and he highlights certain co-operative schemes already proving the ideal can be made real.” Eisenstein’s work offers one model for how communities and individuals might respond to financial and commercial collapse and provides an opportunity to begin practicing this strategy in current time.
Most importantly in preparing for commercial collapse, according to Orlov, “you can work on reducing your dependence on impersonal relationships and institutions. You can learn to avoid relying on money and monetary equivalents, and instead learn to rely on gifts and the various extensions and generalizations of gifts. You can create new custom and ritual, laying the foundation for a new culture that is right side up.”
Political Collapse
Following on the heels of financial and commercial collapse is political collapse which is a different animal altogether, and leaves the society open to chaos.
Realistically, however, the police, the military, and the bureaucrats will not quietly go away and “allow the people to self-organize, experiment and come together as autonomous new groups adapted to the new environment in their composition and patterns of self-governance.” The greatest fear of the hierarchy, and of the general population who are terrified of anarchy, is the lack of order. And of course, eventually the nation state itself will vanish. According to Orlov:
In its stead will come a myriad of tiny polities, some squabbling with their neighbors, some living side by side peaceably, but all incapable of launching a single aircraft carrier, never mind starting a world war. But they might be able to build some beautiful cathedrals and opera houses, lavish resources on the arts and on schools of philosophy and use artisanal methods to produce everyday items that will put to shame the mass-produced plastic rubbish of today.
Much of this depends, however, on the issue of scale. The smaller the scale, the greater the likelihood of sustained success. As political collapse exacerbates, state services go away, and we have only to consider some dramatic examples in the United States such as Flint, Michigan, Camden, New Jersey, and Fall River, Massachusetts to see what wider-spread collapse will look like.
What is certain is that law and order will disappear. “Once central authority does collapse,” says Orlov, “an area may lapse into chaos and warlordism for a time, disrupting both licit and illicit trade. Eventually new forms of governance begin to emerge.” Certainly, we can then expect to see mini-mafias proliferate which will opportunistically provide some kind of societal structure and do so with a certain amount of appearance of honesty and fairness without which they could not succeed.
For Orlov, attempting to effect political change in a collapsing society is more than futile. Not only is political collapse unavoidable, but as resources further deplete, the methods of communication on which we have relied for so long will eventually vanish. He suggests that we could make better use of our time by learning some effective ways of communication that do not rely on the Internet. Of this he says: “And so, if you want to achieve a serious political effect, my suggestion is that you sit back Buddha-like, fold your arms, and do some deep breathing exercises. Then you should work on developing someinterpersonal skills that don’t need to be mediated by electronics.”
This contention also reinforces mine, namely that emotional preparation/inner work/communication skills are every bit as urgent as the logistical preparations we are making in terms of food, water, shelter, security, and health maintenance.
Social Collapse
For Orlov, in social collapse: “Faith that ‘your people will take care of you’ is lost, as local social institutions, be they charities or other groups that rush in to fill the power vacuum, run out of resources or fail through internal conflict.” For this reason, community organizing is futile because “the central problem with community organizing is that the sort of community that stands a chance post-collapse is simply unacceptable pre-collapse: it is illegal, it is uncomfortable and it is unsafe. No reasonable person would want any part of it.”
The old rules must be supplanted by new ones. There will be no time or resources for the rules by which society currently operates to be changed through lobbying, deliberation, legislation, and litigation. Again, one can anticipate obstacles from the vested interests:
By default, the procedure for those who wish to survive will be to universally disregard the old rules and to make up new rules as they go along, but this is bound to cause mayhem and much loss of life. The best-case scenario is that the old rules are consigned to oblivion quickly and decisively. The public at large will not be the major impediment to making the necessary changes. Rather, it will be the vested interests at every level — the political class, the financial elite, professional associations, property and business owners and, last but not least, the lawyers — who will try to block them at every turn. They will not release their grip on society voluntarily, so it is best to make plans to forestall and thwart their efforts….The old rules will not work, but the new ones might, depending on what they are. You might want to give the new rules some thought ahead of time, perhaps even test themout under the guise of emergency preparation training.
Here Orlov reminds us that as jobs and services go away, people will have much more time on their hands, and people will begin engaging with others who are in a similar situation so that the spontaneous regeneration of the community will automatically be engendered by the construction of new rules made by ordinary people who are no longer invested in the consumeristic system.
Some help can come from religious groups or communities and charitable organizations (many of which are religious). Historically, many of them have weathered extremely troubled times and have ensured the survival of their own and surrounding communities. In a disintegrating, corrupt, and unreformable political system, why fight battles that have already been won? Working with religious institutions or communities could prove extremely useful in making new rules and regenerating communities.
Like Orlov, I believe that collapse will not unfold in a monolithic, standardized manner. I am fond of saying that it will play out in a “lumpy” fashion with some regions looking very different from others. In some communities, people will come together and cooperate, and in other communities they will not.
Cultural Collapse
Orlov defines cultural collapse in this way: “Faith in the goodness of humanity is lost. People lose their capacity for ‘kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion, charity.’ Families disband and compete as individuals for scarce resources. The new motto becomes ‘May you die today so that I can die tomorrow’.”
He suggests that we must consciously widen our circle of trust by beginning to trust people outside it in small ways and then deepening that trust when they prove trustworthy. To accomplish this, we need to swim upstream against the culture’s prevailing attitude of not recognizing or not seeing others. Let other know that you see them, and begin trusting in small ways.
Additionally, we must also preserve the knowledge we deem worth preserving by speaking it orally to each other and to our children. This is especially important in a collapsing world where electronic information, libraries, and many forms of written information may disappear. The second-best means of preserving this knowledge is by writing it down and teaching it to children.
In societal collapse, the family will become increasingly important. Orlov argues that “the family can be viewed as a microcosm of society — or society as a meta-family. This line of reasoning leads to a radical conclusion: that family is society, while larger groups are illusory. At the rock bottom of human survival, there is no individual and there is no state; there is only the family, or, if there isn’t, there is something that’s not quite human — or there is nothing at all.”
Orlov ends the book with an invitation to his readers to allow their absorption of collapse information to give them a “secret post-collapse identity” that will profoundly alter how they live their lives. Eventually, the reader will meet others who have adapted their own post-collapse identities, and very rich conversations might ensue. But of course, that will be all about trust, and trust, as Orlov reminds us, is built on actions, not words. Moreover, he cautions the reader not even to trust him “just because,” but rather he asserts, “you should think for yourself, act on your thoughts and, if that works for you, learn to trust yourself. All I want to do is give you a gentle nudge in that direction.”
Most importantly, Dmitry Orlov leaves us with perhaps the most profound and pivotal sentence of the book: “Collapse is not a nightmare scenario to be avoided at all costs but part of the normal, unalterable ebb and flow of human history, and the widespread tendency to block it out of our worldview is, to put it very mildly, maladaptive.” The Five Stages of Collapse, I believe, is required reading for long-term, strategic collapse preparation.
Monday, April 8, 2013
SC116-8
http://news.goldseek.com/GoldenJackass/1364601600.php
USDollar: Ring-Fenced & Checkmate
An unstoppable sequence of events has been put into motion finally. The pressure has been building for months. Some themes are plainly evident, except to those who wear rose colored glasses in the US Dome of Perception. The USTreasury Bond will be brought home to the US and British banks, where it will choke its bankers, then be devalued for survival reasons, after a painful isolation. The Chinese and Russians will conspire to finance the Eurasian Trade Zone corridor foundation with USTBonds, held in reserve, put to usage. The British will play a very unusual role, selling out the United States in order to be squires to the Eastern Duo. The process has begun; it cannot be stopped. The events are already being grossly misinterpreted and minimized in the US press, where devoted lapdogs, artistic swindlers, and creative writers prevail. The Paradigm Shift eastward is showing its next face, with a truly massive trade zone for cooperation and reduced cost overhead as the giant foundation. The Untied States for all of its past hegemony and devious manipulations and vicious attacks, will be excluded. The British will assist in the exclusion in order to avoid the Third World themselves. The following blueprint is the result of years of planning, with steady information and hints and confirmations by at least two Hat Trick Letter sources. The sunset of the USDollar has a blueprint. As a personal embroidery, let me state that this article is the most important the Jackass has ever written. Let it be taken seriously for its grave somber message.
EURASIAN TRADE ZONE
The crowning blow is the financial centerpiece to the trade zone, which draws upon the critical mass bulk of the BRICS nations as nucleus. Together Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa have begun to form an alliance built upon trade and economic development, forged by investment in infrastructure and its construction. Include Iran and Indonesia to welcome the new BRIIICS nations for a larger Eastern representation. The arterial system of the trade zone will be energy supply, the life blood of commerce. The Eurasian Trade Zone is being formed, with an energy foundation. Important bilateral pacts were made concrete in the last week. Supply of crude oil, natural gas, including LNG, will come from a vast system of pipelines from Russia to Central Europe and from Russia to China. Completed pipelines will flow. Other pipelines will be completed. Crucial pacts have been made final, with more to come. Additional important pipelines along the periphery will be completed also, like the Iran-Pakistan Pipeline, despite the USGovt obstruction and intimidation. New LNG ports will be constructed. Logistics for rail traffic will be agreed upon, for commodity supply. Many features of the trade zone will be worked out, like reduced tariffs, like border inspection methods, like payment systems including barter, like environmental concerns, like regional cooperation.
BRICS DEVELOPMENT BANK
Consider the BRICS Development Bank. It is so much more than a fund to build railroads in remote African locations, as the delusional US press reports. It will form the giant credit line for countless projects upon which trade will be conducted, often called infrastructure, but so much more. It will gradually reveal itself to provide a second function, a core bank for trade payments outside the USDollar sphere. Steps are being made, extremely important steps, that will shape the next chapter. The United States will not play a role. With a trade zone and financial payment structure, the USDollar is to be rendered an outsider looking in, soon to be deemed obsolete. The many emerging nations are coming of age, flexing their muscles, banding together. Their critical mass in trade volume, in industrial output, and in product development, including patent registration, are impressive. In the last two years, they have demonstrated that the G-20 Meeting of finance ministers has totally eclipsed the G-7 Meeting that had dominated for two decades. They are making the next critical step in creating a bank, a global bank whose role will grow and expand. It will operate under the golden glow.
EXCLUSION OF UNITED STATES
The many years of abusive control of the FOREX currency markets, intervention in the sovereign bond markets, manipulation in the important commodity markets, devious propaganda in the communications networks, with support role played by the aggressive USMilitary and nefarious activity by its security agencies have guaranteed exclusion of the United States. The unspeakable abuse of the US$ credit card will end, as the global reserve currency is dismissed from its throne. The US leader crew, led by fascist bankers, can print money and counterfeit bonds all they wish, but the currency will be required to submit to grand devaluation if they wish to purchase supplies for the massively lopsided and imbalanced USEconomy, the greatest travesty in marketplace history. While the Keystone Pipeline is corrupted by the USGovt with hidden beneficiaries such as Halliburton and Burlington Northern, essentially divvying up the gangrenous paunch of the exhausted bloated American torso, the vast pipelines of the European and Asian continents are merging. They will not include the Americans, whose pathetic gambit fell on its face, the Trans-Pacific Partnership pushed by the Obama Admin. It actually attempted to form a trade zone with Asia, on condition that the lead nations Japan and South Korea excluded China. How incredibly moronic and amateurish! What a pathetic return on the dime for votes for this leader in the new police state.
BRITISH BROKER ROLE & INTRIGUE
The British have an historical knack to remain on top of the bank center heap. Earlier this year, when they announced the launch of a Chinese Yuan Swap Facility in London City, they stepped on the New York neck. Never in a million years would South Manhattan serve as the site of a Yuan Swap functionary post, not during a trade war that has a secret hot military war element being played out in Southern African near the horn (see Djibouti). The embattled British Petroleum will retain a 19.75% stake in Rosneft, which is to acquire the significant BP-TBK energy firm in Russia. Both Bank of America and Citigroup are brokering a $55 billion deal that will enable Rosneft to become the world's largest oil company. Several hidden messages are laden within the blockbuster global changing deal by Rosneft. By dissecting the flow, it is clear the BP executive staff is selling out, since not paying dividends. The collateral for the deal toward the loans will come from USTreasury Bonds. The Anglo-American bank complex will in effect be forced to swallow its own high volume of toxic paper. The tainted BP oil giant still reels from the tarnish of the Gulf of Mexico incident. Worse, BP is finally pushed out following its dubious role in the Yeltsin years of Russia. That difficult transition period in the 1990 decade saw a failed attempt by the Western Oil Giants to control Russia and its vast energy wealth. Putin from the KGB said no, and it did not happen on his watch. He assumed the Kremlin top post. Witness a potentially crucial London role in helping the Eurasian Trade Zone, perhaps buying favor to avoid the Third World. The broad exclusion of the United States guarantees a Third World flavor and stench for the North American core, with a Mad Max overtone and a Dachau closet.
DEVIOUS CYPRUS HIDDEN ANGLE
A piece of the financing for the Rosneft deal came from GazpromBank, which operates out of Cyprus. China has posted $30 billion in USTBonds as collateral within the massive deal, in return for ample future crude oil supply. Since Russia will receive a steady flow of payments from China from diverse energy pipeline supply, in the form of USTBond fund flow, the big debt to the London banks will be paid off by USTBonds. The payoff will be in the same terms of the huge collateral. Conclude that the Eurasian Trade Zone will have an energy pipeline and delivery system with loaded supply whose foundation is built upon USTBonds, sent back to the Anglo-American bankers to digest. The USTBonds are going home to die. As Lenin said, the rope to hang themselves will be bought by the capitalists. As footnote, some important toes were stepped on in Cyprus. Expect more entries to the morgue. The event opened the door to dangerous games of brinksmanship.
The timing of the Cyprus bank account tax and confiscation is curious, exactly when the extremely significant summit meeting took place between Russian President Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, where several big pacts were signed. One is left to wonder if the Cyprus fire was lit by the Europeans in order to attempt to disrupt the Moscow Energy Summit with heavy smoke. It bears repeating. The summit received almost zero Western press coverage, even though its details outline a sunset of the USDollar. Maybe because its details outline a sunset of the USDollar. The Jackass is left to wonder if the next important energy pact with the Eurasian Leader Duo (Russia & China) will involve Saudi Arabia, with a whiff of sunset for the Petro-Dollar defacto standard. Cyprus might indeed have been all about trying to save the Petro-Dollar, more than the European banks. Perhaps the Moscow Summit dictated the Cyprus timetable. The Italian elections to depose Monti, Spanish high level corruption and bankruptcies, and the French backtrack on massive spending cuts, these three nations point to urgency in disaster control. The bank account tax was thrust forward, unmasking the fascist bankers.
USDOLLAR HEGEMONY ENDING
The alternative system to conducting trade outside the USDollar system has had formative stages since the Lehman Brothers and Fannie Mae collapse. The Eastern trade leaders have been very busy quietly constructing a new system, with almost zero press coverage. They prefer to work in the background. Recent events indicate they have chosen the formal public stages and forums with wider visibility, starting with the February G-20 Meeting in Moscow. The true agenda for G-20 finance ministers was to hatch finally the USDollar alternative. The sleepy West appears not to be paying much attention. The initiatives to construct alternative platforms were given a major thrust in the last year since the Iran sanctions led by the USGovt banker and their henchmen in London. For the last 20 years at least, trade has followed banking. Nations of the world have been coerced for three decades into holding USGovt debt securities in order to make payment in trade, most notably in crude oil. With the Grand Arab Recycling accord struck by the 1970 decade leaders, the Petro-Dollar was born in return for a fantastic higher oil price. The oil-rich Arab royalty supported the USDollar by recycling trade surplus into USTreasury Bonds. The conventional practice dictated that global banking systems be dominated by USTBonds in reserves, serving as the banking foundation of debt.
New chapter to turn. The ongoing endless QE to Infinity has hastened Eastern trade leaders. The near 0% return from USTBond yields has motivated them to seek alternatives. They are horrified by the debasement of their hard-earned reserves, filled to the gills with USTBonds of shrinking value and low yield. The new trade settlement system based in Gold finance will turn the tables, as once more trade is to dictate banking. The combination of central bank hyper monetary inflation, big US bank fraud, security agency $100 bill counterfeit, and rampant criminality in the US financial system has motivated the Eastern nations to act. They have acted. The clear outcome is that the Western banking system will topple, since the East will be shoving the USTBonds back to Anglo-American shores for cemetery treatment. Trade should always dictate banking. The major trade partners no longer want US$-based trade settlement. Watch for the crowning blow in the Saudi response soon, since they always follow the winners.
THE CENTERPIECE PLAN
The new BRICS development bank will surely be supplied with USTreasury Bonds at first. The primary seeding is obvious. The emerging nations have collected huge reserves from successful trade over the last decade, primarily held in USTBonds. They do not wish to hold them, since undermined and debased by their own steward at the US Federal Reserve. The big Eastern nations have committed $100 billion for the fund, whose liquidity lies in USTBonds. On a gradual ramp, the USTBonds will be converted to Gold bars for the core bank asset in the development fund. Some of the 6000 metric tons of Gold bullion removed from London banks by the Eastern entities from March to July 2012 might find their way into the BRICS Fund core. The initial role of funding critical important projects like pipelines, communication networks, railroads, shipping ports, ships & trucks, perhaps even energy transfer ports, will become clear. The more overarching role of forming a (Eastern) global core central bank clearing house for payment transactions will be its second dual role. The emerging nations have had their fill of the USDollar control mechanisms with the SWIFT bank structure, the Intl Monetary Fund steering committee, and others. Finally, Gold Trade Notes would be used in trade settlement. Witness the new Eastern Fed for trade settlement in Gold bullion. Better to call it the BRICS Development Fund, since a major Trojan Horse for excreting USTBonds through its rectum, the London Boyz busily catching it.
The Gold core will facilitate the purchase of Gold Trade Notes much like the common letters of credit used widely in commerce nowadays. Like the Eurasian Russian-Chinese energy foundation, the development fund will be built on the back of USTBonds in toxic discharge. In the process, expect extreme hardball, shoving the toxic USTBonds back into US and British banks, as collateral for huge loans, as funds for repayment of huge loans, as funds to purchase Gold. In the process, the COMEX with LBMA appendage will be drained of its Gold, a future default assured. The Western gold marts will be unmasked as corrupt dens of empty inventory shelves. What comes is a BRICS Development Fund which will serve as a quasi global gold central bank for the expressed purpose of facilitating trade settlement in Gold. This is hardly just a fund to finance African rail projects.
THE CHECKMATE
A checkmate is in progress. It has four important elements.
1) The established Eurasian Trade Zone joins the massive Asian continent with a significant portion of the European continent, where three quarters of the world population resides. The trade zone has no visible presence or participation by either the United States or United Kingdom.
2) The BRICS Development Fund will control a giant sum of $100 billion. It will eclipse the role of the Intl Monetary Fund. The fund will facilitate numerous infrastructure projects. However, its other feature will be the shocker, as its core is transformed into Gold bullion. The conversion of USTBonds to Gold will nail the coffin in the isolated USDollar, a topic of Jackass scribbles for the last full year.
3) The flow of USTBonds will be from China to London, for financing the foundation of the Eurasian Trade Zone on its energy backbone with brisk energy flow. The collateral for large loans is to be USTBonds, as is repayment for loans to be USTBonds.
4) The transition from Yuan-based trade settlement via the numerous Swap Facilities in barter trade with key nations, toward Gold trade settlement via the BRICS fund that will feature a gold core, will launch the new Gold Trade Standard. It will not be a banker dominated currency type of Gold Standard. It will instead be a trade settlement Gold Standard that bypasses the hegemony of the Anglo-American banking system, the SWIFT rules, the FOREX gaming, and the IMF/World Bank harlots that harbor insects.
ZINGERS AS COFFIN NAILS
Many are the big signals and signposts with deep meaning. They line the path to the Third World. They are many, diverse, and unmistakable in importance. The gradual discard of the USDollar as global reserve currency, the gradual discard of the USTreasury Bond as primary banking system reserve asset, these events are in progress with a speed not seen in past months or past years, not since 2008. The level of intrigue matches the level of deception. Cyprus is not a one-off event, an isolated insignificant beer fart. It is a flash point event. The tipping point events could be bank runs across Southern Europe extending to Britain and the United States, including Canada. Numerous potential tipping point events can be identified, each powerful and ominous for the US Fascists in power. The USDollar is coming home to be buried and devalued. The USTBond is coming home to be buried and downgraded. The ring fence has been clearly laid out. The checkmate with the Eurasian Trade Zone and BRICS Fund is evident for the trained analyst eye. The devaluation will cause severe price inflation and supply shortages for the USEconomy. The end game has never been more clear. Follow the numerous highly important factors at work, each of which could produce a tipping point event. The dominos are aligned and ready. Inside the US Dome of Perception, they are less visible, yet still at work for extreme consequences. Some severe disorder comes this way. Expect some quantum leaps upward in the Gold price and Silver price, each controlled by unprecedented criminal activity in the financial markets.
The BRICS Development Fund is the main event, to build a railway to a dark place for the United States, ring fenced for its toxic USDollar. Gone will be the corrupted motivated tools like the IMF and World Bank, with even Western central banks of lesser importance. The BRICS Fund could be the Trojan Horse (much like ObamaCare) that permits a vast conduit to be built, a seemingly innocuous let permitted entrance through the door, which permits USTBonds to be dumped like the trash.
The upcoming Gold purchases by the BRICS Fund might be coordinated with the Shanghai Metals Exchange, to exploit the artificial low London Gold price. A COMEX bust can be foreseen.
The BRICS should be careful about the new undersea global communication cable system. In 2007, foul play resulted in the Iranian cable being cut, the result of cooperative action by the USGovt and the little ally on the Southern Med that looks northwest to Italy.
The tipping nation is Germany, which has had its fill supporting the slower wasteful debt-ridden Southern European nations. After cutting the cord, they will embrace the Eurasian Trade Zone. Evidence is the numerous heavy rail facilities that begin in Russia and end in Germany for commodity supply. There are two Germanys, one with old corrupt ties to the West, another with traditional reliable ties to the East. The Western camp is given light by the press, while the Eastern camp works behind closed doors shaping the next chapter.
The Eastern Alliance (often discussed in past Hat Trick Letters) is slowly coming into view. The Russian and Chinese corridor will serve as the commercial foundation. The BRICS Development Fund will serve as the backbone. When Germany joins in more overt manner, the Alliance will be clear on the geopolitical stage. Then comes the Saudis to join, complete with protectorate role already offered by the Eastern Duo giants, who together will announce the end to the Petro-Dollar defacto standard.
The political rebellion movement inside Germany is slowly coming into view. They wish to return to the D-Mark currency and to discard the Euro, an experiment in disaster, waste, fraud, and ruin. The movement is gaining traction. Discussion of the Nordic Euro (aka Teutonic Euro) has been heard on an increasing basis among its tribal cousins. Germany will side with Russia & China, and join the next chapter, after shedding its PIIGS pen trash.
Both Russia and China purchase all their domestic gold mining output. If truth be told, their gold reserves are multiples higher than the official data indicates. Neither nation has any desire to cooperate with such critical disclosure, much like national trade secrets. Both nations are ready for the next chapter, with a few years of preparation in new modern systems, platforms, wiring, and gold held in reserve as core wealth.
The ABN Amro news of halted gold delivery speaks volumes to the absent inventory linked to the corrupted London gold market. They have no Gold in inventory. They control the Gold price with paper leverage and suppressive techniques. This news halt out of the Netherlands should be viewed in context of the Germans, Dutch, and Austrians demanding their gold in repatriation. London has none. What gold bullion they do obtain comes from urgent shipments from the Roman Catacombs and the Basel hills of Switzerland.
The nations across the entire West have citizens deeply worried about their savings wealth stored in the banks. They are beginning to realize their accounts are legally considered as bank liabilities subject to heavy loss upon bank failures. They will begin to remove the money from bank accounts in droves, but with capital controls imposed.
The Cyprus bank account tax is the latest ignored shock wave warning to the West. It is described as a small tax to assure bank solvency, but it is a vicious transfer from sovereign source to depositor private source in funded bailouts. It is confiscation. The 2005 Bankruptcy Law in the US gave away the plan, with savings deposits subordinated under derivatives. The MF-Global episode has not resulted in much learned. It was the first test ride of the subordination rules in the new law. The Jackass warned in early 2012 of an MF-Global event for bank accounts and stock accounts. The event is coming very soon, but the public is very sleepy distracted and dulled.
USDollar: Ring-Fenced & Checkmate
An unstoppable sequence of events has been put into motion finally. The pressure has been building for months. Some themes are plainly evident, except to those who wear rose colored glasses in the US Dome of Perception. The USTreasury Bond will be brought home to the US and British banks, where it will choke its bankers, then be devalued for survival reasons, after a painful isolation. The Chinese and Russians will conspire to finance the Eurasian Trade Zone corridor foundation with USTBonds, held in reserve, put to usage. The British will play a very unusual role, selling out the United States in order to be squires to the Eastern Duo. The process has begun; it cannot be stopped. The events are already being grossly misinterpreted and minimized in the US press, where devoted lapdogs, artistic swindlers, and creative writers prevail. The Paradigm Shift eastward is showing its next face, with a truly massive trade zone for cooperation and reduced cost overhead as the giant foundation. The Untied States for all of its past hegemony and devious manipulations and vicious attacks, will be excluded. The British will assist in the exclusion in order to avoid the Third World themselves. The following blueprint is the result of years of planning, with steady information and hints and confirmations by at least two Hat Trick Letter sources. The sunset of the USDollar has a blueprint. As a personal embroidery, let me state that this article is the most important the Jackass has ever written. Let it be taken seriously for its grave somber message.
EURASIAN TRADE ZONE
The crowning blow is the financial centerpiece to the trade zone, which draws upon the critical mass bulk of the BRICS nations as nucleus. Together Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa have begun to form an alliance built upon trade and economic development, forged by investment in infrastructure and its construction. Include Iran and Indonesia to welcome the new BRIIICS nations for a larger Eastern representation. The arterial system of the trade zone will be energy supply, the life blood of commerce. The Eurasian Trade Zone is being formed, with an energy foundation. Important bilateral pacts were made concrete in the last week. Supply of crude oil, natural gas, including LNG, will come from a vast system of pipelines from Russia to Central Europe and from Russia to China. Completed pipelines will flow. Other pipelines will be completed. Crucial pacts have been made final, with more to come. Additional important pipelines along the periphery will be completed also, like the Iran-Pakistan Pipeline, despite the USGovt obstruction and intimidation. New LNG ports will be constructed. Logistics for rail traffic will be agreed upon, for commodity supply. Many features of the trade zone will be worked out, like reduced tariffs, like border inspection methods, like payment systems including barter, like environmental concerns, like regional cooperation.
BRICS DEVELOPMENT BANK
Consider the BRICS Development Bank. It is so much more than a fund to build railroads in remote African locations, as the delusional US press reports. It will form the giant credit line for countless projects upon which trade will be conducted, often called infrastructure, but so much more. It will gradually reveal itself to provide a second function, a core bank for trade payments outside the USDollar sphere. Steps are being made, extremely important steps, that will shape the next chapter. The United States will not play a role. With a trade zone and financial payment structure, the USDollar is to be rendered an outsider looking in, soon to be deemed obsolete. The many emerging nations are coming of age, flexing their muscles, banding together. Their critical mass in trade volume, in industrial output, and in product development, including patent registration, are impressive. In the last two years, they have demonstrated that the G-20 Meeting of finance ministers has totally eclipsed the G-7 Meeting that had dominated for two decades. They are making the next critical step in creating a bank, a global bank whose role will grow and expand. It will operate under the golden glow.
EXCLUSION OF UNITED STATES
The many years of abusive control of the FOREX currency markets, intervention in the sovereign bond markets, manipulation in the important commodity markets, devious propaganda in the communications networks, with support role played by the aggressive USMilitary and nefarious activity by its security agencies have guaranteed exclusion of the United States. The unspeakable abuse of the US$ credit card will end, as the global reserve currency is dismissed from its throne. The US leader crew, led by fascist bankers, can print money and counterfeit bonds all they wish, but the currency will be required to submit to grand devaluation if they wish to purchase supplies for the massively lopsided and imbalanced USEconomy, the greatest travesty in marketplace history. While the Keystone Pipeline is corrupted by the USGovt with hidden beneficiaries such as Halliburton and Burlington Northern, essentially divvying up the gangrenous paunch of the exhausted bloated American torso, the vast pipelines of the European and Asian continents are merging. They will not include the Americans, whose pathetic gambit fell on its face, the Trans-Pacific Partnership pushed by the Obama Admin. It actually attempted to form a trade zone with Asia, on condition that the lead nations Japan and South Korea excluded China. How incredibly moronic and amateurish! What a pathetic return on the dime for votes for this leader in the new police state.
BRITISH BROKER ROLE & INTRIGUE
The British have an historical knack to remain on top of the bank center heap. Earlier this year, when they announced the launch of a Chinese Yuan Swap Facility in London City, they stepped on the New York neck. Never in a million years would South Manhattan serve as the site of a Yuan Swap functionary post, not during a trade war that has a secret hot military war element being played out in Southern African near the horn (see Djibouti). The embattled British Petroleum will retain a 19.75% stake in Rosneft, which is to acquire the significant BP-TBK energy firm in Russia. Both Bank of America and Citigroup are brokering a $55 billion deal that will enable Rosneft to become the world's largest oil company. Several hidden messages are laden within the blockbuster global changing deal by Rosneft. By dissecting the flow, it is clear the BP executive staff is selling out, since not paying dividends. The collateral for the deal toward the loans will come from USTreasury Bonds. The Anglo-American bank complex will in effect be forced to swallow its own high volume of toxic paper. The tainted BP oil giant still reels from the tarnish of the Gulf of Mexico incident. Worse, BP is finally pushed out following its dubious role in the Yeltsin years of Russia. That difficult transition period in the 1990 decade saw a failed attempt by the Western Oil Giants to control Russia and its vast energy wealth. Putin from the KGB said no, and it did not happen on his watch. He assumed the Kremlin top post. Witness a potentially crucial London role in helping the Eurasian Trade Zone, perhaps buying favor to avoid the Third World. The broad exclusion of the United States guarantees a Third World flavor and stench for the North American core, with a Mad Max overtone and a Dachau closet.
DEVIOUS CYPRUS HIDDEN ANGLE
A piece of the financing for the Rosneft deal came from GazpromBank, which operates out of Cyprus. China has posted $30 billion in USTBonds as collateral within the massive deal, in return for ample future crude oil supply. Since Russia will receive a steady flow of payments from China from diverse energy pipeline supply, in the form of USTBond fund flow, the big debt to the London banks will be paid off by USTBonds. The payoff will be in the same terms of the huge collateral. Conclude that the Eurasian Trade Zone will have an energy pipeline and delivery system with loaded supply whose foundation is built upon USTBonds, sent back to the Anglo-American bankers to digest. The USTBonds are going home to die. As Lenin said, the rope to hang themselves will be bought by the capitalists. As footnote, some important toes were stepped on in Cyprus. Expect more entries to the morgue. The event opened the door to dangerous games of brinksmanship.
The timing of the Cyprus bank account tax and confiscation is curious, exactly when the extremely significant summit meeting took place between Russian President Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, where several big pacts were signed. One is left to wonder if the Cyprus fire was lit by the Europeans in order to attempt to disrupt the Moscow Energy Summit with heavy smoke. It bears repeating. The summit received almost zero Western press coverage, even though its details outline a sunset of the USDollar. Maybe because its details outline a sunset of the USDollar. The Jackass is left to wonder if the next important energy pact with the Eurasian Leader Duo (Russia & China) will involve Saudi Arabia, with a whiff of sunset for the Petro-Dollar defacto standard. Cyprus might indeed have been all about trying to save the Petro-Dollar, more than the European banks. Perhaps the Moscow Summit dictated the Cyprus timetable. The Italian elections to depose Monti, Spanish high level corruption and bankruptcies, and the French backtrack on massive spending cuts, these three nations point to urgency in disaster control. The bank account tax was thrust forward, unmasking the fascist bankers.
USDOLLAR HEGEMONY ENDING
The alternative system to conducting trade outside the USDollar system has had formative stages since the Lehman Brothers and Fannie Mae collapse. The Eastern trade leaders have been very busy quietly constructing a new system, with almost zero press coverage. They prefer to work in the background. Recent events indicate they have chosen the formal public stages and forums with wider visibility, starting with the February G-20 Meeting in Moscow. The true agenda for G-20 finance ministers was to hatch finally the USDollar alternative. The sleepy West appears not to be paying much attention. The initiatives to construct alternative platforms were given a major thrust in the last year since the Iran sanctions led by the USGovt banker and their henchmen in London. For the last 20 years at least, trade has followed banking. Nations of the world have been coerced for three decades into holding USGovt debt securities in order to make payment in trade, most notably in crude oil. With the Grand Arab Recycling accord struck by the 1970 decade leaders, the Petro-Dollar was born in return for a fantastic higher oil price. The oil-rich Arab royalty supported the USDollar by recycling trade surplus into USTreasury Bonds. The conventional practice dictated that global banking systems be dominated by USTBonds in reserves, serving as the banking foundation of debt.
New chapter to turn. The ongoing endless QE to Infinity has hastened Eastern trade leaders. The near 0% return from USTBond yields has motivated them to seek alternatives. They are horrified by the debasement of their hard-earned reserves, filled to the gills with USTBonds of shrinking value and low yield. The new trade settlement system based in Gold finance will turn the tables, as once more trade is to dictate banking. The combination of central bank hyper monetary inflation, big US bank fraud, security agency $100 bill counterfeit, and rampant criminality in the US financial system has motivated the Eastern nations to act. They have acted. The clear outcome is that the Western banking system will topple, since the East will be shoving the USTBonds back to Anglo-American shores for cemetery treatment. Trade should always dictate banking. The major trade partners no longer want US$-based trade settlement. Watch for the crowning blow in the Saudi response soon, since they always follow the winners.
THE CENTERPIECE PLAN
The new BRICS development bank will surely be supplied with USTreasury Bonds at first. The primary seeding is obvious. The emerging nations have collected huge reserves from successful trade over the last decade, primarily held in USTBonds. They do not wish to hold them, since undermined and debased by their own steward at the US Federal Reserve. The big Eastern nations have committed $100 billion for the fund, whose liquidity lies in USTBonds. On a gradual ramp, the USTBonds will be converted to Gold bars for the core bank asset in the development fund. Some of the 6000 metric tons of Gold bullion removed from London banks by the Eastern entities from March to July 2012 might find their way into the BRICS Fund core. The initial role of funding critical important projects like pipelines, communication networks, railroads, shipping ports, ships & trucks, perhaps even energy transfer ports, will become clear. The more overarching role of forming a (Eastern) global core central bank clearing house for payment transactions will be its second dual role. The emerging nations have had their fill of the USDollar control mechanisms with the SWIFT bank structure, the Intl Monetary Fund steering committee, and others. Finally, Gold Trade Notes would be used in trade settlement. Witness the new Eastern Fed for trade settlement in Gold bullion. Better to call it the BRICS Development Fund, since a major Trojan Horse for excreting USTBonds through its rectum, the London Boyz busily catching it.
The Gold core will facilitate the purchase of Gold Trade Notes much like the common letters of credit used widely in commerce nowadays. Like the Eurasian Russian-Chinese energy foundation, the development fund will be built on the back of USTBonds in toxic discharge. In the process, expect extreme hardball, shoving the toxic USTBonds back into US and British banks, as collateral for huge loans, as funds for repayment of huge loans, as funds to purchase Gold. In the process, the COMEX with LBMA appendage will be drained of its Gold, a future default assured. The Western gold marts will be unmasked as corrupt dens of empty inventory shelves. What comes is a BRICS Development Fund which will serve as a quasi global gold central bank for the expressed purpose of facilitating trade settlement in Gold. This is hardly just a fund to finance African rail projects.
THE CHECKMATE
A checkmate is in progress. It has four important elements.
1) The established Eurasian Trade Zone joins the massive Asian continent with a significant portion of the European continent, where three quarters of the world population resides. The trade zone has no visible presence or participation by either the United States or United Kingdom.
2) The BRICS Development Fund will control a giant sum of $100 billion. It will eclipse the role of the Intl Monetary Fund. The fund will facilitate numerous infrastructure projects. However, its other feature will be the shocker, as its core is transformed into Gold bullion. The conversion of USTBonds to Gold will nail the coffin in the isolated USDollar, a topic of Jackass scribbles for the last full year.
3) The flow of USTBonds will be from China to London, for financing the foundation of the Eurasian Trade Zone on its energy backbone with brisk energy flow. The collateral for large loans is to be USTBonds, as is repayment for loans to be USTBonds.
4) The transition from Yuan-based trade settlement via the numerous Swap Facilities in barter trade with key nations, toward Gold trade settlement via the BRICS fund that will feature a gold core, will launch the new Gold Trade Standard. It will not be a banker dominated currency type of Gold Standard. It will instead be a trade settlement Gold Standard that bypasses the hegemony of the Anglo-American banking system, the SWIFT rules, the FOREX gaming, and the IMF/World Bank harlots that harbor insects.
ZINGERS AS COFFIN NAILS
Many are the big signals and signposts with deep meaning. They line the path to the Third World. They are many, diverse, and unmistakable in importance. The gradual discard of the USDollar as global reserve currency, the gradual discard of the USTreasury Bond as primary banking system reserve asset, these events are in progress with a speed not seen in past months or past years, not since 2008. The level of intrigue matches the level of deception. Cyprus is not a one-off event, an isolated insignificant beer fart. It is a flash point event. The tipping point events could be bank runs across Southern Europe extending to Britain and the United States, including Canada. Numerous potential tipping point events can be identified, each powerful and ominous for the US Fascists in power. The USDollar is coming home to be buried and devalued. The USTBond is coming home to be buried and downgraded. The ring fence has been clearly laid out. The checkmate with the Eurasian Trade Zone and BRICS Fund is evident for the trained analyst eye. The devaluation will cause severe price inflation and supply shortages for the USEconomy. The end game has never been more clear. Follow the numerous highly important factors at work, each of which could produce a tipping point event. The dominos are aligned and ready. Inside the US Dome of Perception, they are less visible, yet still at work for extreme consequences. Some severe disorder comes this way. Expect some quantum leaps upward in the Gold price and Silver price, each controlled by unprecedented criminal activity in the financial markets.
The BRICS Development Fund is the main event, to build a railway to a dark place for the United States, ring fenced for its toxic USDollar. Gone will be the corrupted motivated tools like the IMF and World Bank, with even Western central banks of lesser importance. The BRICS Fund could be the Trojan Horse (much like ObamaCare) that permits a vast conduit to be built, a seemingly innocuous let permitted entrance through the door, which permits USTBonds to be dumped like the trash.
The upcoming Gold purchases by the BRICS Fund might be coordinated with the Shanghai Metals Exchange, to exploit the artificial low London Gold price. A COMEX bust can be foreseen.
The BRICS should be careful about the new undersea global communication cable system. In 2007, foul play resulted in the Iranian cable being cut, the result of cooperative action by the USGovt and the little ally on the Southern Med that looks northwest to Italy.
The tipping nation is Germany, which has had its fill supporting the slower wasteful debt-ridden Southern European nations. After cutting the cord, they will embrace the Eurasian Trade Zone. Evidence is the numerous heavy rail facilities that begin in Russia and end in Germany for commodity supply. There are two Germanys, one with old corrupt ties to the West, another with traditional reliable ties to the East. The Western camp is given light by the press, while the Eastern camp works behind closed doors shaping the next chapter.
The Eastern Alliance (often discussed in past Hat Trick Letters) is slowly coming into view. The Russian and Chinese corridor will serve as the commercial foundation. The BRICS Development Fund will serve as the backbone. When Germany joins in more overt manner, the Alliance will be clear on the geopolitical stage. Then comes the Saudis to join, complete with protectorate role already offered by the Eastern Duo giants, who together will announce the end to the Petro-Dollar defacto standard.
The political rebellion movement inside Germany is slowly coming into view. They wish to return to the D-Mark currency and to discard the Euro, an experiment in disaster, waste, fraud, and ruin. The movement is gaining traction. Discussion of the Nordic Euro (aka Teutonic Euro) has been heard on an increasing basis among its tribal cousins. Germany will side with Russia & China, and join the next chapter, after shedding its PIIGS pen trash.
Both Russia and China purchase all their domestic gold mining output. If truth be told, their gold reserves are multiples higher than the official data indicates. Neither nation has any desire to cooperate with such critical disclosure, much like national trade secrets. Both nations are ready for the next chapter, with a few years of preparation in new modern systems, platforms, wiring, and gold held in reserve as core wealth.
The ABN Amro news of halted gold delivery speaks volumes to the absent inventory linked to the corrupted London gold market. They have no Gold in inventory. They control the Gold price with paper leverage and suppressive techniques. This news halt out of the Netherlands should be viewed in context of the Germans, Dutch, and Austrians demanding their gold in repatriation. London has none. What gold bullion they do obtain comes from urgent shipments from the Roman Catacombs and the Basel hills of Switzerland.
The nations across the entire West have citizens deeply worried about their savings wealth stored in the banks. They are beginning to realize their accounts are legally considered as bank liabilities subject to heavy loss upon bank failures. They will begin to remove the money from bank accounts in droves, but with capital controls imposed.
The Cyprus bank account tax is the latest ignored shock wave warning to the West. It is described as a small tax to assure bank solvency, but it is a vicious transfer from sovereign source to depositor private source in funded bailouts. It is confiscation. The 2005 Bankruptcy Law in the US gave away the plan, with savings deposits subordinated under derivatives. The MF-Global episode has not resulted in much learned. It was the first test ride of the subordination rules in the new law. The Jackass warned in early 2012 of an MF-Global event for bank accounts and stock accounts. The event is coming very soon, but the public is very sleepy distracted and dulled.
SC116-7
http://www.truthdig.com/report/category/hedges/
The Hijacking of Human Rights
The appointment of Suzanne Nossel, a former State Department official and longtime government apparatchik, as executive director of PEN American Center is part of a campaign to turn U.S. human rights organizations into propagandists for pre-emptive war and apologists for empire. Nossel’s appointment led me to resign from PEN as well as withdraw from speaking at the PEN World Voices Festival in May. But Nossel is only symptomatic of the widespread hijacking of human rights organizations to demonize those—especially Muslims—branded by the state as the enemy, in order to cloak pre-emptive war and empire with a fictional virtue and to effectively divert attention from our own mounting human rights abuses, including torture, warrantless wiretapping and monitoring, the denial of due process and extrajudicial assassinations.
Nossel, who was deputy assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs under Hillary Clinton in a State Department that was little more than a subsidiary of the Pentagon, is part of the new wave of “humanitarian interventionists,” such as Samantha Power, Michael Ignatieff and Susan Rice, who naively see in the U.S. military a vehicle to create a better world. They know little of the reality of war or the actual inner workings of empire. They harbor a childish belief in the innate goodness and ultimate beneficence of American power. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents, the horrendous suffering and violent terror inflicted in the name of their utopian goals in Iraq and Afghanistan, barely register on their moral calculus. This makes them at once oblivious and dangerous. “Innocence is a kind of insanity,” Graham Greene wrote in his novel “The Quiet American,” and those who destroy to build are “impregnably armored by … good intentions and … ignorance.”
There are no good wars. There are no just wars. As Erasmus wrote, “there is nothing more wicked, more disastrous, more widely destructive, more deeply tenacious, more loathsome” than war. “Whoever heard of a hundred thousand animals rushing together to butcher each other, as men do everywhere?” Erasmus asked. But war, he knew, was very useful to the power elite. War permitted the powerful, in the name of national security and by fostering a culture of fear, to effortlessly strip the citizen of his or her rights. A declaration of war ensures that “all the affairs of the State are at the mercy of the appetites of a few,” Erasmus wrote.
There are cases, and Bosnia in the 1990s was one, when force should be employed to halt an active campaign of genocide. This is the lesson of the Holocaust: When you have the capacity to stop genocide and you do not, you are culpable. For this reason, we are culpable in the genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda. But the “humanitarian interventionists” have twisted this moral imperative to intercede against genocide to justify the calls for pre-emptive war and imperial expansion. Saddam Hussein did carry out campaigns of genocide against the Kurds and the Shiites, but the dirty fact is that while these campaigns were under way we provided support to Baghdad or looked the other way. It was only when Washington wanted war, and the bodies of tens of thousands of Kurds and Shiites had long decomposed in mass graves, that we suddenly began to speak in the exalted language of human rights.
These “humanitarian interventionists” studiously ignore our own acts of genocide, first unleashed against Native Americans and then exported to the Philippines and, later, nations such as Vietnam. They do not acknowledge, even in light of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, our own capacity for evil. They do not discuss in their books and articles the genocides we backed in Guatemala and East Timor or the crime of pre-emptive war. They minimize the horror and suffering we have delivered to Iraqis and Afghans and exaggerate or fabricate the benefits. The long string of atrocities carried out in our name mocks the idea of the United States as a force for good with a right to impose its values on others. The ugly truth shatters their deification of U.S. power.
Nossel, in the contentious year she headed Amnesty International USA before leaving in January, oversaw a public campaign by the organization to support NATO’s war in Afghanistan. She was running Amnesty International USA when the organization posted billboards at bus stops that read, “Human Rights for Women and Girls in Afghanistan—NATO: Keep the Progress Going.” Madeleine Albright, along with senior State Department officials and politicians, were invited to speak at Amnesty International’s women’s forum during Nossel’s tenure. Nossel has urged Democrats to stay the course in Iraq, warning that a failure in Iraq could unleash “a kind of post-Vietnam, post-Mogadishu hangover” that would lamentably “herald an era of deep reservations among the U.S. public regarding the use of force.” She worked as a State Department official to discredit the Goldstone Report, which charged Israel with war crimes against the Palestinians. As a representative on the U.N. Human Rights Council she said that “the top of our list is our defense of Israel, and Israel’s right to fair treatment at the Human Rights Council.” Not a word about the Palestinians. She has advocated for expanded armed intervention in countries such as Syria and Libya. She has called for a military strike against Iran if it does not halt its nuclear enrichment program. In an article in The Washington Quarterly titled “Battle Hymn of the Democrats,” she wrote: “Democrats must be seen to be every bit as tough-minded as their opponents. Democratic reinvention as a ‘peace party’ is a political dead end.” “In a milieu of war or near-war, the public will look for leadership that is bold and strident—more forceful, resolute, and pugnacious than would otherwise be tolerated,” she went on. In a 2004 Foreign Affairs article, “Smart Power: Reclaiming Liberal Internationalism,” she wrote: “We need to deploy our power in ways that make us stronger, not weaker,” not a stunning thought but one that should be an anathema to human rights campaigners. She added, “U.S. interests are furthered by enlisting others on behalf of U.S. goals,” which, of course, is what she promptly did at Amnesty International. Her “smart power” theory calls on the U.S. to exert its will around the globe by employing a variety of means and tactics, using the United Nations and human rights groups, for example, to promote the nation’s agenda as well as the more naked and raw coercion of military force. This is not a new or original idea, but when held up to George W. Bush’s idiocy I guess it looked thoughtful. The plight of our own dissidents—including Bradley Manning—is of no concern to Nossel and apparently of no concern now to PEN.
Coleen Rowley and Ann Wright first brought Nossel’s past and hawkish ideology to light when she became the executive director of Amnesty International USA a year ago. Rowley and Wright have written correctly that “humanitarian interventionists,” in or out of government, see no distinction between human rights work and the furtherance of U.S. imperial power. Nossel, they noted, “sees no conflict between her current role and having been a member of the executive staff whilst her President and Secretary of State bosses were carrying out war crimes such as drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan and shielding torturers and their enablers in the Bush administration from prosecution.” (For more on this see Rowley’s article “Selling War as ‘Smart Power.’ ”)
Is this the résumé of a human rights advocate in the United States? Are human rights organizations supposed to further the agenda of the state rather than defend its victims? Are the ideas of “humanitarian interventionists” compatible with human rights? Are writers and artists no longer concerned with the plight of all dissidents, freedom of expression and the excesses of state power? Are we nothing more than puppets of the elite? Aren’t we supposed to be in perpetual, voluntary alienation from all forms of power? Isn’t power, from a human rights perspective, the problem?
The current business of human rights means human rights for some and not for others. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Physicians for Human Rights, the Peace Alliance, and Citizens for Global Solutions are all guilty of buying into the false creed that U.S. military force can be deployed to promote human rights. None of these groups stood up to oppose the invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan, as if pre-emptive war is not one of the grossest violations of human rights.
The creed of “humanitarian intervention” means, for many, shedding tears over the “right” victims. Its supporters lobby for the victims in Darfur and ignore the victims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Gaza. They denounce the savagery of the Taliban but ignore the savagery we employ in our offshore penal colonies or our drone-infested war zones. They decry the enslavement of girls in brothels in India or Thailand but not the slavery of workers in our produce fields or our prisons. They demand justice for persecuted dissidents in the Arab world but say nothing about Bradley Manning.
The playwright and fierce anti-war critic Arthur Miller, the first American president of PEN International, fearlessly stood up to McCarthyism and was blacklisted. He denounced the Vietnam War. He decried the invasion of Iraq. PEN, when it embodied Miller’s resistance and decency, stood for something real and important. As the U.S. bombed Iraq into submission and then invaded, Miller, who called the war a form of “mass murder,” said indignantly: “It’s a joke that the U.S. government wheels out the Geneva Convention when they themselves have turned away or flouted so many international treaties.”
The posing of government shills such as Nossel as human rights campaigners and the marginalization of voices such as Miller’s are part of the sickness of our age. If PEN recaptures the moral thunder of the late Arthur Miller, if it remembers that human rights mean defending all who are vulnerable, persecuted and unjustly despised, I will be happy to rejoin.
All systems of power are the problem. And it is the role of the artist, the writer and the intellectual to defy every center of power on behalf of those whom power would silence and crush. This means, in biblical terms, embracing the stranger. It means being a constant opponent rather than an ally of government. It means being the perpetual outcast. Those who truly fight for human rights understand this.
“Whether the mask is labeled Fascism, Democracy, or Dictatorship of the Proletariat, our great adversary remains the Apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military … ,” Simone Weil wrote. “No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this Apparatus, and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.”
The Hijacking of Human Rights
The appointment of Suzanne Nossel, a former State Department official and longtime government apparatchik, as executive director of PEN American Center is part of a campaign to turn U.S. human rights organizations into propagandists for pre-emptive war and apologists for empire. Nossel’s appointment led me to resign from PEN as well as withdraw from speaking at the PEN World Voices Festival in May. But Nossel is only symptomatic of the widespread hijacking of human rights organizations to demonize those—especially Muslims—branded by the state as the enemy, in order to cloak pre-emptive war and empire with a fictional virtue and to effectively divert attention from our own mounting human rights abuses, including torture, warrantless wiretapping and monitoring, the denial of due process and extrajudicial assassinations.
Nossel, who was deputy assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs under Hillary Clinton in a State Department that was little more than a subsidiary of the Pentagon, is part of the new wave of “humanitarian interventionists,” such as Samantha Power, Michael Ignatieff and Susan Rice, who naively see in the U.S. military a vehicle to create a better world. They know little of the reality of war or the actual inner workings of empire. They harbor a childish belief in the innate goodness and ultimate beneficence of American power. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents, the horrendous suffering and violent terror inflicted in the name of their utopian goals in Iraq and Afghanistan, barely register on their moral calculus. This makes them at once oblivious and dangerous. “Innocence is a kind of insanity,” Graham Greene wrote in his novel “The Quiet American,” and those who destroy to build are “impregnably armored by … good intentions and … ignorance.”
There are no good wars. There are no just wars. As Erasmus wrote, “there is nothing more wicked, more disastrous, more widely destructive, more deeply tenacious, more loathsome” than war. “Whoever heard of a hundred thousand animals rushing together to butcher each other, as men do everywhere?” Erasmus asked. But war, he knew, was very useful to the power elite. War permitted the powerful, in the name of national security and by fostering a culture of fear, to effortlessly strip the citizen of his or her rights. A declaration of war ensures that “all the affairs of the State are at the mercy of the appetites of a few,” Erasmus wrote.
There are cases, and Bosnia in the 1990s was one, when force should be employed to halt an active campaign of genocide. This is the lesson of the Holocaust: When you have the capacity to stop genocide and you do not, you are culpable. For this reason, we are culpable in the genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda. But the “humanitarian interventionists” have twisted this moral imperative to intercede against genocide to justify the calls for pre-emptive war and imperial expansion. Saddam Hussein did carry out campaigns of genocide against the Kurds and the Shiites, but the dirty fact is that while these campaigns were under way we provided support to Baghdad or looked the other way. It was only when Washington wanted war, and the bodies of tens of thousands of Kurds and Shiites had long decomposed in mass graves, that we suddenly began to speak in the exalted language of human rights.
These “humanitarian interventionists” studiously ignore our own acts of genocide, first unleashed against Native Americans and then exported to the Philippines and, later, nations such as Vietnam. They do not acknowledge, even in light of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, our own capacity for evil. They do not discuss in their books and articles the genocides we backed in Guatemala and East Timor or the crime of pre-emptive war. They minimize the horror and suffering we have delivered to Iraqis and Afghans and exaggerate or fabricate the benefits. The long string of atrocities carried out in our name mocks the idea of the United States as a force for good with a right to impose its values on others. The ugly truth shatters their deification of U.S. power.
Nossel, in the contentious year she headed Amnesty International USA before leaving in January, oversaw a public campaign by the organization to support NATO’s war in Afghanistan. She was running Amnesty International USA when the organization posted billboards at bus stops that read, “Human Rights for Women and Girls in Afghanistan—NATO: Keep the Progress Going.” Madeleine Albright, along with senior State Department officials and politicians, were invited to speak at Amnesty International’s women’s forum during Nossel’s tenure. Nossel has urged Democrats to stay the course in Iraq, warning that a failure in Iraq could unleash “a kind of post-Vietnam, post-Mogadishu hangover” that would lamentably “herald an era of deep reservations among the U.S. public regarding the use of force.” She worked as a State Department official to discredit the Goldstone Report, which charged Israel with war crimes against the Palestinians. As a representative on the U.N. Human Rights Council she said that “the top of our list is our defense of Israel, and Israel’s right to fair treatment at the Human Rights Council.” Not a word about the Palestinians. She has advocated for expanded armed intervention in countries such as Syria and Libya. She has called for a military strike against Iran if it does not halt its nuclear enrichment program. In an article in The Washington Quarterly titled “Battle Hymn of the Democrats,” she wrote: “Democrats must be seen to be every bit as tough-minded as their opponents. Democratic reinvention as a ‘peace party’ is a political dead end.” “In a milieu of war or near-war, the public will look for leadership that is bold and strident—more forceful, resolute, and pugnacious than would otherwise be tolerated,” she went on. In a 2004 Foreign Affairs article, “Smart Power: Reclaiming Liberal Internationalism,” she wrote: “We need to deploy our power in ways that make us stronger, not weaker,” not a stunning thought but one that should be an anathema to human rights campaigners. She added, “U.S. interests are furthered by enlisting others on behalf of U.S. goals,” which, of course, is what she promptly did at Amnesty International. Her “smart power” theory calls on the U.S. to exert its will around the globe by employing a variety of means and tactics, using the United Nations and human rights groups, for example, to promote the nation’s agenda as well as the more naked and raw coercion of military force. This is not a new or original idea, but when held up to George W. Bush’s idiocy I guess it looked thoughtful. The plight of our own dissidents—including Bradley Manning—is of no concern to Nossel and apparently of no concern now to PEN.
Coleen Rowley and Ann Wright first brought Nossel’s past and hawkish ideology to light when she became the executive director of Amnesty International USA a year ago. Rowley and Wright have written correctly that “humanitarian interventionists,” in or out of government, see no distinction between human rights work and the furtherance of U.S. imperial power. Nossel, they noted, “sees no conflict between her current role and having been a member of the executive staff whilst her President and Secretary of State bosses were carrying out war crimes such as drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan and shielding torturers and their enablers in the Bush administration from prosecution.” (For more on this see Rowley’s article “Selling War as ‘Smart Power.’ ”)
Is this the résumé of a human rights advocate in the United States? Are human rights organizations supposed to further the agenda of the state rather than defend its victims? Are the ideas of “humanitarian interventionists” compatible with human rights? Are writers and artists no longer concerned with the plight of all dissidents, freedom of expression and the excesses of state power? Are we nothing more than puppets of the elite? Aren’t we supposed to be in perpetual, voluntary alienation from all forms of power? Isn’t power, from a human rights perspective, the problem?
The current business of human rights means human rights for some and not for others. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Physicians for Human Rights, the Peace Alliance, and Citizens for Global Solutions are all guilty of buying into the false creed that U.S. military force can be deployed to promote human rights. None of these groups stood up to oppose the invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan, as if pre-emptive war is not one of the grossest violations of human rights.
The creed of “humanitarian intervention” means, for many, shedding tears over the “right” victims. Its supporters lobby for the victims in Darfur and ignore the victims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Gaza. They denounce the savagery of the Taliban but ignore the savagery we employ in our offshore penal colonies or our drone-infested war zones. They decry the enslavement of girls in brothels in India or Thailand but not the slavery of workers in our produce fields or our prisons. They demand justice for persecuted dissidents in the Arab world but say nothing about Bradley Manning.
The playwright and fierce anti-war critic Arthur Miller, the first American president of PEN International, fearlessly stood up to McCarthyism and was blacklisted. He denounced the Vietnam War. He decried the invasion of Iraq. PEN, when it embodied Miller’s resistance and decency, stood for something real and important. As the U.S. bombed Iraq into submission and then invaded, Miller, who called the war a form of “mass murder,” said indignantly: “It’s a joke that the U.S. government wheels out the Geneva Convention when they themselves have turned away or flouted so many international treaties.”
The posing of government shills such as Nossel as human rights campaigners and the marginalization of voices such as Miller’s are part of the sickness of our age. If PEN recaptures the moral thunder of the late Arthur Miller, if it remembers that human rights mean defending all who are vulnerable, persecuted and unjustly despised, I will be happy to rejoin.
All systems of power are the problem. And it is the role of the artist, the writer and the intellectual to defy every center of power on behalf of those whom power would silence and crush. This means, in biblical terms, embracing the stranger. It means being a constant opponent rather than an ally of government. It means being the perpetual outcast. Those who truly fight for human rights understand this.
“Whether the mask is labeled Fascism, Democracy, or Dictatorship of the Proletariat, our great adversary remains the Apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military … ,” Simone Weil wrote. “No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this Apparatus, and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.”
Tuesday, April 2, 2013
SC116-6
http://kunstler.com/blog/2013/04/are-you-going-to-entropy-faire.html
Are You Going To Entropy Faire?
Things are breaking loose. Holes have appeared in the fabric of fraud and lies that passes for the world money system. They are black holes, gravitationally sucking in the things breaking loose, and as these things cross their event horizons, they will never be seen again. These things I speak of are the collateral for vast nebulae of falsely generated debts and obligations that were never intended to be honored (i.e. regarded as real). As they vanish down the wormholes of time, they take with them their pretenses of money value, meaning they leave reverberations of impoverishment in the shadowy place that the real world has become.
The process described above - an alchemy of physics - will begin to shed light where the shadows have been, revealing a much harsher world in sharp contours and shocking color, for instance: red, the color of ink representing losses on real balance sheets of every household, every enterprise, and every government the whole world round. A scramble for safety now ensues, not just to lay hold of anything with remaining real "moneyness," but for the resources that drive the kind of economies we have. In other words, for gold and silver, and for oil and gas.
Of course, great geopolitical forces spin in the background. Only idiots subscribe to the paranoid fantasies of "one world government" and "global currencies." In the scramble underway, the things falling apart include units of governance, breaking into smaller pieces: empires, nation states. These will include the unraveling European Union but also the matrix of agreements and protocols that binds together the West - everything from the IMF to the G-7 to the World Bank - into an entropy express. One rather extreme scenario I do subscribe to was laid out by blogger Jim Willie recently: the effort by Russia, China, and others to isolate and neutralize the US dollar as the world's so-called reserve currency by systematically converting holdings of US Treasury bills into gold wherever possible, and to thereby diminish the baleful influence of the Imperial US behemoth. They are assisted in this endeavor by the US itself in its bungling efforts to manipulate and suppress gold prices, as well as our prevarications as to exactly how much gold remains in the various places it is supposed to be stashed - Fort Knox, West Point, and the sub-basement labyrinth of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York - generating ever-greater uncertainty about the extant world gold supply, and hence its value relative to things like currencies. Nobody here can even ask the right questions.
While The New York Times focuses on the momentous issue of real estate sales in the Hamptons, Russia and China will build gold-backed currencies aimed at monopolizing the trade in mineral and energy resources, leaving America and much of Europe to freeze in the dark and sit on gasoline lines at the empty filling stations. For a while that will work to the East's advantage - until it becomes clear that the entropic contraction of industrial economies is for everyone as we veer into a literal world made by hand. That's right, sooner or later Russia and China will get theirs, too. But in the meantime they have the ability to make the story a lot more interesting.
There's plenty of suspense this Easter weekend as observers nervously await the breaking action, to find out how much the oft-cited fear of confiscation has penetrated the regional money centers around Europe. Slovenia, a fairy-tale republic somewhere between Austria and the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, has been nominated by observers as the place most likely to be whacked by EU treasure confiscators. It owes about 10 billion Euros to the EU entropy cloud, with exactly zero chances of meeting its obligations. But then, it's in the nature of such non-linear event sequences that the shadows of the black swan's wings will pass over Slovenia and alight on a chimney-top in some utterly surprising place, say, Latvia or perhaps even Italy. In any case, European money will be on fire and a lot of that smokin' moolah surely will wend its way into the US equity markets under the illusion of safety. It's all just an accident waiting to happen. Money is not what it used to be and not what it seems.
There must be an inverse relationship between the juiced S & P index and the IQs of the public figures in America who pretend to be able to think, so that there are now just six remaining people in the political arena who can articulate the various parts of the mega-swindle that besets us: Bill Black, Jim Rickards, Bill Moyers, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and David Stockman. Stockman is out with a new book, The Great Deformation, that manages to concentrate all the requisite outrage in one gale of rectified objurgation. It is a pleasure to read Stockman - former budget director under Reagan and Michigan congressman - call out the villains from Reagan to Bernanke to Paulson to Rubin and scores of others in the most opprobrious terms. Stockman characterizes the financial action of recent decades a "leveraged buyout of the USA" and it sure looks that way. If you travel around the towns of the upper Hudson Valley - once an industrial corridor full of Jimmy Stewart type burgs - it's beginning to look like the country Borat grew up in. Everything of value that wasn't nailed down was taken, and everything that remains is broken, including the ragged population.
On Sunday night, wire stories had Cyprus close to "going Icelandic," that is, hoisting the middle finger to Brussels and repudiating the money owed. That option may end up seeming more attractive to virtually everybody in the broke world, including even the young college loan debt donkeys of the USA, groaning under their loads as they stand idle in the barren fields of unemployment. Imagine, all those people thinking that nirvana is a place of cold and darkness... with the vague odor of rotting fish hanging in the still air.
Are You Going To Entropy Faire?
Things are breaking loose. Holes have appeared in the fabric of fraud and lies that passes for the world money system. They are black holes, gravitationally sucking in the things breaking loose, and as these things cross their event horizons, they will never be seen again. These things I speak of are the collateral for vast nebulae of falsely generated debts and obligations that were never intended to be honored (i.e. regarded as real). As they vanish down the wormholes of time, they take with them their pretenses of money value, meaning they leave reverberations of impoverishment in the shadowy place that the real world has become.
The process described above - an alchemy of physics - will begin to shed light where the shadows have been, revealing a much harsher world in sharp contours and shocking color, for instance: red, the color of ink representing losses on real balance sheets of every household, every enterprise, and every government the whole world round. A scramble for safety now ensues, not just to lay hold of anything with remaining real "moneyness," but for the resources that drive the kind of economies we have. In other words, for gold and silver, and for oil and gas.
Of course, great geopolitical forces spin in the background. Only idiots subscribe to the paranoid fantasies of "one world government" and "global currencies." In the scramble underway, the things falling apart include units of governance, breaking into smaller pieces: empires, nation states. These will include the unraveling European Union but also the matrix of agreements and protocols that binds together the West - everything from the IMF to the G-7 to the World Bank - into an entropy express. One rather extreme scenario I do subscribe to was laid out by blogger Jim Willie recently: the effort by Russia, China, and others to isolate and neutralize the US dollar as the world's so-called reserve currency by systematically converting holdings of US Treasury bills into gold wherever possible, and to thereby diminish the baleful influence of the Imperial US behemoth. They are assisted in this endeavor by the US itself in its bungling efforts to manipulate and suppress gold prices, as well as our prevarications as to exactly how much gold remains in the various places it is supposed to be stashed - Fort Knox, West Point, and the sub-basement labyrinth of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York - generating ever-greater uncertainty about the extant world gold supply, and hence its value relative to things like currencies. Nobody here can even ask the right questions.
While The New York Times focuses on the momentous issue of real estate sales in the Hamptons, Russia and China will build gold-backed currencies aimed at monopolizing the trade in mineral and energy resources, leaving America and much of Europe to freeze in the dark and sit on gasoline lines at the empty filling stations. For a while that will work to the East's advantage - until it becomes clear that the entropic contraction of industrial economies is for everyone as we veer into a literal world made by hand. That's right, sooner or later Russia and China will get theirs, too. But in the meantime they have the ability to make the story a lot more interesting.
There's plenty of suspense this Easter weekend as observers nervously await the breaking action, to find out how much the oft-cited fear of confiscation has penetrated the regional money centers around Europe. Slovenia, a fairy-tale republic somewhere between Austria and the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, has been nominated by observers as the place most likely to be whacked by EU treasure confiscators. It owes about 10 billion Euros to the EU entropy cloud, with exactly zero chances of meeting its obligations. But then, it's in the nature of such non-linear event sequences that the shadows of the black swan's wings will pass over Slovenia and alight on a chimney-top in some utterly surprising place, say, Latvia or perhaps even Italy. In any case, European money will be on fire and a lot of that smokin' moolah surely will wend its way into the US equity markets under the illusion of safety. It's all just an accident waiting to happen. Money is not what it used to be and not what it seems.
There must be an inverse relationship between the juiced S & P index and the IQs of the public figures in America who pretend to be able to think, so that there are now just six remaining people in the political arena who can articulate the various parts of the mega-swindle that besets us: Bill Black, Jim Rickards, Bill Moyers, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and David Stockman. Stockman is out with a new book, The Great Deformation, that manages to concentrate all the requisite outrage in one gale of rectified objurgation. It is a pleasure to read Stockman - former budget director under Reagan and Michigan congressman - call out the villains from Reagan to Bernanke to Paulson to Rubin and scores of others in the most opprobrious terms. Stockman characterizes the financial action of recent decades a "leveraged buyout of the USA" and it sure looks that way. If you travel around the towns of the upper Hudson Valley - once an industrial corridor full of Jimmy Stewart type burgs - it's beginning to look like the country Borat grew up in. Everything of value that wasn't nailed down was taken, and everything that remains is broken, including the ragged population.
On Sunday night, wire stories had Cyprus close to "going Icelandic," that is, hoisting the middle finger to Brussels and repudiating the money owed. That option may end up seeming more attractive to virtually everybody in the broke world, including even the young college loan debt donkeys of the USA, groaning under their loads as they stand idle in the barren fields of unemployment. Imagine, all those people thinking that nirvana is a place of cold and darkness... with the vague odor of rotting fish hanging in the still air.
Sunday, March 31, 2013
SC116-5
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_treason_of_the_intellectuals_20130331/
The Treason of the Intellectuals
The rewriting of history by the power elite was painfully evident as the nation marked the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. Some claimed they had opposed the war when they had not. Others among “Bush’s useful idiots” argued that they had merely acted in good faith on the information available; if they had known then what they know now, they assured us, they would have acted differently. This, of course, is false. The war boosters, especially the “liberal hawks”—who included Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Al Franken and John Kerry, along with academics, writers and journalists such as Bill Keller, Michael Ignatieff, Nicholas Kristof, David Remnick, Fareed Zakaria, Michael Walzer, Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, George Packer, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Kanan Makiya and the late Christopher Hitchens—did what they always have done: engage in acts of self-preservation. To oppose the war would have been a career killer. And they knew it.
These apologists, however, acted not only as cheerleaders for war; in most cases they ridiculed and attempted to discredit anyone who questioned the call to invade Iraq. Kristof, in The New York Times, attacked the filmmaker Michael Moore as a conspiracy theorist and wrote that anti-war voices were only polarizing what he termed “the political cesspool.” Hitchens said that those who opposed the attack on Iraq “do not think that Saddam Hussein is a bad guy at all.” He called the typical anti-war protester a “blithering ex-flower child or ranting neo-Stalinist.” The halfhearted mea culpas by many of these courtiers a decade later always fail to mention the most pernicious and fundamental role they played in the buildup to the war—shutting down public debate. Those of us who spoke out against the war, faced with the onslaught of right-wing “patriots” and their liberal apologists, became pariahs. In my case it did not matter that I was an Arabic speaker. It did not matter that I had spent seven years in the Middle East, including months in Iraq, as a foreign correspondent. It did not matter that I knew the instrument of war. The critique that I and other opponents of war delivered, no matter how well grounded in fact and experience, turned us into objects of scorn by a liberal elite that cravenly wanted to demonstrate its own “patriotism” and “realism” about national security. The liberal class fueled a rabid, irrational hatred of all war critics. Many of us received death threats and lost our jobs, for me one at The New York Times. These liberal warmongers, 10 years later, remain both clueless about their moral bankruptcy and cloyingly sanctimonious. They have the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocents on their hands.
The power elite, especially the liberal elite, has always been willing to sacrifice integrity and truth for power, personal advancement, foundation grants, awards, tenured professorships, columns, book contracts, television appearances, generous lecture fees and social status. They know what they need to say. They know which ideology they have to serve. They know what lies must be told—the biggest being that they take moral stances on issues that aren’t safe and anodyne. They have been at this game a long time. And they will, should their careers require it, happily sell us out again.
Leslie Gelb, in the magazine Foreign Affairs, spelled it out after the invasion of Iraq.
“My initial support for the war was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility,” he wrote. “We ‘experts’ have a lot to fix about ourselves, even as we ‘perfect’ the media. We must redouble our commitment to independent thought, and embrace, rather than cast aside, opinions and facts that blow the common—often wrong—wisdom apart. Our democracy requires nothing less.”
The moral cowardice of the power elite is especially evident when it comes to the plight of the Palestinians. The liberal class, in fact, is used to marginalize and discredit those, such as Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein, who have the honesty, integrity and courage to denounce Israeli war crimes. And the liberal class is compensated for its dirty role in squelching debate.
“Nothing in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position, which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take,” wrote the late Edward Said. “You do not want to appear too political; you are afraid of seeming controversial; you want to keep a reputation for being balanced, objective, moderate; your hope is to be asked back, to consult, to be on a board or prestigious committee, and so to remain within the responsible mainstream; someday you hope to get an honorary degree, a big prize, perhaps even an ambassadorship.”
“For an intellectual these habits of mind are corrupting par excellence,” Said went on. “If anything can denature, neutralize, and finally kill a passionate intellectual life it is the internalization of such habits. Personally I have encountered them in one of the toughest of all contemporary issues, Palestine, where fear of speaking out about one of the greatest injustices in modern history has hobbled, blinkered, muzzled many who know the truth and are in a position to serve it. For despite the abuse and vilification that any outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights and self-determination earns for him or herself, the truth deserves to be spoken, represented by an unafraid and compassionate intellectual.”
Julien Benda argued in his 1927 book “The Treason of Intellectuals”—“La Trahison des Clercs”—that it is only when we are not in pursuit of practical aims or material advantages that we can serve as a conscience and a corrective. Those who transfer their allegiance to the practical aims of power and material advantage emasculate themselves intellectually and morally. Benda wrote that intellectuals were once supposed to be indifferent to popular passions. They “set an example of attachment to the purely disinterested activity of the mind and created a belief in the supreme value of this form of existence.” They looked “as moralists upon the conflict of human egotisms.” They “preached, in the name of humanity or justice, the adoption of an abstract principle superior to and directly opposed to these passions.” These intellectuals were not, Benda conceded, very often able to prevent the powerful from “filling all history with the noise of their hatred and their slaughters.” But they did, at least, “prevent the laymen from setting up their actions as a religion, they did prevent them from thinking themselves great men as they carried out these activities.” In short, Benda asserted, “humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honored good. This contradiction was an honor to the human species, and formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world.” But once the intellectuals began to “play the game of political passions,” those who had “acted as a check on the realism of the people began to act as its stimulators.” And this is why Michael Moore is correct when he blames The New York Times and the liberal establishment, even more than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, for the Iraq War.
“The desire to tell the truth,” wrote Paul Baran, the brilliant Marxist economist and author of “The Political Economy of Growth,” is “only one condition for being an intellectual. The other is courage, readiness to carry on rational inquiry to wherever it may lead … to withstand … comfortable and lucrative conformity.”
Those who doggedly challenge the orthodoxy of belief, who question the reigning political passions, who refuse to sacrifice their integrity to serve the cult of power, are pushed to the margins. They are denounced by the very people who, years later, will often claim these moral battles as their own. It is only the outcasts and the rebels who keep truth and intellectual inquiry alive. They alone name the crimes of the state. They alone give a voice to the victims of oppression. They alone ask the difficult questions. Most important, they expose the powerful, along with their liberal apologists, for what they are.
The Treason of the Intellectuals
The rewriting of history by the power elite was painfully evident as the nation marked the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. Some claimed they had opposed the war when they had not. Others among “Bush’s useful idiots” argued that they had merely acted in good faith on the information available; if they had known then what they know now, they assured us, they would have acted differently. This, of course, is false. The war boosters, especially the “liberal hawks”—who included Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Al Franken and John Kerry, along with academics, writers and journalists such as Bill Keller, Michael Ignatieff, Nicholas Kristof, David Remnick, Fareed Zakaria, Michael Walzer, Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, George Packer, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Kanan Makiya and the late Christopher Hitchens—did what they always have done: engage in acts of self-preservation. To oppose the war would have been a career killer. And they knew it.
These apologists, however, acted not only as cheerleaders for war; in most cases they ridiculed and attempted to discredit anyone who questioned the call to invade Iraq. Kristof, in The New York Times, attacked the filmmaker Michael Moore as a conspiracy theorist and wrote that anti-war voices were only polarizing what he termed “the political cesspool.” Hitchens said that those who opposed the attack on Iraq “do not think that Saddam Hussein is a bad guy at all.” He called the typical anti-war protester a “blithering ex-flower child or ranting neo-Stalinist.” The halfhearted mea culpas by many of these courtiers a decade later always fail to mention the most pernicious and fundamental role they played in the buildup to the war—shutting down public debate. Those of us who spoke out against the war, faced with the onslaught of right-wing “patriots” and their liberal apologists, became pariahs. In my case it did not matter that I was an Arabic speaker. It did not matter that I had spent seven years in the Middle East, including months in Iraq, as a foreign correspondent. It did not matter that I knew the instrument of war. The critique that I and other opponents of war delivered, no matter how well grounded in fact and experience, turned us into objects of scorn by a liberal elite that cravenly wanted to demonstrate its own “patriotism” and “realism” about national security. The liberal class fueled a rabid, irrational hatred of all war critics. Many of us received death threats and lost our jobs, for me one at The New York Times. These liberal warmongers, 10 years later, remain both clueless about their moral bankruptcy and cloyingly sanctimonious. They have the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocents on their hands.
The power elite, especially the liberal elite, has always been willing to sacrifice integrity and truth for power, personal advancement, foundation grants, awards, tenured professorships, columns, book contracts, television appearances, generous lecture fees and social status. They know what they need to say. They know which ideology they have to serve. They know what lies must be told—the biggest being that they take moral stances on issues that aren’t safe and anodyne. They have been at this game a long time. And they will, should their careers require it, happily sell us out again.
Leslie Gelb, in the magazine Foreign Affairs, spelled it out after the invasion of Iraq.
“My initial support for the war was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility,” he wrote. “We ‘experts’ have a lot to fix about ourselves, even as we ‘perfect’ the media. We must redouble our commitment to independent thought, and embrace, rather than cast aside, opinions and facts that blow the common—often wrong—wisdom apart. Our democracy requires nothing less.”
The moral cowardice of the power elite is especially evident when it comes to the plight of the Palestinians. The liberal class, in fact, is used to marginalize and discredit those, such as Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein, who have the honesty, integrity and courage to denounce Israeli war crimes. And the liberal class is compensated for its dirty role in squelching debate.
“Nothing in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position, which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take,” wrote the late Edward Said. “You do not want to appear too political; you are afraid of seeming controversial; you want to keep a reputation for being balanced, objective, moderate; your hope is to be asked back, to consult, to be on a board or prestigious committee, and so to remain within the responsible mainstream; someday you hope to get an honorary degree, a big prize, perhaps even an ambassadorship.”
“For an intellectual these habits of mind are corrupting par excellence,” Said went on. “If anything can denature, neutralize, and finally kill a passionate intellectual life it is the internalization of such habits. Personally I have encountered them in one of the toughest of all contemporary issues, Palestine, where fear of speaking out about one of the greatest injustices in modern history has hobbled, blinkered, muzzled many who know the truth and are in a position to serve it. For despite the abuse and vilification that any outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights and self-determination earns for him or herself, the truth deserves to be spoken, represented by an unafraid and compassionate intellectual.”
Julien Benda argued in his 1927 book “The Treason of Intellectuals”—“La Trahison des Clercs”—that it is only when we are not in pursuit of practical aims or material advantages that we can serve as a conscience and a corrective. Those who transfer their allegiance to the practical aims of power and material advantage emasculate themselves intellectually and morally. Benda wrote that intellectuals were once supposed to be indifferent to popular passions. They “set an example of attachment to the purely disinterested activity of the mind and created a belief in the supreme value of this form of existence.” They looked “as moralists upon the conflict of human egotisms.” They “preached, in the name of humanity or justice, the adoption of an abstract principle superior to and directly opposed to these passions.” These intellectuals were not, Benda conceded, very often able to prevent the powerful from “filling all history with the noise of their hatred and their slaughters.” But they did, at least, “prevent the laymen from setting up their actions as a religion, they did prevent them from thinking themselves great men as they carried out these activities.” In short, Benda asserted, “humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honored good. This contradiction was an honor to the human species, and formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world.” But once the intellectuals began to “play the game of political passions,” those who had “acted as a check on the realism of the people began to act as its stimulators.” And this is why Michael Moore is correct when he blames The New York Times and the liberal establishment, even more than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, for the Iraq War.
“The desire to tell the truth,” wrote Paul Baran, the brilliant Marxist economist and author of “The Political Economy of Growth,” is “only one condition for being an intellectual. The other is courage, readiness to carry on rational inquiry to wherever it may lead … to withstand … comfortable and lucrative conformity.”
Those who doggedly challenge the orthodoxy of belief, who question the reigning political passions, who refuse to sacrifice their integrity to serve the cult of power, are pushed to the margins. They are denounced by the very people who, years later, will often claim these moral battles as their own. It is only the outcasts and the rebels who keep truth and intellectual inquiry alive. They alone name the crimes of the state. They alone give a voice to the victims of oppression. They alone ask the difficult questions. Most important, they expose the powerful, along with their liberal apologists, for what they are.
SC116-4
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-03-28/the-shale-gale-is-a-retirement-party
The Shale Gale Is a Retirement Party
Every day a government agency or industry group in North America still hails natural gas mined from deep shale rock formations as "the bridging fuel" that will power a brighter if not cleaner energy tomorrow. Cheap natural gas, goes the mantra, will solve our energy woes and build a new energy foundation.
The government of British Columbia, for example, dutifully salutes the ancient hydrocarbon as "a transition fuel to a low carbon global economy" that will fill government coffers.
And the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) calculates that the continent's growing gas supply can retire the majority of the continent's aging coal-fired plants. Others claim that natural gas will make the continent energy independent altogether.
Big Oil such as Exxon Mobil and Shell have invested so much money in shale resources that they now want to export U.S. and Canadian natural gas to Asia. Exuberant corporate leaders also predict that natural gas will surpass coal as the second-largest energy source on the planet, after oil, by 2040.
Eager to cash in on the shale gale, pipeline companies can't wait to build another 450,000 miles of new pipelines to ship gas from heavily fracked rural landscapes to urban markets over the next two decades.
But that's not Arthur Berman's take. The oil patch consultant sees the shale gas frenzy as "magical thinking" as well as a full-blown commercial failure. In fact, the 62-year-old Houston-based petroleum geologist doesn't view natural gas as "a bridge to anywhere."
What others call the "shale gas revolution," he rudely describes as an "industry retirement party."
Industry supporter, skeptical eye
Now don't get Berman wrong. With more than 30 years of technical experience in the oil and gas industry, the consultant recognizes the intensive mining of shale gas and shale oil across the continent as significant events.
He clearly supports the industry. But he's the kind of thoughtful and critical guy that quotes Samuel Johnson or Tao Te Ching in his presentations. As such, he has persistently challenged corporate gold rush economics that crushed natural gas prices as well as persistent government ignorance about the resource's longevity, volume and cost.
His blunt refusal to cheerlead for the industry has also earned him some grief. The magazine World Oil cancelled his long-running column in 2009 after Berman repeatedly questioned the accuracy of inflated shale gas reserves in the absence of real production data. The editor got sacked too.
In the last couple of years, a Devon Energy spokesperson dubbed Berman a "dinosaur" for questioning industry hubris. Former Chesapeake CEO Aubrey McClendon, now under investigation by the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission, also dished the prominent analyst as "third tier geologist."
But Berman's no-nonsense technical assessments have been damningly accurate. In many quarters the prescient Berman is now hailed as an energy fox.
Compulsive drilling
It all began six years ago when the savvy geologist started to question the economics of shale gas drilling in Texas as well as a manufacturing model that promised endless energy. After checking real geology and real production numbers he warned that industry had overhyped the potential of many fields while ignoring falling prices, rising costs and sharp depletion rates.
Nevertheless, the shale boom became a verifiable mania in the mid-2000s. With heavy promotional hoopla and flush with easy credit from Wall Street, companies such as Chesapeake and Encana individually acquired land bases as large as the State of West Virginia.
Then they compulsively drilled them with repeated fracture treatments. Not surprisingly, industry flooded the market and drove down the price of natural gas from a historic high of $14 a million metric BTU in 2008 to lows of $2.
Yet cracking rock miles underground remains a high cost and high-risk business. In 2010 Berman predicted the shale gas manufacturing model "was unsustainable" and that overproduction would create killing debt loads and force companies to divest their assets.
Most shale gas companies need a price between $6 and $8 a mm BTU to be economic. Yet the market price for gas remains around $3. Hence the sell-offs, mergers and acquisitions and corporate resignations in the natural gas industry now making media headlines.
Two of the loudest shale gas promoters, Chesapeake and Encana, have suffered major train wrecks due to the shale gas glut. Their CEOS have resigned. They've not only reduced drilling but have tried to sell off a billion dollars worth of assets to cover their unsustainable debt loads.
They are not alone. BP has written off nearly $2 billion in assets. In addition Quicksilver has temporarily suspended drilling in the Horn River shale play due to low natural gas prices. Even Rex Tillerson, the bombastic CEO of Exxon Mobil, admitted last year that the company was "losing our shirts" on shale gas investments.
Or as Berman duly warned in one article: "Improbable stories that great profits can be made at increasingly lower prices have intersected with reality."
Berman was also one of the first to question the abundance of the resource too. Formations blasted open by water, sand and chemicals often yield great gushers of gas for six months but then drop off as dramatically as a Wall Street market crash. In many shale gas plays, production declines average more than 40 per cent a year, says Berman. (In contrast conventional plays deplete by an average of 20 per cent.)
Nevertheless, industry and industry-funded academics often boasted that the so-called shale gale could spew enough methane to meet North America's energy needs for 100 years. But real-time depletion rates and problematic geology (not all shale resources are equal) have totally rewritten those optimistic claims.
The Marcellus shale formation in Pennsylvania and New York, for example, was supposed to hold 410 trillion cubic feet of gas or nearly 20 years worth of natural gas. (The U.S. burns about 22 TCF a year).
But in 2011 the U.S. Geological Survey slashed that estimate by 80 per cent to 84 trillion cubic feet, or a four-year supply. Other studies "show that commercially recoverable per-well shale gas reserves may be considerably smaller than some believe."
Two decades to transition
Given such downgrades in shale fields from Haynesville to Woodford, Berman believes that the unconventional gas may represent only between 20 and 25 years worth of supply. That's not a bridge given dramatic declines in conventional gas, says Berman. In short, most shale gas deposits are too deep, too marginal or too inaccessible to be economically viable.
A 2013 comprehensive report based on the study of 60,000 oil and shale wells in the United States confirmed Berman's own analysis and research.
The Post-Carbon Institute study reported that 80 per cent of all shale gas production comes from just five of 20 developed fields. Moreover, the majority of these fields had peaked after five years of production and were now in decline. "In the Haynesville play (a major shale gas field in north Louisiana and east Texas), an average well delivered almost one-third less gas in 2012 than in 2010," reported Hughes.
David Hughes, a retired Canadian geologist and author of the report, estimated that it would cost $42 billion to maintain current production (that's 40 per cent of US gas supply) with 7,000 more wells even though the 2012 market value of shale gas production was but $32.5 billion.
Rapid decline rates have taken the wind out of the shale gale. Industry once advertised shale wells as assets that could be milked for up to 40 years. Now it appears that some wells might not be economic after fives years of production. As a consequence, an increasing number of high cost wells must be drilled (a veritable treadmill) in order to maintain supply. "We are spending more and more to get less and less," explains Berman.
Given such poor thermodynamics, shale gas is a temporary phenomenon and another sign of peaking supply in hydrocarbons explains the consultant. "But it is not sustainable. By 2020 or 2025 it will be pretty much played out. And what comes after that?"
Now that the gold rush is over, Berman thinks the future for natural gas could be equally dramatic.
Conventional gas production, which supplies 60 per cent of the market, is steadily declining. In 2001 the decline rate was 23 per cent; today its 33 per cent.
That means 12 billion cubic feet of new gas was needed every year to offset consumption rates of 54 billion cubic feet. Today industry needs to replace 22 billion cubic feet a year to sustain the consumption of 64 billion cubic feet of gas. Calgary-based Arc Financialestimates that major gas producers must spend $22 billion per quarter to replace what's being burned. But most firms are only spending half of that.
It's unlikely that shale gas will be able to make up the difference.
'Retirement' looms
This reality coupled with increasing demand for natural gas to replace coal-fired power based on illusions of cheapness, will soon increase prices as well as the volume of shale drilling. But even hundreds of thousands of newly fracked shale gas wells won't be able to keep up the depletion rates, making natural gas an ugly treadmill industry.
"Shale plays are not a renaissance or a revolution. This is a retirement party."
As a consequence Berman doesn't think industry, now in a panic mode over low prices, should rush to build high-risk LNG terminals to export shale gas to Asian markets. "Just because we have a temporary supply of abundant natural gas, why should we race to use it up as fast as we can?"
Nor does he believe that government should subsidize the fossil fuel industry. "We'll never develop effective or alternative technologies as long as government gains profit from fossil fuels."
B.C.'s shale gas industry, for example, is entirely subsidized by low royalties, free water and tax-payer funded roads and other infrastructure. All horizontal drilling in Alberta gets a hefty royalty break, too, in addition to free water.
Nor should the illusion of temporary cheap gas dissuade governments from investing in public transportation, energy conservation or encouraging green renewables such as solar and wind power, adds the consultant. "I think our energy future is quite bleak and we are going to need everything we can get."
"The transition we're in now is one from energy abundance to scarcity. I know it doesn't play well. But right now we don't have a bridge to anything. We have a bridge to nowhere and we don't know where the future is."
"Shale gas is a retirement party because we now have to live on what we have left," he explains.
"We have reached the bottom of the resource pyramid. All the good resources are gone. So, like a reluctant retiree, we try to convince ourselves that the best is in front of us but we know it is really not. We will have a nice retirement party -- these are usually awkward events -- and in coming days will resign ourselves to the hard truth."....
The Shale Gale Is a Retirement Party
Every day a government agency or industry group in North America still hails natural gas mined from deep shale rock formations as "the bridging fuel" that will power a brighter if not cleaner energy tomorrow. Cheap natural gas, goes the mantra, will solve our energy woes and build a new energy foundation.
The government of British Columbia, for example, dutifully salutes the ancient hydrocarbon as "a transition fuel to a low carbon global economy" that will fill government coffers.
And the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) calculates that the continent's growing gas supply can retire the majority of the continent's aging coal-fired plants. Others claim that natural gas will make the continent energy independent altogether.
Big Oil such as Exxon Mobil and Shell have invested so much money in shale resources that they now want to export U.S. and Canadian natural gas to Asia. Exuberant corporate leaders also predict that natural gas will surpass coal as the second-largest energy source on the planet, after oil, by 2040.
Eager to cash in on the shale gale, pipeline companies can't wait to build another 450,000 miles of new pipelines to ship gas from heavily fracked rural landscapes to urban markets over the next two decades.
But that's not Arthur Berman's take. The oil patch consultant sees the shale gas frenzy as "magical thinking" as well as a full-blown commercial failure. In fact, the 62-year-old Houston-based petroleum geologist doesn't view natural gas as "a bridge to anywhere."
What others call the "shale gas revolution," he rudely describes as an "industry retirement party."
Industry supporter, skeptical eye
Now don't get Berman wrong. With more than 30 years of technical experience in the oil and gas industry, the consultant recognizes the intensive mining of shale gas and shale oil across the continent as significant events.
He clearly supports the industry. But he's the kind of thoughtful and critical guy that quotes Samuel Johnson or Tao Te Ching in his presentations. As such, he has persistently challenged corporate gold rush economics that crushed natural gas prices as well as persistent government ignorance about the resource's longevity, volume and cost.
His blunt refusal to cheerlead for the industry has also earned him some grief. The magazine World Oil cancelled his long-running column in 2009 after Berman repeatedly questioned the accuracy of inflated shale gas reserves in the absence of real production data. The editor got sacked too.
In the last couple of years, a Devon Energy spokesperson dubbed Berman a "dinosaur" for questioning industry hubris. Former Chesapeake CEO Aubrey McClendon, now under investigation by the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission, also dished the prominent analyst as "third tier geologist."
But Berman's no-nonsense technical assessments have been damningly accurate. In many quarters the prescient Berman is now hailed as an energy fox.
Compulsive drilling
It all began six years ago when the savvy geologist started to question the economics of shale gas drilling in Texas as well as a manufacturing model that promised endless energy. After checking real geology and real production numbers he warned that industry had overhyped the potential of many fields while ignoring falling prices, rising costs and sharp depletion rates.
Nevertheless, the shale boom became a verifiable mania in the mid-2000s. With heavy promotional hoopla and flush with easy credit from Wall Street, companies such as Chesapeake and Encana individually acquired land bases as large as the State of West Virginia.
Then they compulsively drilled them with repeated fracture treatments. Not surprisingly, industry flooded the market and drove down the price of natural gas from a historic high of $14 a million metric BTU in 2008 to lows of $2.
Yet cracking rock miles underground remains a high cost and high-risk business. In 2010 Berman predicted the shale gas manufacturing model "was unsustainable" and that overproduction would create killing debt loads and force companies to divest their assets.
Most shale gas companies need a price between $6 and $8 a mm BTU to be economic. Yet the market price for gas remains around $3. Hence the sell-offs, mergers and acquisitions and corporate resignations in the natural gas industry now making media headlines.
Two of the loudest shale gas promoters, Chesapeake and Encana, have suffered major train wrecks due to the shale gas glut. Their CEOS have resigned. They've not only reduced drilling but have tried to sell off a billion dollars worth of assets to cover their unsustainable debt loads.
They are not alone. BP has written off nearly $2 billion in assets. In addition Quicksilver has temporarily suspended drilling in the Horn River shale play due to low natural gas prices. Even Rex Tillerson, the bombastic CEO of Exxon Mobil, admitted last year that the company was "losing our shirts" on shale gas investments.
Or as Berman duly warned in one article: "Improbable stories that great profits can be made at increasingly lower prices have intersected with reality."
Berman was also one of the first to question the abundance of the resource too. Formations blasted open by water, sand and chemicals often yield great gushers of gas for six months but then drop off as dramatically as a Wall Street market crash. In many shale gas plays, production declines average more than 40 per cent a year, says Berman. (In contrast conventional plays deplete by an average of 20 per cent.)
Nevertheless, industry and industry-funded academics often boasted that the so-called shale gale could spew enough methane to meet North America's energy needs for 100 years. But real-time depletion rates and problematic geology (not all shale resources are equal) have totally rewritten those optimistic claims.
The Marcellus shale formation in Pennsylvania and New York, for example, was supposed to hold 410 trillion cubic feet of gas or nearly 20 years worth of natural gas. (The U.S. burns about 22 TCF a year).
But in 2011 the U.S. Geological Survey slashed that estimate by 80 per cent to 84 trillion cubic feet, or a four-year supply. Other studies "show that commercially recoverable per-well shale gas reserves may be considerably smaller than some believe."
Two decades to transition
Given such downgrades in shale fields from Haynesville to Woodford, Berman believes that the unconventional gas may represent only between 20 and 25 years worth of supply. That's not a bridge given dramatic declines in conventional gas, says Berman. In short, most shale gas deposits are too deep, too marginal or too inaccessible to be economically viable.
A 2013 comprehensive report based on the study of 60,000 oil and shale wells in the United States confirmed Berman's own analysis and research.
The Post-Carbon Institute study reported that 80 per cent of all shale gas production comes from just five of 20 developed fields. Moreover, the majority of these fields had peaked after five years of production and were now in decline. "In the Haynesville play (a major shale gas field in north Louisiana and east Texas), an average well delivered almost one-third less gas in 2012 than in 2010," reported Hughes.
David Hughes, a retired Canadian geologist and author of the report, estimated that it would cost $42 billion to maintain current production (that's 40 per cent of US gas supply) with 7,000 more wells even though the 2012 market value of shale gas production was but $32.5 billion.
Rapid decline rates have taken the wind out of the shale gale. Industry once advertised shale wells as assets that could be milked for up to 40 years. Now it appears that some wells might not be economic after fives years of production. As a consequence, an increasing number of high cost wells must be drilled (a veritable treadmill) in order to maintain supply. "We are spending more and more to get less and less," explains Berman.
Given such poor thermodynamics, shale gas is a temporary phenomenon and another sign of peaking supply in hydrocarbons explains the consultant. "But it is not sustainable. By 2020 or 2025 it will be pretty much played out. And what comes after that?"
Now that the gold rush is over, Berman thinks the future for natural gas could be equally dramatic.
Conventional gas production, which supplies 60 per cent of the market, is steadily declining. In 2001 the decline rate was 23 per cent; today its 33 per cent.
That means 12 billion cubic feet of new gas was needed every year to offset consumption rates of 54 billion cubic feet. Today industry needs to replace 22 billion cubic feet a year to sustain the consumption of 64 billion cubic feet of gas. Calgary-based Arc Financialestimates that major gas producers must spend $22 billion per quarter to replace what's being burned. But most firms are only spending half of that.
It's unlikely that shale gas will be able to make up the difference.
'Retirement' looms
This reality coupled with increasing demand for natural gas to replace coal-fired power based on illusions of cheapness, will soon increase prices as well as the volume of shale drilling. But even hundreds of thousands of newly fracked shale gas wells won't be able to keep up the depletion rates, making natural gas an ugly treadmill industry.
"Shale plays are not a renaissance or a revolution. This is a retirement party."
As a consequence Berman doesn't think industry, now in a panic mode over low prices, should rush to build high-risk LNG terminals to export shale gas to Asian markets. "Just because we have a temporary supply of abundant natural gas, why should we race to use it up as fast as we can?"
Nor does he believe that government should subsidize the fossil fuel industry. "We'll never develop effective or alternative technologies as long as government gains profit from fossil fuels."
B.C.'s shale gas industry, for example, is entirely subsidized by low royalties, free water and tax-payer funded roads and other infrastructure. All horizontal drilling in Alberta gets a hefty royalty break, too, in addition to free water.
Nor should the illusion of temporary cheap gas dissuade governments from investing in public transportation, energy conservation or encouraging green renewables such as solar and wind power, adds the consultant. "I think our energy future is quite bleak and we are going to need everything we can get."
"The transition we're in now is one from energy abundance to scarcity. I know it doesn't play well. But right now we don't have a bridge to anything. We have a bridge to nowhere and we don't know where the future is."
"Shale gas is a retirement party because we now have to live on what we have left," he explains.
"We have reached the bottom of the resource pyramid. All the good resources are gone. So, like a reluctant retiree, we try to convince ourselves that the best is in front of us but we know it is really not. We will have a nice retirement party -- these are usually awkward events -- and in coming days will resign ourselves to the hard truth."....
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
