http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/
Well and Truly Fracked
The reduction of contemporary debates about the future to ritual theater, the theme of last week’s post here on The Archdruid Report, isn’t limited to the specific technological issues I discussed in that essay—the increasingly dubious quest for fusion power, on the one hand, and the prospects for the internet’s survival in an age of economic contraction and resource scarcity, on the other. Across the landscape of contemporary (mis)understandings of the future, just about every issue you care to name has been turned into yet another modern morality play in which progress gets to act out one more symbolic triumph over its eternal enemies.
To describe that habit as unhelpful is to understate the case considerably. Modern industrial civilization faces serious challenges in the years immediately before us, as the paired jaws of resource depletion and environmental disruption clamp down ever more tightly on it, and the consequences of decades of bad decisions come home to roost. In order to deal with those challenges, hard questions need to be asked and realistic answers considered—and this isn’t furthered at all by the tendency on the part of so many people these days to lapse into cheerleading instead. It’s rather as though you were trying to have a serious discussion about educational policy with someone whose only response to anything you said was to shout, “Central High, Central High, rah, rah, rah!”
Any number of examples of this could be quoted, but the one I’d like to discuss here is the way that fracking—hydrofracturing of oil and gas-bearing shales, to give it its more precise moniker—has been transformed, at least in the popular imagination, into the conclusive answer to those annoying little worries about the impossibility of extracting an infinite amount of petroleum from a finite planet. That’s worth discussing just now for at least two reasons.
The first of these is that the public debate over fracking is almost certainly about to become a good deal more heated than it’s already gotten, due to the publication of a lively and eminently readable little book on the subject—Snake Oil: How Fracking’s False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future by Richard Heinberg, which you can order from the publisher here. Those of my readers who have been following the peak oil story since its reemergence early in the last decade will recall Heinberg’s The Party’s Over; that and James Howard Kunstler’s memorably edgy The Long Emergency were the books that launched peak oil into the collective conversation of our time.
Snake Oil may just accomplish the same thing with the side of the fracking debate that’s getting no attention from the mainstream media. Heinberg makes four points in the book, each of which could usefully be put on the business end of a branding iron and applied to the tender backsides of pundits and politicians alike. First, the loudly ballyhooed claims that fracking promises a new age of limitless cheap energy for Americans are pure malarkey, based on a patchwork of unjustifiable assumptions and outright fabrications that wildly overstate potential production and tacitly ignore all the downsides of a far from flawless technology. Second, in the usual fashion of today’s American economy, fracking piles up short term profits for a few by loading immense long term costs on local communities, natural systems, and future generations.
Third, a significant proportion of the hoopla over fracking is being orchestrated by those wonderful folks on Wall Street who brought you last decade’s housing bubble and bust, and the same kind of financial shenanigans that nearly capsized the global economy in 2008 and 2009 are being applied with gusto to a burgeoning bubble in shale leases and the like. Fourth, and most critically, the increasingly frantic cheerleading being devoted to the fracking industry these days is simply one more delay in the process of coming to grips with the real crisis of our time—the need to decouple as much as possible of industrial society from its current dependence on fossil fuels. As Heinberg points out, there aren’t enough economically recoverable fossil fuels left in the planet’s crust to keep the world chugging ahead on a business-as-usual track of economic growth for much longer, but there’s more than enough to finish the job of destabilizing the Earth’s climate and pitching us face first into a very difficult future.
None of these points will be news to regular readers of The Archdruid Report, but then regular readers of The Archdruid Report are not this book’s primary audience. (You won’t find any of my peak oil writings in the bibliography, either, and for very good reason—a book meant to influence policymakers and the general public does itself no favors by citing archdruids.) Those of my regular readers who need facts and figures to argue against fracking-industry shills, or who want a short and highly readable book to press into the hands of the uninformed or undecided, will certainly want a copy, and those who have just stumbled across this blog and are still trying to figure out what all the fuss about peak oil means could do much worse than to get a copy of Snake Oil and read it—the absurd media blather about “limitless fossil fuels” and similar oxymorons gets a well-earned hiding at Heinberg’s capable hands.
The publication of Snake Oil, then, is one of the reasons why a discussion of fracking is particularly relevant at the moment. The other? That comes from an even more unanswerable critique of fracking—this one written by the impersonal forces of geology and economics. This will come as no surprise to this blog’s regular readers, either; as I suggested in a post earlier this year, with the approach of autumn, the fracking juggernaut is running on fumes.
Consider this story from the financial media—tip of the archdruidical hat to Ron Patterson’s blog Peak Oil Barrel, one of the rising stars of the post-Oil Drum peak oil scene, for the link. Big oil names Shell and BHP Billiton are writing down the value of their shale assets by billions of dollars. Meanwhile the value of oil and gas-related transactions, among the top profit centers for Wall Street every year since 2005, has dropped like a rock and, unless something changes drastically, won’t even make the top five list this year.
Nor is this happening solely on Wall Street; out in shale country, too, the boom is grinding to a halt. The pace of drilling in the Fayetteville shale has dropped precipitously this year; in Texas, meanwhile, gas production from the Barnett Shale has dropped more than a billion cubic feet a day, to levels last seen in 2009; while in the Marcellus Shale country of Pennsylvania, insurance companies are starting to cancel homeowners insurance and home mortgages are becoming unavailable as the health and environmental toll of reckless shale development piles up.
Headlines of this sort are becoming increasingly common in the financial press as one month gives way to another. With utter predictability, so have articles and essays in the mainstream media crowing about the supposed end of peak oil, and financial-advice columns urging the general public to get out there and invest their life’s savings in shale oil and gas. Those who recall the way the housing bubble played out over its last year or two will recall this same phenomenon: as the fundamentals turned sour, the chorus of pundits praising the arrival of a new age of prosperity for all got louder and louder, until the crash of collapsing prices finally drowned it out.
Exactly how long it will take for the shale bubble to tip over into full-scale bust probably can’t be known except in hindsight. The same principle probably applies just as well to another question that may be even more explosive: just how much of Wall Street and the broader US financial industry depends on income skimmed off the shale bubble for its economic survival. It’s when the tide goes out, as Warren Buffet famously said, that you find out who’s been swimming naked; when the bubble bursts and companies with heavy exposure to the fracking industry can no longer cover their day to day costs by tapping into the money flows any speculative boom attracts, the consequences could fall anywhere along the spectrum from sharp regional recessions in shale country all the way to panic selling on global markets and a reprise of 2008’s economic turmoil.
I suppose it counts as belaboring the obvious to point out that these aren’t the consequences that were supposed to flow from the so-called shale revolution, according to the pundits and politicians and industry shills that filled the media with proclamations of good times to come. Still, the point needs to be made, because it’s a safe bet that the same promises of abundant energy and prosperity for all will be made in regard to any number of equally dubious revolutions and breakthroughs and great leaps forward in the years ahead., with equally unsatisfactory results.
The rhetoric that surrounded the fracking bubble from its inception, after all, was exactly the sort of ritual theater of progress I discussed in last week’s post. Read any discussion of fracking in the US mainstream media and you’ll find every one of the standard cliches present and accounted for: the imaginary barriers that are there solely to be overcome, the innovative new technology hot off the lab bench, the lucky discoveries that show up just in time for the new technology to exploit, the ceremonial debate in which the opponents of progress raise doleful cries about the timeless order of rural life that’s about to be destroyed while the protagonists proclaim the dawn of a new day of prosperity and abundance for all, and so on.
None of this has any relevance to the facts on the ground. Outside the realm of ritual theater, the limits are real, the technology isn’t new and neither are the discoveries, the destruction announced by the opponents of fracking has turned out to be quite tangible, and the new day of prosperity and abundance has gone missing in action. Still, you won’t hear that from the media, not until long after the boom has gone bust, the hardware has been sold to the Chinese for scrap, and the sole remaining legacy of the shale bubble consists of county-sized areas where the groundwater is too toxic to drink.
This is what happens when a culture’s traditions get fatally out of step with its circumstances. Not that long ago in America, the ritual theater of progress was adaptive, to borrow a bit of jargon from ecology: more often than not, those who extracted more resources, burnt more energy, built more infrastructure, and produced more goods and services prospered, and so did their communities. Every disagreement about economic development, as I showed last week, was therefore forced into what amounts to a ceremonial pattern that guaranteed that the proponents of progress would win every round. When the limits to growth were still far off, when it was still possible to pretend that resources were infinite and the environment’s capacity to absorb pollutants was just as limitless, that was a successful strategy.
The problem with that strategy was that it was unable to adapt when the hard limits to resource reserves and the biosphere’s tolerance for pollution came within sight. In terms of our culture’s faith in progress and the ritual theater that unfolded from that faith, those limits could only be interpreted as another set of imaginary barriers to be overcome, and another set of doleful cries for the opponents of progress to utter in the ceremonial debate they were supposed to lose. That’s why every response to the crisis of our time that gets favorable attention from the US media is framed as an overcoming of imaginary limits by way of some innovative new technology, and quickly gets its chorus of opponents of progress uttering doleful cries, so that the heroes of progress have the appropriate ritual setting against which the can sing their praises of the shining new day about to dawn. Those are our traditions and our rituals, handed down to us by our tribal elders, and it’s simply our bad luck that those traditions and rituals have left us hopelessly unprepared to deal with the real world.
In the real world, the most important task facing each of us right now is that of grasping that the absurd abundance of energy and resources that Americans enjoyed in the second half of the 20th century was anything but normal. A cascade of fortuitous events handed the American people of that period a huge surplus of energy and resources, orders of magnitude greater than any comparable example in history. Of course we squandered most of it, and picked up habits of extravagance and waste that will have to be unlearnt painfully as the last of the surplus fades away.
To accept that task, though, is to abandon habits of thought and action that have pervaded American culture throughout living memory. The habits of thrift and self-discipline that our forebears learned in the school of hard necessity—“use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without”—drowned in the flood of mostly unearned wealth that saturated American society during this nation’s age of empire, and every detail of contemporary American culture militates against a return to those sane but unwelcome standards. At this point, as I’ve argued more than once in the past, any response to the challenge of our time that doesn’t start with using much less energy and other resources simply isn’t serious; still, our culture being what it is, unserious responses remain the order of the day.
Still, there’s at least one good reason to think that this latter may be a distinctly temporary condition. The fracking bubble, after all, was not the first such response to the twilight of cheap abundant petroleum. In the wake of the 1970s energy crises, it bears remembering, the same sort of rhetoric currently being deployed on behalf of fracking was much in evidence, as the reckless pumping of the North Sea and Alaskan North Slope oilfields crashed the price of oil and convinced a great many people that the great god Progress was still soundly ensconced in his temple. Then as now, an increasingly frantic effort to scrape the barrel was treated as proof that the barrel was still full, and allowed politicians, the press, and the public at large to put off necessary changes for a little while.
Notice the difference, though: the scrape-the-barrel efforts launched by the Reagan counterrevolution of the 1980s kept oil production propped up for more than twenty years, while the equivalent efforts this time around barely managed the thing for five. The available reserves in 1980 were large enough to crash the price of oil and pay for one last spectacular era of prosperity; the reserves tapped by fracking weren’t enough to keep the price of oil from rising up into triple digits, or give the economy more than a brief and localized boost. We really are getting near the bottom of the barrel—less metaphorically, the point at which petroleum production worldwide tips over from its current unsteady plateau into the long ragged decline that marks the twilight of every resource.
Those necessary changes still wait to be made. What remains to be seen is how many people in America and elsewhere will rise to the challenge and make them, and how many will cling to the failed beliefs of a bygone era until the night closes in.
Saturday, August 24, 2013
SC118-14
http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/near-term-extinctionists-believe-the-world-is-going-to-end-very-soon
Some Credible Scientists Believe Humanity Is Verrrrrry Close to Destruction
If you were to zoom out and take a comparative look back at our planet during the 1950s from some sort of cosmic time-travelling orbiter cube, you would probably first notice that millions of pieces of space trash had disappeared from orbit.
The moon would appear six and a half feet closer to Earth, and the continents of Europe and North America would be four feet closer together. Zooming in, you would be able to spot some of the industrial clambering of the Golden Age of Capitalism in the West and some of the stilted attempts at the Great Leap Forward in the East. Lasers, bar codes, contraceptives, hydrogen bombs, microchips, credit cards, synthesizers, superglue, Barbie dolls, pharmaceuticals, factory farming, and distortion pedals would just be coming into existence.
There would be two thirds fewer humans on the planet than there are now. Over a million different species of plants and animals would exist that have since gone extinct. There would be 90 percent more fish, a billion less tons of plastic, and 40 percent more phytoplankton (producers of half the planet’s oxygen) in the oceans. There would be twice as many trees covering the land and about three times more drinking water available from ancient aquifers. There would be about 80 percent more ice covering the northern pole during the summer season and 30 percent less carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere. The list goes on…
Most educated and semi-concerned people know that these sorts of sordid details make up the backdrop of our retina-screened, ethylene-ripened story of progress, but what happens when you start stringing them all together?
If Doomsday Preppers, the highest rated show on the National Geographic Channel is any indication, the general public seems to be getting ready for some sort of societal collapse. There have always been doomsday prophets and cults around and everyone has their own personal view of how the apocalypse will probably go down (ascension of pure souls, zombie crows), but in the midst of all of the Mayan Calendar/Timewave Zero/Rapture babble, there are some clarion calls coming from a crowd that’s less into bugout bags and eschatology: well-respected scientists and journalists who have come to some scarily-sane sounding conclusions about the threat of human-induced climate change on the survival of the human species.
Recent data seems to suggest that we may have already tripped several irrevocable, non-linear, positive feedback loops (melting of permafrost, methane hydrates, and arctic sea ice) that make an average global temperature increase of only 2°C by 2100 seem like a fairy tale. Instead, we’re talking 4°C, 6°C, 10°C, 16°C (????????) here.
The link between rapid climate change and human extinction is basically this: the planet becomes uninhabitable by humans if the average temperature goes up by 4-6°C. It doesn’t sound like a lot because we’re used to the temperature changing 15°C overnight, but the thing that is not mentioned enough is that even a 2-3°C average increase would give us temperatures that regularly surpass 40°C (104°F) in North America and Europe, and soar even higher near the equator. Human bodies start to break down after six hours at a wet-bulb (100% humidity) temperature of 35°C (95°F). This makes the 2003 heat wave in Europe that killed over 70,000 people seem like not a very big deal.
Factoring in the increase we’re already seeing in heat waves, droughts, wildfires, massive storms, food and water shortages, deforestation, ocean acidification, and sea level rise some are seeing the writing on the wall:
We’re all gonna die!
If you want to freak yourself the fuck out, spend a few hours trying to refute the mounting evidence of our impending doom heralded by the man who gave the Near Term Extinction movement its name, Guy McPherson, on his blog Nature Bats Last. McPherson is a former Professor Emeritus of Natural Resources and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona, who left his cushy tenured academic career and now lives in a straw-bale house on a sustainable commune in rural New Mexico in an attempt to “walk away from Empire.” There are a lot of interviews and videos available of Dr. McPherson talking about NTE if you want to boost your pessimism about the future to suicidal/ruin-any-dinner-party levels.
If you are in need of an ultimate mind-fuck, there is a long essay on McPherson’s site entitled “The Irreconcilable Acceptance of Near Term Extinction” written by a lifelong environmental activist named Daniel Drumright. He writes about trying to come to terms with what it means to be on a clear path toward extinction now that it’s probably too late to do anything about it (hint: suicide or shrooms). As Drumright points out, the entirety of human philosophy, religion, and politics doesn’t really provide a framework for processing the psychological terror of all of humanity not existing in the near future.
Outside of the official NTE enclave, there are a lot of scientists and journalists who would probably try to avoid being labeled as NTE proponents, but are still making the same sort of dire predictions about our collective fate. They may not believe that humans will ALL be gone by mid-century, but massive, catastrophic “population decline” due to human-induced rapid climate change is not out of the picture.
James Hansen, the former head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the world’s leading climatologists has recently retired from his position after 43 years in order to concentrate on climate-change activism. He predicts that without full de-carbonization by 2030, global CO2 emissions will be 16 times higher than in 1950, guaranteeing catastrophic climate change. In an essay published in April of this year, Hansen states:
“If we should ‘succeed’ in digging up and burning all fossil fuels, some parts of the planet would become literally uninhabitable, with some times during the year having wet bulb temperatures exceeding 35°C. At such temperatures, for reasons of physiology and physics, humans cannot survive… it is physically impossible for the environment to carry away the 100W of metabolic heat that a human body generates when it is at rest. Thus even a person lying quietly naked in hurricane force winds would be unable to survive.”
Bill McKibben, prominent green journalist, author, distinguished scholar, and one of the founders of350.org – the movement that aims to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels to 350ppm in the hopes of avoiding runaway climate change – wrote a book in 2011 called Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. In it he highlights current environmental changes that have put us past the predictions that had previously been reserved for the end of the 21st century. He emphasizes that the popular political rhetoric that we need to do something about climate change for our “grandchildren” is sorely out of touch with reality. This is happening now. We’re already living on a sci-fi planet from a parallel universe:
“The Arctic ice cap is melting, the great glacier above Greenland is thinning, both with disconcerting and unexpected speed. The oceans are distinctly more acid and their level is rising…The greatest storms on our planet, hurricanes and cyclones, have become more powerful…The great rain forest of the Amazon is drying on its margins…The great boreal forest of North America is dying in a matter of years… [This] new planet looks more or less like our own but clearly isn’t… This is the biggest thing that’s ever happened.”
Peter Ward is a paleontologist and author whose 2007 book Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What they Can Tell Us About the Future, provides evidence that all but one of the major global extinction events (dinosaurs) occurred due to rapid climate change caused by increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. This time around, the carbon dioxide increase happens to be coming from humans figuring out how to dig billions of tons of carbon out of the ground – and releasing it into the air. Ward states that during the last 10,000 years in which human civilization has emerged, our carbon dioxide levels and climate have remained anomalously stable, but the future doesn’t look so good:
“The average global temperature has changed as much as 18°F [8°C] in a few decades. The average global temperature is 59°F [15°C]. Imagine that it shot to 75°F [24°C] or dropped to 40°F [4°C], in a century or less. We have no experience of such a world… at minimum, such sudden changes would create catastrophic storms of unbelievable magnitude and fury…lashing the continents not once a decade or century but several times each year…For most of the last 100,000 years, an abruptly changing climate was the rule, not the exception.”
Far from being a Mother Earth lover, Ward has also developed an anti-Gaia hypothesis that he calls the “Medea Hypothesis” in which complex life, instead of being in symbiotic harmony with the environment, is actually a horrible nuisance. In this hypothesis, the planet and microbial life have worked together multiple times to trigger mass extinction events that have almost succeeded in returning the earth to its microbe-dominant state. In other words, Mother Earth might be Microbe Earth and she might be trying to kill her kids.
Scientists are putting out the warning call that rapid, life-threatening climate change lies ahead in our near future – but most are drowned out by the political arguments and denialist rhetoric of climate change skeptics. The well-funded effort by free market think tanks, energy lobbyists, and industry advocates to blur the public perception of climate science should come as no surprise. The thermodynamic forcing effects of an ice-free artic by 2015 don’t seem so threatening if you stand to gain billions of dollars by sending drill bits into the potentially huge oil reservoirs there.
It may not be the case that the southwest US will be uninhabitable by 2035, or that all of human life will be extinguished in a generation, but we should probably start to acknowledge and internalize what some of the people who have given their lives to better understand this planet are saying about it. It’s depressing to think that humans, in our current state, could be the Omega Point of consciousness. Maybe sentience and the knowledge of our inevitable death have given us a sort of survival vertigo that we can’t overcome. As the separate paths of environmental exploitation quickly and quietly converge around us, we might just tumble off the precipice, drunk on fossil fuels, making duck faces into black mirrors.
Some Credible Scientists Believe Humanity Is Verrrrrry Close to Destruction
If you were to zoom out and take a comparative look back at our planet during the 1950s from some sort of cosmic time-travelling orbiter cube, you would probably first notice that millions of pieces of space trash had disappeared from orbit.
The moon would appear six and a half feet closer to Earth, and the continents of Europe and North America would be four feet closer together. Zooming in, you would be able to spot some of the industrial clambering of the Golden Age of Capitalism in the West and some of the stilted attempts at the Great Leap Forward in the East. Lasers, bar codes, contraceptives, hydrogen bombs, microchips, credit cards, synthesizers, superglue, Barbie dolls, pharmaceuticals, factory farming, and distortion pedals would just be coming into existence.
There would be two thirds fewer humans on the planet than there are now. Over a million different species of plants and animals would exist that have since gone extinct. There would be 90 percent more fish, a billion less tons of plastic, and 40 percent more phytoplankton (producers of half the planet’s oxygen) in the oceans. There would be twice as many trees covering the land and about three times more drinking water available from ancient aquifers. There would be about 80 percent more ice covering the northern pole during the summer season and 30 percent less carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere. The list goes on…
Most educated and semi-concerned people know that these sorts of sordid details make up the backdrop of our retina-screened, ethylene-ripened story of progress, but what happens when you start stringing them all together?
If Doomsday Preppers, the highest rated show on the National Geographic Channel is any indication, the general public seems to be getting ready for some sort of societal collapse. There have always been doomsday prophets and cults around and everyone has their own personal view of how the apocalypse will probably go down (ascension of pure souls, zombie crows), but in the midst of all of the Mayan Calendar/Timewave Zero/Rapture babble, there are some clarion calls coming from a crowd that’s less into bugout bags and eschatology: well-respected scientists and journalists who have come to some scarily-sane sounding conclusions about the threat of human-induced climate change on the survival of the human species.
Recent data seems to suggest that we may have already tripped several irrevocable, non-linear, positive feedback loops (melting of permafrost, methane hydrates, and arctic sea ice) that make an average global temperature increase of only 2°C by 2100 seem like a fairy tale. Instead, we’re talking 4°C, 6°C, 10°C, 16°C (????????) here.
The link between rapid climate change and human extinction is basically this: the planet becomes uninhabitable by humans if the average temperature goes up by 4-6°C. It doesn’t sound like a lot because we’re used to the temperature changing 15°C overnight, but the thing that is not mentioned enough is that even a 2-3°C average increase would give us temperatures that regularly surpass 40°C (104°F) in North America and Europe, and soar even higher near the equator. Human bodies start to break down after six hours at a wet-bulb (100% humidity) temperature of 35°C (95°F). This makes the 2003 heat wave in Europe that killed over 70,000 people seem like not a very big deal.
Factoring in the increase we’re already seeing in heat waves, droughts, wildfires, massive storms, food and water shortages, deforestation, ocean acidification, and sea level rise some are seeing the writing on the wall:
We’re all gonna die!
If you want to freak yourself the fuck out, spend a few hours trying to refute the mounting evidence of our impending doom heralded by the man who gave the Near Term Extinction movement its name, Guy McPherson, on his blog Nature Bats Last. McPherson is a former Professor Emeritus of Natural Resources and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona, who left his cushy tenured academic career and now lives in a straw-bale house on a sustainable commune in rural New Mexico in an attempt to “walk away from Empire.” There are a lot of interviews and videos available of Dr. McPherson talking about NTE if you want to boost your pessimism about the future to suicidal/ruin-any-dinner-party levels.
If you are in need of an ultimate mind-fuck, there is a long essay on McPherson’s site entitled “The Irreconcilable Acceptance of Near Term Extinction” written by a lifelong environmental activist named Daniel Drumright. He writes about trying to come to terms with what it means to be on a clear path toward extinction now that it’s probably too late to do anything about it (hint: suicide or shrooms). As Drumright points out, the entirety of human philosophy, religion, and politics doesn’t really provide a framework for processing the psychological terror of all of humanity not existing in the near future.
Outside of the official NTE enclave, there are a lot of scientists and journalists who would probably try to avoid being labeled as NTE proponents, but are still making the same sort of dire predictions about our collective fate. They may not believe that humans will ALL be gone by mid-century, but massive, catastrophic “population decline” due to human-induced rapid climate change is not out of the picture.
James Hansen, the former head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the world’s leading climatologists has recently retired from his position after 43 years in order to concentrate on climate-change activism. He predicts that without full de-carbonization by 2030, global CO2 emissions will be 16 times higher than in 1950, guaranteeing catastrophic climate change. In an essay published in April of this year, Hansen states:
“If we should ‘succeed’ in digging up and burning all fossil fuels, some parts of the planet would become literally uninhabitable, with some times during the year having wet bulb temperatures exceeding 35°C. At such temperatures, for reasons of physiology and physics, humans cannot survive… it is physically impossible for the environment to carry away the 100W of metabolic heat that a human body generates when it is at rest. Thus even a person lying quietly naked in hurricane force winds would be unable to survive.”
Bill McKibben, prominent green journalist, author, distinguished scholar, and one of the founders of350.org – the movement that aims to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels to 350ppm in the hopes of avoiding runaway climate change – wrote a book in 2011 called Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. In it he highlights current environmental changes that have put us past the predictions that had previously been reserved for the end of the 21st century. He emphasizes that the popular political rhetoric that we need to do something about climate change for our “grandchildren” is sorely out of touch with reality. This is happening now. We’re already living on a sci-fi planet from a parallel universe:
“The Arctic ice cap is melting, the great glacier above Greenland is thinning, both with disconcerting and unexpected speed. The oceans are distinctly more acid and their level is rising…The greatest storms on our planet, hurricanes and cyclones, have become more powerful…The great rain forest of the Amazon is drying on its margins…The great boreal forest of North America is dying in a matter of years… [This] new planet looks more or less like our own but clearly isn’t… This is the biggest thing that’s ever happened.”
Peter Ward is a paleontologist and author whose 2007 book Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What they Can Tell Us About the Future, provides evidence that all but one of the major global extinction events (dinosaurs) occurred due to rapid climate change caused by increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. This time around, the carbon dioxide increase happens to be coming from humans figuring out how to dig billions of tons of carbon out of the ground – and releasing it into the air. Ward states that during the last 10,000 years in which human civilization has emerged, our carbon dioxide levels and climate have remained anomalously stable, but the future doesn’t look so good:
“The average global temperature has changed as much as 18°F [8°C] in a few decades. The average global temperature is 59°F [15°C]. Imagine that it shot to 75°F [24°C] or dropped to 40°F [4°C], in a century or less. We have no experience of such a world… at minimum, such sudden changes would create catastrophic storms of unbelievable magnitude and fury…lashing the continents not once a decade or century but several times each year…For most of the last 100,000 years, an abruptly changing climate was the rule, not the exception.”
Far from being a Mother Earth lover, Ward has also developed an anti-Gaia hypothesis that he calls the “Medea Hypothesis” in which complex life, instead of being in symbiotic harmony with the environment, is actually a horrible nuisance. In this hypothesis, the planet and microbial life have worked together multiple times to trigger mass extinction events that have almost succeeded in returning the earth to its microbe-dominant state. In other words, Mother Earth might be Microbe Earth and she might be trying to kill her kids.
Scientists are putting out the warning call that rapid, life-threatening climate change lies ahead in our near future – but most are drowned out by the political arguments and denialist rhetoric of climate change skeptics. The well-funded effort by free market think tanks, energy lobbyists, and industry advocates to blur the public perception of climate science should come as no surprise. The thermodynamic forcing effects of an ice-free artic by 2015 don’t seem so threatening if you stand to gain billions of dollars by sending drill bits into the potentially huge oil reservoirs there.
It may not be the case that the southwest US will be uninhabitable by 2035, or that all of human life will be extinguished in a generation, but we should probably start to acknowledge and internalize what some of the people who have given their lives to better understand this planet are saying about it. It’s depressing to think that humans, in our current state, could be the Omega Point of consciousness. Maybe sentience and the knowledge of our inevitable death have given us a sort of survival vertigo that we can’t overcome. As the separate paths of environmental exploitation quickly and quietly converge around us, we might just tumble off the precipice, drunk on fossil fuels, making duck faces into black mirrors.
Thursday, August 22, 2013
SC118-13
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/bradley_manning_and_the_gangster_state_20130821/
Bradley Manning and the Gangster State
The swift and brutal verdict read out by Army Col. Judge Denise Lind in sentencing Pfc. Bradley Manning to 35 years in prison means we have become a nation run by gangsters. It signals the inversion of our moral and legal order, the death of an independent media, and the open and flagrant misuse of the law to prevent any oversight or investigation of official abuses of power, including war crimes. The passivity of most of the nation’s citizens—the most spied upon, monitored and controlled population in human history—to the judicial lynching of Manning means they will be next. There are no institutional mechanisms left to halt the shredding of our most fundamental civil liberties, including habeas corpus and due process, or to prevent pre-emptive war, the assassination of U.S. citizens by the government and the complete obliteration of privacy.
Wednesday’s sentencing marks one of the most important watersheds in U.S. history. It marks the day when the state formally declared that all who name and expose its crimes will become political prisoners or be forced, like Edward Snowden, and perhaps Glenn Greenwald, to spend the rest of their lives in exile. It marks the day when the country dropped all pretense of democracy, obliterated checks and balances under the separation of powers and rejected the rule of law. It marks the removal of the mask of democracy, already a fiction, and its replacement with the ugly, naked visage of corporate totalitarianism. State power is to be, from now on, unchecked, unfettered and unregulated. And those who do not accept unlimited state power, always the road to tyranny, will be ruthlessly persecuted. On Wednesday we became vassals. As I watched the burly guards hustle Manning out of a military courtroom at Fort Meade after the two-minute sentencing, as I listened to half a dozen of his supporters shout to him, “We’ll keep fighting for you, Bradley! You’re our hero!” I realized that our nation has become a vast penal colony.
If we actually had a functioning judicial system and an independent press, Manning would have been a witness for the prosecution against the war criminals he helped expose. He would not have been headed, bound and shackled, to the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. His testimony would have ensured that those who waged illegal war, tortured, lied to the public, monitored our electronic communications and ordered the gunning down of unarmed civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen were sent to Fort Leavenworth’s cells. If we had a functioning judiciary the hundreds of rapes and murders Manning made public would be investigated. The officials and generals who lied to us when they said they did not keep a record of civilian dead would be held to account for the 109,032 “violent deaths” in Iraq, including those of 66,081 civilians. The pilots in the “Collateral Murder” video, which showed the helicopter attack on unarmed civilians in Baghdad that left nine dead, including two Reuters journalists, would be court-martialed.
The message that Manning’s sentence, the longest in U.S. history for the leaking of classified information to the press, sends to the rest of the world is disturbing. It says to the mothers and fathers who have lost children in drone strikes and air attacks, to the families grieving over innocent relatives killed by U.S. forces, that their suffering means nothing to us. It says we will continue to murder and to wage imperial wars that consume hundreds of thousands of civilian lives with no accountability. And it says that as a country we despise those within our midst who have the moral courage to make such crimes public.
There are strict rules now in our American penal colony. If we remain supine, if we permit ourselves to be passively stripped of all political power and voice, if we refuse to resist as we are incrementally reduced to poverty and the natural world is senselessly exploited and destroyed by corporate oligarchs, we will have the dubious freedom to wander among the ruins of the empire, to be diverted by tawdry spectacles and to consume the crass products marketed to us. But if we speak up, if we name what is being done to us and done in our name to others, we will become, like Manning, Julian Assange and Snowden, prey for the vast security and surveillance apparatus. And we will, if we effectively resist, go to prison or be forced to flee.
Manning from the start was subjected to a kangaroo trial. His lawyers were never permitted to mount a credible defense. They were left only to beg for mercy. Under the military code of conduct and international law, the soldier had a moral and legal obligation to report the war crimes he witnessed. But this argument was ruled off-limits. The troves of documents that Manning transmitted to WikiLeaks in February 2010—known as the Iraq and Afghanistan “War Logs”—which exposed numerous war crimes and instances of government dishonesty, were barred from being presented. And it was accepted in the courtroom, without any evidence, that Manning’s release of the documents had harmed U.S. security and endangered U.S. citizens. A realistic defense was not possible. It never is in any state show trial.....
Bradley Manning and the Gangster State
The swift and brutal verdict read out by Army Col. Judge Denise Lind in sentencing Pfc. Bradley Manning to 35 years in prison means we have become a nation run by gangsters. It signals the inversion of our moral and legal order, the death of an independent media, and the open and flagrant misuse of the law to prevent any oversight or investigation of official abuses of power, including war crimes. The passivity of most of the nation’s citizens—the most spied upon, monitored and controlled population in human history—to the judicial lynching of Manning means they will be next. There are no institutional mechanisms left to halt the shredding of our most fundamental civil liberties, including habeas corpus and due process, or to prevent pre-emptive war, the assassination of U.S. citizens by the government and the complete obliteration of privacy.
Wednesday’s sentencing marks one of the most important watersheds in U.S. history. It marks the day when the state formally declared that all who name and expose its crimes will become political prisoners or be forced, like Edward Snowden, and perhaps Glenn Greenwald, to spend the rest of their lives in exile. It marks the day when the country dropped all pretense of democracy, obliterated checks and balances under the separation of powers and rejected the rule of law. It marks the removal of the mask of democracy, already a fiction, and its replacement with the ugly, naked visage of corporate totalitarianism. State power is to be, from now on, unchecked, unfettered and unregulated. And those who do not accept unlimited state power, always the road to tyranny, will be ruthlessly persecuted. On Wednesday we became vassals. As I watched the burly guards hustle Manning out of a military courtroom at Fort Meade after the two-minute sentencing, as I listened to half a dozen of his supporters shout to him, “We’ll keep fighting for you, Bradley! You’re our hero!” I realized that our nation has become a vast penal colony.
If we actually had a functioning judicial system and an independent press, Manning would have been a witness for the prosecution against the war criminals he helped expose. He would not have been headed, bound and shackled, to the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. His testimony would have ensured that those who waged illegal war, tortured, lied to the public, monitored our electronic communications and ordered the gunning down of unarmed civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen were sent to Fort Leavenworth’s cells. If we had a functioning judiciary the hundreds of rapes and murders Manning made public would be investigated. The officials and generals who lied to us when they said they did not keep a record of civilian dead would be held to account for the 109,032 “violent deaths” in Iraq, including those of 66,081 civilians. The pilots in the “Collateral Murder” video, which showed the helicopter attack on unarmed civilians in Baghdad that left nine dead, including two Reuters journalists, would be court-martialed.
The message that Manning’s sentence, the longest in U.S. history for the leaking of classified information to the press, sends to the rest of the world is disturbing. It says to the mothers and fathers who have lost children in drone strikes and air attacks, to the families grieving over innocent relatives killed by U.S. forces, that their suffering means nothing to us. It says we will continue to murder and to wage imperial wars that consume hundreds of thousands of civilian lives with no accountability. And it says that as a country we despise those within our midst who have the moral courage to make such crimes public.
There are strict rules now in our American penal colony. If we remain supine, if we permit ourselves to be passively stripped of all political power and voice, if we refuse to resist as we are incrementally reduced to poverty and the natural world is senselessly exploited and destroyed by corporate oligarchs, we will have the dubious freedom to wander among the ruins of the empire, to be diverted by tawdry spectacles and to consume the crass products marketed to us. But if we speak up, if we name what is being done to us and done in our name to others, we will become, like Manning, Julian Assange and Snowden, prey for the vast security and surveillance apparatus. And we will, if we effectively resist, go to prison or be forced to flee.
Manning from the start was subjected to a kangaroo trial. His lawyers were never permitted to mount a credible defense. They were left only to beg for mercy. Under the military code of conduct and international law, the soldier had a moral and legal obligation to report the war crimes he witnessed. But this argument was ruled off-limits. The troves of documents that Manning transmitted to WikiLeaks in February 2010—known as the Iraq and Afghanistan “War Logs”—which exposed numerous war crimes and instances of government dishonesty, were barred from being presented. And it was accepted in the courtroom, without any evidence, that Manning’s release of the documents had harmed U.S. security and endangered U.S. citizens. A realistic defense was not possible. It never is in any state show trial.....
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
SC118-12
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/nowhere-to-run-nowhere-to-hide/
Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide
The Federal Reserve answers only to God, but Ben Bernanke’s must not have known that his boss was such a prankster. All of a sudden here is the interest rate of 10-year Treasury paper rising like an angry carbuncle on Ben’s pale tuchus just when he thought he could sit back and watch the mud wrestling contest between Larry Summers and Janet Yellen.
Poor Ben, sedulous student of the Great Depression, who didn’t notice that the country had changed from a nation of farmers and factory workers to a nation of pole dancers and waiters, now awaits his sublime moment of Hooverization. Like poor President Hoover, he gets to hang around the pilot house half a year after he runs the garbage barge of US finance aground on the shoals of wishful thinking and accounting fraud.
Everyone who has to pay attention to the order of things in the universe — meaning those not stewed on crank or drank, or waiting on line for a SNAP card, or leafing through the tattoo catalog, or waiting for a Kim Kardashian gangbang guest shot on Duck Dynasty, or lost in the alt reality of their cell phone — is suddenly very nervous about the order of things in this little corner of the universe. Sag Harbor is starting to live up to its name and down along the Hamptons the tide has gone out to feed a Tsunami of margin calls that soon will give the phrase “under water” a whole new life in the twisted mythology of capital. The immortal Bill Gross even sent out an SOS on Twitter at the end of the week. No wonder folks have got the heebie-jeebies.
The fear is that the central banks have finally lost control of a situation that they have only pretended to control since 2007, when the grotesque racket of mortgage re-bundling caused a psychotic break in the banking system. The prescribed therapy for that was half a decade of ZIRP and maxing out the national credit card. The ugly truth now emerging through this fog of psychosis is that the bond market probably can’t be saved, and without it all other paper markets are toast, including the stock markets and very possibly the entire fiat currency system.
In the background, of course, is the energy melodrama. How can anybody with half a brain suppose that the late turbo-industrial economy could “recover” with oil priced at $107 a barrel? Anyway, all the “recovery” memes floating around the collective media zeitgeist are based on a handful of doctored and massaged GDP numbers universally known to be false. In short, the USA can’t run the current setup on oil over $100 a barrel and has been trying to compensate for that basic fact by lending itself money. So has virtually every other advanced economy, and now they are all in trouble so there is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide — and for us, nowhere to export our financial quandaries to.
Japan is the most interesting corpse in the pathology lab. It shot its wad twenty years ago and has been self-cannibalizing ever since. It has no oil or gas of its own, and now it has a runaway nuclear meltdown that is getting only slightly less attention than its financial meltdown. I used to think that Japan had no choice except to go medieval. Now I wonder if there will be anything there in ten years but a depopulated archipelago of steaming radioactive kelp. They can’t possibly buy more US treasury paper and must desperately need to dump their accumulated holdings, and when they do they will start a financial chain reaction that will flense the pretense of value from all the world’s sovereign debt paper. It may already be happening.
If you prepare for anything, prepare for a world without financial pretense. Credibility is caught in that riptide developing off the Hamptons. When the water goes out, all you will see is ugly things wriggling in the mud, and when the water comes rushing back in again, all you will see is a spectacle of drowning bankers. The only higher ground to go to will be your local community, if you have one, and even there it will be a struggle to make sense of what has happened to the world.
Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide
The Federal Reserve answers only to God, but Ben Bernanke’s must not have known that his boss was such a prankster. All of a sudden here is the interest rate of 10-year Treasury paper rising like an angry carbuncle on Ben’s pale tuchus just when he thought he could sit back and watch the mud wrestling contest between Larry Summers and Janet Yellen.
Poor Ben, sedulous student of the Great Depression, who didn’t notice that the country had changed from a nation of farmers and factory workers to a nation of pole dancers and waiters, now awaits his sublime moment of Hooverization. Like poor President Hoover, he gets to hang around the pilot house half a year after he runs the garbage barge of US finance aground on the shoals of wishful thinking and accounting fraud.
Everyone who has to pay attention to the order of things in the universe — meaning those not stewed on crank or drank, or waiting on line for a SNAP card, or leafing through the tattoo catalog, or waiting for a Kim Kardashian gangbang guest shot on Duck Dynasty, or lost in the alt reality of their cell phone — is suddenly very nervous about the order of things in this little corner of the universe. Sag Harbor is starting to live up to its name and down along the Hamptons the tide has gone out to feed a Tsunami of margin calls that soon will give the phrase “under water” a whole new life in the twisted mythology of capital. The immortal Bill Gross even sent out an SOS on Twitter at the end of the week. No wonder folks have got the heebie-jeebies.
The fear is that the central banks have finally lost control of a situation that they have only pretended to control since 2007, when the grotesque racket of mortgage re-bundling caused a psychotic break in the banking system. The prescribed therapy for that was half a decade of ZIRP and maxing out the national credit card. The ugly truth now emerging through this fog of psychosis is that the bond market probably can’t be saved, and without it all other paper markets are toast, including the stock markets and very possibly the entire fiat currency system.
In the background, of course, is the energy melodrama. How can anybody with half a brain suppose that the late turbo-industrial economy could “recover” with oil priced at $107 a barrel? Anyway, all the “recovery” memes floating around the collective media zeitgeist are based on a handful of doctored and massaged GDP numbers universally known to be false. In short, the USA can’t run the current setup on oil over $100 a barrel and has been trying to compensate for that basic fact by lending itself money. So has virtually every other advanced economy, and now they are all in trouble so there is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide — and for us, nowhere to export our financial quandaries to.
Japan is the most interesting corpse in the pathology lab. It shot its wad twenty years ago and has been self-cannibalizing ever since. It has no oil or gas of its own, and now it has a runaway nuclear meltdown that is getting only slightly less attention than its financial meltdown. I used to think that Japan had no choice except to go medieval. Now I wonder if there will be anything there in ten years but a depopulated archipelago of steaming radioactive kelp. They can’t possibly buy more US treasury paper and must desperately need to dump their accumulated holdings, and when they do they will start a financial chain reaction that will flense the pretense of value from all the world’s sovereign debt paper. It may already be happening.
If you prepare for anything, prepare for a world without financial pretense. Credibility is caught in that riptide developing off the Hamptons. When the water goes out, all you will see is ugly things wriggling in the mud, and when the water comes rushing back in again, all you will see is a spectacle of drowning bankers. The only higher ground to go to will be your local community, if you have one, and even there it will be a struggle to make sense of what has happened to the world.
Thursday, August 15, 2013
SC118-11
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/murdering_the_wretched_of_the_earth_20130814/
Murdering the Wretched of the Earth
Radical Islam is the last refuge of the Muslim poor. The mandated five prayers a day give the only real structure to the lives of impoverished believers. The careful rituals of washing before prayers in the mosque, the strict moral code, along with the understanding that life has an ultimate purpose and meaning, keep hundreds of millions of destitute Muslims from despair. The fundamentalist ideology that rises from oppression is rigid and unforgiving. It radically splits the world into black and white, good and evil, apostates and believers. It is bigoted and cruel to women, Jews, Christians and secularists, along with gays and lesbians. But at the same time it offers to those on the very bottom of society a final refuge and hope. The massacres of hundreds of believers in the streets of Cairo signal not only an assault against a religious ideology, not only a return to the brutal police state of Hosni Mubarak, but the start of a holy war that will turn Egypt and other poor regions of the globe into a caldron of blood and suffering.
The only way to break the hold of radical Islam is to give its followers a stake in the wider economy, the possibility of a life where the future is not dominated by grinding poverty, repression and hopelessness. If you live in the sprawling slums of Cairo or the refugee camps in Gaza or the concrete hovels in New Delhi, every avenue of escape is closed. You cannot get an education. You cannot get a job. You do not have the resources to marry. You cannot challenge the domination of the economy by the oligarchs and the generals. The only way left for you to affirm yourself is to become a martyr, or shahid. Then you will get what you cannot get in life—a brief moment of fame and glory. And while what will take place in Egypt will be defined as a religious war, and the acts of violence by the insurgents who will rise from the bloodied squares of Cairo will be defined as terrorism, the engine for this chaos is not religion but the collapsing economy of a world where the wretched of the earth are to be subjugated and starved or shot. The lines of battle are being drawn in Egypt and across the globe. Adli Mansour, the titular president appointed by the military dictator of Egypt, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, has imposed a military-led government, a curfew and a state of emergency. They will not be lifted soon.
The lifeblood of radical movements is martyrdom. The Egyptian military has provided an ample supply. The faces and the names of the sanctified dead will be used by enraged clerics to call for holy vengeance. And as violence grows and the lists of martyrs expand, a war will be ignited that will tear Egypt apart. Police, Coptic Christians, secularists, Westerners, businesses, banks, the tourism industry and the military will become targets. Those radical Islamists who were persuaded by the Muslim Brotherhood that electoral politics could work and brought into the system will go back underground, and many of the rank and file of the Muslim Brotherhood will join them. Crude bombs will be set off. Random attacks and assassinations by gunmen will puncture daily life in Egypt as they did in the 1990s when I was in Cairo for The New York Times, although this time the attacks will be wider and more fierce, far harder to control or ultimately crush.
What is happening in Egypt is a precursor to a wider global war between the world’s elites and the world’s poor, a war caused by diminishing resources, chronic unemployment and underemployment, overpopulation, declining crop yields caused by climate change, and rising food prices. Thirty-three percent of Egypt’s 80 million people are 14 or younger, and millions live under or just above the poverty line, which the World Bank sets at a daily income of $2 in that nation. The poor in Egypt spend more than half their income on food—often food that has little nutritional value. An estimated 13.7 million Egyptians, or 17 percent of the population, suffered from food insecurity in 2011, compared with 14 percent in 2009, according to a report by the U.N. World Food Program and the Egyptian Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS). Malnutrition is endemic among poor children, with 31 percent under 5 years old stunted in growth. Illiteracy runs at more than 70 percent.
In “Les Misérables” Victor Hugo described war with the poor as one between the “egoists” and the “outcasts.” The egoists, Hugo wrote, had “the bemusement of prosperity, which blunts the sense, the fear of suffering which is some cases goes so far as to hate all sufferers, and unshakable complacency, the ego so inflated that is stifles the soul.” The outcasts, who were ignored until their persecution and deprivation morphed into violence, had “greed and envy, resentment at the happiness of others, the turmoil of the human element in search of personal fulfillment, hearts filled with fog, misery, needs, and fatalism, and simple, impure ignorance.”
The belief systems the oppressed embrace can be intolerant, but these belief systems are a response to the injustice, state violence and cruelty inflicted on them by the global elites. Our enemy is not radical Islam. It is global capitalism. It is a world where the wretched of the earth are forced to bow before the dictates of the marketplace, where children go hungry as global corporate elites siphon away the world’s wealth and natural resources and where our troops and U.S.-backed militaries carry out massacres on city streets. Egypt offers a window into the coming dystopia. The wars of survival will mark the final stage of human habitation of the planet. And if you want to know what they will look like, visit any city morgue in Cairo.
Murdering the Wretched of the Earth
Radical Islam is the last refuge of the Muslim poor. The mandated five prayers a day give the only real structure to the lives of impoverished believers. The careful rituals of washing before prayers in the mosque, the strict moral code, along with the understanding that life has an ultimate purpose and meaning, keep hundreds of millions of destitute Muslims from despair. The fundamentalist ideology that rises from oppression is rigid and unforgiving. It radically splits the world into black and white, good and evil, apostates and believers. It is bigoted and cruel to women, Jews, Christians and secularists, along with gays and lesbians. But at the same time it offers to those on the very bottom of society a final refuge and hope. The massacres of hundreds of believers in the streets of Cairo signal not only an assault against a religious ideology, not only a return to the brutal police state of Hosni Mubarak, but the start of a holy war that will turn Egypt and other poor regions of the globe into a caldron of blood and suffering.
The only way to break the hold of radical Islam is to give its followers a stake in the wider economy, the possibility of a life where the future is not dominated by grinding poverty, repression and hopelessness. If you live in the sprawling slums of Cairo or the refugee camps in Gaza or the concrete hovels in New Delhi, every avenue of escape is closed. You cannot get an education. You cannot get a job. You do not have the resources to marry. You cannot challenge the domination of the economy by the oligarchs and the generals. The only way left for you to affirm yourself is to become a martyr, or shahid. Then you will get what you cannot get in life—a brief moment of fame and glory. And while what will take place in Egypt will be defined as a religious war, and the acts of violence by the insurgents who will rise from the bloodied squares of Cairo will be defined as terrorism, the engine for this chaos is not religion but the collapsing economy of a world where the wretched of the earth are to be subjugated and starved or shot. The lines of battle are being drawn in Egypt and across the globe. Adli Mansour, the titular president appointed by the military dictator of Egypt, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, has imposed a military-led government, a curfew and a state of emergency. They will not be lifted soon.
The lifeblood of radical movements is martyrdom. The Egyptian military has provided an ample supply. The faces and the names of the sanctified dead will be used by enraged clerics to call for holy vengeance. And as violence grows and the lists of martyrs expand, a war will be ignited that will tear Egypt apart. Police, Coptic Christians, secularists, Westerners, businesses, banks, the tourism industry and the military will become targets. Those radical Islamists who were persuaded by the Muslim Brotherhood that electoral politics could work and brought into the system will go back underground, and many of the rank and file of the Muslim Brotherhood will join them. Crude bombs will be set off. Random attacks and assassinations by gunmen will puncture daily life in Egypt as they did in the 1990s when I was in Cairo for The New York Times, although this time the attacks will be wider and more fierce, far harder to control or ultimately crush.
What is happening in Egypt is a precursor to a wider global war between the world’s elites and the world’s poor, a war caused by diminishing resources, chronic unemployment and underemployment, overpopulation, declining crop yields caused by climate change, and rising food prices. Thirty-three percent of Egypt’s 80 million people are 14 or younger, and millions live under or just above the poverty line, which the World Bank sets at a daily income of $2 in that nation. The poor in Egypt spend more than half their income on food—often food that has little nutritional value. An estimated 13.7 million Egyptians, or 17 percent of the population, suffered from food insecurity in 2011, compared with 14 percent in 2009, according to a report by the U.N. World Food Program and the Egyptian Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS). Malnutrition is endemic among poor children, with 31 percent under 5 years old stunted in growth. Illiteracy runs at more than 70 percent.
In “Les Misérables” Victor Hugo described war with the poor as one between the “egoists” and the “outcasts.” The egoists, Hugo wrote, had “the bemusement of prosperity, which blunts the sense, the fear of suffering which is some cases goes so far as to hate all sufferers, and unshakable complacency, the ego so inflated that is stifles the soul.” The outcasts, who were ignored until their persecution and deprivation morphed into violence, had “greed and envy, resentment at the happiness of others, the turmoil of the human element in search of personal fulfillment, hearts filled with fog, misery, needs, and fatalism, and simple, impure ignorance.”
The belief systems the oppressed embrace can be intolerant, but these belief systems are a response to the injustice, state violence and cruelty inflicted on them by the global elites. Our enemy is not radical Islam. It is global capitalism. It is a world where the wretched of the earth are forced to bow before the dictates of the marketplace, where children go hungry as global corporate elites siphon away the world’s wealth and natural resources and where our troops and U.S.-backed militaries carry out massacres on city streets. Egypt offers a window into the coming dystopia. The wars of survival will mark the final stage of human habitation of the planet. And if you want to know what they will look like, visit any city morgue in Cairo.
SC118-10
http://kulturcritic.wordpress.com/posts/obamas-new-cold-war/
Obama’s New Cold War
Well folks, it’s official! The new cold war between Russia and the USA has commenced. It was declared by Obama himself in several news conferences this week.
Obama holds pre-vacation news conference, laments ‘backward’ Russian thinking
Obama Compares Russia’s President Putin to a Bored Kid
Obama: U.S. Pausing To Reassess Relations With Russia
Is this guy for real? Is this the “pause” that refreshes or a stagnation in a long drawn-out slushy thaw that refreezes? Is it not obvious who is the pouty fat kid picking his nose in the back of the classroom? The warrior mentality that has infected much of our country and our corporate policy is now solidly embedded in the political infrastructure of this hegemony. If anyone dares to have an alternative opinion or point of view regarding our behavior, or demonstrates policies we find distasteful (i.e., not in our elites best interests), well then we are ready to cast them as the enemy and proceed directly with crucifixion. A very Roman behavior, don’t you think?
Again, I say, the self-righteous extremism of such an attitude is overwhelming. And when the present hegemon was asked during a press conference if Mr. Snowden was a “patriot” he answered:
‘I don’t think Mr. Snowden was a patriot,’ Obama said…’The fact is, is that Mr. Snowden’s been charged with three felonies…’
Really, you don’t say. And just who was it that saw he was charged with said felonies Mr. Obomber? You and your Justice Department; is that not correct? And why did you take away his passport if you believed he had the right to prove his rectitude, not his innocence because he committed no crime but simply disclosed the most illegal and heinous of actions committed by our government and its corporate oligarchs? Did you not already label him guilty, as charged? Do you not see how your entire administration along with the controlling media propaganda machine have already found him guilty? Have you become so blind to your own selfish ambitions that you fail to see a real community activist in the flesh before your eyes? Are you so profoundly in bed with your corporate benefactors that any attempt to unveil the charade you all are playing-for- keeps is punishable by death? Or by life in political prison?… prisons themselves privatized and run by your own corporate goon squads, the same goons who are up-armored in your police forces and rent-a-warrior camos that soak the American taxpayer, while protecting big corporate interests abroad, and your beloved elite lifestyle at home, while the rest of the citizenry – those unwashed masses – sweat and toil so that you, your monied sponsors (overlords), and your cronies, can keep this party going until the entire globe is fucked?
What nerve you have, sir, to belittle Vladimir Putin for making a decision of conscience just because it is at odds with your own imperial plans, and embarrasses you, just as Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and others have embarrassed you over the past six years. Is there no introspection of which you are capable? Are you nothing but surfaces, without any interior? It is a rhetorical question, sir. Of course you are without substance… just a smiley face, a pitchman, there to do the bidding of those robbing the world of its beauty and people of their lives and livelihood. You have finally done all Americans a huge favor… you have disclosed without a shred of embarrassment the vacuousness of the American presidency, the sham of our political system, and the concept of democracy in general… and you have accomplished all of this in record time, just six years. The constitutional lawyer has shredded the beloved Constitution; or to put a finer point on it sir, you have shown us – shown the world – that the US Constitution is nothing, of no more significance than any other corporate policy statement; that it was so constructed (as are all laws and policies) simply to protect the property of those who wrote them; that it is capable (as are all laws) of being reinterpreted by the whim and fancy of any corporate lawyer or constitutional law professor to fit whatever the exigencies of the moment demand; to make it amenable to the needs and desires of those in power, without regard for the citizenry, other peoples or the planet.
Whether its fracking the crap out of the earth just to prop up the semblance of empire, rerouting and downing another sovereign’s plane to satisfy your curiosity, calling your counterpart in Russia names, stirring up international rebellions to get better control of global resources and markets for your corporate bosses, assassinating American citizens abroad or terrorizing them at home with your constant drone-ing, surveillance, and militarized police forces, killing innocents in Pakistan to satisfy your godly aspirations, allowing your thieving bankers to go unmolested while continuing to run your casino economy operation, you have shown us how to do it while remaining aloof and as smug as an ass, even denying that Mr. Snowden’s whistle-blowing was in any way a causal factor in your decision to revamp the NSA surveillance programs. And you still call him a traitor, while dissing Putin for protecting him. Enjoy your new cold war, sir, and enjoy your political debauchery while still in office; I am sure the next clown will do no better.
Obama’s New Cold War
Well folks, it’s official! The new cold war between Russia and the USA has commenced. It was declared by Obama himself in several news conferences this week.
Obama holds pre-vacation news conference, laments ‘backward’ Russian thinking
Obama Compares Russia’s President Putin to a Bored Kid
Obama: U.S. Pausing To Reassess Relations With Russia
Is this guy for real? Is this the “pause” that refreshes or a stagnation in a long drawn-out slushy thaw that refreezes? Is it not obvious who is the pouty fat kid picking his nose in the back of the classroom? The warrior mentality that has infected much of our country and our corporate policy is now solidly embedded in the political infrastructure of this hegemony. If anyone dares to have an alternative opinion or point of view regarding our behavior, or demonstrates policies we find distasteful (i.e., not in our elites best interests), well then we are ready to cast them as the enemy and proceed directly with crucifixion. A very Roman behavior, don’t you think?
Again, I say, the self-righteous extremism of such an attitude is overwhelming. And when the present hegemon was asked during a press conference if Mr. Snowden was a “patriot” he answered:
‘I don’t think Mr. Snowden was a patriot,’ Obama said…’The fact is, is that Mr. Snowden’s been charged with three felonies…’
Really, you don’t say. And just who was it that saw he was charged with said felonies Mr. Obomber? You and your Justice Department; is that not correct? And why did you take away his passport if you believed he had the right to prove his rectitude, not his innocence because he committed no crime but simply disclosed the most illegal and heinous of actions committed by our government and its corporate oligarchs? Did you not already label him guilty, as charged? Do you not see how your entire administration along with the controlling media propaganda machine have already found him guilty? Have you become so blind to your own selfish ambitions that you fail to see a real community activist in the flesh before your eyes? Are you so profoundly in bed with your corporate benefactors that any attempt to unveil the charade you all are playing-for- keeps is punishable by death? Or by life in political prison?… prisons themselves privatized and run by your own corporate goon squads, the same goons who are up-armored in your police forces and rent-a-warrior camos that soak the American taxpayer, while protecting big corporate interests abroad, and your beloved elite lifestyle at home, while the rest of the citizenry – those unwashed masses – sweat and toil so that you, your monied sponsors (overlords), and your cronies, can keep this party going until the entire globe is fucked?
What nerve you have, sir, to belittle Vladimir Putin for making a decision of conscience just because it is at odds with your own imperial plans, and embarrasses you, just as Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and others have embarrassed you over the past six years. Is there no introspection of which you are capable? Are you nothing but surfaces, without any interior? It is a rhetorical question, sir. Of course you are without substance… just a smiley face, a pitchman, there to do the bidding of those robbing the world of its beauty and people of their lives and livelihood. You have finally done all Americans a huge favor… you have disclosed without a shred of embarrassment the vacuousness of the American presidency, the sham of our political system, and the concept of democracy in general… and you have accomplished all of this in record time, just six years. The constitutional lawyer has shredded the beloved Constitution; or to put a finer point on it sir, you have shown us – shown the world – that the US Constitution is nothing, of no more significance than any other corporate policy statement; that it was so constructed (as are all laws and policies) simply to protect the property of those who wrote them; that it is capable (as are all laws) of being reinterpreted by the whim and fancy of any corporate lawyer or constitutional law professor to fit whatever the exigencies of the moment demand; to make it amenable to the needs and desires of those in power, without regard for the citizenry, other peoples or the planet.
Whether its fracking the crap out of the earth just to prop up the semblance of empire, rerouting and downing another sovereign’s plane to satisfy your curiosity, calling your counterpart in Russia names, stirring up international rebellions to get better control of global resources and markets for your corporate bosses, assassinating American citizens abroad or terrorizing them at home with your constant drone-ing, surveillance, and militarized police forces, killing innocents in Pakistan to satisfy your godly aspirations, allowing your thieving bankers to go unmolested while continuing to run your casino economy operation, you have shown us how to do it while remaining aloof and as smug as an ass, even denying that Mr. Snowden’s whistle-blowing was in any way a causal factor in your decision to revamp the NSA surveillance programs. And you still call him a traitor, while dissing Putin for protecting him. Enjoy your new cold war, sir, and enjoy your political debauchery while still in office; I am sure the next clown will do no better.
Monday, August 5, 2013
SC118-9
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/locking_out_the_voices_of_dissent_20130714//
Locking Out the Voices of Dissent
The security and surveillance state, after crushing the Occupy movement and eradicating its encampments, has mounted a relentless and largely clandestine campaign to deny public space to any group or movement that might spawn another popular uprising. The legal system has been grotesquely deformed in most cities to, in essence, shut public space to protesters, eradicating our right to free speech and peaceful assembly. The goal of the corporate state is to criminalize democratic, popular dissent before there is another popular eruption. The vast state surveillance system, detailed in Edward Snowden’s revelations to the British newspaper The Guardian, at the same time ensures that no action or protest can occur without the advanced knowledge of our internal security apparatus. This foreknowledge has allowed the internal security systems to proactively block activists from public spaces as well as carry out pre-emptive harassment, interrogation, intimidation, detention and arrests before protests can begin. There is a word for this type of political system—tyranny.
If the state is ultimately successful in preventing us from mobilizing in public spaces, then dissent will mutate from nonviolent mass protests to clandestine and perhaps violent acts of resistance. Some demonstrators have already been branded “domestic terrorists” under the law. The rear-guard effort by a handful of activists to protect our rights to be heard and peaceably assemble is perhaps the most crucial, though unseen, struggle we currently are engaged in with the corporate state. It is a struggle to salvage what is left of our civil society and our right to nonviolent resistance against corporate tyranny. This is why the New York City trial last week of members of Veterans for Peace, along with other activists, took on an importance that belied the simple trespassing charges against them.
The activists were arrested Oct. 7, 2012, while they were placing flowers in 11 vases and reading the names of the dead inscribed on the wall in New York’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial Plaza after the official closing time, 10 p.m. The defiance of the plaza’s official closing time—which appears to be enforced against political activists only—was spawned by a May 1, 2012, protest by Occupy Wall Street activists. The Occupy activists had attempted to hold a meeting in the plaza and been driven out by police. A number of Veterans for Peace activists, most of them veterans of the Vietnam War, formed a line in front of the advancing police that May night and refused to move. They were arrested.
Many of these veterans came back to the plaza on a rainy, windy night in October to protest on the 11th anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan and again assert their right to carry out nonviolent protests in public spaces. They included Jay Wenk, an 86-year-old combat veteran of World War II who served with Gen. George Patton’s Third Army in Europe. When he was arrested Wenk was beating a gong in the downpour as the names of the dead were read. During the October protest 25 people were seized by police for refusing to leave the park after 10 p.m. Twelve went to trail last week. Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Robert Mandelbaum on Friday found the dozen activists guilty. The judge, however, quickly threw out his own verdict, calling the case a “unique circumstance.” “Justice,” he said, “cries out for a dismissal.” His dismissal shuts down the possibility of an appeal.
“The legislative system, the judicial system, the whole national security state that’s invading all of our privacy are taking away our right to dissent,” Dr. Margaret Flowers, one of the defendants, told me on a lunch break during the trial. “But everything that’s happening is happening legally. It’s a slippery slope. People will look at this case and they’re going to say, ‘So what? They were in a park. There was a rule. It was closing. The police arrested them. That makes sense to me!’ And they don’t put it in the bigger context. That’s how all of this is happening. It’s all being justified. The whole system is being flipped on its head. The judicial and law enforcement system should be protecting our rights. We have the right to dissent. It’s in the Bill of Rights. The question is, can we halt that slide for a second, maybe even reverse it a little bit?”
The executive, legislative and judicial branches of government have been taken over by corporations and used to protect and promote the criminal activity of Wall Street, the destruction of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel industry, the looting of the U.S. Treasury by the banking industry and the corporate seizure of all major centers of power. The primacy of corporate profit trumps our right to a living wage, affordable and adequate health care, the regulation of industry and environmental controls, protection from corporate fraud and abuse, the right to a good and affordable public education, the ability to form labor unions, and having a government that serves the basic needs of ordinary citizens. Our voices, our rights and our aspirations are no longer of concern to the state. And if we try to assert them, the state now has mechanisms in place to shut us down.
Tarak Kauff, a 71-year-old veteran of the Army’s 111th Airborne and former professional boxer, was one of the organizers of the Oct. 7 protest. He has been on a hunger strike for more than a month to express solidarity with the hunger strikers at Guantanamo Bay and in the Pelican Bay prison in California. He was gaunt. His skin was ashen and his cheeks sunken. He consumes 300 liquid calories a day and has lost 24 pounds. He was arrested in May and again in October.
“I saw clearly that the purpose of the arrest was not merely enforcing the 10 p.m. curfew,” he said of the May arrests, “but the purpose was very specific in restricting the right of assembly. We decided that October 7th would be a perfect day to do it. It was 11 years of war in Afghanistan. So when we came to the Vietnam Veterans Plaza that night we had four purposes. One was to call for an end to the war, the ongoing war in Afghanistan. The second was to call for an end to all U.S. wars of empire. The third was to remember and lament those who had fallen and been wounded in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, including the civilians, including the 5 million civilians in Vietnam. The fourth was to affirm our right to assemble. If we lose the right to address these issues and to organize in public places, we have absolutely nothing.”
“I’m fasting because it’s a sacrifice,” he said when I asked about his hunger strike. “I want to encourage other people in our movement of the necessity of sacrifice. If we want to establish anything, if we want to re-establish or ever establish any kind of democratic system, it’s not going to happen without sacrifice, some kind of sacrifice. And we have a choir. I want to see that choir inspired to start sacrificing more, to take risks. We have to be willing to put our bodies on the line in some way, shape, or form, nonviolently.”
According to several of the activists, some of the police officers said that they too were military veterans and disliked making the arrests but had been told by their superiors to take the demonstrators into custody to prevent another Occupy encampment.
“ ‘We can’t let you stay,’ ” Kauff said he was told by a police captain. “ ‘It sets a bad example for the Occupy movement.’ ”
“After the process of being arrested began, a police lieutenant told me the Occupy Wall Street people really screwed this up for you guys,” Sam Adams, who served in the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam, said in his courtroom testimony. “You can thank them for this.”
The trial was a tiny window into how rattled the state was by Occupy, unfortunately now in disarray. The security organs know that as conditions worsen for the majority of Americans, as austerity cuts and chronic unemployment and underemployment drive tens of millions of families into desperation, as climate change continues to produce extreme and dangerous weather, there remains the threat of another popular backlash. The problem lies not, of course, with the Occupy movement, but with the reconfiguration of the government into a handmaiden of corporations that seek to squeeze profits out of the dying carcass of empire.
The corporate state’s quest to control all power includes using the military to carry out domestic policing, which is why I sued the president over Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act. It is imperative to defend, as the activists did in New York City, what freedoms and rights we have left. If we remain passive, if we permit the state to continue to use the law to take away our right of political expression, we will have no legal protection of resistance when we will need it most.
Locking Out the Voices of Dissent
The security and surveillance state, after crushing the Occupy movement and eradicating its encampments, has mounted a relentless and largely clandestine campaign to deny public space to any group or movement that might spawn another popular uprising. The legal system has been grotesquely deformed in most cities to, in essence, shut public space to protesters, eradicating our right to free speech and peaceful assembly. The goal of the corporate state is to criminalize democratic, popular dissent before there is another popular eruption. The vast state surveillance system, detailed in Edward Snowden’s revelations to the British newspaper The Guardian, at the same time ensures that no action or protest can occur without the advanced knowledge of our internal security apparatus. This foreknowledge has allowed the internal security systems to proactively block activists from public spaces as well as carry out pre-emptive harassment, interrogation, intimidation, detention and arrests before protests can begin. There is a word for this type of political system—tyranny.
If the state is ultimately successful in preventing us from mobilizing in public spaces, then dissent will mutate from nonviolent mass protests to clandestine and perhaps violent acts of resistance. Some demonstrators have already been branded “domestic terrorists” under the law. The rear-guard effort by a handful of activists to protect our rights to be heard and peaceably assemble is perhaps the most crucial, though unseen, struggle we currently are engaged in with the corporate state. It is a struggle to salvage what is left of our civil society and our right to nonviolent resistance against corporate tyranny. This is why the New York City trial last week of members of Veterans for Peace, along with other activists, took on an importance that belied the simple trespassing charges against them.
The activists were arrested Oct. 7, 2012, while they were placing flowers in 11 vases and reading the names of the dead inscribed on the wall in New York’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial Plaza after the official closing time, 10 p.m. The defiance of the plaza’s official closing time—which appears to be enforced against political activists only—was spawned by a May 1, 2012, protest by Occupy Wall Street activists. The Occupy activists had attempted to hold a meeting in the plaza and been driven out by police. A number of Veterans for Peace activists, most of them veterans of the Vietnam War, formed a line in front of the advancing police that May night and refused to move. They were arrested.
Many of these veterans came back to the plaza on a rainy, windy night in October to protest on the 11th anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan and again assert their right to carry out nonviolent protests in public spaces. They included Jay Wenk, an 86-year-old combat veteran of World War II who served with Gen. George Patton’s Third Army in Europe. When he was arrested Wenk was beating a gong in the downpour as the names of the dead were read. During the October protest 25 people were seized by police for refusing to leave the park after 10 p.m. Twelve went to trail last week. Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Robert Mandelbaum on Friday found the dozen activists guilty. The judge, however, quickly threw out his own verdict, calling the case a “unique circumstance.” “Justice,” he said, “cries out for a dismissal.” His dismissal shuts down the possibility of an appeal.
“The legislative system, the judicial system, the whole national security state that’s invading all of our privacy are taking away our right to dissent,” Dr. Margaret Flowers, one of the defendants, told me on a lunch break during the trial. “But everything that’s happening is happening legally. It’s a slippery slope. People will look at this case and they’re going to say, ‘So what? They were in a park. There was a rule. It was closing. The police arrested them. That makes sense to me!’ And they don’t put it in the bigger context. That’s how all of this is happening. It’s all being justified. The whole system is being flipped on its head. The judicial and law enforcement system should be protecting our rights. We have the right to dissent. It’s in the Bill of Rights. The question is, can we halt that slide for a second, maybe even reverse it a little bit?”
The executive, legislative and judicial branches of government have been taken over by corporations and used to protect and promote the criminal activity of Wall Street, the destruction of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel industry, the looting of the U.S. Treasury by the banking industry and the corporate seizure of all major centers of power. The primacy of corporate profit trumps our right to a living wage, affordable and adequate health care, the regulation of industry and environmental controls, protection from corporate fraud and abuse, the right to a good and affordable public education, the ability to form labor unions, and having a government that serves the basic needs of ordinary citizens. Our voices, our rights and our aspirations are no longer of concern to the state. And if we try to assert them, the state now has mechanisms in place to shut us down.
Tarak Kauff, a 71-year-old veteran of the Army’s 111th Airborne and former professional boxer, was one of the organizers of the Oct. 7 protest. He has been on a hunger strike for more than a month to express solidarity with the hunger strikers at Guantanamo Bay and in the Pelican Bay prison in California. He was gaunt. His skin was ashen and his cheeks sunken. He consumes 300 liquid calories a day and has lost 24 pounds. He was arrested in May and again in October.
“I saw clearly that the purpose of the arrest was not merely enforcing the 10 p.m. curfew,” he said of the May arrests, “but the purpose was very specific in restricting the right of assembly. We decided that October 7th would be a perfect day to do it. It was 11 years of war in Afghanistan. So when we came to the Vietnam Veterans Plaza that night we had four purposes. One was to call for an end to the war, the ongoing war in Afghanistan. The second was to call for an end to all U.S. wars of empire. The third was to remember and lament those who had fallen and been wounded in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, including the civilians, including the 5 million civilians in Vietnam. The fourth was to affirm our right to assemble. If we lose the right to address these issues and to organize in public places, we have absolutely nothing.”
“I’m fasting because it’s a sacrifice,” he said when I asked about his hunger strike. “I want to encourage other people in our movement of the necessity of sacrifice. If we want to establish anything, if we want to re-establish or ever establish any kind of democratic system, it’s not going to happen without sacrifice, some kind of sacrifice. And we have a choir. I want to see that choir inspired to start sacrificing more, to take risks. We have to be willing to put our bodies on the line in some way, shape, or form, nonviolently.”
According to several of the activists, some of the police officers said that they too were military veterans and disliked making the arrests but had been told by their superiors to take the demonstrators into custody to prevent another Occupy encampment.
“ ‘We can’t let you stay,’ ” Kauff said he was told by a police captain. “ ‘It sets a bad example for the Occupy movement.’ ”
“After the process of being arrested began, a police lieutenant told me the Occupy Wall Street people really screwed this up for you guys,” Sam Adams, who served in the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam, said in his courtroom testimony. “You can thank them for this.”
The trial was a tiny window into how rattled the state was by Occupy, unfortunately now in disarray. The security organs know that as conditions worsen for the majority of Americans, as austerity cuts and chronic unemployment and underemployment drive tens of millions of families into desperation, as climate change continues to produce extreme and dangerous weather, there remains the threat of another popular backlash. The problem lies not, of course, with the Occupy movement, but with the reconfiguration of the government into a handmaiden of corporations that seek to squeeze profits out of the dying carcass of empire.
The corporate state’s quest to control all power includes using the military to carry out domestic policing, which is why I sued the president over Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act. It is imperative to defend, as the activists did in New York City, what freedoms and rights we have left. If we remain passive, if we permit the state to continue to use the law to take away our right of political expression, we will have no legal protection of resistance when we will need it most.
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