The Myth
" America is a shining city upon a hill whose beacon light guides freedom-loving people everywhere "
The Truth
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/08/16/uncle-sam-was-born-lethal/
Uncle Sam was Born Lethal
" For revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival "
– Frederick Douglass, July 4, 1852
One of the occupational and intellectual hazards of being a historian is that current events often seem far less new to oneself than they do to others. Recently a leftish liberal friend told me that the United States under the Donald Trump had “become a lethal society.” My friend cited the neofascist Trump’s: horrible family separations and concentration camps on the border; openly white-nationalist assaults on four progressive nonwhite and female Congresswomen; real and threatened roundups of undocumented immigrants; fascist-style and hate-filled “Make America Great Again” rallies; encouragement of white supremacist terrorism; alliance with right-wing evangelical Christian fascists.
Another friend received news of the recent mass-shooting of mostly Latinx Wal-Mart shoppers by racist and nativist white male Trump fan in El Paso, Texas by denouncing Trump’s “fascism” and linking to an essay he’d published about the white-nationalist president’s racist and authoritarian behavior.
I agree with my friends about the lethality of the contemporary United States. I largely share their description of Trump and much of his base as fascist or at least fascistic. “Durable fascist tendencies,” the prolific left political scientist Carl Boggs warns in his important book Fascism Old New: American Politics at the Crossroads, “run deep throughout present-day American society…In the absence of powerful counterforces and a thriving democracy, …those tendencies could morph over into something more expansive and menacing – and Donald Trump could serve, wittingly or unwittingly, as a great historical accelerator.”
It’s nothing to sneeze at. The institutional forms and technologies of militarized surveillance and policing and thought control that are available to fascism-prone elites in the United States are daunting indeed. The United States enjoys historically unprecedented global power on a scale the fascist Third Reich’s leaders dreamed of achieving but never remotely approached.
Still, I sometimes worry about reaching beyond American history to label horrors of its own making. Longstanding foundational aristo-republican U.S. white-settler nationalism and its state-military-capitalist, imperialist, and corporatist evolution has long been disastrous and dystopian enough without “charismatic” dictators, Baretta-toting squadristis, single party states, the suspension of elections, the end of bourgeois law, jackbooted brown-shirts, death squads, state propaganda, political executions, shuttered media, and the rest of the full-on fascist nightmare.
Savagely and Mercilessly Exterminating “the Common Enemy of the Country”
How new is racist lethality and white nationalism to the U.S.-American experience, after all? The white European “settlers” of North America wiped out millions of the continent’s original inhabitants. They populated their southern colonies and states with Black slaves they mercilessly tortured, raped, maimed, and murdered in forced labor camps that provided the critical raw material for the rise of American capitalism long before Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler rose to power.
Trump’s favorite president prior to himself, Andrew Jackson, first rose to prominence in the early 19th century as the head of the Tennessee militia who exterminated the Creek Nation by, in the words of the Yale historian Greg Grandin, “burning houses, killing warriors, mutilating their bodies (he ordered his men to cut off the noses of the Indian corpses, so as to more easily tally the dead), and enslaving their women and children…[thereby] previewing the misery he would later, as president, nationalize” (with the 1830 Indian Removal Act). Jackson later ordered the “Trail of Tears,” a giant and sadistic death march that finalized the ethnic cleansing of the Cherokee Nation from the nation’s Southeastern seaboard.
Consider the conclusion of the one-sided “Black Hawk War” – just one of many examples of a ferocious white history of North American extermination. The Sauk and Fox Indians lost 600 people, including hundreds of woman and children. Just 70 soldiers and settlers were killed. The conflict culminated in the so-called Battle of Bad Axe, on the eastern shore of the Mississippi River, near the present-day community of Victory in southwest Wisconsin. Better described as a massacre than a battle, this American military triumph involved U.S. General Henry Atkinson killing every Indian who tried to run for cover or flee across the Mississippi River. On August 1, 1832, Black Hawk’s band reached the Mississippi at its confluence with the Bad Axe River. What followed was an atrocity, committed despite the Indians’ repeated attempts at surrender:
“While the Sauk refugees were preparing rafts and canoes,” writes historian Kerry Trask, “the armed [U.S.] steamboat Warrior arrived, whereupon Black Hawk tried to negotiate with its troops under a flag of truce. The Americans opened fire, killing twenty-three warriors.”
“As we neared them,” one US officer who “served” in the U.S. assault recalled, “they raised a white flag and endeavored to decoy us, but we were a little too old for them.”
Hundreds of Sauk and Fox men, women and children were shot, clubbed, and bayoneted to death. US soldiers scalped most of the dead. They cut long strips of flesh from dead and wounded Indians for use as razor strops. The slaughter was supported by cannon and rifle fire from the aptly named US military ship Warrior, which picked off tribal members swimming for their lives. The United States suffered 5 dead and 19 wounded in the “Battle of Bad Axe.”
In a popular account of the “battle” published two years later, US Major John Allen Wakefield offered some interesting reflections. “It was a horrid sight,” Wakefield wrote:
to witness little children, wounded and suffering the most excruciating pain, although they were of the savage enemy, and the common enemy of the country…It was enough to make the heart of the most hardened being on earth to ache. [But, Wakefield wrote]…I must confess, that it filled my heart with gratitude and joy, to think that I had been instrumental, with many others, in delivering my country of those merciless savages, and restoring those [invading white] people again to their peaceful homes and firesides”.
“Our Great Father,” a government agent told the Sauk Indians, “will forbear no longer. He has tried to reclaim [Native Americans] and they grow worse. He is resolved to sweep them from the face of the earth. … If they cannot be made good they must be killed.”
By Wakefield’s account, the US troops at Bad Axe “shrank not from their duty. They all joined in the work of death for death it was. We were by this time fast getting rid of those demons in human shape… the Ruler of the Universe, He who takes vengeance on the guilty, did not design those guilty wretches to escape His vengeance…”
Such sentiments were common among American army and militia members, who reveled in the mass murder of indigenous people.
This was just one of many such genocidal moments in the rapacious white settlement of North America – the abject annihilation and ethnic cleansing of native people. This terrible history is pock-marked with such horrid and genocidal atrocities as the razing of 20 Cherokee towns in 1776, the forced removal of the Cherokee, Choctaw, and Seminole nations to Oklahoma (1828-1840), the savage clearance of the Sauk nation from their ancestral home in northern Illinois (1832-1833), the massacre of at least 75 Pomo Indians trapped on an island in the Russian River area of California (1850), the mass hanging of 38 Lakotas in 1862, the brutal murder of as many as 200 Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians at Sand Creek, Colorado (1864)), the slaughter of more than 100 Cheyenne, including women and children, by Lieutenant George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh U.S. Cavalry at Washita (in Oklahoma in 1868), the openly extermination-ist clearance of Lakota Sioux from the Black Hills (1876-1877), and the Seventh Cavalry’s massacre of 350 unarmed Lakota at Wounded Knee (1890). The nation’s first president, George Washington, was known to the Iroquois as “Town Destroyer.”
“Teutonic Conquest”
This genocidal history received hearty approval in future US President and Spanish-American War instigator Theodore Roosevelt’s four-volume 1899 study The Winning of the West. Penned by a heralded symbol of “the American soul,” The Winning of the West was a white-supremacist paean to Anglo-America’s near- eradication of North America’s original civilizations. “During the past three centuries,” Roosevelt opined, “the spread of English-speaking people over the world’s waste spaces” (meaning spaces not occupied by “progressive” capitalist-developmental Caucasians) was a great and welcome “feat of power,” for which the “English-speaking race” could justly feel proud. No “feat” of “race power” was more laudable for the “Bull Moose” than “the vast movement by which this continent [North America] was conquered and peopled” – the “crowning and greatest achievement of a series of mighty movements.” The Anglo-American pioneers conducted what Roosevelt called the noble civilizing “work” of “overcoming the original inhabitants.” The North American settlers performed the most heroic “work” of all, for they “confronted the most formidable savage foes ever encountered by colonists of European stock.”
No 20th century fascist had anything on Roosevelt’s Winning of the West when it came to the heralding of white supremacist violence. ”The settler and pioneer,” the future war president wrote, “have at bottom had justice on their side; this great continent could not have been kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid savages….The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman.”
Roosevelt considered the destruction of the continent’s original civilizations to be part of Teutonic Saxons’ long and noble crusade to master inferior races. “Let the sentimentalist say what they will,” Roosevelt wrote, “the man who puts the soil to use must of right dispossess the man who does not,” with “put the soil to use” understood to mean enclosing the earthly commons, fencing it off as private property and exploiting natural resources and human labor power.
“American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tartar, New Zealander and Maori, – in each case the victor,” The Winning of the West instructed, “horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty people.”
“It is of incalculable importance,” Roosevelt opined, “that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races…The world would have halted had it not been for the Teutonic conquests in alien lands; but the victories of Moslem over Christian have always proved a curse in the end. Nothing but sheer evil has come from the victories of Turk and Tartar.”
Destroying the Indian “savages,” Roosevelt claimed, was white North America’s third greatest work to date, exceeded only by “the preservation of the Union itself and the emancipation of the blacks” – this as African-Americans suffered under terrorist Jim Crow regime in the former slave states and faced countless indignities throughout the U.S. (more on that below).
Raping and Screaming Like Fiends
The “wining of the West” also included savage racist and sexist war crimes against Mexico, which lost the land that makes up current day Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Wyoming and Utah to the United States in one sided 1846-48 Mexican American War. Ulysses S. Grant would later call it “one of the most unjust [wars] ever won by a stronger against a weaker nation.” He would have known a thing or two about that since he was an officer in the U.S- white-Protestant assault on brown-skinned and Catholic Mexico, which had committed the unpardonable sin of abolishing slavery years before. Here is Grandin’s account of just two of many atrocities that U.S.-American soldiers committed during that conflict, long before the No Gun Ris, Operation Tiger Forces, My Lais, Bola Boluks, and Abu Ghraibs of future centuries:
“On February 9, 1847, for one example, a member of the Arkansas volunteer regiment raped a Mexican woman near the regiment’s camp at Agua Nueva, in the state of Coahuila, and Mexicans retaliated by killing a U.S. soldier. Afterwards, over one hundred Arkansans cornered a group of war refugees in a cave. According to one eyewitness, the volunteers screamed ‘like fiends’ as they raped and slaughtered their victims, with women and children ‘shrieking for mercy.’ By the time the killing had ended, scores of Mexicans lay dead or dying on the cave floor, which was covered with clotted blood. Many of the dead had been scalped (more than a few volunteers in the U.S. Army had, before the war, made their living on the borderlands scalping Apaches for bounty money, or ‘barbering,’ as one infamous Texas scalp-hunter called his trade.)”
The march of “Saxon civilization” in its glorious campaign against “savagery” was something to behold.
Because God: “The Sword of the Lord”
Evangelical Christian barbarism wedded to lethal American white nationalism? American evangelicals have been terrorizing their fellow Americans and others around the world for as long as the United States has existed – and indeed before that. The historically astute left political scientist Carl Boggs reminds us that contemporary American right-wing Christianity is “an extension of traditional, homespun, God-fearing Protestantism that historically intersected with racist, colonial, and exceptionalist currents of Manifest Destiny.” Further:
“We know that slavery, along with every step toward extermination of Native Americans, was justified and even celebrated as part of God’s will. Did not President William McKinley, as the U.S. was preparing for a war in the Philippines that would slaughter hundreds of thousands of civilians, inform Americans that this was a Christian duty?…Replete with images of great violence, hatred, and repression, [the Christians’ ancient holy text] the Bible in fact justifies all forms of mass murder, torture, warfare, and slavery. We have a text, as Michael Parenti notes, that takes enormous gratification in the mass slaughter of humans and animals, with few limits. In the Bible we find executions for taking God’s name in vain, death to practitioners of ‘idolatry,’ and horrific punishment for adulterers not to mention genocidal military attacks on heathen nations and culture. Such fundamentalist views, resonant of the Dark Ages, Parenti correctly likens to a modern fascist outlook.”
Seventeen years ago, the evangelical Christian George W. Bush, neo-fascistically turbo-charged by the Reichstag Fire-like gift of the Islamist 9/11 attacks, concluded that God had told him to invade Mesopotamia. The invasion led to more than a million Iraqi deaths accompanied by countless explicitly racist and often evangelically infused acts of torture and murder committed by feral U.S. military forces.
The use of messianic Christianity to justify murdering and maiming people of color en-masse goes back to the original British invasion of what would be called New England. The U.S. Declaration of Independence’s description of North America’s original inhabitants as “merciless Indian savages” anticipated Orwell by projecting onto Native Americans the genocidal practices that white “settlers” exhibited from day one. Consider the celebrated left historian Eric Foner’s textbook description of the grisly and religiously infused Mystic River Massacre of 1637:
“A force of Connecticut and Massachusetts soldiers, augmented by Narraganset allies, surrounded the main Pequot fortified village at Mystic and set it ablaze, killing those who tried to escape. Over 500 men, women, and children lost their lives in the massacre. By the end of the war [of New England settlers on the once powerful Pequot tribe], most of the Pequots had been exterminated or sold into Caribbean slavery. The treat that restored peace decreed that their name should be wiped from the historical record.”
“…The colonists’ ferocity shocked their Indian allies, who considered European military practices barbaric. A few Puritans agreed. ‘It was a fearful sight to see them frying in the fire,’ the Pilgrim leaders William Bradford wrote of the raid on Mystic. But to most Puritans, including Bradford, the defeat of a ‘barbarous nation’ by ‘the sword of the Lord’ offered further proof that they were on a sacred mission and that Indians were unworthy of sharing New England with the visible saints of the church.”
The Puritans wept with joy and thanked “God” for helping them flame-broil Indian women and children who stood on ground they would turn into a heavenly “City on the Hill.”
After a cruel campaign of ethnic cleansing (at the conclusion of “King Phillips’ War”) in which the white (un-) settlers pushed most of the last Indians they had not killed out of New England in the mid-1670s, “the image of Indians as bloodthirsty savages,” Foner writes, “became firmly entrenched in the New England mind.”
“America” (the U.S.) was born lethal, merciless, and savage.
“Crimes Which Would Disgrace a Nation of Savages”
Even worse than killing Native-Americans en-masse was the torture and exploitation of millions upon of millions of African-Americans as slaves – the highly profitable and hidden secret to America’s rise to prominence in the world of nations by the mid-19th century. Racialized chattel slavery found regular Christian “justification” on the part of the white “settlers.” From the nearly 800,000 words that make up the Bible, American Christian slaveholders, particularly loved two texts. They adored this from Genesis IX of the period’s King James Bible, the one they cited to show how Jehovah had made Blacks lifelong servants in the image of “Ham”;
“And the sons of Noah that went forth from the ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth: and Ham is the father of Canaan. These are the three sons of Noah: and of them was the whole world overspread. And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard: and he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without. And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness. And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him. And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. And he said, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. And Noah lived after the flood three hundred and fifty years.”
It was a ridiculous passage for pro-slavery polemicists to cite. How was it a transgression to see Noah drunk and naked? Why did Noah curse Canaan rather than Ham? Why would Ham have been of a different color than his brothers? But so what? In its popularized southern version, labelled “The Curse of Ham,” Canaan was deleted, Ham was turned Black, and Ham’s descendants were turned into Africans. Slaver Simon said so!
The Christian slaveowners’ second favorite text came from Apostle Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians, VI, 5-7:
“Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ; not with eye-service, as men-pleasers; but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart; with good will doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men: knowing that whatsoever good thing any man doeth, the same shall he receive of the Lord, whether he be bond or free.”
Translation: Black slaves served God and Christ, not white people, by being slaves “with fear and trembling” to white “masters.” These masters tortured slaves to extract the last ounce of profit from them in cotton fields built on blood-soaked land stolen from Native Americans. They stood atop a vicious chattel system whose polemicists justified the regular rape of Black females as a “safety valve” that protected the virtue of white “southern womanhood.”
“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass asked in 1852. “A day,” Douglass answered, “that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.” Further:
“To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour…Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.”
Red Hot Iron Brands and Kerosene
Do Americans really need to look overseas or to European-born fascism to learn historical lessons about the horrors of racist barbarism? Consider another among countless horrendous U.S. racist atrocities that occurred on U.S. soil long before Mussolini invented fascism and the demonic Hitler rose to power in the Old World. In 1893, a Black man falsely accused of molesting a white child was burned at the stake before 10,000 cheering white people in Paris, Texas. A New York reporter described the Hellish sight:
“The negro was placed upon a carnival float in mockery of a king upon his throne, and, followed by an immense crowd, was escorted through the city so that all might see the…inhuman monster…Smith was placed upon a scaffold, six feet square and ten feet high, securely bound, within the view of all beholders. Here the victim was tortured for fifty minutes by red-hot iron brands thrust against his quivering body. Commencing at the feet the brands were placed against him inch by inch until they were thrust against the face. Then, being apparently dead, kerosene was poured upon him, cottonseed hulls placed beneath him and set on fire. In less time than it takes to relate it, the tortured man was wafted beyond the grave to another fire, hotter and more terrible than the one just experienced.”
After this grisly spectacle, many crowd members took away pieces of “Smith’s” body as souvenirs.
Many such grisly occurrences took place across the U.S. South during the late and early 20th centuries – a time when images of Blacks who were lynched and burned to death before large and smiling white crowds were popular on American postcards. Between 1889 and 1918, 3,224 Americans were lynched within the United States, mostly in the South. Seventy-eight percent of these atrocity victims were black. In most cases the victims were hung or burned to death by mobs of soulful white “vigilantes,” commonly in front of thousands of gleeful spectators. Lynching continued in the South through 1968, the year in which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was executed in Memphis, Tennessee.
In November 1898, Grandin reports, “thousands of white men” in Wilmington, North Carolina, celebrated news of Lisbon’s surrender to Washington in the Spanish-American War by “stag[ing] a coup against the elected, multi-racial coalition governing [Wilmington]. The white mob, many of them veterans of the Cuban campaign {the U.S. seizure of Cuba from Spain] just returned from the war, killed between sixty and three hundred African Americans, ransacked African American businesses, and set fire to African American homes.”
“Fascism Has Happened Before in America”
Another example of lethal racist (and classist) Americanism took place in the rural Arkansas town of Elaine in September of 1919 when hundreds of Blacks were massacred after Black sharecroppers had tried to organize a union. As Smithsonian.com reported last year:
“The sharecroppers who gathered at a small church in Elaine, Arkansas, in the late hours of September 30, 1919, knew the risk they were taking. Upset about unfair low wages, they enlisted the help of a prominent white attorney from Little Rock, Ulysses Bratton, to come to Elaine to press for a fairer share in the profits of their labor. Each season, landowners came around demanding obscene percentages of the profits, without ever presenting the sharecroppers detailed accounting and trapping them with supposed debts…Aware of the dangers – the atmosphere was tense after racially motivated violence in the area – some of the farmers were armed with rifles…At around 11 p.m. that night, a group of local white men, some of whom may have been affiliated with local law enforcement, fired shots into the church. The shots were returned, and in the chaos, one white man was killed. Word spread rapidly about the death. Rumors arose that the sharecroppers, who had formally joined a union known as the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America (PFHUA) were leading an organized ‘insurrection’ against the white residents of Phillips County…Governor Charles Brough called for 500 soldiers from nearby Camp Pike to, as the Arkansas Democrat reported on Oct 2, ‘round up’ the ‘heavily armed negroes.’ The troops were ‘under order to shoot to kill any negro who refused to surrender immediately.’ They went well beyond that, banding together with local vigilantes and killing at least 200 African-Americans (estimates run much higher but there was never a full accounting). And the killing was indiscriminate—men, women and children unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity were slaughtered.”
These extra-legal and ritualistic executions enforced an American version of something very much like fascism. As Ezekiel Kweku and Jane Coastan noted two months after Trump was inaugurated:
“If full-throated fascism should rise in the United States, it will be an American fascism, animated by American concerns and with antecedents in American history. Fascism has happened before in America…For generations of black Americans, the United States between the end of Reconstruction, around 1876, and the triumphs of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s was a fascist state. Local and federal governments enforced an authoritarian regime that curtailed the movements and advancement of black Americans, and black Americans only. America has been governed by the heavy hand of white nationalism before. The lessons learned by black Americans living under a restrictive and domineering regime a century ago are ones we can take now, too. If we want to know what it looks like when the worst happens, we don’t have to look to the old world; we have a rich history of horror in the new.”
It wasn’t just about the former Confederacy. Mass-murderous white mob violence against Black Americans arose in Chicago, Omaha, East St. Louis, and numerous other northern locations during and after World War One. Racial terrorism, discrimination and apartheid was imposed on ghettoized urban black northerners and the thousands of all-white northern “Sundown Towns” were formed with the threat and reality of violence between 1890 and 1968.
Kweku and Coaston might have added that the United States’ Indian Removal and reservation policies and Jim Crow terror regimes were inspirations and role models for Adolph Hitler and other European fascists, who also admired American mass production methods and the potent means of thought- and feeling-control developed by American advertisers and Hollywood. European fascism was Americanism to no small degree.
Crushing “Anti-American Subversives”
American lethality hasn’t just been about race, of course. Fascism was above all an organized assault on working class resistance and the Left. European fascists could find much to draw models and inspiration in that regard from America, home to the bloodiest industrial relations in the capitalist world in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries – and to a long history of violently repressing working-class activists and radicals. The grisly highlights included the execution of ten Irish-American “Molly Maguire” union militants at the behest of the Pennsylvania employer class on June 21, 1877 (the activists were hanged in two separate prisons surrounded by state militia with fixed bayonets) and the grotesquely inhumane short-rope hanging of four leftist Eight Hour Day activists (the “Haymarket Martyrs”) at the behest of the Chicago bourgeoisie (after a rigged trial followed the legendary merchandiser Marshal Field ordering the Governor of Illinois not to commute the death sentence) on November 11, 1887.
Just a month after the ten Molly Maguires were murdered by the state as punishment for organizing coal miners and railroad workers, the one-sided “Battle of the Viaduct” took place on Halsted Street on the Near Southwest Side of Chicago. Federal troops called in from fighting (slaughtering) Sioux Indians (“red savages”) in the Dakota Territory joined local police and state militia in repressing striking workers (“white savages”). After two days, 30 workers lay dead; the gendarmes experienced no fatalities.
In April of 1914, you can learn from Wikipedia, “The Colorado National Guard and Colorado Fuel and Iron (CFI) Company guards attacked a tent colony of 1,200 striking coal miners and their families at Ludlow, Colorado, on April 20, 1914, with the National Guard using machine guns to fire into the colony. Approximately twenty-one people, including miners’ wives and children, were killed.”
The ruthless massacre was ordered by the legendary American capitalist John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the chief owner of the CFI mine.
Three years later came the great “Bisbee Deportation.” Here again one need look no further than good old Wikipedia for a useful introduction:
“The Bisbee Deportation was the illegal kidnapping and deportation of about 1,300 striking mine workers, their supporters, and citizen bystanders by 2,000 members of a deputized posse, who arrested these people beginning on July 12, 1917. The action was orchestrated by Phelps Dodge, the major mining company in the area, which provided lists of workers and others who were to be arrested in Bisbee, Arizona, to the Cochise County sheriff, Harry C. Wheeler. These workers were arrested and held at a local baseball park before being loaded onto cattle cars and deported 200 miles (320 km) to Tres Hermanas in New Mexico. The 16-hour journey was through desert without food and with little water. Once unloaded, the deportees, most without money or transportation, were warned against returning to Bisbee…As Phelps Dodge, in collusion with the sheriff, had closed down access to outside communications, it was some time before the story was reported….no individual, company, or agency was ever convicted in connection with the deportations.”
The end of the “Great War” (during which the eloquent U.S. Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs was held in federal prison for the sin of opposing mass-murderous inter-imperialist slaughter) was followed by the nation’s “First Red Scare.” A massive government and employer class crackdown on the Left including the capture and deportation of hundreds of suspected anarchists and communists. While it called its foreign enemies racist names (see below), lethal American white-nationalism in the opening decades of the last century called its “domestic enemies – labor, farmer, and civil rights organizers, both people of color and their white allies – subversives and anti-American.” (Grandin).
Slaughtering “Niggers,” “Apaches,” and “Gooks” Abroad
As the nineteenth century ended, America’s racist-classist-sexist soul-force was increasingly directed at victims beyond the North American continent. New predominantly non-white victims were searched out and destroyed overseas, always in the name of the United States’ higher morality and commitment to the benevolent ideals of democracy and rule of law. Between 1898 and 1905, for example, the U.S. Army, frequently led by “old Indian fighters,” seized the Philippines from its prior colonial master (Spain) and crushed a Filipino independence movement. The new American Empire’s first overseas counter-insurgency campaign killed perhaps as many as one million in the newly US-acquired Philippine islands. Few prisoners were taken and the Red Cross reported an extremely high ratio of dead to wounded, indicating a U.S. “determination to kill every native in sight.”
“You never hear of any disturbances in Northern Luzon,” an anonymous U.S. Congressman reported, “because there isn’t anybody there to rebel….The good Lord in heaven only knows the number of Filipinos that were put under ground. Our soldiers took no prisoners, they kept no records; they simply swept the country and wherever and whenever they could get hold of a Filipino they killed him.”
Throughout the “pacification” of the Philippines, the United States’ armed forces soulfully referred to the Filipinos as “niggers,” “barbarians,” and “savages.” America’s racist and Social-Darwinist President (1901-08) Theodore Roosevelt vilified Filipino resisters as “Apaches.” The phrase “gook” made its first appearance as a U.S. military term to describe angry and frightened Asians who inhabit lands invaded by “freedom-loving” Americans when George Custer’s legendary Seventh Cavalry arrived in the Philippines to help suppress “gook Apaches” in 1905.
The hideous term “gook” would figure prominently in the United States’ crucifixion of Southeast Asia, which mercilessly and savagely exterminated as many as 5 million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians between 1962 and 1975. The criminal and unnecessary atom-bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were great acts of racially tinged exterminism as well as the first atomic shots in the Cold War.
We can be certain that “the N-word” was used freely by U.S. soldiers when racist U.S. president Woodrow Wilson sent U.S. troops to Black Haiti in 1915. “Wilson‘s troops,” Noam Chomsky has noted, “murdered, destroyed, reinstituted virtual slavery and demolished the constitutional system in Haiti.” These actions followed in accord with Wilson’s Secretary of State Robert Lansing’s belief that “the African races are devoid of any capacity for political organization” and possessed “an inherent tendency to revert to savagery and to cast aside the shackles of civilization which are irksome to their physical nature.” That was a testament that Hitler certainly would have appreciated. The U.S. military’s murderous, and extremely racially infused “body count in the Caribbean and Pacific was high” during the first four decades of the last century, by Grandin’s account:
“U.S. troops killed about fifteen thousand Haitians…between 1915 and 1935; tens of thousands of Dominicans between 1916 and 1924 fifty thousand Nicaraguans between 1912 and 1933; and thousands upon thousands of Filipinos between 1898 and 1946. Many more hundreds of thousands from these countries died from disease, famine, and exposure….Letters from [U.S.] soldiers, first in the 1898 campaign and then later, in Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, are notably similar, lightheartedly narrating to family and friends how they would shoot ‘niggers,’ lynch ‘niggers,’ release ‘niggers’ into the swamp to die, and use ‘niggers for target practice.’”
How lethally fascistic was that?
The racist American Empire’s racist lethality got worse after it belatedly helped the Soviet Union (the main target of Hitler’s Third Reich) prevail in the great global war against, well, fascism – and then graduated to the status of global hegemon. It is difficult, sometimes, to wrap one’s mind around the extent of the merciless savagery that Superpower Uncle Sam unleashed on the world to advance and maintain its global supremacy. In the early 1950s, the “liberal” Democratic Harry Truman administration responded to an early challenge to U.S. power in Northern Korea with a practically genocidal three-year bombing campaign that was described in soul-numbing terms by the Washington Post years ago:
“The bombing was long, leisurely and merciless, even by the assessment of America’s own leaders. ‘Over a period of three years or so, we killed off—what—20 percent of the population,’ Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, told the Office of Air Force History in 1984. Dean Rusk, a supporter of the war and later Secretary of State, said the United States bombed ‘everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.’ After running low on urban targets, U.S. bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war, flooding farmland and destroying crops … [T]he U.S. dropped 635,000 tons of explosives on North Korea, including 32,557 tons of napalm, an incendiary liquid that can clear forested areas and cause devastating burns to human skin.”
This ferocious bombardment, which killed 2 million or more civilians, began five years after Truman arch-criminally and unnecessarily ordered the atom bombing of hundreds of thousands pf civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to warn the Soviet Union to stay out of Japan and Western Europe.
Indirect Massacre
The merciless savagery of U.S. foreign policy in “America Era” did not always require direct U.S. military intervention. Take Indonesia and Chile, for two examples from the “Golden Age” height of the “American Century.” In Indonesia, the U.S.-backed dictator Suharto killed millions of his subjects, targeting communist sympathizers, ethnic Chinese and alleged leftists. A senior CIA operations officer in the 1960s later described Suharto’s 1965-66 U.S.-assisted coup as s “the model operation” for the U.S.-backed coup that eliminated the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, seven years later. “The CIA forged a document purporting to reveal a leftist plot to murder Chilean military leaders,” the officer wrote, “[just like] what happened in Indonesia in 1965.”
As John Pilger noted 10 years ago, “the U.S. embassy in Jakarta supplied Suharto with a ‘zap list’ of Indonesian Communist party members and crossed off the names when they were killed or captured. … The deal was that Indonesia under Suharto would offer up what Richard Nixon had called ‘the richest hoard of natural resources, the greatest prize in south-east Asia.’ ”
“No single American action in the period after 1945,” wrote the historian Gabriel Kolko, “was as bloodthirsty as its role in Indonesia.”
Two years and three months after the Chilean coup, Suharto received a green light from Kissinger and the Gerald Ford White House to invade the small island nation of East Timor. With Washington’s approval and backing, Indonesia carried out genocidal massacres and mass rapes and killed at least 100,000 of the island’s residents.
“Spiritual Death”: From “Great Society” and Vietnam to Mass Incarceration and the Destruction of Iraq and Libya
By that time, Uncle Sam had just finished killing as many as 5 million Southeast Asians over the previous thirteen years in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The slaughter was drastically escalated at the precise moment when the domestic civil rights movement had compelled the liberal “Great Society” Lyndon Johnson administration to expand the welfare state like never before. The enormous taxpayer expense of the “crucifixion of Southeast Asia” (as Noam Chomsky aptly described the so-called Vietnam War at the time) meant that Johnson’s much-ballyhooed “war on poverty” at home was stillborn. Beyond murdering millions in Southeast Asia, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. noted in New York City’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 (one year to the day before his assassination or execution in Memphis, Tennessee), the deadly imperial expenditures crushed “hope for the [U.S.] poor – both black and white.” The anti-poverty program was “broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle plaything of a society gone mad” on a militarism that drew “men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube…A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift,” King added, “is approaching spiritual death.”
America has become lethal under Trump? More openly and soul-numbingly racist, nativist, stupid, eco-cidal and sexist in the time of the textbook malignant narcissist and neofascist Trump-Pence-Bannon-Miller-McConnell regime, surely, but not lethal for the first time. Study North American and U.S. history with clear eyes: it’s a record loaded with vicious white-nationalist exterminist and lethal Americanism. Ask older Black Americans about the Jim Crow and “Sundown Town” eras.
Born into a virulently racist society at the tail end of the fading McCarthy era (which absurdly cost my New Dealer grandfather – a future “Vietnam War” enthusiast – a teaching position in the 1950s), I am old enough to harbor early childhood through young-adult memories of Civil Rights activists being murdered in the South, the executions of Malcolm X and King, Chicago’s Mayor Richard J. Daley telling police to “shoot to kill” Black rioters protesting King’s murder, the openly white-supremacist 1968 presidential campaign of George Wallace, the racist 1968 “law and order” presidential campaign of Richard Nixon, the racist Chicago police-state execution of the young Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, the imperial state murders of student protesters at Kent State and Jackson State universities in May of 1970, the beginnings of the racist mass-incarcerationist “War on Drugs” under Nixon, the election of the malevolent racist Ronald Reagan in 1980, and much more terrible to contemplate. I’ve experienced the United States as lethal both domestically and globally lethal from my earliest moments of political consciousness.
Speaking of merciless racist savagery in a time still within the living memory of tens of millions of Americans, consider Grandin’s account of how the mass-murderer and war criminal William Calley became a political folk-hero to Confederate flag-waving southerners while being embraced by Nixon during Tricky Dick’s noxious re-election campaign. As Grandin writes in his recent book The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (2019):
“The Confederate flag stopped flying as the pennant of reconciliation, the joining of the southern military tradition to northern establishment might to spread Americanism abroad [by the early 1970s]. It now was the banner of those who felt that the establishment had sacrificed that tradition, ‘stabbed it in the back.’ The battle flag became the banner not of of a specific Lost Cause but of all of white supremacy’s lost causes.”
“The working-class Floridian lieutenant William Calley, for instance, the only solider convicted for taking part in the March 1968 My Lai Massacre [one of dozens if not hundreds of village massacres carried out by U.S. imperial troops in Vietnam – P.S.] became the representational bearer of this aggrieved standard. He was popular throughout the country, especially in the South; his supporters rallied under the Confederate Flag and Richard Nixon embraced Calley in his reelection campaign. As a result, the massacre of over five hundred Vietnamese civilians was transformed from a war crime into a cultural wedge issue, used to nationalize southern grievance and weaponize the wartime coarsening of sentiment for electoral advantage. ‘Most people,’ said Nixon of Calley’s actions at My Lai, ‘don’t give a shit whether he killed them or not.’ ‘The villagers got what they deserved,’ agreed Louisiana senator Allen Ellender” (emphasis added).
How fascistic and lethal was that?
Worried about racism in the White House? Consider the following, recently released 1971 telephone exchange between then President Nixon and future president Ronald Reagan insulting African United Nations delegates who defied Washington by voting to recognize the People’s Republic of China:
Reagan: “Last night, I tell you, to watch that thing on television as I did.”
Nixon: “Yeah.”
Reagan: “To see those, those monkeys from those African countries — damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!”
Nixon: laughter.
It is clear from recently released tapes that “Nixon believed in a ‘hierarchy of races’ with white people at the top and people of African and Latin American descent towards the bottom.”
After a brief interlude of Democratic rule (the one-term presidency of the transitional neoliberal Jimmy Carter) produced by Watergate, Reagan doubled down on Nixon’s liberal- and red-baiting and racist “southern strategy” and mass-incarcerationist “war on drugs” and promised (in classic palingenetic fascist-style) national regeneration (a “new morning in America”) to serve two terms of a presidency that justifiably won the title of “friendly fascism” from the political journalist Bertram Gross. Reagan was the standard bearer of a lethal white nationalist and evangelical Americanism as old as the nation’s bloody “settlement.”
The arch-neoliberal de facto Republican presidency of racist mass incarcerator Bill “Three Strikes” Clinton, the vicious war presidencies of the two Bushes and the noxious neoliberal imperialism of Wall Street Barry Obomber (the nations silver-tongued “deporter-in-chief” and wrecker of Libya and Honduras) all followed in the same institutionally and ideologically lethal grooves, just with different styles tailored to different partisan/regional constituencies and funding bases. The sick and neofascistic Trump, whose rallies are reminiscent of Mussolini and Hitler, whose hateful rhetoric triggers lone-wolf white-nationalist jihadists to conduct NRA-outfitted assault-weapon pogroms against people of color, is, like Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, and the two Bushes. the product of a longstanding racial barbarism that is (like guns and violence) as American as cherry pie.
Terrible as he is, Trump has yet to order anything on the scale of Bush41’s Operation Desert Storm (1991), Bush 43’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, or Obama’s destruction of Libya (2011). Concerned about racist barbarism? Among the countless episodes of mass-murderous U.S. savagery in the oil-rich Middle East over the last generation, few can match for the barbarous ferocity of the “Highway of Death,” where the “global policeman’s” forces massacred tens of thousands of surrendered Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait on Feb. 26 and 27, 1991. Journalist Joyce Chediac testified that:
U.S. planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front, and at the rear, and then pounded the resulting traffic jams for hours. ‘It was like shooting fish in a barrel,’ said one U.S. pilot. On the sixty miles of coastal highway, Iraqi military units sit in gruesome repose, scorched skeletons of vehicles and men alike, black and awful under the sun … for 60 miles every vehicle was strafed or bombed, every windshield is shattered, every tank is burned, every truck is riddled with shell fragments. No survivors are known or likely. … ‘Even in Vietnam I didn’t see anything like this. It’s pathetic,’ said Major Bob Nugent, an Army intelligence officer. … U.S. pilots took whatever bombs happened to be close to the flight deck, from cluster bombs to 500-pound bombs. … U.S. forces continued to drop bombs on the convoys until all humans were killed. So many jets swarmed over the inland road that it created an aerial traffic jam, and combat air controllers feared midair collisions. … The victims were not offering resistance. … [I]t was simply a one-sided massacre of tens of thousands of people who had no ability to fight back or defend.
Talk about merciless savagery! The victims’ crime was having been conscripted into an army controlled by a dictator perceived as a threat to U.S. control of Middle Eastern oil. President George H.W. Bush welcomed the so-called Persian Gulf War as an opportunity to demonstrate America’s unrivaled power and new freedom of action in the post-Cold War world, where the Soviet Union could no longer deter Washington. Bush also heralded the “war” (really a one-sided imperial assault) as marking the end of the “Vietnam Syndrome,” the reigning political culture’s curious term for U.S. citizens’ reluctance to commit U.S. troops to murderous imperial mayhem.
As Noam Chomsky observed in 1992, reflecting on U.S. efforts to maximize suffering in Vietnam by blocking economic and humanitarian assistance to the nation it had devastated: “No degree of cruelty is too great for Washington sadists.”
Bush Junior’s invasion killed at least a million Iraqis. In a poignant 2015 memoir from “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” the former U.S. Marine and brilliant antiwar activist Vince Emanuel recalled “the hundreds of prisoners we took captive and tortured in makeshift detention facilities staffed by teenagers from Tennessee, New York and Oregon.” By Emanuel’s account:
“I never had the misfortune of working in the detention facility, but I remember the stories. I vividly remember the marines telling me about punching, slapping, kicking, elbowing, kneeing and head-butting Iraqis. I remember the tales of sexual torture: forcing Iraqi men to perform sexual acts on each other while marines held knives against their testicles, sometimes sodomizing them with batons.”
“However, before those abominations could take place, those of us in infantry units had the pleasure of rounding up Iraqis during night raids, zip-tying their hands, black-bagging their heads and throwing them in the back of HUMVEEs and trucks while their wives and kids collapsed to their knees and wailed. Sometimes, we would pick them up during the day. Most of the time they wouldn’t resist. Some of them would hold hands while marines would butt-stroke the prisoners in the face. Once they arrived at the detention facility, they would be held for days, weeks, and even months at a time. Their families were never notified. And when they were released, we would drive them from the FOB (Forward Operating Base) to the middle of the desert and release them several miles from their homes.”
“After we cut their zip-ties and took the black bags off their heads, several of our more deranged marines would fire rounds from their AR-15s into their air or ground, scaring the recently released captives. Always for laughs. Most Iraqis would run, still crying from their long ordeal at the detention facility, hoping some level of freedom awaited them on the outside. Who knows how long they survived. After all, no one cared…”
“Amazingly, the ability to dehumanize the Iraqi people reached a crescendo after the bullets and explosions concluded, as many marines spent their spare time taking pictures of the dead, often mutilating their corpses for fun or poking their bloated bodies with sticks for some cheap laughs. Because iPhones weren’t available at the time, several marines came to Iraq with digital cameras. Those cameras contain an untold history of the war in Iraq, a history the West hopes the world forgets. That history and those cameras also contain footage of wanton massacres and numerous other war crimes, realities the Iraqis don’t have the pleasure of forgetting.”
“Unfortunately…Innocent people were not only routinely rounded-up, tortured and imprisoned, they were also incinerated by the hundreds of thousands, some studies suggest by the millions.”
How lethal and fascist was that?
Is Trumpism fascism? It is interesting that the word does not appear once in Grandin’s superb End of the Myth, one of the most important books ever written by a left (or any other kind) of American historian. “The 2016 election of Donald Trump as president of the United States – and all the vitriol his campaign and presidency have unleased – has,” writes Grandin, “been presented by commentators as one of two opposing possibilities. Trumpism either represents a rupture, a wholly un-American movement that has captured the institutions of government; or he is the realization of a deep-rooted American form of extremism. Does Trump’s crass and cruel appeal to nativism represent a break from tradition, from a fitful but persistent commitment to tolerance and equality…? Or is it but the ‘dark side,’ to use Dick Cheney’s resonant phrase, of U.S. history coming into the light?”
Grandin sees the “dark side” coming back to the fore with a vengeance under Obama and Trump because new limits on American capitalist and imperial expansion have brought an end to the nation’s ability to displace its internal class and racial disparities on to the “frontier,” broadly understood:
“When fascism comes to America,” someone (possibly Huey Long, but not Sinclair Lewis) is supposed to have said or written in the 1930s, “it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” That is certainly true – every variant of national fascism will bear the imprint of the specific nation in which it arises – but it would have been better to say that “When American develops its own breed of fascism, it will be wrapped in the Star-Spangled Banner and carrying a cross.”
Fascism won’t come to America. It will emerge out of American history. Yes, “it could happen here,” to paraphrase Sinclair Lewis 84 years ago, with “it” meaning fascism. But let us not turn away from how terrible and dangerous what has already happened here and what is happening now, richly consistent with a savagely racist, patriarchal, eco-cidal, authoritarian, and classist Americanism that is as old as this criminal, savagely merciless and “exceptional” nation itself.
Postscript: This essay was completed in the South Loop of Chicago, beneath the intermittent roar of deadly U.S. fighter jets doing practice flights over and around the Midwestern Metropolis’s downtown lakefront. The pilots are practicing for this weekend’s annual Chicago Air and Water Show, when a disproportionately white crowd of one million metropolitan area residents gather along the Chicago shoreline to ooh and ahh over some of the global American Empire’s most awe-inspiring weapons of air-borne mass destruction. The swoosh of the military planes can he heard in 95% Black ghetto South and West Side neighborhoods where a third and more of children are living at less than half the federal government’s hopelessly inadequate poverty level. The cost of just a single U.S. F-35 B Fighter Jet is $250 million (in 2014 dollars) a sum that could be used to vastly improve Chicago’s poorly funded and hyper-segregated inner-city public schools. Many parts of the U.S. military’s airborne arsenal bear Native-American names: the Blackhawk, Apache, and Chinook helicopters are three examples. The city’s National Hockey League team is named after the Sauk warrior who led the battle against white invaders in 1832, only to see his nation devastated and removed from the fertile planes of northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin. Many Chicagoland residents wear “chief” Black Hawk’s profile on t-shirts and jerseys. When you ask them who Black Hawk was and what happened to his people, their responses range from embarrassed ignorance to bemused indifference, mild irritation, and overt hostility. One of the very top U.S. military aviation manufacturers, Boeing, is headquartered in downtown Chicago. Its overseas body count over the decades is incalculable but surely ranks in the millions.
Monday, September 9, 2019
Sunday, September 8, 2019
SC196-11
https://www.globalresearch.ca/another-us-great-recession-coming/5687892
Another US Great Recession Coming?
Hindsight is the best foresight, so clarity will arrive as events unfold.
For the vast majority of ordinary Americans, the 2008-09 great recession never ended.
Real unemployment is around 21%, based on how numbers were calculated in the 1980s.
The so-called U-3 headlined unemployment number omits individuals without jobs who want them, including many longterm unemployed ones not looking after months of failure to find work.
Millions of unemployed Americans are considered nonpersons, their status omitted from headlined monthly Labor Department figures.
These are real people struggling to get by. Most working Americans hold low-wage, poor-or-no benefit temporary or part-time service jobs.
Already living in poverty or bordering it, they’re one or a few missed paychecks away from possible homelessness, hunger and despair — the world’s richest nation uncaring about their dire straights.
Its policymakers serve privileged interests exclusively at the expense of the rights and welfare of most others — what the scourge of neoliberal harshness is all about.
Current US economic growth is weak, likely heading south, not improving.
Economist John Williams re-engineers official data to how it was accurately calculated decades earlier.
On August 29, he reported the following:
Q II 2019 GDP was revised lower to 2.04%. “Manufacturing and oil and gas production are in decline.”
“Real new orders are in their worst contraction since the (2008-09) great recession.”
Construction spending fell to its lowest level since that period, the same true for freight activity.
“Heavy downside revisions to retail trade employment suggest” officials numbers were overstated.
Williams believes further Fed interest rate cuts are cutting, money printing madness quantitative easing (QE) likely to follow. Will monetary policy and tax cuts strengthen economic conditions?
Corporations used their windfall for executive pay increases and bonuses, stock buybacks raising valuations, mergers and acquisitions to reduce competition, dividends to shareholders, and stashing trillions of dollars in offshore tax havens.
Easy money encourages speculation, what drove equity valuations to record-high levels.
Economic growth depends on productive investments, creating jobs, absent in the US, its industrial base and other high-paying jobs offshored to low-wage countries.
Tax cuts for the rich widened the wealth gap to extremes not seen since the roaring 20s and earlier age of the robber barons.
It did little or nothing to benefit ordinary Americans, the nation in decline, thirdworldized for most of its people, things worsening, not improving.
Another great recession will hit them harder — while the nation’s privileged class never had things better, able to ride out economic storms when arrive.
Economist David Rosenberg believes recession is coming, things close to it now, saying:
Corporate earnings are “rolling over.” Weakening economic data suggest “a significant growth turndown right now in the US economy,” adding:
“(E)arnings estimates are coming down and the stock market is just rocking and rolling.”
Trump’s trade war with China made things worse. On September 1, new 15% tariffs took effect on $112 billion worth of Chinese imports — including consumer products, making them more costly to buyers.
On December 15, US tariffs are coming on all remaining Chinese goods. According to JP Morgan Chase, tariffs imposed on September 1 will cost the average US household an extra $1,000 annually.
Numerous US companies and industry groups voiced strong opposition to Trump’s tariffs war. He slammed them, saying they’re “badly run and weak,” using tariffs as an excuse for bad management.
Likely making enemies in corporate boardrooms by his arrogance, he maintains the myth that China is paying for US tariffs. They’re hitting US business and consumers.
Forbes magazine said most economists predict that “the next recession could be deeper and more severe than the previous one in light of the fact that business and household debts are at higher levels than they were prior to the Great Recession of 2007-09, a global trade war is ramping up, and there’s been a significant increase in the federal debt.”
Economist David Stockman believes Fed interest rate cuts and QE will be “no match” for the coming recession.
The yield curve is an important indicator of future economic activity. When the spread between US 3-month Treasury notes and 10-year bonds inverts for at least three consecutive months, recession follows every time — according to the historical record.
Last week, the Economic Collapse blog said the following:
“We now have had three months of a 3-mo/10-yr yield curve inversion. The track record this has had in predicting recessions: 100%.”
It’s likely coming, hindsight will tell when — maybe later this year or some time in 2020, its strength and duration to be known after the fact.
Escalating trade war with China showing no signs of easing, increases the chance for economic downturn, maybe something stiff and protracted.
In late August, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that the 2018-19 period ending in March produced 501,000 fewer nonfarm jobs than initially reported — a 20% downward revision from 2.496 million to 1.995 million.
It’s the largest downward revision since the 2008/09 great recession’s waning stages.
Payroll growth was downwardly revised from 1.69% to 1.35%, the weakest figure since the great recession, John Williams reported.
The data is further proof that tax cuts don’t stimulate jobs creation, a myth maintained by Trump and others around him.
Economist Jack Rasmus explained another myth. Adjusted for inflation and other factors, wage gains have been minimal, stagnant or falling for US workers, “not rising 3.1%,” adding:
“A survey by the finance site Bankrate.com found that ‘more than 60% of Americans said they didn’t get a pay raise or get a better-paying job in the last 12 months.’ ”
Re-engineered US inflation to how it was calculated in the 1980s (by Williams) shows it exceeds 5.5%, not the phony sub-2% official number.
Rasmus asked “if 60% (of US workers) didn’t get any wage increase at all, how could wages be rising 3.1% or even 1.5%?”
If real US inflation exceeds 5.5%, average wages for working Americans declined, a further drag on the economy, compounded by record high consumer debt exceeding $13 trillion.
McKinsey Global Institute data show US “median wages have not risen at all since 2007,” Rasmus reported.
Adjusted for real inflation, they’ve fallen, exacerbating the widening US wealth gap, have and have not economic reality in the country.
Whenever it arrives, economic recession will hit ordinary Americans hardest.
If stiff and protracted, current hard times will be much harder for most households.
Another US Great Recession Coming?
Hindsight is the best foresight, so clarity will arrive as events unfold.
For the vast majority of ordinary Americans, the 2008-09 great recession never ended.
Real unemployment is around 21%, based on how numbers were calculated in the 1980s.
The so-called U-3 headlined unemployment number omits individuals without jobs who want them, including many longterm unemployed ones not looking after months of failure to find work.
Millions of unemployed Americans are considered nonpersons, their status omitted from headlined monthly Labor Department figures.
These are real people struggling to get by. Most working Americans hold low-wage, poor-or-no benefit temporary or part-time service jobs.
Already living in poverty or bordering it, they’re one or a few missed paychecks away from possible homelessness, hunger and despair — the world’s richest nation uncaring about their dire straights.
Its policymakers serve privileged interests exclusively at the expense of the rights and welfare of most others — what the scourge of neoliberal harshness is all about.
Current US economic growth is weak, likely heading south, not improving.
Economist John Williams re-engineers official data to how it was accurately calculated decades earlier.
On August 29, he reported the following:
Q II 2019 GDP was revised lower to 2.04%. “Manufacturing and oil and gas production are in decline.”
“Real new orders are in their worst contraction since the (2008-09) great recession.”
Construction spending fell to its lowest level since that period, the same true for freight activity.
“Heavy downside revisions to retail trade employment suggest” officials numbers were overstated.
Williams believes further Fed interest rate cuts are cutting, money printing madness quantitative easing (QE) likely to follow. Will monetary policy and tax cuts strengthen economic conditions?
Corporations used their windfall for executive pay increases and bonuses, stock buybacks raising valuations, mergers and acquisitions to reduce competition, dividends to shareholders, and stashing trillions of dollars in offshore tax havens.
Easy money encourages speculation, what drove equity valuations to record-high levels.
Economic growth depends on productive investments, creating jobs, absent in the US, its industrial base and other high-paying jobs offshored to low-wage countries.
Tax cuts for the rich widened the wealth gap to extremes not seen since the roaring 20s and earlier age of the robber barons.
It did little or nothing to benefit ordinary Americans, the nation in decline, thirdworldized for most of its people, things worsening, not improving.
Another great recession will hit them harder — while the nation’s privileged class never had things better, able to ride out economic storms when arrive.
Economist David Rosenberg believes recession is coming, things close to it now, saying:
Corporate earnings are “rolling over.” Weakening economic data suggest “a significant growth turndown right now in the US economy,” adding:
“(E)arnings estimates are coming down and the stock market is just rocking and rolling.”
Trump’s trade war with China made things worse. On September 1, new 15% tariffs took effect on $112 billion worth of Chinese imports — including consumer products, making them more costly to buyers.
On December 15, US tariffs are coming on all remaining Chinese goods. According to JP Morgan Chase, tariffs imposed on September 1 will cost the average US household an extra $1,000 annually.
Numerous US companies and industry groups voiced strong opposition to Trump’s tariffs war. He slammed them, saying they’re “badly run and weak,” using tariffs as an excuse for bad management.
Likely making enemies in corporate boardrooms by his arrogance, he maintains the myth that China is paying for US tariffs. They’re hitting US business and consumers.
Forbes magazine said most economists predict that “the next recession could be deeper and more severe than the previous one in light of the fact that business and household debts are at higher levels than they were prior to the Great Recession of 2007-09, a global trade war is ramping up, and there’s been a significant increase in the federal debt.”
Economist David Stockman believes Fed interest rate cuts and QE will be “no match” for the coming recession.
The yield curve is an important indicator of future economic activity. When the spread between US 3-month Treasury notes and 10-year bonds inverts for at least three consecutive months, recession follows every time — according to the historical record.
Last week, the Economic Collapse blog said the following:
“We now have had three months of a 3-mo/10-yr yield curve inversion. The track record this has had in predicting recessions: 100%.”
It’s likely coming, hindsight will tell when — maybe later this year or some time in 2020, its strength and duration to be known after the fact.
Escalating trade war with China showing no signs of easing, increases the chance for economic downturn, maybe something stiff and protracted.
In late August, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that the 2018-19 period ending in March produced 501,000 fewer nonfarm jobs than initially reported — a 20% downward revision from 2.496 million to 1.995 million.
It’s the largest downward revision since the 2008/09 great recession’s waning stages.
Payroll growth was downwardly revised from 1.69% to 1.35%, the weakest figure since the great recession, John Williams reported.
The data is further proof that tax cuts don’t stimulate jobs creation, a myth maintained by Trump and others around him.
Economist Jack Rasmus explained another myth. Adjusted for inflation and other factors, wage gains have been minimal, stagnant or falling for US workers, “not rising 3.1%,” adding:
“A survey by the finance site Bankrate.com found that ‘more than 60% of Americans said they didn’t get a pay raise or get a better-paying job in the last 12 months.’ ”
Re-engineered US inflation to how it was calculated in the 1980s (by Williams) shows it exceeds 5.5%, not the phony sub-2% official number.
Rasmus asked “if 60% (of US workers) didn’t get any wage increase at all, how could wages be rising 3.1% or even 1.5%?”
If real US inflation exceeds 5.5%, average wages for working Americans declined, a further drag on the economy, compounded by record high consumer debt exceeding $13 trillion.
McKinsey Global Institute data show US “median wages have not risen at all since 2007,” Rasmus reported.
Adjusted for real inflation, they’ve fallen, exacerbating the widening US wealth gap, have and have not economic reality in the country.
Whenever it arrives, economic recession will hit ordinary Americans hardest.
If stiff and protracted, current hard times will be much harder for most households.
Saturday, September 7, 2019
SC196-10
https://internationalman.com/articles/falling-from-grace/
Falling From Grace
Years ago, Doug Casey mentioned in a correspondence to me, “Empires fall from grace with alarming speed.”
Every now and then, you receive a comment that, although it may have been stated casually, has a lasting effect, as it offers uncommon insight. For me, this was one of those and it’s one that I’ve kept handy at my desk since that time, as a reminder.
I’m from a British family, one that left the UK just as the British Empire was about to begin its decline. They expatriated to the “New World” to seek promise for the future.
As I’ve spent most of my life centred in a British colony – the Cayman Islands – I’ve had the opportunity to observe many British contract professionals who left the UK seeking advancement, which they almost invariably find in Cayman. Curiously, though, most returned to the UK after a contract or two, in the belief that the UK would bounce back from its decline, and they wanted to be on board when Britain “came back.”
This, of course, never happened. The US replaced the UK as the world’s foremost empire, and although the UK has had its ups and downs over the ensuing decades, it hasn’t returned to its former glory.
And it never will.
If we observe the empires of the world that have existed over the millennia, we see a consistent history of collapse without renewal. Whether we’re looking at the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Spanish Empire, or any other that’s existed at one time, history is remarkably consistent: The decline and fall of any empire never reverses itself; nor does the empire return, once it’s fallen.
But of what importance is this to us today?
Well, today, the US is the world’s undisputed leading empire and most Americans would agree that, whilst it’s going through a bad patch, it will bounce back and might even be better than ever.
Not so, I’m afraid. All empires follow the same cycle. They begin with a population that has a strong work ethic and is self-reliant. Those people organize to form a nation of great strength, based upon high productivity.
This leads to expansion, generally based upon world trade. At some point, this gives rise to leaders who seek, not to work in partnership with other nations, but to dominate them, and of course, this is when a great nation becomes an empire. The US began this stage under the flamboyant and aggressive Teddy Roosevelt.
The twentieth century was the American century and the US went from victory to victory, expanding its power.
But the decline began in the 1960s, when the US started to pursue unwinnable wars, began the destruction of its currency and began to expand its government into an all-powerful body.
Still, this process tends to be protracted and the overall decline often takes decades.
So, how does that square with the quote, “Empires fall from grace with alarming speed”?
Well, the preparation for the fall can often be seen for a generation or more, but the actual fall tends to occur quite rapidly.
What happens is very similar to what happens with a schoolyard bully.
The bully has a slow rise, based upon his strength and aggressive tendency. After a number of successful fights, he becomes first revered, then feared. He then takes on several toadies who lack his abilities but want some of the spoils, so they do his bidding, acting in a threatening manner to other schoolboys.
The bully then becomes hated. No one tells him so, but the other kids secretly dream of his defeat, hopefully in a shameful manner.
Then, at some point, some boy who has a measure of strength and the requisite determination has had enough and takes on the bully.
If he defeats him, a curious thing happens. The toadies suddenly realise that the jig is up and they head for the hills, knowing that their source of power is gone.
Also, once the defeated bully is down, all the anger, fear and hatred that his schoolmates felt for him come out, and they take great pleasure in his defeat.
And this, in a nutshell, is what happens with empires.
A nation that comes to the rescue in times of genuine need (such as the two World Wars) is revered. But once that nation morphs into a bully that uses any excuse to invade countries such as Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq and Syria, its allies may continue to bow to it but secretly fear it and wish that it could be taken down a peg.
When the empire then starts looking around for other nations to bully, such as Iran and Venezuela, its allies again say nothing but react with fear when they see the John Boltons and Mike Pompeos beating the war drums and making reckless comments.
At present, the US is focusing primarily on economic warfare, but if this fails to get the world to bend to its dominance, the US has repeatedly warned, regarding possible military aggression, that “no option is off the table.”
The US has reached the classic stage when it has become a reckless bully, and its support structure of allies has begun to de-couple as a result.
At the same time that allies begin to pull back and make other plans for their future, those citizens within the empire who tend to be the creators of prosperity also begin to seek greener pastures.
History has seen this happen countless times. The “brain drain” occurs, in which the best and most productive begin to look elsewhere for their future. Just as the most productive Europeans crossed the Pond to colonise the US when it was a new, promising country, their present-day counterparts have begun moving offshore.
The US is presently in a state of suspended animation. It still appears to be a major force, but its buttresses are quietly disappearing. At some point in the near future, it’s likely that the US government will overplay its hand and aggress against a foe that either is stronger or has alliances that, collectively, make it stronger.
The US will be entering into warfare at a time when it’s broke, and this will become apparent suddenly and dramatically. The final decline will occur with alarming speed.
When this happens, the majority of Americans will hope in vain for a reverse of events. They’ll be inclined to hope that, if they collectively say, “Whoops, we goofed,” the world will be forgiving, returning them to their former glory.
But historically, this never occurs. Empires fall with alarming speed, because the support systems that made them possible have decamped and have become reinvigorated elsewhere.
Rather than mourn the loss of empire that’s on the horizon, we’d be better served if we focus instead on those parts of the world that are likely to benefit from this inevitability.
Editor’s Note: Socialist ideas are becoming increasingly popular in the US. At the same time the US government is printing money hand over fist. All while the US empire continues to overstretch itself across the world.
It’s all shaping up to be a world-class disaster… one unlike anything we’ve seen before....
Falling From Grace
Years ago, Doug Casey mentioned in a correspondence to me, “Empires fall from grace with alarming speed.”
Every now and then, you receive a comment that, although it may have been stated casually, has a lasting effect, as it offers uncommon insight. For me, this was one of those and it’s one that I’ve kept handy at my desk since that time, as a reminder.
I’m from a British family, one that left the UK just as the British Empire was about to begin its decline. They expatriated to the “New World” to seek promise for the future.
As I’ve spent most of my life centred in a British colony – the Cayman Islands – I’ve had the opportunity to observe many British contract professionals who left the UK seeking advancement, which they almost invariably find in Cayman. Curiously, though, most returned to the UK after a contract or two, in the belief that the UK would bounce back from its decline, and they wanted to be on board when Britain “came back.”
This, of course, never happened. The US replaced the UK as the world’s foremost empire, and although the UK has had its ups and downs over the ensuing decades, it hasn’t returned to its former glory.
And it never will.
If we observe the empires of the world that have existed over the millennia, we see a consistent history of collapse without renewal. Whether we’re looking at the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Spanish Empire, or any other that’s existed at one time, history is remarkably consistent: The decline and fall of any empire never reverses itself; nor does the empire return, once it’s fallen.
But of what importance is this to us today?
Well, today, the US is the world’s undisputed leading empire and most Americans would agree that, whilst it’s going through a bad patch, it will bounce back and might even be better than ever.
Not so, I’m afraid. All empires follow the same cycle. They begin with a population that has a strong work ethic and is self-reliant. Those people organize to form a nation of great strength, based upon high productivity.
This leads to expansion, generally based upon world trade. At some point, this gives rise to leaders who seek, not to work in partnership with other nations, but to dominate them, and of course, this is when a great nation becomes an empire. The US began this stage under the flamboyant and aggressive Teddy Roosevelt.
The twentieth century was the American century and the US went from victory to victory, expanding its power.
But the decline began in the 1960s, when the US started to pursue unwinnable wars, began the destruction of its currency and began to expand its government into an all-powerful body.
Still, this process tends to be protracted and the overall decline often takes decades.
So, how does that square with the quote, “Empires fall from grace with alarming speed”?
Well, the preparation for the fall can often be seen for a generation or more, but the actual fall tends to occur quite rapidly.
What happens is very similar to what happens with a schoolyard bully.
The bully has a slow rise, based upon his strength and aggressive tendency. After a number of successful fights, he becomes first revered, then feared. He then takes on several toadies who lack his abilities but want some of the spoils, so they do his bidding, acting in a threatening manner to other schoolboys.
The bully then becomes hated. No one tells him so, but the other kids secretly dream of his defeat, hopefully in a shameful manner.
Then, at some point, some boy who has a measure of strength and the requisite determination has had enough and takes on the bully.
If he defeats him, a curious thing happens. The toadies suddenly realise that the jig is up and they head for the hills, knowing that their source of power is gone.
Also, once the defeated bully is down, all the anger, fear and hatred that his schoolmates felt for him come out, and they take great pleasure in his defeat.
And this, in a nutshell, is what happens with empires.
A nation that comes to the rescue in times of genuine need (such as the two World Wars) is revered. But once that nation morphs into a bully that uses any excuse to invade countries such as Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq and Syria, its allies may continue to bow to it but secretly fear it and wish that it could be taken down a peg.
When the empire then starts looking around for other nations to bully, such as Iran and Venezuela, its allies again say nothing but react with fear when they see the John Boltons and Mike Pompeos beating the war drums and making reckless comments.
At present, the US is focusing primarily on economic warfare, but if this fails to get the world to bend to its dominance, the US has repeatedly warned, regarding possible military aggression, that “no option is off the table.”
The US has reached the classic stage when it has become a reckless bully, and its support structure of allies has begun to de-couple as a result.
At the same time that allies begin to pull back and make other plans for their future, those citizens within the empire who tend to be the creators of prosperity also begin to seek greener pastures.
History has seen this happen countless times. The “brain drain” occurs, in which the best and most productive begin to look elsewhere for their future. Just as the most productive Europeans crossed the Pond to colonise the US when it was a new, promising country, their present-day counterparts have begun moving offshore.
The US is presently in a state of suspended animation. It still appears to be a major force, but its buttresses are quietly disappearing. At some point in the near future, it’s likely that the US government will overplay its hand and aggress against a foe that either is stronger or has alliances that, collectively, make it stronger.
The US will be entering into warfare at a time when it’s broke, and this will become apparent suddenly and dramatically. The final decline will occur with alarming speed.
When this happens, the majority of Americans will hope in vain for a reverse of events. They’ll be inclined to hope that, if they collectively say, “Whoops, we goofed,” the world will be forgiving, returning them to their former glory.
But historically, this never occurs. Empires fall with alarming speed, because the support systems that made them possible have decamped and have become reinvigorated elsewhere.
Rather than mourn the loss of empire that’s on the horizon, we’d be better served if we focus instead on those parts of the world that are likely to benefit from this inevitability.
Editor’s Note: Socialist ideas are becoming increasingly popular in the US. At the same time the US government is printing money hand over fist. All while the US empire continues to overstretch itself across the world.
It’s all shaping up to be a world-class disaster… one unlike anything we’ve seen before....
Friday, September 6, 2019
SC196-9
https://www.peakprosperity.com/its-the-pace-of-change-that-kills-you/
It’s The Pace Of Change That Kills You
And it has now sped up beyond our means to control it
A treasured member of my family is in the process of dying right now. She has lived a full, rich life; but her passing is a sad affair for us.
I’ve spent a lot of time recently with hospice workers. I’ve learned that they’re often asked by their patients, “How much time do I have left?”
While sometimes loathe to offer an answer, hospice staff can predict the timing of the end pretty accurately.
They do so by measuring by the changes they see. Or, more accurately, the pace of change in those changes.
Could a patient pick a book up off the floor in June, but not in July? If not, then their remaining time is likely to be measured in months.
Could they raise themselves out of a chair last week but not today? If not, then it may be only weeks until the end.
Are they losing function every day? Then death is likely just days away.
And so on, right through hours, minutes and seconds.
It is the pace of change that matters. Tracking the pace of change is as important as the actual changes themselves.
Both provide critical information about what’s going on, but it’s the pace that informs our timing predictions.
This is equally true for larger systems like economies and ecosystems.
The Pace Is Accelerating All Around Us
Losing a certain population of a given species over a million years is a very different proposition from losing the same number within just 40 years. Or even yearly, as now appears to be the case.
The years 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 each saw one or more Cat 5 hurricanes form in the Atlantic. This is the longest such stretch of years in the record books.
Dorian was absolutely brutal to the Bahamas; the damage was unprecedented and extreme. I simply cannot imagine the sustained horror of being pinned down by a Cat 5 for 36 hours as it brutally dismantled my home.
Like slow-moving Hurricane Harvey (not a Cat 5, but hugely damaging) Dorian just parked itself over the Bahamas and laid waste to all that lay beneath, churning like a massive blender.
Are monster storms that move slowly a new meteorological trend? Or has it simply been ‘bad luck’ to experience so many of late?
We don’t know yet. But there have only been 35 Cat 5 hurricanes in the past 100 years. However, at our current pace, there will be 125 such storms over the next century. That’s four times as many vs the past.
Negative Rates Multiplying At A Staggering Rate
Financially, the latest and most head-spinning change concerns the explosive proliferation of debts with negative interest rates.
Unheard of since the Mesopotamian invention of debt in 2,400 BC, negative interest rates have suddenly appeared on the financial landscape like a new mutant species, an invader without natural predators, gaining a sudden foothold and then spreading rapidly.
It’s as if a virulent chestnut blight landed in a virgin forest of corporate and sovereign debt.
From literally ‘none’ ten years ago, to more than $17 trillion now. And up from a ‘mere’ $6 trillion in the past ten months alone:
chart of growth in negative interest rate government debt
Is this a new, permanent trend? We don’t know yet.
But the pace of change is sure intensifying.
First, Switzerland gave negative rates a tentative go. Then Denmark timidly followed. But eventually, the entire Euro complex followed with gusto, with most countries’ rates crossing below the 0%-boundary in late 2014:
timeline of negative market interest rates
Whatever the final repercussions are, one fact is clear: the world’s central banks are completely, 100% responsible for these bizarro-world negative interest rates.
They try to pretend that the $20+ trillion money printing spree they engineered after 2008 isn’t a root cause. Instead, they claim “the markets” are responsible. But this is as weak a defense as Ted Bundy claiming his victims all killed themselves. It’s just not a credible defense.
Emboldened by seeing that nothing terribly bad happened in the early years of negative rates, the ECB went on an absolute tear of a printing spree in 2016 and 2017. It went so far as to buy corporate debt via private placement, meaning that the debt was never issued to the bond market. The ECB just conjured up the necessary billions of euros and directly credited corporate accounts while taking their bonds onto its books.
Again, it’s worth noting just how unusual this all is. It has never been done before.
5,000 years of accumulated knowledge is being chucked out the window by activist central bankers who assume they know best.
But do they? And what will be the repercussions if they don’t?
Economic And Social Vandalism
The financial media is working very, very hard to defuse concerns about negative rates and sell them as a talisman against anything that could hurt the economy.
They dutifully scribe down what the central bankers say, and then pitch it to us as gospel.
Instead, I propose that now is the time to ask stiff questions of the central bankers, and to not let them avoid answering. And to keep asking until we either receive reasonable responses, or clarify that they have no good answers to give.
Here are questions I would love to hear posed to Chairmen Powell, Draghi or Kuroda:
“Your actions were designed to spike the prices of stocks and bonds and you’ve succeeded. This has led to an enormous wealth gap. What’s ‘too far’ in your view? Right now 5 people have as much wealth as the bottom half, by which we mean 3.8 billion humans. Is ‘too far’ when those same five individuals own as much as the bottom 75%? The bottom 90%? Or is it your aim that these top five individuals should actually possess everything in the world with everyone in their debt?”
“5,000 years of financial trial and error has firmly established that saved capital deserves a positive rate of return. You are now certain that negative interest rates are what the world needs. What empirical data do you rely on to make that assessment? What happens if you’re wrong?”
“All investment decisions depend upon an assumed rate of return. Pensions, for example, require matching future liabilities with current assets and an assumed rate of return. Now that central banks are certain that negative yielding debt is just what the doctor ordered, and under the principle of “you break, it you buy it“, we’re wondering what responsibilities the central banks are prepared to assume here for broken pensions?”
“Same question as above, but for savers and endowments.”
“Money is not actual wealth, but a claim on real wealth. More importantly, it’s a social contract. Central bankers are monkeying with that social contract and the effects are obvious. Corporations are incentivized to make returns by financially engineering their balance sheets and rigging their share counts instead of taking actual risks, hiring more people, and investing in R&D. Can we not just take this all the way to the end and propose eliminating risk for everyone and just give everybody money without anyone performing any work at all? Obviously not, but we’re also obviously somewhere along that path. The question is, how far is ‘too far’ and what criteria are you using to determine that?”
“Endless growth is not possible on a finite planet. Your policies are all geared towards stoking the fastest economic growth possible. Do central banks have any responsibility to future generations and leaving behind a world worth inheriting?”
We deserve to know the answers to these — and a dozen other — questions. Why nobody in the press or Congress is asking any of them is a different story for another day.
While it’s possible that central bankers are competent, benevolent experts doing their best, it’s equally possible they are the largest economic and social vandals in all of history.
Given that possibility, the Overton Window really needs to be smashed wider, and quickly, so that we can get answers to those ‘impolite’ but necessary questions above. If it turns out that the central bankers have thoughtful, intelligent responses to them, then fine. We can debate the assumptions and data.
If, on the other hand, they get snippy and affronted by being challenged, then it will mean they have no good answers. It will unveil that they’re merely ‘winging it’ when literally everything is on the line.
It will mean, for the sake of ease and expediency, they’re basically dismantling a cultural heritage site as they scavenge for handy building materials. Turning architectural splendors into crude stone huts.
In other words, they’d be unmasked as economic and social vandals. Wrecking the infrastructure of financial knowledge and thousands of years of cultural arrangements simply because they are too intellectually lazy or too emotionally weak to do otherwise.
We Have To Be Our Own Rescuers
The Powers That Be, like central bankers and politicians, are just humans. They err. They have to operate with imperfect information.
But they are also mostly untrained in systems thinking, resource limits, and other such necessary fields — which they could correct for if they cared or dared.
But they aren’t. And because of this, the pace and the scope of the changes happening are beyond their powers of comprehension, let alone their powers to fix.
So many things are changing. And the rate of change is speeding up, too. It’s barely possible to fashion a comprehensive plan for what to do about it. It’s probably too much to expect that anyone in power would have the necessary broad-based systems thinking required to concoct a reasonable plan forward.
Someday we’ll begin to run out of fossil fuels, and we have no plan for that. We haven’t a clue what to do about the rapidly intensifying weather. Nobody knows how we’re going to grow enough food for 9 billion people when the phosphate runs out.
But instead of planning for these certain challenges, what are our leaders doing instead?
The central bankers are continuing to lower interest rates. Politicians squabble about marginal, ultimately unimportant distractions. And universities enforce spaces safe from micro-aggressions so that nobody is ever offended (leaving them woefully unprepared for what’s coming next).
Everybody is still busy doing the very same things that have moved us away from what has served us well for 5,000 years: positive interest rates and a stable climate.
The rate of change is accelerating. Things are speeding up. That’s how exponential systems behave. It’s not surprising to those who understanding it, but it’s shocking to behold.
It’s dead simple at this point to conclude that we’re on course for a massive financial accident. And a major ecological upheaval that will make it difficult, if not impossible, to feed everyone, too.
If we don’t change direction, dramatically and soon, those eventualities are about as close to guaranteed outcomes as you can get.
Will society make the necessary change in time? I doubt it. Don’t you?
Our signposts along the way for timing the arrival of the next crisis will come from closely tracking the pace of change in developments from here.
And for me, recent events have accelerated to the point that I’m no longer comfortable residing in my current location.
In Part 2, ALERT: Time To Relocate, I explain the factors compelling me to leave my community of 15+ years for a safer, more resilient and liberty-respecting location. And I share the qualities I’ve prioritized highest when evaluating the new property to relocate to.
Those who have followed me for years know that I very rarely issue Alerts. I only do so when I arrive at important conclusions that cause me to take major action in my own life.
The pace of change in world developments is now high enough for me to undertake big life change like this.
How about for you?
It’s The Pace Of Change That Kills You
And it has now sped up beyond our means to control it
A treasured member of my family is in the process of dying right now. She has lived a full, rich life; but her passing is a sad affair for us.
I’ve spent a lot of time recently with hospice workers. I’ve learned that they’re often asked by their patients, “How much time do I have left?”
While sometimes loathe to offer an answer, hospice staff can predict the timing of the end pretty accurately.
They do so by measuring by the changes they see. Or, more accurately, the pace of change in those changes.
Could a patient pick a book up off the floor in June, but not in July? If not, then their remaining time is likely to be measured in months.
Could they raise themselves out of a chair last week but not today? If not, then it may be only weeks until the end.
Are they losing function every day? Then death is likely just days away.
And so on, right through hours, minutes and seconds.
It is the pace of change that matters. Tracking the pace of change is as important as the actual changes themselves.
Both provide critical information about what’s going on, but it’s the pace that informs our timing predictions.
This is equally true for larger systems like economies and ecosystems.
The Pace Is Accelerating All Around Us
Losing a certain population of a given species over a million years is a very different proposition from losing the same number within just 40 years. Or even yearly, as now appears to be the case.
The years 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 each saw one or more Cat 5 hurricanes form in the Atlantic. This is the longest such stretch of years in the record books.
Dorian was absolutely brutal to the Bahamas; the damage was unprecedented and extreme. I simply cannot imagine the sustained horror of being pinned down by a Cat 5 for 36 hours as it brutally dismantled my home.
Like slow-moving Hurricane Harvey (not a Cat 5, but hugely damaging) Dorian just parked itself over the Bahamas and laid waste to all that lay beneath, churning like a massive blender.
Are monster storms that move slowly a new meteorological trend? Or has it simply been ‘bad luck’ to experience so many of late?
We don’t know yet. But there have only been 35 Cat 5 hurricanes in the past 100 years. However, at our current pace, there will be 125 such storms over the next century. That’s four times as many vs the past.
Negative Rates Multiplying At A Staggering Rate
Financially, the latest and most head-spinning change concerns the explosive proliferation of debts with negative interest rates.
Unheard of since the Mesopotamian invention of debt in 2,400 BC, negative interest rates have suddenly appeared on the financial landscape like a new mutant species, an invader without natural predators, gaining a sudden foothold and then spreading rapidly.
It’s as if a virulent chestnut blight landed in a virgin forest of corporate and sovereign debt.
From literally ‘none’ ten years ago, to more than $17 trillion now. And up from a ‘mere’ $6 trillion in the past ten months alone:
chart of growth in negative interest rate government debt
Is this a new, permanent trend? We don’t know yet.
But the pace of change is sure intensifying.
First, Switzerland gave negative rates a tentative go. Then Denmark timidly followed. But eventually, the entire Euro complex followed with gusto, with most countries’ rates crossing below the 0%-boundary in late 2014:
timeline of negative market interest rates
Whatever the final repercussions are, one fact is clear: the world’s central banks are completely, 100% responsible for these bizarro-world negative interest rates.
They try to pretend that the $20+ trillion money printing spree they engineered after 2008 isn’t a root cause. Instead, they claim “the markets” are responsible. But this is as weak a defense as Ted Bundy claiming his victims all killed themselves. It’s just not a credible defense.
Emboldened by seeing that nothing terribly bad happened in the early years of negative rates, the ECB went on an absolute tear of a printing spree in 2016 and 2017. It went so far as to buy corporate debt via private placement, meaning that the debt was never issued to the bond market. The ECB just conjured up the necessary billions of euros and directly credited corporate accounts while taking their bonds onto its books.
Again, it’s worth noting just how unusual this all is. It has never been done before.
5,000 years of accumulated knowledge is being chucked out the window by activist central bankers who assume they know best.
But do they? And what will be the repercussions if they don’t?
Economic And Social Vandalism
The financial media is working very, very hard to defuse concerns about negative rates and sell them as a talisman against anything that could hurt the economy.
They dutifully scribe down what the central bankers say, and then pitch it to us as gospel.
Instead, I propose that now is the time to ask stiff questions of the central bankers, and to not let them avoid answering. And to keep asking until we either receive reasonable responses, or clarify that they have no good answers to give.
Here are questions I would love to hear posed to Chairmen Powell, Draghi or Kuroda:
“Your actions were designed to spike the prices of stocks and bonds and you’ve succeeded. This has led to an enormous wealth gap. What’s ‘too far’ in your view? Right now 5 people have as much wealth as the bottom half, by which we mean 3.8 billion humans. Is ‘too far’ when those same five individuals own as much as the bottom 75%? The bottom 90%? Or is it your aim that these top five individuals should actually possess everything in the world with everyone in their debt?”
“5,000 years of financial trial and error has firmly established that saved capital deserves a positive rate of return. You are now certain that negative interest rates are what the world needs. What empirical data do you rely on to make that assessment? What happens if you’re wrong?”
“All investment decisions depend upon an assumed rate of return. Pensions, for example, require matching future liabilities with current assets and an assumed rate of return. Now that central banks are certain that negative yielding debt is just what the doctor ordered, and under the principle of “you break, it you buy it“, we’re wondering what responsibilities the central banks are prepared to assume here for broken pensions?”
“Same question as above, but for savers and endowments.”
“Money is not actual wealth, but a claim on real wealth. More importantly, it’s a social contract. Central bankers are monkeying with that social contract and the effects are obvious. Corporations are incentivized to make returns by financially engineering their balance sheets and rigging their share counts instead of taking actual risks, hiring more people, and investing in R&D. Can we not just take this all the way to the end and propose eliminating risk for everyone and just give everybody money without anyone performing any work at all? Obviously not, but we’re also obviously somewhere along that path. The question is, how far is ‘too far’ and what criteria are you using to determine that?”
“Endless growth is not possible on a finite planet. Your policies are all geared towards stoking the fastest economic growth possible. Do central banks have any responsibility to future generations and leaving behind a world worth inheriting?”
We deserve to know the answers to these — and a dozen other — questions. Why nobody in the press or Congress is asking any of them is a different story for another day.
While it’s possible that central bankers are competent, benevolent experts doing their best, it’s equally possible they are the largest economic and social vandals in all of history.
Given that possibility, the Overton Window really needs to be smashed wider, and quickly, so that we can get answers to those ‘impolite’ but necessary questions above. If it turns out that the central bankers have thoughtful, intelligent responses to them, then fine. We can debate the assumptions and data.
If, on the other hand, they get snippy and affronted by being challenged, then it will mean they have no good answers. It will unveil that they’re merely ‘winging it’ when literally everything is on the line.
It will mean, for the sake of ease and expediency, they’re basically dismantling a cultural heritage site as they scavenge for handy building materials. Turning architectural splendors into crude stone huts.
In other words, they’d be unmasked as economic and social vandals. Wrecking the infrastructure of financial knowledge and thousands of years of cultural arrangements simply because they are too intellectually lazy or too emotionally weak to do otherwise.
We Have To Be Our Own Rescuers
The Powers That Be, like central bankers and politicians, are just humans. They err. They have to operate with imperfect information.
But they are also mostly untrained in systems thinking, resource limits, and other such necessary fields — which they could correct for if they cared or dared.
But they aren’t. And because of this, the pace and the scope of the changes happening are beyond their powers of comprehension, let alone their powers to fix.
So many things are changing. And the rate of change is speeding up, too. It’s barely possible to fashion a comprehensive plan for what to do about it. It’s probably too much to expect that anyone in power would have the necessary broad-based systems thinking required to concoct a reasonable plan forward.
Someday we’ll begin to run out of fossil fuels, and we have no plan for that. We haven’t a clue what to do about the rapidly intensifying weather. Nobody knows how we’re going to grow enough food for 9 billion people when the phosphate runs out.
But instead of planning for these certain challenges, what are our leaders doing instead?
The central bankers are continuing to lower interest rates. Politicians squabble about marginal, ultimately unimportant distractions. And universities enforce spaces safe from micro-aggressions so that nobody is ever offended (leaving them woefully unprepared for what’s coming next).
Everybody is still busy doing the very same things that have moved us away from what has served us well for 5,000 years: positive interest rates and a stable climate.
The rate of change is accelerating. Things are speeding up. That’s how exponential systems behave. It’s not surprising to those who understanding it, but it’s shocking to behold.
It’s dead simple at this point to conclude that we’re on course for a massive financial accident. And a major ecological upheaval that will make it difficult, if not impossible, to feed everyone, too.
If we don’t change direction, dramatically and soon, those eventualities are about as close to guaranteed outcomes as you can get.
Will society make the necessary change in time? I doubt it. Don’t you?
Our signposts along the way for timing the arrival of the next crisis will come from closely tracking the pace of change in developments from here.
And for me, recent events have accelerated to the point that I’m no longer comfortable residing in my current location.
In Part 2, ALERT: Time To Relocate, I explain the factors compelling me to leave my community of 15+ years for a safer, more resilient and liberty-respecting location. And I share the qualities I’ve prioritized highest when evaluating the new property to relocate to.
Those who have followed me for years know that I very rarely issue Alerts. I only do so when I arrive at important conclusions that cause me to take major action in my own life.
The pace of change in world developments is now high enough for me to undertake big life change like this.
How about for you?
Thursday, September 5, 2019
SC196-8
https://truthout.org/articles/climate-crisis-forces-us-to-ask-to-what-do-we-devote-ourselves/
Climate Crisis Forces Us to Ask: To What Do We Devote Ourselves?
“The universe says
loss demands birth
and the two
are lovers.”
—Deena Metzger
During the times when I’m being as emotionally honest with myself as I’m capable — when I truly ponder the idea that this industrialized version of our species may well have already baked enough warming into Earth’s life-supporting biosphere that all of us may very well be on the way out — I feel at a total loss as to what to do.
From that point of numbness, my life force begins to ask, “What next, then?” Cycling through this process for years since I’ve been reporting on the climate crisis, and most intensely during the research and field trips for my book The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption, circumstances (namely my own grief and despair) have inevitably forced me into contending with my emotions.
I’ve learned, through a lot of pain and struggling, that the only way forward is to allow myself to deeply feel and express the fear, rage, shock, panic, sadness, anxiety and despair. Only then can I move into a place of taking some of the deep breaths which accompany acceptance of the grave situation at hand.
Uncompromised, uncompromising news
You, dear reader, who are paying such close attention to the unraveling of all that we know, must share in many of these feelings. When you see another of these grotesque, pasty-white iterations of humanity stuffed into a glossy suit, acting as nothing more than a fossil-fueled ventriloquist’s puppet, do you, like me, burn inside with rage, a rage that threatens to incinerate you? Do you fantasize of their demise? Of somehow bringing them, at least, a taste of the pain their soulless and heartless actions are bringing to the fish searching for food atop the bleached-out coral reefs? To show them the starving polar bears swimming for hundreds of miles to find no ice to rest upon? At these times, I wonder if any of these so-called humans can feel a goddamn thing anymore.
Do you feel the emptiness inside when you become aware of emperor penguin chicks drowning from collapsing ice resulting from planetary warming? Or the fear that comes when we understand our ability to feed ourselves is now very much under threat?
First: Accepting Reality
When you read of how 1.5 acres of rainforest are vanishing every, single, second, does your heart clench in fear? Or when the last of another of the rare frogs existing within said rainforest is lost from this world forever, do you shed the tears that come from a seemingly impotent sadness?
When you come to understand what co-founder of Extinction Rebellion Roger Hallam, himself a former organic farmer, has previously told the public, all of these feelings set in even more deeply. In the aforementioned lecture, to paraphrase Hallam, he pointed out how we have already warmed the planet 1.2 degrees Celsius (1.2°C). Based on observational data, we are easily within a decade of losing the summer sea ice in the Arctic. Within another decade, Earth will warm another .5°C due to the melting ice alone. There is already another .5°C warming to come from CO2 that has already been emitted but we’ve yet to experience the warming. The water vapor effect from these events (and other processes already in motion) doubles the impact of warming from other sources, adding another 1°C warming. Hence, at 3°C warming, most of the Amazon rainforest is lost, which in itself adds another 1.5°C of warming. At this point, most likely, Earth is tipped into a hothouse state, possibly into conditions that render it uninhabitable by humans.
Perhaps you might think this sounds too extreme, the stuff of science fiction. If so, consider this: the level of CO2 in the atmosphere today hasn’t been seen in 12 million years, and this level of greenhouse gas is rapidly bringing Earth back into the state it was in during the Eocene Epoch, 33 million years ago, when there was no ice on either of the poles.
I wonder if any of these so-called humans can feel a goddamn thing anymore.
At that point, there was very little temperature difference between the poles and the equator, according to Harvard University Professor James Anderson, who is best known for establishing that chlorofluorocarbons were damaging the ozone layer, in an interview with Forbes magazine.
“The ocean was running almost 10ºC warmer all the way to the bottom than it is today,” Anderson said, “and the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere would have meant that storm systems would be violent in the extreme, because water vapor, which is an exponential function of water temperature, is the gasoline that fuels the frequency and intensity of storm systems.”
He warned of the folly of those who believe we can recover from this track we are on simply by reducing CO2 emissions — unless we undertake a deeply radical transformation of industry and the economic system, coupled with halting carbon emissions alongside removing what is already in the atmosphere, all within five years’ time.
“The chance that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero,” Anderson said, while reminding us that 75 to 80 percent of the permanent ice has already melted in just the last 35 years.
Anderson warned that people have failed to come to grips with this, along with the pending collapse of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which by itself will raise sea levels seven meters.
“When you look at the irreversibility and you study the numbers, this along with the moral issue is what keeps you up at night,” Anderson said.
Second: How Shall We Be?
“My sense is that only seldom is the problem that we “don’t know” — or, at any rate, that we don’t know enough,” Chris Goode, author of The Forest and the Field, has written. “The real problem is that we don’t have a living-space in which to fully know what we know, in which to confront that knowledge and respond to it emotionally without immediately becoming entrenched in a position of fear, denial and hopelessness.”
On Earth Day I was part of a panel at the Brooklyn Historical Society. The panel discussion, titled “Chroniclers of the Climate Apocalypse,” was comprised of climate journalist Oliver Milman, climate and health reporter Sheri Fink, and myself.
It is imperative to do what we can to protect the planet, even without a guarantee of success.
During the Q and A session, someone asked me a question along the lines of this: “What do you do, Dahr, or how are you being, with the grieving that comes from how far along we already are?”
I laughed dryly, thought for a brief moment, and then answered honestly: “I don’t know? I get to figure it out all over each day. Each time I give one of my book readings, it is different, because I’m having to evolve every day.”
And that is my truth.
My unsettledness around the question arises for two reasons: One, it always forces me to look into my heart to answer, rather than my head, which means I must experience all of the emotions brought about by the crisis within which we all must live; secondly, when I do this the right way, each moment it shifts and I must live on those emotional front lines, caretaking myself alongside listening, deeply, for what I am called to do next for the planet.
For Roger Hallam, his 20 years of organic farming connected him deeply enough to Earth that when a series of climate-disruption-fueled floods made it impossible for him to continue, he knew what he needed to do: work on his Ph.D. research on the dynamics of political power with particular reference to radical campaign design.
He then co-founded Extinction Rebellion, a group that describes itself as “an international movement that uses non-violent civil disobedience to achieve radical change in order to minimize the risk of human extinction and ecological collapse.”
I asked Hallam why it is imperative for people to rebel.
“Life is short and all we really know is that it pays to live a good life — whatever happens,” he said. “And that means the golden rule — do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This rule is broken in the most grotesque way … particularly by way of what we are doing to our kids.”
To those who feel there is no point in rebelling or taking other actions for the betterment of the planet, who feel that all is lost, Hallam had this to say: “We are in this life to do good, not to bargain with outcomes that are out of our control, anyhow.”
In other words, it is imperative to do what we can to protect the planet, even without a guarantee of success.
Third: To What Are We Devoted?
By way of the corporate capitalist industrial growth culture within which most of us have been raised and immersed, we have become disconnected from the planet we are so deeply part of. This, I believe, is the root cause of the climate crisis we now find ourselves in. Hence, the first step toward answering the question of “how to be” during this time, which must be answered before any of us can decide “what to do,” is to connect ourselves back to the planet. For we cannot begin to walk until our feet are on the ground.
Each day I wake and begin to process the daily news of the climate catastrophe and the global political tilt into overt fascism. The associated trauma, grief, rage and despair that come from all of this draws me back to the work of Stan Rushworth, Cherokee elder, activist and scholar, who has guided much of my own thinking about how to move forward. Rushworth has reminded me that while Western colonialist culture believes in “rights,” many Indigenous cultures teach of “obligations” that we are born into: obligations to those who came before, to those who will come after, and to the Earth itself.
Hence, when the grief and rage threaten to consume me, I now orient myself around the question, “What are my obligations?” In other words, “From this moment on, knowing what is happening to the planet, to what do I devote my life?“
Each of us must ask ourselves this question every day, as we face down catastrophe.
Climate Crisis Forces Us to Ask: To What Do We Devote Ourselves?
“The universe says
loss demands birth
and the two
are lovers.”
—Deena Metzger
During the times when I’m being as emotionally honest with myself as I’m capable — when I truly ponder the idea that this industrialized version of our species may well have already baked enough warming into Earth’s life-supporting biosphere that all of us may very well be on the way out — I feel at a total loss as to what to do.
From that point of numbness, my life force begins to ask, “What next, then?” Cycling through this process for years since I’ve been reporting on the climate crisis, and most intensely during the research and field trips for my book The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption, circumstances (namely my own grief and despair) have inevitably forced me into contending with my emotions.
I’ve learned, through a lot of pain and struggling, that the only way forward is to allow myself to deeply feel and express the fear, rage, shock, panic, sadness, anxiety and despair. Only then can I move into a place of taking some of the deep breaths which accompany acceptance of the grave situation at hand.
Uncompromised, uncompromising news
You, dear reader, who are paying such close attention to the unraveling of all that we know, must share in many of these feelings. When you see another of these grotesque, pasty-white iterations of humanity stuffed into a glossy suit, acting as nothing more than a fossil-fueled ventriloquist’s puppet, do you, like me, burn inside with rage, a rage that threatens to incinerate you? Do you fantasize of their demise? Of somehow bringing them, at least, a taste of the pain their soulless and heartless actions are bringing to the fish searching for food atop the bleached-out coral reefs? To show them the starving polar bears swimming for hundreds of miles to find no ice to rest upon? At these times, I wonder if any of these so-called humans can feel a goddamn thing anymore.
Do you feel the emptiness inside when you become aware of emperor penguin chicks drowning from collapsing ice resulting from planetary warming? Or the fear that comes when we understand our ability to feed ourselves is now very much under threat?
First: Accepting Reality
When you read of how 1.5 acres of rainforest are vanishing every, single, second, does your heart clench in fear? Or when the last of another of the rare frogs existing within said rainforest is lost from this world forever, do you shed the tears that come from a seemingly impotent sadness?
When you come to understand what co-founder of Extinction Rebellion Roger Hallam, himself a former organic farmer, has previously told the public, all of these feelings set in even more deeply. In the aforementioned lecture, to paraphrase Hallam, he pointed out how we have already warmed the planet 1.2 degrees Celsius (1.2°C). Based on observational data, we are easily within a decade of losing the summer sea ice in the Arctic. Within another decade, Earth will warm another .5°C due to the melting ice alone. There is already another .5°C warming to come from CO2 that has already been emitted but we’ve yet to experience the warming. The water vapor effect from these events (and other processes already in motion) doubles the impact of warming from other sources, adding another 1°C warming. Hence, at 3°C warming, most of the Amazon rainforest is lost, which in itself adds another 1.5°C of warming. At this point, most likely, Earth is tipped into a hothouse state, possibly into conditions that render it uninhabitable by humans.
Perhaps you might think this sounds too extreme, the stuff of science fiction. If so, consider this: the level of CO2 in the atmosphere today hasn’t been seen in 12 million years, and this level of greenhouse gas is rapidly bringing Earth back into the state it was in during the Eocene Epoch, 33 million years ago, when there was no ice on either of the poles.
I wonder if any of these so-called humans can feel a goddamn thing anymore.
At that point, there was very little temperature difference between the poles and the equator, according to Harvard University Professor James Anderson, who is best known for establishing that chlorofluorocarbons were damaging the ozone layer, in an interview with Forbes magazine.
“The ocean was running almost 10ºC warmer all the way to the bottom than it is today,” Anderson said, “and the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere would have meant that storm systems would be violent in the extreme, because water vapor, which is an exponential function of water temperature, is the gasoline that fuels the frequency and intensity of storm systems.”
He warned of the folly of those who believe we can recover from this track we are on simply by reducing CO2 emissions — unless we undertake a deeply radical transformation of industry and the economic system, coupled with halting carbon emissions alongside removing what is already in the atmosphere, all within five years’ time.
“The chance that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero,” Anderson said, while reminding us that 75 to 80 percent of the permanent ice has already melted in just the last 35 years.
Anderson warned that people have failed to come to grips with this, along with the pending collapse of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which by itself will raise sea levels seven meters.
“When you look at the irreversibility and you study the numbers, this along with the moral issue is what keeps you up at night,” Anderson said.
Second: How Shall We Be?
“My sense is that only seldom is the problem that we “don’t know” — or, at any rate, that we don’t know enough,” Chris Goode, author of The Forest and the Field, has written. “The real problem is that we don’t have a living-space in which to fully know what we know, in which to confront that knowledge and respond to it emotionally without immediately becoming entrenched in a position of fear, denial and hopelessness.”
On Earth Day I was part of a panel at the Brooklyn Historical Society. The panel discussion, titled “Chroniclers of the Climate Apocalypse,” was comprised of climate journalist Oliver Milman, climate and health reporter Sheri Fink, and myself.
It is imperative to do what we can to protect the planet, even without a guarantee of success.
During the Q and A session, someone asked me a question along the lines of this: “What do you do, Dahr, or how are you being, with the grieving that comes from how far along we already are?”
I laughed dryly, thought for a brief moment, and then answered honestly: “I don’t know? I get to figure it out all over each day. Each time I give one of my book readings, it is different, because I’m having to evolve every day.”
And that is my truth.
My unsettledness around the question arises for two reasons: One, it always forces me to look into my heart to answer, rather than my head, which means I must experience all of the emotions brought about by the crisis within which we all must live; secondly, when I do this the right way, each moment it shifts and I must live on those emotional front lines, caretaking myself alongside listening, deeply, for what I am called to do next for the planet.
For Roger Hallam, his 20 years of organic farming connected him deeply enough to Earth that when a series of climate-disruption-fueled floods made it impossible for him to continue, he knew what he needed to do: work on his Ph.D. research on the dynamics of political power with particular reference to radical campaign design.
He then co-founded Extinction Rebellion, a group that describes itself as “an international movement that uses non-violent civil disobedience to achieve radical change in order to minimize the risk of human extinction and ecological collapse.”
I asked Hallam why it is imperative for people to rebel.
“Life is short and all we really know is that it pays to live a good life — whatever happens,” he said. “And that means the golden rule — do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This rule is broken in the most grotesque way … particularly by way of what we are doing to our kids.”
To those who feel there is no point in rebelling or taking other actions for the betterment of the planet, who feel that all is lost, Hallam had this to say: “We are in this life to do good, not to bargain with outcomes that are out of our control, anyhow.”
In other words, it is imperative to do what we can to protect the planet, even without a guarantee of success.
Third: To What Are We Devoted?
By way of the corporate capitalist industrial growth culture within which most of us have been raised and immersed, we have become disconnected from the planet we are so deeply part of. This, I believe, is the root cause of the climate crisis we now find ourselves in. Hence, the first step toward answering the question of “how to be” during this time, which must be answered before any of us can decide “what to do,” is to connect ourselves back to the planet. For we cannot begin to walk until our feet are on the ground.
Each day I wake and begin to process the daily news of the climate catastrophe and the global political tilt into overt fascism. The associated trauma, grief, rage and despair that come from all of this draws me back to the work of Stan Rushworth, Cherokee elder, activist and scholar, who has guided much of my own thinking about how to move forward. Rushworth has reminded me that while Western colonialist culture believes in “rights,” many Indigenous cultures teach of “obligations” that we are born into: obligations to those who came before, to those who will come after, and to the Earth itself.
Hence, when the grief and rage threaten to consume me, I now orient myself around the question, “What are my obligations?” In other words, “From this moment on, knowing what is happening to the planet, to what do I devote my life?“
Each of us must ask ourselves this question every day, as we face down catastrophe.
Wednesday, September 4, 2019
SC196-7
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-last-act-of-the-human-comedy/
The Last Act of the Human Comedy
There is nothing new to our story. The flagrant lies and imbecilities of the inept and corrupt leader. The inability to halt the costly, endless wars and curb the gargantuan expenditures on the military. The looting of a beleaguered populace by the rich. The destruction of the ecosystem. The decay and abandonment of a once-efficient infrastructure. The implosion of the institutions, from education to diplomacy, that sustain a functioning state. The world has seen it before. It is the familiar disease of the end of a civilization. At first it is grimly entertaining, even amid the mounting suffering. But no one will be laughing at the end.
Human nature does not change. It follows its familiar and cyclical patterns. Yes, this time, when we go down the whole planet will go with us. But until then we will be mesmerized by fools and con artists. What are demagogues like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, positive psychologists and Candide-like prognosticators such as Steven Pinker other than charlatans who insist the tragedy facing us is not real? What are the technocrats and scientists arguing that education and Western civilization can turn us into rational beings other than shamans? What are the corporate titans who make their fortunes off the arms, chemical, fossil fuel and animal agriculture industries that are destroying the natural world other than high priests demanding human sacrifice?
There is one human story. Dressed in new clothing and using new tools, we endlessly relive it. If we still read philosophy, literature, history, poetry and theology we would not be surprised that greed, hedonism and hubris have easily defeated empathy and reason. But because we do not, because we spend hours each day getting little bursts of dopamine from electronic screens, we think we are unique in human existence. We are unable to see that the climate conditions that allowed civilizations to flourish during the last 10,000 years will soon be replaced by a savage struggle to survive.
Human beings have inhabited the planet for about 200,000 of its 4.5 billion years. For most of those 200,000 years, humans did not radically alter the ecosystem. But the Industrial Revolution, which began about two and a half centuries ago, saw human beings extract fossil fuels, tapping into a hundred million years of sunlight stored in the form of coal and petroleum. The energy from fossil fuels provided unparalleled wealth and military superiority to the planet’s industrialized north, which used its power to subjugate most of the rest of the globe to cheaply extract resources and abuse cheap labor. The human population rapidly climbed to over 7 billion. The air, water and ice have seriously degraded under the onslaught as the planet shifts from one climate to another, a climate that will no longer be hospitable to human habitation.
The only existential question left is how we will choose to wait out the finale. But to pose that question is to defy the cultural mania for hope, the yearning for collective self-delusion. If reality is grim, you banish it. You invent impossible scenarios of inevitable salvation. Which explains how we ended up where we are.
Most of the climate activists and operatives of democracy see themselves, like the wider consumer culture, as being in the business of selling hope. Without hope, they argue, people would succumb to despair. People would not resist the looming catastrophe. Of course, the opposite is true. Hope, or rather false hope, exacerbates despair and lethargy. It infantilizes the population. Carbon emissions may continue to rise, the polar ice caps may continue to melt, crop yields may continue to decline, the world’s forests may continue to burn, coastal cities may continue to sink under rising seas and droughts may continue to wipe out fertile farmlands, but the messiahs of hope assure us that all will be right in the end. Only it won’t. We will not be able to adapt. Those who sell you the false hope that we can adapt are as self-deluded as those who brand global warming a hoax. And, at least subconsciously, many people know it.
The longer we publicly deny the bleak reality before us and privately cope with our existential dread and pain, the more crippling despair becomes. This schizophrenic existence is a form of emotional abuse. It is imposed on us by a dominant culture that will not allow us to speak this tragic truth. This censorship forces us to struggle with reality in solitude....
The Last Act of the Human Comedy
There is nothing new to our story. The flagrant lies and imbecilities of the inept and corrupt leader. The inability to halt the costly, endless wars and curb the gargantuan expenditures on the military. The looting of a beleaguered populace by the rich. The destruction of the ecosystem. The decay and abandonment of a once-efficient infrastructure. The implosion of the institutions, from education to diplomacy, that sustain a functioning state. The world has seen it before. It is the familiar disease of the end of a civilization. At first it is grimly entertaining, even amid the mounting suffering. But no one will be laughing at the end.
Human nature does not change. It follows its familiar and cyclical patterns. Yes, this time, when we go down the whole planet will go with us. But until then we will be mesmerized by fools and con artists. What are demagogues like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, positive psychologists and Candide-like prognosticators such as Steven Pinker other than charlatans who insist the tragedy facing us is not real? What are the technocrats and scientists arguing that education and Western civilization can turn us into rational beings other than shamans? What are the corporate titans who make their fortunes off the arms, chemical, fossil fuel and animal agriculture industries that are destroying the natural world other than high priests demanding human sacrifice?
There is one human story. Dressed in new clothing and using new tools, we endlessly relive it. If we still read philosophy, literature, history, poetry and theology we would not be surprised that greed, hedonism and hubris have easily defeated empathy and reason. But because we do not, because we spend hours each day getting little bursts of dopamine from electronic screens, we think we are unique in human existence. We are unable to see that the climate conditions that allowed civilizations to flourish during the last 10,000 years will soon be replaced by a savage struggle to survive.
Human beings have inhabited the planet for about 200,000 of its 4.5 billion years. For most of those 200,000 years, humans did not radically alter the ecosystem. But the Industrial Revolution, which began about two and a half centuries ago, saw human beings extract fossil fuels, tapping into a hundred million years of sunlight stored in the form of coal and petroleum. The energy from fossil fuels provided unparalleled wealth and military superiority to the planet’s industrialized north, which used its power to subjugate most of the rest of the globe to cheaply extract resources and abuse cheap labor. The human population rapidly climbed to over 7 billion. The air, water and ice have seriously degraded under the onslaught as the planet shifts from one climate to another, a climate that will no longer be hospitable to human habitation.
The only existential question left is how we will choose to wait out the finale. But to pose that question is to defy the cultural mania for hope, the yearning for collective self-delusion. If reality is grim, you banish it. You invent impossible scenarios of inevitable salvation. Which explains how we ended up where we are.
Most of the climate activists and operatives of democracy see themselves, like the wider consumer culture, as being in the business of selling hope. Without hope, they argue, people would succumb to despair. People would not resist the looming catastrophe. Of course, the opposite is true. Hope, or rather false hope, exacerbates despair and lethargy. It infantilizes the population. Carbon emissions may continue to rise, the polar ice caps may continue to melt, crop yields may continue to decline, the world’s forests may continue to burn, coastal cities may continue to sink under rising seas and droughts may continue to wipe out fertile farmlands, but the messiahs of hope assure us that all will be right in the end. Only it won’t. We will not be able to adapt. Those who sell you the false hope that we can adapt are as self-deluded as those who brand global warming a hoax. And, at least subconsciously, many people know it.
The longer we publicly deny the bleak reality before us and privately cope with our existential dread and pain, the more crippling despair becomes. This schizophrenic existence is a form of emotional abuse. It is imposed on us by a dominant culture that will not allow us to speak this tragic truth. This censorship forces us to struggle with reality in solitude....
Tuesday, September 3, 2019
SC196-6
https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2019/09/03/humans-are-creating-their-own-narratives/
Humans Are Creating Their Own Narratives
Somewhere between the arrest of Jeffrey Epstein and his extremely suspicious death in a Department of Justice operated prison, the public learned that an FBI intelligence bulletin published by the bureau’s Phoenix field office mentioned for the first time that conspiracy theories pose a domestic terrorism threat. This was followed up last week by a Bloomberg article discussing a new project by the U.S. military (DARPA) to identify fake news and disinformation.
We learned:
Fake news and social media posts are such a threat to U.S. security that the Defense Department is launching a project to repel “large-scale, automated disinformation attacks,” as the top Republican in Congress blocks efforts to protect the integrity of elections.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency wants custom software that can unearth fakes hidden among more than 500,000 stories, photos, videos and audio clips. If successful, the system after four years of trials may expand to detect malicious intent and prevent viral fake news from polarizing society.
Recall that after the 2016 election, focus was on social media companies and we saw tremendous pressure placed on these platforms by national security state politicians and distressed Democrats to “do something” about the supposed fake news epidemic. Fast forward three years and it’s now apparently the U.S. military’s job to police human content on the internet. This is the sort of natural regression a society will witness so long as it puts up with incremental censorship and the demonization of any thought which goes agains the official narrative.
Before we dissect what’s really going on, allow me to point out the glaringly obvious, which is that politicians, pundits, mass media and the U.S. military don’t actually care about the societal harm of fake news or conspiracy theories. We know this based on how the media sold government lies in order to advocate for the Iraq war, and how many of the biggest proponents of that blatant war crime have gone on to spectacularly lucrative careers in subsequent years. There were zero consequences, proving the point that this has nothing to do with the dangers of fake news or conspiracy theories, and everything to do with protecting the establishment grip on narrative creation and propagation.
The above tweet summarizes what’s really going on. It’s a provable fact that the harm caused by some crazy person reacting to viral “fake news” on social media doesn’t compare with the destruction and criminality perpetrated by oligarchs like Jeffrey Epstein, or governments which destroy entire countries and murder millions without flinching. It’s the extremely wealthy and powerful, as a consequence of their societal status and influence, who are in a position to do the most harm. This isn’t debatable, yet the U.S. military and media don’t seem particularly bothered by this sort of thing. What really keeps them up at night is a realization that the powerless masses of humanity are suddenly talking to one another across borders and coming to their own conclusions about how the world works. You’re supposed to be told what to think, not to think for yourself.
This is what the power structure’s really worried about. It’s terrified that billions of people are now in direct, instantaneous communication with one another and thinking independently about world events. The mass media’s freakout over the election of Donald Trump was never rooted in concerns about the man and his specific policies. What really bothered them was his election proved they no longer matter. Enough people simply ignored the media’s instructions to suck it up and go vote for Hillary Clinton. This repudiation and loss of control was devastating and terrifying for U.S. media personalities and their bosses.
At this point, it’s important to note that what’s happening is exactly what you’d expect after half the people on earth come online and start talking to one another in the midst of an oligarch-fueled epidemic of gangsterism masquerading as democratic government. The advent of the internet created the conditions for cross-border, near instantaneous, peer-to-peer human communication for the first time in history.
We’re still in the very early stages of discovering what it means to live in such a world, but what you’d expect to emerge is precisely what we’ve seen. We see countless streams of diverse narratives emerging to explain what’s happening around us and how power really operates. Humans are no longer accepting the narratives force-fed to them via mass media channels, and are instead talking directly to one another and creating their own narratives. This is exactly how it should be.
Meanwhile, into this increasingly disruptive environment comes the Epstein affair, which I consider another major inflection point in the public’s increased and justified cynicism about the establishment. While the mass media swallows the increasingly clownish official story hook, line and sinker, the public simply isn’t buying it according to recent polls. The most recent one from Emerson College showed that more people think he was murdered than think he committed suicide.
Alternative narratives are openly, and often successfully, competing with the spoon-fed narratives of mass media. Increased numbers are coming to understand that those who craft official narratives (government, mass media, billionaires) have their own interests, and those interests are typically not aligned with the interests of most people. There’s no reason to trust anything mass media or government says, because both groups are dominated by proven liars and war mongers. This obviously doesn’t mean you should believe everything you read online, but we must maintain perspective. Fake news from powerless citizens doesn’t compete with fake news from the government when it comes to disastrous consequences, yet the focus is always centered on the former and never the latter.
There’s a reason the U.S. military is suddenly talking about fighting fake news and disinformation, and the reason is the power structure is terrified of humans talking to each another and coming to their own conclusions. Moreover, this isn’t limited to an interpretation of world events. The emergence and success of Bitcoin represents a global movement of humans propagating an alternative narrative about money, how it could and how it should work. The longer human beings are allowed to freely talk to one another, the more likely they are to reject official narratives and shape society in a more sane manner. This represents an existential threat to the power structure. And they know it.
It’s also why CNN anchor Chris Cuomo instructed his viewers to not pay attention to those who were closest to Jeffrey Epstein.
Now the good news. I think the cat’s already out of the bag. People aren’t going back to simply swallowing official narratives regurgitated by some television mannequin with makeup and an expensive suit who’s being paid by a billionaire. This doesn’t mean there won’t be a fight, in fact, we’re already in it.
Going forward, I suspect the narrative managers will more aggressively label anyone who doesn’t toe the official line as somehow linked to or sympathetic with foreign governments. They won’t offer any proof, but they’ll claim it authoritatively. This will become an increasingly potent weapon as governments begin to more intensely scapegoat foreign nations as the root of all our problems. We’ve already seen this since the 2016 election, but I expect it to increase in frequency and force.
As such, it’s going to be increasingly important for all of us to retain control of our minds and emotions as much as possible. We must never forget the importance of critical thinking, and must adamantly defend the right of humans to talk to one another freely and come to our own conclusions. We must never forget how preposterous it is to assume media giants owned by billionaires have any interest in telling us the truth about anything.
So keep writing, keep talking, keep thinking and never lose sight of the big picture....
Humans Are Creating Their Own Narratives
Somewhere between the arrest of Jeffrey Epstein and his extremely suspicious death in a Department of Justice operated prison, the public learned that an FBI intelligence bulletin published by the bureau’s Phoenix field office mentioned for the first time that conspiracy theories pose a domestic terrorism threat. This was followed up last week by a Bloomberg article discussing a new project by the U.S. military (DARPA) to identify fake news and disinformation.
We learned:
Fake news and social media posts are such a threat to U.S. security that the Defense Department is launching a project to repel “large-scale, automated disinformation attacks,” as the top Republican in Congress blocks efforts to protect the integrity of elections.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency wants custom software that can unearth fakes hidden among more than 500,000 stories, photos, videos and audio clips. If successful, the system after four years of trials may expand to detect malicious intent and prevent viral fake news from polarizing society.
Recall that after the 2016 election, focus was on social media companies and we saw tremendous pressure placed on these platforms by national security state politicians and distressed Democrats to “do something” about the supposed fake news epidemic. Fast forward three years and it’s now apparently the U.S. military’s job to police human content on the internet. This is the sort of natural regression a society will witness so long as it puts up with incremental censorship and the demonization of any thought which goes agains the official narrative.
Before we dissect what’s really going on, allow me to point out the glaringly obvious, which is that politicians, pundits, mass media and the U.S. military don’t actually care about the societal harm of fake news or conspiracy theories. We know this based on how the media sold government lies in order to advocate for the Iraq war, and how many of the biggest proponents of that blatant war crime have gone on to spectacularly lucrative careers in subsequent years. There were zero consequences, proving the point that this has nothing to do with the dangers of fake news or conspiracy theories, and everything to do with protecting the establishment grip on narrative creation and propagation.
The above tweet summarizes what’s really going on. It’s a provable fact that the harm caused by some crazy person reacting to viral “fake news” on social media doesn’t compare with the destruction and criminality perpetrated by oligarchs like Jeffrey Epstein, or governments which destroy entire countries and murder millions without flinching. It’s the extremely wealthy and powerful, as a consequence of their societal status and influence, who are in a position to do the most harm. This isn’t debatable, yet the U.S. military and media don’t seem particularly bothered by this sort of thing. What really keeps them up at night is a realization that the powerless masses of humanity are suddenly talking to one another across borders and coming to their own conclusions about how the world works. You’re supposed to be told what to think, not to think for yourself.
This is what the power structure’s really worried about. It’s terrified that billions of people are now in direct, instantaneous communication with one another and thinking independently about world events. The mass media’s freakout over the election of Donald Trump was never rooted in concerns about the man and his specific policies. What really bothered them was his election proved they no longer matter. Enough people simply ignored the media’s instructions to suck it up and go vote for Hillary Clinton. This repudiation and loss of control was devastating and terrifying for U.S. media personalities and their bosses.
At this point, it’s important to note that what’s happening is exactly what you’d expect after half the people on earth come online and start talking to one another in the midst of an oligarch-fueled epidemic of gangsterism masquerading as democratic government. The advent of the internet created the conditions for cross-border, near instantaneous, peer-to-peer human communication for the first time in history.
We’re still in the very early stages of discovering what it means to live in such a world, but what you’d expect to emerge is precisely what we’ve seen. We see countless streams of diverse narratives emerging to explain what’s happening around us and how power really operates. Humans are no longer accepting the narratives force-fed to them via mass media channels, and are instead talking directly to one another and creating their own narratives. This is exactly how it should be.
Meanwhile, into this increasingly disruptive environment comes the Epstein affair, which I consider another major inflection point in the public’s increased and justified cynicism about the establishment. While the mass media swallows the increasingly clownish official story hook, line and sinker, the public simply isn’t buying it according to recent polls. The most recent one from Emerson College showed that more people think he was murdered than think he committed suicide.
Alternative narratives are openly, and often successfully, competing with the spoon-fed narratives of mass media. Increased numbers are coming to understand that those who craft official narratives (government, mass media, billionaires) have their own interests, and those interests are typically not aligned with the interests of most people. There’s no reason to trust anything mass media or government says, because both groups are dominated by proven liars and war mongers. This obviously doesn’t mean you should believe everything you read online, but we must maintain perspective. Fake news from powerless citizens doesn’t compete with fake news from the government when it comes to disastrous consequences, yet the focus is always centered on the former and never the latter.
There’s a reason the U.S. military is suddenly talking about fighting fake news and disinformation, and the reason is the power structure is terrified of humans talking to each another and coming to their own conclusions. Moreover, this isn’t limited to an interpretation of world events. The emergence and success of Bitcoin represents a global movement of humans propagating an alternative narrative about money, how it could and how it should work. The longer human beings are allowed to freely talk to one another, the more likely they are to reject official narratives and shape society in a more sane manner. This represents an existential threat to the power structure. And they know it.
It’s also why CNN anchor Chris Cuomo instructed his viewers to not pay attention to those who were closest to Jeffrey Epstein.
Now the good news. I think the cat’s already out of the bag. People aren’t going back to simply swallowing official narratives regurgitated by some television mannequin with makeup and an expensive suit who’s being paid by a billionaire. This doesn’t mean there won’t be a fight, in fact, we’re already in it.
Going forward, I suspect the narrative managers will more aggressively label anyone who doesn’t toe the official line as somehow linked to or sympathetic with foreign governments. They won’t offer any proof, but they’ll claim it authoritatively. This will become an increasingly potent weapon as governments begin to more intensely scapegoat foreign nations as the root of all our problems. We’ve already seen this since the 2016 election, but I expect it to increase in frequency and force.
As such, it’s going to be increasingly important for all of us to retain control of our minds and emotions as much as possible. We must never forget the importance of critical thinking, and must adamantly defend the right of humans to talk to one another freely and come to our own conclusions. We must never forget how preposterous it is to assume media giants owned by billionaires have any interest in telling us the truth about anything.
So keep writing, keep talking, keep thinking and never lose sight of the big picture....
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