http://ricefarmer.blogspot.com/
Energy Supply System Requirements
In a few posts I’ve briefly touched upon the three basic requirements (as I see them) for any energy supply system which sustains a society, state, empire, or civilization, but I have always felt the need to describe it in a bit more detail and in a more formal manner. Such is the purpose of this post. The three requirements are:
1. The system must be self-sustaining. That is, it must pay its own day-to-day running costs.
2. The system must be self-replicating. That is, it must provide the energy for building (and rebuilding/replacing) its own physical infrastructure. These costs are capital expenditures, as opposed to running costs.
3. After satisfying requirements #1 and #2, the system must still have surplus energy with which to power the socioeconomic system.
Corollary to #3: The amount of surplus energy supplied to society determines what kind of society/civilization is possible. For example, civilizations based on wood and charcoal will be totally different from, and primitive in comparison with, those based on denser forms of energy such as fossil fuels.
This helps explain why industrial civilization is tanking. Not all fossil fuels are created equal, and we are steadily moving from higher-quality, easy-to-extract fossil fuels to lower-quality, hard-to-extract fossil fuels. This transition gradually decreases surplus energy (#3) because there is progressively less surplus energy left after covering the costs in #1 and #2. The situation gets increasingly desperate, as illustrated by, for example, shale oil, which is not even economically viable. Another example would be biofuels, which — because of their low EROI values — cannot satisfy even requirement #1. In other words, if biofuels produced in the first cycle were used to power the machinery, trucks, and biofuel production facilities in the second cycle, the biofuels would run out during the production process, leaving no energy for requirements #2 and #3.
This also casts a dark cloud over renewables like wind and solar. Intermittency, variability, and the need for storage, overbuilding, and vast tracts of land, as well as other problems, lead me to believe that they cannot satisfy the three requirements, or at least that they cannot supply enough surplus energy to maintain civilization at this level. And if civilization cannot be maintained at this level, that is bad news for renewables because their infrastructure is built by the industrial system.
Another factor is the key difference between fossil fuels and renewables. FFs are actually biofuels created by natural forces. Nature produced the organic materials which served as the feedstock for FFs, gathered them up in colossal quantities, put them in gigantic pressure cookers, and let them stew for millennia. When humans appeared on the Earth, they were already finished. All we have to do is extract them from their underground containers and perform the final processing. Because our energy input is relatively small, the FF energy supply system has yielded a fabulously huge amount of surplus energy. And that is the prodigious power that built our globe-straddling industrial civilization.
On the other hand, to make biofuels such as ethanol and biodiesel we must do all that work ourselves. Nature’s only input is sunlight (in the case of FFs, geological forces did the rest), so we have to produce and harvest the feedstock ourselves. As such, our energy inputs are so large that there is much less surplus energy, and in some cases none at all! As I have conceived it, therefore, biofuels are a complete waste of the FF energy used to satisfy requirements #2 and #3. In terms of this energy system, the sensible thing to do is directly use the FFs, and forget about biofuels. The real test of any energy source or combination of sources is not its EROI, but whether it can satisfy the three requirements given above. In other words, it either pulls its own weight (requirements #1 and #2) and supplies surplus energy to society (requirement #3), or it’s simply not an energy source. Many people will say that technological improvements will be made, and they are likely correct. But no matter what improvements are made, they will not cause nature to magically do most of the work for us, as it did with FFs; we still need to supply the inputs ourselves, which means that renewables can never match FFs with regard to requirement #3, i.e., in supplying society with such a large amount of surplus energy.
Many people insist that we can completely stop using fossil fuels, and power civilization as we know it on renewables alone. Think about that for a minute. Renewable-energy hardware is currently made with FFs, but we are supposedly going to operate, build, and replace all those solar and wind farms, hydroelectric dams, and other energy-producing facilities and equipment with their energy alone, and still have plenty of energy left over to live the high life. I propose that if and when we actually try to do this, we shall find that even if all three requirements are met (which I strongly doubt), the amount of surplus energy will not be big enough to maintain what we have already built. In light of the corollary to #3, that is a very serious problem. It means a long downhill slide to a much simpler lifestyle. As Richard Heinberg would say, the party’s over.
Finally, there are several peripheral items I would like to briefly touch upon.
1. I have frequently mentioned “net energy decline.” Net energy is simply a system’s “energy take-home pay” after paying the system’s energy costs. Those costs are requirements #1 and #2. And the “take-home” portion is the surplus energy left to run the economy.
2. Governments and military forces all know that FFs, not renewables, will power the victors. Thus the focus on controlling major oil fields.
3. We often hear that new technologies are going to bless us with new sources of energy, i.e., technology begets energy. I propose that it is actually the other way around. In other words, energy begets technology. Although I concede that technology does aid in obtaining more energy or new sources of energy, it’s important to realize that scientific discovery and technological advances are very highly dependent on the amount of energy we can lavish on research and development. I leave it to readers to imagine how different the world would be if humanity had never gotten beyond the photosynthetic ceiling, and we were still limited to biomass for energy.
4. Hydrogen is not an energy source!
Saturday, October 19, 2019
Friday, October 18, 2019
SC199-5
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/even-national-geographic-admits-billions-of-people-will-face-shortages-of-food-and-clean-water-over-the-next-30-years
National Geographic Admits Billions Of People Will “Face Shortages Of Food And Clean Water” Over The Next 30 Years
A lot of people out there don’t like when I write these kinds of articles, because they directly contradict the false narrative that humanity has an extremely bright future ahead. Sadly, the truth is that our planet and everything that lives on it is rapidly deteriorating. And I am not talking about the false environmentalism being pushed by the mainstream media, Greta Thunberg and countless well-funded NGOs. What I am talking about is the stuff that is happening right in our face. We are systematically poisoning our planet, thousands upon thousands of species are going extinct, and we are literally running out of all of our most important natural resources. There isn’t going to be enough of anything in the not too distant future. In fact, even National Geographic is admitting that up to five billion people could soon be facing “shortages of food and clean water”…
As many as five billion people, particularly in Africa and South Asia, are likely to face shortages of food and clean water in the coming decades as nature declines. Hundreds of millions more could be vulnerable to increased risks of severe coastal storms, according to the first-ever model examining how nature and humans can survive together.
“I hope no one is shocked that billions of people could be impacted by 2050,” says Rebecca Chaplin-Kramer a landscape ecologist at Stanford University. “We know we are dependent on nature for many things,” says Chaplin-Kramer, lead author of the paper “Global Modeling Of Nature’s Contributions To People” published in Science.
The clock is literally ticking for humanity, but meanwhile we spend immense amounts of energy on relatively meaningless political squabbles.
Look, the reality of the matter is that this is going to happen no matter which political party is in control of the White House. We are in very big trouble, and nobody really has any idea how we can possibly turn things around.
At this point, we are running out of topsoil at a staggering rate. In fact, we have already lost “nearly half of the most productive soil” within the last 150 years…
The world grows 95% of its food in the uppermost layer of soil, making topsoil one of the most important components of our food system. But thanks to conventional farming practices, nearly half of the most productive soil has disappeared in the world in the last 150 years, threatening crop yields and contributing to nutrient pollution, dead zones and erosion. In the US alone, soil on cropland is eroding 10 times faster than it can be replenished.
If we continue to degrade the soil at the rate we are now, the world could run out of topsoil in about 60 years, according to Maria-Helena Semedo of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization.
So do any of you have a viable plan for how we can stop losing our topsoil?
Because if nobody has a plan, mass starvation is an absolute certainty. Even if we found a way to save our topsoil, we aren’t going to have anyone to pollinate our crops because all of the insects are dying. I covered this phenomenon in a previous article entitled “Insect Species Are Rapidly Going Extinct Across The Globe – All Insects Could Be Gone ‘In 100 Years'”.
And without enough insects to eat, the bird population is rapidly declining as well. This is something that I wrote about in a previous article entitled “North America’s Bird Population Is Collapsing – Nearly 3 Billion Birds Have Been Wiped Out Since 1970”.
Despite all of our advanced technology, we can’t seem to do much of anything to stop the death and decay that we see all over the globe.
Even the human race is steadily deteriorating. Scientists tell us that humans are now smaller, shorter, weaker and dumber than our ancestors were thousands of years ago. Today, our genes contain tens of thousands of mistakes (mutations), and those mistakes are passed on to the next generation. And each new generation adds additional mistakes (mutations) to the gene pool, and so over time the number of mutations being passed on continues to grow. In virtually every case those mutations are harmful, and we have absolutely no way to stop this systematic decay of the human genome.
Literally, our planet and everything in it is falling apart.
Here in the western world, things may seem okay for the moment because our debt-fueled lifestyles and our advanced technology allow us to live fairly comfortable lives.
But things are already starting to change, and global events are accelerating at a pace that is very alarming. As the fabric of our society unravels (#ad), it is going to be imperative to have others that you can lean on for support.
Unfortunately, making friends is not something that most of us are very good at doing. In fact, one recent study discovered that the average American adult “hasn’t made a new friend in the last five years”…
Spending time in the company of good friends regularly has been shown to have a positive impact on health. But for many Americans, socializing in adulthood gets harder with age. A recent survey reveals that 45% of adults admit they find it hard to make new friends. In fact, the average adult hasn’t made a new friend in the last five years, according to the survey.
In this day and age, our screens have become our friends. We spend countless hours with our televisions, our phones and our computers. Meanwhile, many of us don’t have any idea how the people living right next door are doing.
One of the reasons why I write so many articles is because that is how I can reach the most people.
If the most effective way of waking people up was traveling the country and holding meetings, I would do it.
But these days it is exceedingly difficult to get people to leave their homes and go to a meeting. But once I publish this article on the Internet, it will be seen by enough people to easily fill a sports stadium.
The Internet is where the battle for hearts and minds is being won or lost, and we need to do all that we can to wake more people up.
Because the clock is ticking for humanity, and the destiny of billions hangs in the balance.
National Geographic Admits Billions Of People Will “Face Shortages Of Food And Clean Water” Over The Next 30 Years
A lot of people out there don’t like when I write these kinds of articles, because they directly contradict the false narrative that humanity has an extremely bright future ahead. Sadly, the truth is that our planet and everything that lives on it is rapidly deteriorating. And I am not talking about the false environmentalism being pushed by the mainstream media, Greta Thunberg and countless well-funded NGOs. What I am talking about is the stuff that is happening right in our face. We are systematically poisoning our planet, thousands upon thousands of species are going extinct, and we are literally running out of all of our most important natural resources. There isn’t going to be enough of anything in the not too distant future. In fact, even National Geographic is admitting that up to five billion people could soon be facing “shortages of food and clean water”…
As many as five billion people, particularly in Africa and South Asia, are likely to face shortages of food and clean water in the coming decades as nature declines. Hundreds of millions more could be vulnerable to increased risks of severe coastal storms, according to the first-ever model examining how nature and humans can survive together.
“I hope no one is shocked that billions of people could be impacted by 2050,” says Rebecca Chaplin-Kramer a landscape ecologist at Stanford University. “We know we are dependent on nature for many things,” says Chaplin-Kramer, lead author of the paper “Global Modeling Of Nature’s Contributions To People” published in Science.
The clock is literally ticking for humanity, but meanwhile we spend immense amounts of energy on relatively meaningless political squabbles.
Look, the reality of the matter is that this is going to happen no matter which political party is in control of the White House. We are in very big trouble, and nobody really has any idea how we can possibly turn things around.
At this point, we are running out of topsoil at a staggering rate. In fact, we have already lost “nearly half of the most productive soil” within the last 150 years…
The world grows 95% of its food in the uppermost layer of soil, making topsoil one of the most important components of our food system. But thanks to conventional farming practices, nearly half of the most productive soil has disappeared in the world in the last 150 years, threatening crop yields and contributing to nutrient pollution, dead zones and erosion. In the US alone, soil on cropland is eroding 10 times faster than it can be replenished.
If we continue to degrade the soil at the rate we are now, the world could run out of topsoil in about 60 years, according to Maria-Helena Semedo of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization.
So do any of you have a viable plan for how we can stop losing our topsoil?
Because if nobody has a plan, mass starvation is an absolute certainty. Even if we found a way to save our topsoil, we aren’t going to have anyone to pollinate our crops because all of the insects are dying. I covered this phenomenon in a previous article entitled “Insect Species Are Rapidly Going Extinct Across The Globe – All Insects Could Be Gone ‘In 100 Years'”.
And without enough insects to eat, the bird population is rapidly declining as well. This is something that I wrote about in a previous article entitled “North America’s Bird Population Is Collapsing – Nearly 3 Billion Birds Have Been Wiped Out Since 1970”.
Despite all of our advanced technology, we can’t seem to do much of anything to stop the death and decay that we see all over the globe.
Even the human race is steadily deteriorating. Scientists tell us that humans are now smaller, shorter, weaker and dumber than our ancestors were thousands of years ago. Today, our genes contain tens of thousands of mistakes (mutations), and those mistakes are passed on to the next generation. And each new generation adds additional mistakes (mutations) to the gene pool, and so over time the number of mutations being passed on continues to grow. In virtually every case those mutations are harmful, and we have absolutely no way to stop this systematic decay of the human genome.
Literally, our planet and everything in it is falling apart.
Here in the western world, things may seem okay for the moment because our debt-fueled lifestyles and our advanced technology allow us to live fairly comfortable lives.
But things are already starting to change, and global events are accelerating at a pace that is very alarming. As the fabric of our society unravels (#ad), it is going to be imperative to have others that you can lean on for support.
Unfortunately, making friends is not something that most of us are very good at doing. In fact, one recent study discovered that the average American adult “hasn’t made a new friend in the last five years”…
Spending time in the company of good friends regularly has been shown to have a positive impact on health. But for many Americans, socializing in adulthood gets harder with age. A recent survey reveals that 45% of adults admit they find it hard to make new friends. In fact, the average adult hasn’t made a new friend in the last five years, according to the survey.
In this day and age, our screens have become our friends. We spend countless hours with our televisions, our phones and our computers. Meanwhile, many of us don’t have any idea how the people living right next door are doing.
One of the reasons why I write so many articles is because that is how I can reach the most people.
If the most effective way of waking people up was traveling the country and holding meetings, I would do it.
But these days it is exceedingly difficult to get people to leave their homes and go to a meeting. But once I publish this article on the Internet, it will be seen by enough people to easily fill a sports stadium.
The Internet is where the battle for hearts and minds is being won or lost, and we need to do all that we can to wake more people up.
Because the clock is ticking for humanity, and the destiny of billions hangs in the balance.
Thursday, October 17, 2019
SC199-4
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogoct19/decay10-19.html
Economic Decay Leads to Social and Political Decay
It seems my rant yesterday (Let Me Know When It's Over) upset a lot of people, many of whom felt I trivialized the differences between the parties and all the reforms that people believe will right wrongs and reduce suffering.
OK, I get it, there are differences, but if the "reform" doesn't change the source of the suffering and injustice, it's just window-dressing that makes the supporter feel virtuous. Want an example? Let's take the the "cruel and unusual punishment" for drug-law offenders, many of whom are African-American males whose lives are effectively hobbled by felony convictions and long sentences in America's Drug War Gulag.
You want a "reform" that actually gets to the root and solves the source of the injustice? It's simple: decriminalize all drugs and recognize drug use as a medical and social issue rather than a criminal-justice / Gulag issue. But that won't happen because too many people are making too much money off the Gulag, which is now a public and private-prison Gulag.
(Other advanced nations have had success with this structural change. Maybe we could learn something from their examples?)
If you're not ready to demand the full decriminalization of all drugs, then you're not really interested in solving the problem; you're just seeking virtue-signaling "reforms" that don't upset the power structure. And since any real solution necessarily disrupts the power structure benefiting from the status quo, all the painless "reforms" are ineffective.
In other words, either go big and change the power structure or go home and stop promoting your own virtue. This is why the economy is floundering despite all the warm and fuzzy headlines about stocks rising due to the Federal Reserve lowering interest rates: we collectively refuse to consider structural changes in the way "money" is created in our perverse system--perverse because the way "money" is created guarantees soaring inequality.
If you don't change the way "money" is created and distributed, you change nothing. Did the thousands of pages of financial regulations passed after the 2008-09 debacle reverse wealth and income inequality? The answer is no, wealth inequality is rising even faster after all the feel-good "reforms." The net result of the "reforms" is the costs of compliance for banks went up substantially, and that regulatory moat simply pushed risky lending outside the banking system.
In other words, the sources of systemic instability and wealth inequality weren't even touched by the "reforms." If the financial system were actually stable, why was the Federal Reserve only able to "normalize" interest rates and its bloated balance sheet for a few months after a decade of "growth"? Why is the Fed reverting to "emergency measures" again after a few brief months of "normalizing"?
If all these "reforms" were worth more than a bucket of spit, why isn't wealth inequality reversing?
Here's the way our "money" system works: banks borrow trillions of dollars into existence and loan it to debt serfs at high rates of interest. Central banks create "money" out of thin air and distribute it to the very top of the wealth-power pyramid: banks, financiers and corporations.
The only way to change this corrupt, exploitive system that generates inequality as its only possible output is to eliminate central banks and fractional reserve banking, and ban the aggregation of "too big to fail" entities: a system of 1,000 small banks is structurally far less vulnerable than five mega-banks that are tightly bound to virtually every risk-on asset in the entire system.
if you don't change the way "money" is created and distributed, you change nothing.
Since we're incapable of changing the sources of financial instability, fragility and inequality (because it would destabilize those benefiting from the status quo), we're doomed to watch our social and political systems decay and implode.
If we're honest--an increasingly rare and hazardous condition--we'd admit that the purchasing power of wages has fallen sharply for the bottom 95% in the past 19 years, while the concentration of wealth in the hands of the top .01% has skyrocketed, leaving the bottom 80% with few if any meaningful assets and only the top 5% reaping the gains in our "winner take most" economy.
This systemic decay in social mobility, positive social roles and financial security has eroded the social fabric as the implicit social contract between the powerful and the disenfranchized has unraveled: all the phony "reforms" of the past 19 years simply locked in insiders' "legal" pillaging.
The failure of the political system to recognize and rectify the broad-based decline of America's economy as experienced by the bottom 80% has eroded trust in politics as a "solution." Instead, people see the same powerful corporations buying influence with both parties, and tens of thousands of lobbyists in Washington DC writing the legislation passed by both parties (recall Nancy Pelosi's brief flash of honesty: "We have to pass the bill to know what's in it."). Anyone who believes this manifests the ideals of democracy is delusional.
To those I offended: please pardon my frustration with all the phony "reforms" that change nothing and thus serve to tighten the grip of the self-serving power structure on the throat of the nation.
Here's the unpalatable reality: The financial rot spread to the "real" economy two decades ago, and now the economic rot is decaying the social and political orders.
If we want to make real progress, we have to properly diagnose the structural sources of the rot that is spreading quickly into every nook and cranny of the society and culture. If we're not willing to disrupt those reaping the outsized benefits from the existing structures of wealth and power, we're deluding ourselves if we believe we're solving any problems at the source....
Economic Decay Leads to Social and Political Decay
It seems my rant yesterday (Let Me Know When It's Over) upset a lot of people, many of whom felt I trivialized the differences between the parties and all the reforms that people believe will right wrongs and reduce suffering.
OK, I get it, there are differences, but if the "reform" doesn't change the source of the suffering and injustice, it's just window-dressing that makes the supporter feel virtuous. Want an example? Let's take the the "cruel and unusual punishment" for drug-law offenders, many of whom are African-American males whose lives are effectively hobbled by felony convictions and long sentences in America's Drug War Gulag.
You want a "reform" that actually gets to the root and solves the source of the injustice? It's simple: decriminalize all drugs and recognize drug use as a medical and social issue rather than a criminal-justice / Gulag issue. But that won't happen because too many people are making too much money off the Gulag, which is now a public and private-prison Gulag.
(Other advanced nations have had success with this structural change. Maybe we could learn something from their examples?)
If you're not ready to demand the full decriminalization of all drugs, then you're not really interested in solving the problem; you're just seeking virtue-signaling "reforms" that don't upset the power structure. And since any real solution necessarily disrupts the power structure benefiting from the status quo, all the painless "reforms" are ineffective.
In other words, either go big and change the power structure or go home and stop promoting your own virtue. This is why the economy is floundering despite all the warm and fuzzy headlines about stocks rising due to the Federal Reserve lowering interest rates: we collectively refuse to consider structural changes in the way "money" is created in our perverse system--perverse because the way "money" is created guarantees soaring inequality.
If you don't change the way "money" is created and distributed, you change nothing. Did the thousands of pages of financial regulations passed after the 2008-09 debacle reverse wealth and income inequality? The answer is no, wealth inequality is rising even faster after all the feel-good "reforms." The net result of the "reforms" is the costs of compliance for banks went up substantially, and that regulatory moat simply pushed risky lending outside the banking system.
In other words, the sources of systemic instability and wealth inequality weren't even touched by the "reforms." If the financial system were actually stable, why was the Federal Reserve only able to "normalize" interest rates and its bloated balance sheet for a few months after a decade of "growth"? Why is the Fed reverting to "emergency measures" again after a few brief months of "normalizing"?
If all these "reforms" were worth more than a bucket of spit, why isn't wealth inequality reversing?
Here's the way our "money" system works: banks borrow trillions of dollars into existence and loan it to debt serfs at high rates of interest. Central banks create "money" out of thin air and distribute it to the very top of the wealth-power pyramid: banks, financiers and corporations.
The only way to change this corrupt, exploitive system that generates inequality as its only possible output is to eliminate central banks and fractional reserve banking, and ban the aggregation of "too big to fail" entities: a system of 1,000 small banks is structurally far less vulnerable than five mega-banks that are tightly bound to virtually every risk-on asset in the entire system.
if you don't change the way "money" is created and distributed, you change nothing.
Since we're incapable of changing the sources of financial instability, fragility and inequality (because it would destabilize those benefiting from the status quo), we're doomed to watch our social and political systems decay and implode.
If we're honest--an increasingly rare and hazardous condition--we'd admit that the purchasing power of wages has fallen sharply for the bottom 95% in the past 19 years, while the concentration of wealth in the hands of the top .01% has skyrocketed, leaving the bottom 80% with few if any meaningful assets and only the top 5% reaping the gains in our "winner take most" economy.
This systemic decay in social mobility, positive social roles and financial security has eroded the social fabric as the implicit social contract between the powerful and the disenfranchized has unraveled: all the phony "reforms" of the past 19 years simply locked in insiders' "legal" pillaging.
The failure of the political system to recognize and rectify the broad-based decline of America's economy as experienced by the bottom 80% has eroded trust in politics as a "solution." Instead, people see the same powerful corporations buying influence with both parties, and tens of thousands of lobbyists in Washington DC writing the legislation passed by both parties (recall Nancy Pelosi's brief flash of honesty: "We have to pass the bill to know what's in it."). Anyone who believes this manifests the ideals of democracy is delusional.
To those I offended: please pardon my frustration with all the phony "reforms" that change nothing and thus serve to tighten the grip of the self-serving power structure on the throat of the nation.
Here's the unpalatable reality: The financial rot spread to the "real" economy two decades ago, and now the economic rot is decaying the social and political orders.
If we want to make real progress, we have to properly diagnose the structural sources of the rot that is spreading quickly into every nook and cranny of the society and culture. If we're not willing to disrupt those reaping the outsized benefits from the existing structures of wealth and power, we're deluding ourselves if we believe we're solving any problems at the source....
SC199-3
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogoct19/let-me-know10-19.html
Let Me Know When It's Over
Let me me know when it's over: yes, all of it: the impeachment, the trade dispute with China, U.S. involvement in Syria, the manic stock market rally and the 2020 election.
I'm not interested in following every twist and turn of the endless trauma-drama because none of it changes anything: Swapping Pence for Trump changes nothing, and then swapping Warren for Pence in 2020 doesn't change anything, either: the rot is too deep for any one person to do much beyond feel-good virtue-signaling and symbolic gestures (tax the billionaires, etc.)
The entire political process has devolved to staged battles in the Bread and Circuses Coliseum, entertainment that is highly profitable for the corporate media that whips the partisan mobs into a frenzy and highly useful for the status quo, as the sound and fury signifying nothing serves to distract the restive audience from the decline of everything of value: civil liberties, free expression, social mobility, free markets and so on.
The nation is in the deadly grip of cartels, monopolies and bureaucracies tasked with increasing and protecting the continuing concentration of wealth and power in financial and political elites.
We are eating our seed corn while borrowing profligately from the future to create an illusion of growth--an illusion that requires ever greater levels of intervention / manipulation and propaganda. Dissent must be buried or silenced, as the absurd disconnects from reality reach new extremes.
China is in the same boat, having borrowed $40 trillion into existence to fund a vast permanent construction project that has completed everything that is remotely useful and is now lumbering onward building ghost cities, stadiums, malls, highways across deserts, etc. because that worked so well for 30 years and policy makers don't have any sustainable alternatives. That malinvestment leads to default and bankruptcy is That Which Cannot Be Spoken, lest the entire financial house of cards collapses.
In other words, a trade agreement won't change anything: the world's major economies are careening toward a demographic / financial / energy cliff that can't be reversed with a trade deal or any other policy tweaks on the margins.
As for all our foreign entanglements--there's no ending them, no matter how disastrous because the Imperial Pretensions / Project has no intention of ceasing the multi-level interventions of postmodern imperialism, regardless of who's president.
Look, the clowns are harassing a chained bear--it's the Stock Market Circus, led by head clown Powellus Absurdus. The must-always-levitate-higher stock market is the comic relief for the dismal slaughter of innocents that makes up the rest of the entertainment. Ha-ha, what fun the clowns make of the enraged bear, until the bear break loose and then ha-ha, the clowns scatter.
The mood of the mob is fast becoming ugly; even the victors of the staged games are being booed. The attention span of the audience has dwindled to the point that few even wait for the outcome of the contest to scream for somebody's blood. The crowd is no longer satiated by gore or drama, and even the comedic interludes no longer mask the sense that the mob is one spark away from taking their rage and frustration out on each other--the vicarious thrills are no longer enough.
Maybe it's my cheap seat or my general exhaustion, but the whole staged spectacle is beyond tiresome; I've had my fill. So let me know when it's all over: the impeachment entertainment, the trade war drama, the stock market comedy, the election circus, all of it.
Until then, I'll look to the real world for amusement and distraction. The Bread and Circuses Coliseum is feeling increasingly deranged and dangerous.
Let Me Know When It's Over
Let me me know when it's over: yes, all of it: the impeachment, the trade dispute with China, U.S. involvement in Syria, the manic stock market rally and the 2020 election.
I'm not interested in following every twist and turn of the endless trauma-drama because none of it changes anything: Swapping Pence for Trump changes nothing, and then swapping Warren for Pence in 2020 doesn't change anything, either: the rot is too deep for any one person to do much beyond feel-good virtue-signaling and symbolic gestures (tax the billionaires, etc.)
The entire political process has devolved to staged battles in the Bread and Circuses Coliseum, entertainment that is highly profitable for the corporate media that whips the partisan mobs into a frenzy and highly useful for the status quo, as the sound and fury signifying nothing serves to distract the restive audience from the decline of everything of value: civil liberties, free expression, social mobility, free markets and so on.
The nation is in the deadly grip of cartels, monopolies and bureaucracies tasked with increasing and protecting the continuing concentration of wealth and power in financial and political elites.
We are eating our seed corn while borrowing profligately from the future to create an illusion of growth--an illusion that requires ever greater levels of intervention / manipulation and propaganda. Dissent must be buried or silenced, as the absurd disconnects from reality reach new extremes.
China is in the same boat, having borrowed $40 trillion into existence to fund a vast permanent construction project that has completed everything that is remotely useful and is now lumbering onward building ghost cities, stadiums, malls, highways across deserts, etc. because that worked so well for 30 years and policy makers don't have any sustainable alternatives. That malinvestment leads to default and bankruptcy is That Which Cannot Be Spoken, lest the entire financial house of cards collapses.
In other words, a trade agreement won't change anything: the world's major economies are careening toward a demographic / financial / energy cliff that can't be reversed with a trade deal or any other policy tweaks on the margins.
As for all our foreign entanglements--there's no ending them, no matter how disastrous because the Imperial Pretensions / Project has no intention of ceasing the multi-level interventions of postmodern imperialism, regardless of who's president.
Look, the clowns are harassing a chained bear--it's the Stock Market Circus, led by head clown Powellus Absurdus. The must-always-levitate-higher stock market is the comic relief for the dismal slaughter of innocents that makes up the rest of the entertainment. Ha-ha, what fun the clowns make of the enraged bear, until the bear break loose and then ha-ha, the clowns scatter.
The mood of the mob is fast becoming ugly; even the victors of the staged games are being booed. The attention span of the audience has dwindled to the point that few even wait for the outcome of the contest to scream for somebody's blood. The crowd is no longer satiated by gore or drama, and even the comedic interludes no longer mask the sense that the mob is one spark away from taking their rage and frustration out on each other--the vicarious thrills are no longer enough.
Maybe it's my cheap seat or my general exhaustion, but the whole staged spectacle is beyond tiresome; I've had my fill. So let me know when it's all over: the impeachment entertainment, the trade war drama, the stock market comedy, the election circus, all of it.
Until then, I'll look to the real world for amusement and distraction. The Bread and Circuses Coliseum is feeling increasingly deranged and dangerous.
Wednesday, October 16, 2019
SC199-2
https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/10/opinion/imf-deaf-to-suffering-it-causes-across-the-planet/
IMF deaf to suffering it causes across the planet
Each year, the board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) gathers at its headquarters in Washington, DC. This week, the IMF is meeting under the leadership of a new chief, Kristalina Georgieva, who crossed the street from the World Bank to take over this post from Christine Lagarde. Lagarde, as it happens, is getting ready to cross the Atlantic Ocean to take over the European Central Bank. There is a game of musical chairs at the top. A handful of bureaucrats seem to waltz in and out of these jobs.
For the past 40 years, the IMF has had the same agenda: to make sure that developing countries adhere to the rules of globalization set by the advanced capitalist states. Sovereignty of these developing countries has become irrelevant, as their governments have to accede to pressure from the IMF on fiscal and monetary policy as well as their trade and development agenda. Any attempt to break the orthodoxy of the IMF is met with a ferocious array of sanctions, along with pressure on international creditors not to lend to a country that the Fund determines is a scofflaw. Funds will only flow to distressed countries if they accept the full policy slate developed for them not by their own lawmakers, but by the IMF economists in Washington, DC.
Over these four decades, fires have burned on the streets of the countries that have gone to the IMF and then forced austerity on their populations. In the 1980s, these uprisings used to be called “IMF riots.” It was clear to everyone that the IMF’s policies had provoked desperate people to take to the streets. The name given to these riots was precise. The emphasis had to be on the IMF and not on the riots themselves. The most famous of these riots took place in Venezuela – the Caracazo of 1989 – which opened up a process that brought Hugo Chavez to power and created the Bolivarian Revolution. It is reasonable to call the Arab Spring of 2011 an IMF riot because it was provoked by IMF austerity policies combined with rising food prices. The current unrest from Pakistan to Ecuador should be filed under “IMF riot.”
In response to these riots, the IMF has used new language to describe the same old policies. We hear of “social compacts” and of Structural Adjustment 2.0 and then the bizarre “expansionary austerity.” Discussions of gender and environmentalism within the IMF are all to the good, but these are merely words that adorn an entrenched regime of austerity that defines the IMF Article IV Consultations and the IMF Staff Papers. Beneath the smiles lies the skull – a terrible reliance upon policies that are framed by wage cuts and the shrinking of the public sector, by handcuffs on public spending and liberalization for corporations. Sweeter rhetoric does nothing to make the policy framework less harsh.
Ecuador
Ecuador’s people rose up against President Lenín Moreno’s deal with the IMF. He had to go back on the cuts on fuel subsidies. Moreno had no choice. The protests would simply have unseated him if he held the line.
But now Moreno must return to the IMF. If democratic norms prevailed, then the IMF would have to honor the “referendum” of the Ecuadoran people. But there is no democracy in the IMF. It marches to the drum of its main funder.
Currently, the United States with 16.52% of the voting shares has the largest bloc of votes on the board. Following far behind are Japan (6.15%), China (6.09%), Germany (5.32%) and then the UK and France, each with 4.03%. By “convention,” the IMF head is a European, but the Europeans do not control the IMF.
In 1998, The New York Times let slip that the IMF “acts as the United States Treasury’s lap dog.” The US has an effective veto on IMF policy. When it suits US interests, IMF orthodoxy is suspended (as against Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt in 1987 and 1991). When it suits the US to put the screws to a country, that is precisely what the IMF does.
Democracy for the people of Ecuador is irrelevant; what is relevant is that they – by hook or by crook – bow before what the IMF, and behind it the United States, says. Moreno withdrew the cuts on subsidies. But it is likely that in the dark he will return these cuts under another name. The IMF will not stand for anything less than that.
Malawi
The consequences of IMF orthodoxy are often deadly, with the Malawi case as one very painful episode. In 1996, IMF staff pushed the government of Malawi to privatize its Agricultural Development and Marketing Corporation. This body held Malawi’s grain stock, and it regulated the price for the sale of grain in the country. Privatization of the corporation in 1999 left Malawi’s government without a way to protect its population in case of an emergency.
Between October 2001 and March 2002, the price of maize shot up by 400%. Flooding in 2000-2001 and a year of drought set the food production in the country into distress. People began to die of starvation – as many as 3,000. The IMF did not relent. Malawi had to continue to service its debt. In 2002, it spent US$70 million on its debt service payments, which was 20% of its national budget (more than Malawi spent on health, education and agriculture combined). There was no lifeline through to Malawi, whose food crisis continues to this day. Malawi’s president at that time, Bakili Muluzi, said, “The IMF is to blame for the biting food crisis.” What happened to Malawi in 2002 is precisely what happened to so many countries that went under the knife of the IMF.
No one at this week’s IMF meetings will raise the question of democracy, either in terms of the IMF’s own functioning or in terms of the IMF’s relationship with sovereign countries around the world. Ecuador’s streets rejected the IMF deal. Argentina’s electorate will do the same in a few weeks. Will there be room to start a conversation now about the divergence between IMF policy and democracy? The main lesson of these uprisings is not only that the people want fuel subsidies or a stable currency; what they want more than anything is democratic control over their own economy.
IMF deaf to suffering it causes across the planet
Each year, the board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) gathers at its headquarters in Washington, DC. This week, the IMF is meeting under the leadership of a new chief, Kristalina Georgieva, who crossed the street from the World Bank to take over this post from Christine Lagarde. Lagarde, as it happens, is getting ready to cross the Atlantic Ocean to take over the European Central Bank. There is a game of musical chairs at the top. A handful of bureaucrats seem to waltz in and out of these jobs.
For the past 40 years, the IMF has had the same agenda: to make sure that developing countries adhere to the rules of globalization set by the advanced capitalist states. Sovereignty of these developing countries has become irrelevant, as their governments have to accede to pressure from the IMF on fiscal and monetary policy as well as their trade and development agenda. Any attempt to break the orthodoxy of the IMF is met with a ferocious array of sanctions, along with pressure on international creditors not to lend to a country that the Fund determines is a scofflaw. Funds will only flow to distressed countries if they accept the full policy slate developed for them not by their own lawmakers, but by the IMF economists in Washington, DC.
Over these four decades, fires have burned on the streets of the countries that have gone to the IMF and then forced austerity on their populations. In the 1980s, these uprisings used to be called “IMF riots.” It was clear to everyone that the IMF’s policies had provoked desperate people to take to the streets. The name given to these riots was precise. The emphasis had to be on the IMF and not on the riots themselves. The most famous of these riots took place in Venezuela – the Caracazo of 1989 – which opened up a process that brought Hugo Chavez to power and created the Bolivarian Revolution. It is reasonable to call the Arab Spring of 2011 an IMF riot because it was provoked by IMF austerity policies combined with rising food prices. The current unrest from Pakistan to Ecuador should be filed under “IMF riot.”
In response to these riots, the IMF has used new language to describe the same old policies. We hear of “social compacts” and of Structural Adjustment 2.0 and then the bizarre “expansionary austerity.” Discussions of gender and environmentalism within the IMF are all to the good, but these are merely words that adorn an entrenched regime of austerity that defines the IMF Article IV Consultations and the IMF Staff Papers. Beneath the smiles lies the skull – a terrible reliance upon policies that are framed by wage cuts and the shrinking of the public sector, by handcuffs on public spending and liberalization for corporations. Sweeter rhetoric does nothing to make the policy framework less harsh.
Ecuador
Ecuador’s people rose up against President Lenín Moreno’s deal with the IMF. He had to go back on the cuts on fuel subsidies. Moreno had no choice. The protests would simply have unseated him if he held the line.
But now Moreno must return to the IMF. If democratic norms prevailed, then the IMF would have to honor the “referendum” of the Ecuadoran people. But there is no democracy in the IMF. It marches to the drum of its main funder.
Currently, the United States with 16.52% of the voting shares has the largest bloc of votes on the board. Following far behind are Japan (6.15%), China (6.09%), Germany (5.32%) and then the UK and France, each with 4.03%. By “convention,” the IMF head is a European, but the Europeans do not control the IMF.
In 1998, The New York Times let slip that the IMF “acts as the United States Treasury’s lap dog.” The US has an effective veto on IMF policy. When it suits US interests, IMF orthodoxy is suspended (as against Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt in 1987 and 1991). When it suits the US to put the screws to a country, that is precisely what the IMF does.
Democracy for the people of Ecuador is irrelevant; what is relevant is that they – by hook or by crook – bow before what the IMF, and behind it the United States, says. Moreno withdrew the cuts on subsidies. But it is likely that in the dark he will return these cuts under another name. The IMF will not stand for anything less than that.
Malawi
The consequences of IMF orthodoxy are often deadly, with the Malawi case as one very painful episode. In 1996, IMF staff pushed the government of Malawi to privatize its Agricultural Development and Marketing Corporation. This body held Malawi’s grain stock, and it regulated the price for the sale of grain in the country. Privatization of the corporation in 1999 left Malawi’s government without a way to protect its population in case of an emergency.
Between October 2001 and March 2002, the price of maize shot up by 400%. Flooding in 2000-2001 and a year of drought set the food production in the country into distress. People began to die of starvation – as many as 3,000. The IMF did not relent. Malawi had to continue to service its debt. In 2002, it spent US$70 million on its debt service payments, which was 20% of its national budget (more than Malawi spent on health, education and agriculture combined). There was no lifeline through to Malawi, whose food crisis continues to this day. Malawi’s president at that time, Bakili Muluzi, said, “The IMF is to blame for the biting food crisis.” What happened to Malawi in 2002 is precisely what happened to so many countries that went under the knife of the IMF.
No one at this week’s IMF meetings will raise the question of democracy, either in terms of the IMF’s own functioning or in terms of the IMF’s relationship with sovereign countries around the world. Ecuador’s streets rejected the IMF deal. Argentina’s electorate will do the same in a few weeks. Will there be room to start a conversation now about the divergence between IMF policy and democracy? The main lesson of these uprisings is not only that the people want fuel subsidies or a stable currency; what they want more than anything is democratic control over their own economy.
Tuesday, October 15, 2019
SC199-1
https://www.globalresearch.ca/american-foreign-policy/5690291
The Sickness of American Foreign Policy
The Military-Industrial Complex runs US foreign policies. What passes for international ‘news’ reporting in the United States media was supremely represented by the instance of those ’news’ media stenographically reporting the Government’s lies about ’Saddam’s WMD’, even after it was unarguably clear that those were just blatant lies from the President and his Administration.
America’s media were merely passive megaphones for the regime’s lies. Instead of disproving the regime’s lies — as they could have done if they were journalistic, instead of propagandistic, media — they merely reported the lying government’s assertions. It was like 1984 “Big Brother”; and it still is, as today’s 2019 USA.
In between 2003 and now, the regime invaded Libya and Syria and Yemen, on the basis of lies that in some respects were even more blatant. The same groups of billionaires control the US ‘news’ media today as controlled the media in 2003; and they continue, in their ‘news’-media, the same stenographic ‘reporting’ — propaganda by their Government, regarding which nations are the latest targets, for the masses to hate and fear, as being our nation’s ‘enemies’.
These are the lands suitable for US weapons and bombs to destroy. These ‘news’-media simply ‘justify’ what are, in fact, international war-crimes: US-and-allied invasions, of nations that never had invaded the US.
There’s always the Big Lie that the hate-target is only ‘the tyrant’, and not the nation. But it’s the targeted nation that gets strangulated by America and its allies imposing ‘sanctions’ that are really economic blockades (such as against Venezuela and Iran today, but formerly against Iraq before we invaded and destroyed it); and, then, if that doesn’t bring down the targeted Government, a coup is attempted; and, then (if no coup results), paying and arming ‘rebels’ (such as Al Qaeda in Syria) to overthrow the targeted nation’s Government; and, then, missiles and bombers are used, in order to destroy the infrastructure.
It’s no better now than it was then, in 2003 in Iraq, and later in Libya, Syria, and so much else. There has been no change, except in the identities of the nations for Americans to hate and fear, and overthrow. And especially under Trump, refugees are being banned to immigrate from the countries the US regime has destroyed. He’s “making America great again,” like his predecessor Obama had insisted that “The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation.”
Every other nation — including Libya and Syria and Yemen — is consequently “dispensable,” in that view. America’s voters tolerate, or even respect and re-elect, such vile leaders as this.
How, then, should the citizens of other countries feel about America?
And yet, the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner Obama as President is overwhelmingly respected around the world, notwithstanding his having destroyed, or participated in destroying, Libya and Syria and Yemen, whereas as soon as the obviously uncouth Trump came into office and ever since then, Trump has been widely despised throughout the world — as all three US Presidents during this Century thus far, reasonably ought to be.
The public responds more to surfaces than to reality. Thus, though the reality of Obama was overall as horrendous as the reality of Trump, the reputations of those two Presidents could hardly be more different from one another.
The deeper reality of the United States is Big Brother, which was born in the United States when FDR died in 1945, and it has grown larger ever since then — and especially since 2001. America’s voters are kept ignorant of the ongoing and bipartisan ugliness of its Government’s bipartisan imperialistic (or “neoconservative”) foreign policy.
After all, the motivation behind it is to ‘protect human rights’ and ‘spread democracy’ in other countries (if you can believe the liars). How ‘nice’ is that (while the bombs are dropping and the target-country is being economically strangled)? And so, the US, as policeman to the world, has become an insult to the UN that FDR had been so proud to design and establish.
The US regime’s hatreds are bipartisan because all of this hate comes actually from America’s billionaires (the masters of America’s top brands) who control America’s international corporations and who are America’s political mega-donors; and these billionaires are of two types, Republican and Democratic; and both types of American billionaires are neoconservatives — champions of US imperialism — because extending the American empire is very profitable for America’s international corporations. That’s what it’s really all about.
Here’s one example:
On 25 July 2017, the US House of Representatives voted 419 to 3 to expand America’s economic blockades against “the Governments of Iran, the Russian Federation, and North Korea”, via “Sanctions”, which are a device that has become the US regime’s typical first step toward an ultimate military invasion. They always produce suffering amongst the targeted nation’s population, and far less so against the targeted nation’s leaders.
Yet sanctions and coups and invasions are done because of the US Government’s ‘humanitarian’ concern for the attacked nation’s people, and in order to install ‘democracy’ there. How can a militaristic regime function if it’s not constantly lying, like that? It can’t. That’s why it continually lies.
Iran, Russia and North Korea are the enemies authorized in this virtual declaration of war against all three nations.
This bill, which passed the House by 419 to 3, became voted 98 to 2 in the US Senate, and was then signed into law by US President Donald Trump, on 2 August 2017. It was a triple farce (and “farce” here is a euphemism for fraud). Here’s just a bit of the evidence for that:
The case against Iran
The US regime constantly refers to Iran as “the foremost state sponsor of terrorism”, which it never has been even close to being, and which phrase describes the US regime itself far more than it does Iran. But did Iran ever invade America? Of course not!
However, Americans actually did become enemies of Iran when our Government overthrew Iran’s progressive and democratically elected Government, in July and August of 1953, and the US regime at that time had the full cooperation of the UK regime, and of Iran’s own mullahs, in that coup d’etat, which installed the US regime’s chosen brutal dictator, the Shah, to rule there. But did Iran ever even threaten America? No, not even threaten.
The US regime constantly threatens Iran, and Iran’s Government would need to be idiots to take lightly these threats by the US regime — the same regime that had installed the brutal Shah in 1953. Yet the US regime has the nerve to continue, and even to intensify, these threats, and even to blame Iran’s suffering economy on Iran’s own Government (which America’s billionaires want to replace), instead of on America’s Government (those billionaires’ own government) and on this regime’s allies, and on the strangulating economic sanctions which this US team leads, and imposes, against Iran.
The case against Russia
The US regime overthrows governments routinely, and doesn’t just propagandize in those targeted countries so as to influence their elections; but when the Obama regime’s frame-up against Russia as having supposedly acted in collusion with Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016, as having constituted a merely possible excuse for the failure of Obama’s chosen successor to win the US Presidency, even the Special Prosecutor’s efforts to find evidence that might be able to convict Trump on such a charge after he leaves office, drew only blanks. There was no such evidence, of any such collusion, the Special Counsel Robert Mueller reluctantly admitted.
Actually, there does exist statistically overwhelming evidence to the exact contrary — that, as the definitive scientific analysis of the evidence reluctantly reported:
What is most striking about the data in this table is that Donald Trump actually slightly under-performed the model’s predictions in all three states. He did about one point worse than predicted in Michigan, about two points worse than predicted in Pennsylvania, and between two and three points worse than predicted in Wisconsin. There is no evidence here that Russian interference, to the extent that it occurred, did anything to help Trump in these three states.
In other words: the single predictive model that has a flawless record of predicting Presidential winners, and which was the only model that predicted Trump to beat Hillary in 2016, showed Trump winning the three toss-up states by slightly higher margins than he actually did win them.
If there was any influence upon the electoral outcome that came from a factor (such as from Russian influence) that was not being considered in this model, then that factor ended up benefiting Hillary, not Trump. That’s the exact opposite of the Obama-engineered hypothesis, which falsely alleges that ‘Trump is Putin’s stooge’.
And, now, the Trump regime is trying to establish a convictable case against Trump’s predecessor, Obama, for having tried to frame Trump (and Russia) for Hillary’s loss in 2016. (There’s considerable evidence that Obama did try to frame Trump, and Russia’s Government, for that loss.
And the US Government — even under Trump — has been trying to keep this information secret, unless and until House Democrats become serious about ‘impeaching Trump’. If they won’t try to impeach him, then he won’t try to convict Obama for treason.) (What? Democrats want Mike Pence to become President? Not really: it’s all just a show, for stupid voters in their own Party — and they obviously think that there are plenty of those.
Rooting for Pence to become President is apparently very popular amongst Democratic Party voters. Perhaps many Republican Party billionaires are even hoping that those Democratic idiots will get what they want. Is this democracy in action, or just a threatened counter-coup to punish the Democratic Party’s prior coup-attempt against the Republican President?)
The case against North Korea
So, Iran didn’t ever invade America, nor did Russia. What about North Korea, then? Did North Korea ever invade America? No, neither did that alleged ‘enemy’ of America. But America did invade North Korea during the Korean War. Have you ever seen the 764-page
“REPORT OF THE INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC COMMISSION FOR THE INVESTIGATION OF THE FACTS CONCERNING BACTERIAL WARFARE IN KOREA AND CHINA”?
It documents America’s biological warfare program against North Korea in 1952. You probably haven’t even heard about it, because the US regime managed to keep it hidden from the public until just this year, and because America’s ‘news’-media continue to blacklist its existence so as to continue the ‘justification’ for the US regime’s still-ongoing efforts to conquer North Korea. But look at it here, as soon as its 764 pages have finished loading into your computer. Now that the US regime is increasing its threats against both North Korea and China, the Governments in those countries recently released this document to the public, and thereby are challenging the US propaganda-media to allow the publics in the US and its vassal nations to see it — to see real history about this matter, not just propaganda (such as the US is the world’s champion of).
This massive historical document opens:
On the 22nd. Feb. 1952, Mr. Bak Hun-Yung, Foreign Minister of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and on the 8th. March, Mr. Chou En-Lai, Foreign Minister of the People’s Republic of China, protested officially against the use of bacteriological warfare by the USA. On the 25th. Feb., Dr. Kuo Mo-Jo, President of the Chinese People’s Committee for World Peace, addressed an appeal to the World Peace Council.
At the meeting of the Executive Committee of the World Peace Council held at Oslo on the 29th. March, Dr. Kuo Mo-Jo, with the assistance of the Chinese delegates who accompanied him, and in the presence of the Korean representative, Mr. Li Ki-len, placed the members of the Committee, and other national delegates, in possession of much information concerning the phenomena in question. Dr. Kuo declared that the governments of China and (North) Korea did not consider the International Red Cross Committee sufficiently free from political influence to be capable of instituting an unbiassed enquiry in the field. This objection was later extended to the World Health Organisation, as a specialised agency of the United Nations. However, the two governments were entirely desirous of inviting an international group of impartial and independent scientists to proceed to China and to investigate personally the facts on which the allegations were based. They might or might not be connected with organisations working for peace, but they would naturally be persons known for their devotion to humanitarian causes. The group would have the mission of verifying or invalidating the allegations. After thorough discussion, the Executive Committee adopted unanimously a resolution calling for the formation of such an International Scientific Commission.
Ultimately, as Jeffrey S. Kay recently explained in his superb article at Global Research introducing this document to US-and-allied publics:
Written largely by the most prestigious British scientist of his day, this report was effectively suppressed upon its release in 1952. Published now in text-searchable format, it includes hundreds of pages of evidence about the use of US biological weapons during the Korean War, available for the first time to the general public.
Back in the early 1950s, the US conducted a furious bombing campaign during the Korean War, dropping hundreds of thousands of tons of ordnance, much of it napalm, on North Korea. The bombardment, worse than any country had received up to that point, excepting the effects on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, wiped out nearly every city in North Korea, contributing to well over a million civilian deaths. Because of the relentless bombing, the people were reduced to living in tunnels. Even the normally bellicose Gen. MacArthur claimed to find the devastation wreaked by the US to be sickening.[1]
The massive document itself authenticates numerous reports of the US flying planes over North Korea and dropping containers of fleas, clams, and other creatures, that were tested and verified as being contaminated with plague and cholera. For example, on pages 24-26 are described several such incidents. Typical was one in which “the Commission had no option but to conclude that the American air force was employing in Korea methods very similar to, if not exactly identical with, those employed to spread plague by the Japanese during the second world war.”
Furthermore, one expert “gave evidence to the effect that he had urged the Kuomintang government to make known to the world the facts concerning Japanese bacterial warfare, but without success, partly, he thought, as the result of American dissuasion.”
In other words: the US regime not only protected and hired ‘former’ Nazis to use against the USSR, but it did the same with Japan to use against China and North Korea. This 1952 operation against North Korea was perpetrated by the regime under US President Harry S. Truman — the former Vice President who had been forced onto FDR’s final ticket by that Party’s top donors in order to get a war started against the Soviet Union and thereby keep their enormous government contracts continuing after WW II.
Right after FDR died, Truman got fooled by Churchill and Eisenhower into starting the Cold War against the Soviet Union; and this 1952 international war-crime against China and North Korea was part of that.
Conclusion
Okay, then: When will US President Trump, and the 419 members of the US House, and the 98 members of the US Senate, eat crow and come clean about what they actually represent? (It’s certainly not democracy.)
Congress is very partisanly split over domestic issues, because Republican and Democratic billionaires are split about them, but America’s billionaires are united in their support for US imperialism; and, so, the members of Congress, and Presidential candidates, are, too.
When do you see near 100% support in Congress for a domestic policy? Never even close to that. But for American aggressions, it’s virtual unanimity. The billionaires are solidly for aggression; and, so, their Government is, too. Virtually all politicians who are elected to national office are psychopaths. Otherwise, they’ll get nothing from the billionaires, and therefore won’t win public office.
Americans are supposed to trust such a government. Well, of course, the billionaires can trust it, because they bought it.
And that’s the sickness, and slickness, of American foreign policy.
It’s just a global scam, which destroys millions of people, and creates misery for hundreds of millions, all in the name of ‘defending America’, and of ‘protecting human rights’ and ‘defending democracy’, around the world.
The Sickness of American Foreign Policy
The Military-Industrial Complex runs US foreign policies. What passes for international ‘news’ reporting in the United States media was supremely represented by the instance of those ’news’ media stenographically reporting the Government’s lies about ’Saddam’s WMD’, even after it was unarguably clear that those were just blatant lies from the President and his Administration.
America’s media were merely passive megaphones for the regime’s lies. Instead of disproving the regime’s lies — as they could have done if they were journalistic, instead of propagandistic, media — they merely reported the lying government’s assertions. It was like 1984 “Big Brother”; and it still is, as today’s 2019 USA.
In between 2003 and now, the regime invaded Libya and Syria and Yemen, on the basis of lies that in some respects were even more blatant. The same groups of billionaires control the US ‘news’ media today as controlled the media in 2003; and they continue, in their ‘news’-media, the same stenographic ‘reporting’ — propaganda by their Government, regarding which nations are the latest targets, for the masses to hate and fear, as being our nation’s ‘enemies’.
These are the lands suitable for US weapons and bombs to destroy. These ‘news’-media simply ‘justify’ what are, in fact, international war-crimes: US-and-allied invasions, of nations that never had invaded the US.
There’s always the Big Lie that the hate-target is only ‘the tyrant’, and not the nation. But it’s the targeted nation that gets strangulated by America and its allies imposing ‘sanctions’ that are really economic blockades (such as against Venezuela and Iran today, but formerly against Iraq before we invaded and destroyed it); and, then, if that doesn’t bring down the targeted Government, a coup is attempted; and, then (if no coup results), paying and arming ‘rebels’ (such as Al Qaeda in Syria) to overthrow the targeted nation’s Government; and, then, missiles and bombers are used, in order to destroy the infrastructure.
It’s no better now than it was then, in 2003 in Iraq, and later in Libya, Syria, and so much else. There has been no change, except in the identities of the nations for Americans to hate and fear, and overthrow. And especially under Trump, refugees are being banned to immigrate from the countries the US regime has destroyed. He’s “making America great again,” like his predecessor Obama had insisted that “The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation.”
Every other nation — including Libya and Syria and Yemen — is consequently “dispensable,” in that view. America’s voters tolerate, or even respect and re-elect, such vile leaders as this.
How, then, should the citizens of other countries feel about America?
And yet, the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner Obama as President is overwhelmingly respected around the world, notwithstanding his having destroyed, or participated in destroying, Libya and Syria and Yemen, whereas as soon as the obviously uncouth Trump came into office and ever since then, Trump has been widely despised throughout the world — as all three US Presidents during this Century thus far, reasonably ought to be.
The public responds more to surfaces than to reality. Thus, though the reality of Obama was overall as horrendous as the reality of Trump, the reputations of those two Presidents could hardly be more different from one another.
The deeper reality of the United States is Big Brother, which was born in the United States when FDR died in 1945, and it has grown larger ever since then — and especially since 2001. America’s voters are kept ignorant of the ongoing and bipartisan ugliness of its Government’s bipartisan imperialistic (or “neoconservative”) foreign policy.
After all, the motivation behind it is to ‘protect human rights’ and ‘spread democracy’ in other countries (if you can believe the liars). How ‘nice’ is that (while the bombs are dropping and the target-country is being economically strangled)? And so, the US, as policeman to the world, has become an insult to the UN that FDR had been so proud to design and establish.
The US regime’s hatreds are bipartisan because all of this hate comes actually from America’s billionaires (the masters of America’s top brands) who control America’s international corporations and who are America’s political mega-donors; and these billionaires are of two types, Republican and Democratic; and both types of American billionaires are neoconservatives — champions of US imperialism — because extending the American empire is very profitable for America’s international corporations. That’s what it’s really all about.
Here’s one example:
On 25 July 2017, the US House of Representatives voted 419 to 3 to expand America’s economic blockades against “the Governments of Iran, the Russian Federation, and North Korea”, via “Sanctions”, which are a device that has become the US regime’s typical first step toward an ultimate military invasion. They always produce suffering amongst the targeted nation’s population, and far less so against the targeted nation’s leaders.
Yet sanctions and coups and invasions are done because of the US Government’s ‘humanitarian’ concern for the attacked nation’s people, and in order to install ‘democracy’ there. How can a militaristic regime function if it’s not constantly lying, like that? It can’t. That’s why it continually lies.
Iran, Russia and North Korea are the enemies authorized in this virtual declaration of war against all three nations.
This bill, which passed the House by 419 to 3, became voted 98 to 2 in the US Senate, and was then signed into law by US President Donald Trump, on 2 August 2017. It was a triple farce (and “farce” here is a euphemism for fraud). Here’s just a bit of the evidence for that:
The case against Iran
The US regime constantly refers to Iran as “the foremost state sponsor of terrorism”, which it never has been even close to being, and which phrase describes the US regime itself far more than it does Iran. But did Iran ever invade America? Of course not!
However, Americans actually did become enemies of Iran when our Government overthrew Iran’s progressive and democratically elected Government, in July and August of 1953, and the US regime at that time had the full cooperation of the UK regime, and of Iran’s own mullahs, in that coup d’etat, which installed the US regime’s chosen brutal dictator, the Shah, to rule there. But did Iran ever even threaten America? No, not even threaten.
The US regime constantly threatens Iran, and Iran’s Government would need to be idiots to take lightly these threats by the US regime — the same regime that had installed the brutal Shah in 1953. Yet the US regime has the nerve to continue, and even to intensify, these threats, and even to blame Iran’s suffering economy on Iran’s own Government (which America’s billionaires want to replace), instead of on America’s Government (those billionaires’ own government) and on this regime’s allies, and on the strangulating economic sanctions which this US team leads, and imposes, against Iran.
The case against Russia
The US regime overthrows governments routinely, and doesn’t just propagandize in those targeted countries so as to influence their elections; but when the Obama regime’s frame-up against Russia as having supposedly acted in collusion with Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016, as having constituted a merely possible excuse for the failure of Obama’s chosen successor to win the US Presidency, even the Special Prosecutor’s efforts to find evidence that might be able to convict Trump on such a charge after he leaves office, drew only blanks. There was no such evidence, of any such collusion, the Special Counsel Robert Mueller reluctantly admitted.
Actually, there does exist statistically overwhelming evidence to the exact contrary — that, as the definitive scientific analysis of the evidence reluctantly reported:
What is most striking about the data in this table is that Donald Trump actually slightly under-performed the model’s predictions in all three states. He did about one point worse than predicted in Michigan, about two points worse than predicted in Pennsylvania, and between two and three points worse than predicted in Wisconsin. There is no evidence here that Russian interference, to the extent that it occurred, did anything to help Trump in these three states.
In other words: the single predictive model that has a flawless record of predicting Presidential winners, and which was the only model that predicted Trump to beat Hillary in 2016, showed Trump winning the three toss-up states by slightly higher margins than he actually did win them.
If there was any influence upon the electoral outcome that came from a factor (such as from Russian influence) that was not being considered in this model, then that factor ended up benefiting Hillary, not Trump. That’s the exact opposite of the Obama-engineered hypothesis, which falsely alleges that ‘Trump is Putin’s stooge’.
And, now, the Trump regime is trying to establish a convictable case against Trump’s predecessor, Obama, for having tried to frame Trump (and Russia) for Hillary’s loss in 2016. (There’s considerable evidence that Obama did try to frame Trump, and Russia’s Government, for that loss.
And the US Government — even under Trump — has been trying to keep this information secret, unless and until House Democrats become serious about ‘impeaching Trump’. If they won’t try to impeach him, then he won’t try to convict Obama for treason.) (What? Democrats want Mike Pence to become President? Not really: it’s all just a show, for stupid voters in their own Party — and they obviously think that there are plenty of those.
Rooting for Pence to become President is apparently very popular amongst Democratic Party voters. Perhaps many Republican Party billionaires are even hoping that those Democratic idiots will get what they want. Is this democracy in action, or just a threatened counter-coup to punish the Democratic Party’s prior coup-attempt against the Republican President?)
The case against North Korea
So, Iran didn’t ever invade America, nor did Russia. What about North Korea, then? Did North Korea ever invade America? No, neither did that alleged ‘enemy’ of America. But America did invade North Korea during the Korean War. Have you ever seen the 764-page
“REPORT OF THE INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC COMMISSION FOR THE INVESTIGATION OF THE FACTS CONCERNING BACTERIAL WARFARE IN KOREA AND CHINA”?
It documents America’s biological warfare program against North Korea in 1952. You probably haven’t even heard about it, because the US regime managed to keep it hidden from the public until just this year, and because America’s ‘news’-media continue to blacklist its existence so as to continue the ‘justification’ for the US regime’s still-ongoing efforts to conquer North Korea. But look at it here, as soon as its 764 pages have finished loading into your computer. Now that the US regime is increasing its threats against both North Korea and China, the Governments in those countries recently released this document to the public, and thereby are challenging the US propaganda-media to allow the publics in the US and its vassal nations to see it — to see real history about this matter, not just propaganda (such as the US is the world’s champion of).
This massive historical document opens:
On the 22nd. Feb. 1952, Mr. Bak Hun-Yung, Foreign Minister of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and on the 8th. March, Mr. Chou En-Lai, Foreign Minister of the People’s Republic of China, protested officially against the use of bacteriological warfare by the USA. On the 25th. Feb., Dr. Kuo Mo-Jo, President of the Chinese People’s Committee for World Peace, addressed an appeal to the World Peace Council.
At the meeting of the Executive Committee of the World Peace Council held at Oslo on the 29th. March, Dr. Kuo Mo-Jo, with the assistance of the Chinese delegates who accompanied him, and in the presence of the Korean representative, Mr. Li Ki-len, placed the members of the Committee, and other national delegates, in possession of much information concerning the phenomena in question. Dr. Kuo declared that the governments of China and (North) Korea did not consider the International Red Cross Committee sufficiently free from political influence to be capable of instituting an unbiassed enquiry in the field. This objection was later extended to the World Health Organisation, as a specialised agency of the United Nations. However, the two governments were entirely desirous of inviting an international group of impartial and independent scientists to proceed to China and to investigate personally the facts on which the allegations were based. They might or might not be connected with organisations working for peace, but they would naturally be persons known for their devotion to humanitarian causes. The group would have the mission of verifying or invalidating the allegations. After thorough discussion, the Executive Committee adopted unanimously a resolution calling for the formation of such an International Scientific Commission.
Ultimately, as Jeffrey S. Kay recently explained in his superb article at Global Research introducing this document to US-and-allied publics:
Written largely by the most prestigious British scientist of his day, this report was effectively suppressed upon its release in 1952. Published now in text-searchable format, it includes hundreds of pages of evidence about the use of US biological weapons during the Korean War, available for the first time to the general public.
Back in the early 1950s, the US conducted a furious bombing campaign during the Korean War, dropping hundreds of thousands of tons of ordnance, much of it napalm, on North Korea. The bombardment, worse than any country had received up to that point, excepting the effects on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, wiped out nearly every city in North Korea, contributing to well over a million civilian deaths. Because of the relentless bombing, the people were reduced to living in tunnels. Even the normally bellicose Gen. MacArthur claimed to find the devastation wreaked by the US to be sickening.[1]
The massive document itself authenticates numerous reports of the US flying planes over North Korea and dropping containers of fleas, clams, and other creatures, that were tested and verified as being contaminated with plague and cholera. For example, on pages 24-26 are described several such incidents. Typical was one in which “the Commission had no option but to conclude that the American air force was employing in Korea methods very similar to, if not exactly identical with, those employed to spread plague by the Japanese during the second world war.”
Furthermore, one expert “gave evidence to the effect that he had urged the Kuomintang government to make known to the world the facts concerning Japanese bacterial warfare, but without success, partly, he thought, as the result of American dissuasion.”
In other words: the US regime not only protected and hired ‘former’ Nazis to use against the USSR, but it did the same with Japan to use against China and North Korea. This 1952 operation against North Korea was perpetrated by the regime under US President Harry S. Truman — the former Vice President who had been forced onto FDR’s final ticket by that Party’s top donors in order to get a war started against the Soviet Union and thereby keep their enormous government contracts continuing after WW II.
Right after FDR died, Truman got fooled by Churchill and Eisenhower into starting the Cold War against the Soviet Union; and this 1952 international war-crime against China and North Korea was part of that.
Conclusion
Okay, then: When will US President Trump, and the 419 members of the US House, and the 98 members of the US Senate, eat crow and come clean about what they actually represent? (It’s certainly not democracy.)
Congress is very partisanly split over domestic issues, because Republican and Democratic billionaires are split about them, but America’s billionaires are united in their support for US imperialism; and, so, the members of Congress, and Presidential candidates, are, too.
When do you see near 100% support in Congress for a domestic policy? Never even close to that. But for American aggressions, it’s virtual unanimity. The billionaires are solidly for aggression; and, so, their Government is, too. Virtually all politicians who are elected to national office are psychopaths. Otherwise, they’ll get nothing from the billionaires, and therefore won’t win public office.
Americans are supposed to trust such a government. Well, of course, the billionaires can trust it, because they bought it.
And that’s the sickness, and slickness, of American foreign policy.
It’s just a global scam, which destroys millions of people, and creates misery for hundreds of millions, all in the name of ‘defending America’, and of ‘protecting human rights’ and ‘defending democracy’, around the world.
Monday, October 14, 2019
SC198-15
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-age-of-radical-evil/
The Age of Radical Evil
Immanuel Kant coined the term “radical evil.” It was the privileging of one’s own interest over that of others, effectively reducing those around you to objects to be manipulated and used for your own ends. But Hannah Arendt, who also used the term “radical evil,” saw that it was worse than merely treating others as objects. Radical evil, she wrote, rendered vast numbers of people superfluous. They possessed no value at all. They were, once they could not be utilized by the powerful, discarded as human refuse.
We live in an age of radical evil. The architects of this evil are despoiling the earth and driving the human species toward extinction. They are stripping us of our most basic civil liberties and freedoms. They are orchestrating the growing social inequity, concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a cabal of global oligarchs. They are destroying our democratic institutions, turning elected office into a system of legalized bribery, stacking our courts with judges who invert constitutional rights so that unlimited corporate money invested in political campaigns is disguised as the right to petition the government or a form of free speech. Their seizure of power has vomited up demagogues and con artists including Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, each the distortion of a failed democracy. They are turning America’s poor communities into internal militarized colonies where police carry out lethal campaigns of terror and use the blunt instrument of mass incarceration as a tool of social control. They are waging endless wars in the Middle East and diverting half of all discretionary spending to a bloated military. They are placing the rights of the corporation above the rights of the citizen.
Arendt captured the radical evil of a corporate capitalism in which people are rendered superfluous—surplus labor as Karl Marx said—and pushed to the margins of society where they and their children are no longer considered to have value, value always determined by the amount of money produced and amassed. But as the Gospel of Luke reminds us, “what is prized by human beings is an abomination in the sight of God.”
Who are those who would sacrifice us on the altar of global capitalism? How did they amass the power to deny us a voice, to insist that the earth is an inert commodity they have a right to exploit until the ecosystem that sustains life collapses and the human species, along with most other species, becomes extinct?
These architects of radical evil have been here from the beginning. They are the slaveholders who crammed men, women and children into the holds of ships and sold them in auctions in Charleston and Montgomery, rending families apart, taking from them their names, language, religion and culture. They wielded the whips, the chains, the dogs and the slave patrols. They orchestrated the holocaust of slavery, and when slavery was abolished, after a war that left 700,000 dead, they used convict leasing—slavery by another name—along with lynching and black codes, to carry out a reign of terror that continues today in our deindustrialized cities and our prisons. Black and brown bodies are worth nothing to our corporate masters when on the streets of our decayed cities, but locked in cages they each generate 50 or 60 thousand dollars a year. Some people say the system does not work. They are wrong. The system works exactly as it is designed to work.
These architects of radical evil are the white militias and Army units that stole the land, decimated the herds of buffalo, signed the treaties that were promptly violated and carried out a campaign of genocide against indigenous people, penning the few who remained in prisoner of war camps. They are the gun thugs, Baldwin-Felts and Pinkerton agents who gunned down, by the hundreds, American workers struggling to organize, forces of the kind that today oversee the bonded labor of workers in China, Vietnam and Bangladesh. They are the oligarchs, J.P. Morgan, Rockefeller and Carnegie, who paid for these rivers of blood, and who today, like Tim Cook at Apple and Jeff Bezos at Amazon, amass staggering fortunes from human misery.
We know these architects of radical evil. They are the DNA of American capitalism. You can find them on the commodity desks at Goldman Sachs. The financial firm’s commodities index is the most heavily traded in the world. These traders buy up futures of rice, wheat, corn, sugar and livestock and jack up the commodity prices by as much as 200% on the global market so that the poor in Asia, Africa and Latin America can no longer afford basic staples, and starve. Hundreds of millions of people go hungry to feed this mania for profit, this radical evil that sees human beings, including children, as worth nothing.
These architects of radical evil extract the coal, oil and gas, poisoning our air, soil and water, while demanding huge taxpayer subsidies and blocking the urgent transition to renewable energy. They are the massive corporations that own the factory farms, egg hatcheries and dairy farms where tens of billions of animals endure horrendous abuse before being needlessly slaughtered, part of an animal agriculture industry that is one of the leading multifactorial causes of climate catastrophe. They are the generals and arms manufacturers. They are the bankers, hedge fund managers and global speculators who looted $7 trillion from the U.S. treasury after the pyramid schemes and fraud they carried out imploded the global economy in 2007-2008. They are the goons in state security who make us the most spied-upon, watched, monitored and photographed population in human history. When your government watches you 24 hours a day you cannot use the word “liberty.” This is the relationship between a master and a slave.
Corporate culture serves a faceless system. It is, as Hannah Arendt wrote, “the rule of nobody and for this very reason perhaps the least human and most cruel form of rulership.” It will stop at nothing. Anyone or any movement that attempts to impede their profits will be targeted for obliteration. These architects of radical evil are incapable of reform. Appealing to their better nature is a waste of time. They don’t have one. They have rigged the system, elections dominated by corporate money, the courts, the press a vast burlesque show for profit, which is why they spend so much time focused on Trump. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs or Exxon, Shell, BP and Chevron, which along with the other top 20 fossil fuel corporations have contributed 35% of all energy-related carbon dioxide and methane emissions worldwide—480 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent since 1965.
We know these architects of radical evil. They have been and always will be with us.
But who are those who resist? Where do they come from? What historical, social and cultural forces created them?
They too are familiar. They are Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, John Brown, Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. They are Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and Chief Joseph. They are Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Emma Goldman. They are “Big Bill” Haywood, Joe Hill and Eugene V. Debs. They are Woody Guthrie, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer. They are Andrea Dworkin and Caesar Chavez. They are those who from the beginning fought back, often to be defeated by this radical evil but knowing they were called to defy it, even at the cost of their own reputations, financial security, social standing and sometimes their lives.
The architects of radical evil are disemboweling every last social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to Social Security, because lives that do not swell their profits are considered superfluous. Let the sick die. Let many of the poor—41 million people, including children—go to bed hungry. Let families be tossed into the streets. Let the young graduate have no meaningful employment. Let the U.S. prison system, with 25% of the world’s prison population, swell. Let torture continue. Let assault rifles proliferate to fuel the epidemic of mass shootings. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools and libraries crumble or close. Let the rising temperatures, the freak weather patterns, the monster cyclones and hurricanes, the droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the wildfires, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned water systems and the polluted air worsen until the species dies.
Many in the church are complicit in this radical evil, failing to name it and denounce it, just as we failed to see in the thousands of men, women and children who were lynched the very crucifixion itself, as James Cone pointed out. And this complicity and silence condemns us. It is why W.E.B. Du Bois called “white religion” a “miserable failure.”
“Black people did not need to go to seminary and study theology to know that white Christianity was fraudulent,” Cone wrote in “The Cross and the Lynching Tree.” “As a teenager in the South where whites treated blacks with contempt, I and other blacks knew that the Christian identity of whites was not a true expression of what it means to follow Jesus. Nothing their theologians and preachers could say would convince us otherwise. We wondered how whites could live with their hypocrisy—such blatant contradiction of the man from Nazareth. (I am still wondering about that!) White conservative Christianity’s blatant endorsement of lynching as a part of its religion, and white liberal Christians’ silence about lynching placed both outside of Christian identity. I could not find one sermon or theological essay, not to mention a book, opposing lynching by a prominent liberal white preacher. There was no way a community could support or ignore lynching in America, while still representing in word and deed the one who was lynched by Rome.”
We have failed to denounce the Christian fascists who peddle a magic Jesus who will make us rich, a Jesus who blesses America above other countries and the white race above other races, a Jesus who turns the barbarity of war into a holy crusade, for the heretics they are. And we have failed, as well, to confront the radical evil of corporate capitalism. Let us not once again render our faith a miserable failure.
Defying evil cannot be rationally defended. It makes a leap into the moral, which is beyond rational thought. It refuses to place a monetary value on human life or the natural world. It refuses to see anyone as superfluous. It acknowledges human life, indeed all life, as sacred. And this is why, as Arendt points out, the only morally reliable people are not those who say “this is wrong” or “this should not be done,” but those who say “I can’t do this.”
Those who come out of a religious tradition, any religious tradition, have a responsibility to fight this latest iteration of radical evil, which is swiftly ensuring that our species and many other species will not have a future on this earth. It is our religious duty to place our bodies in front of the machine, as many of us did in the protests organized by Extinction Rebellion last week around the globe.
“The law, as presently revered and taught and enforced, is becoming an enticement to lawlessness,” Dan Berrigan wrote. “Lawyers and laws and courts and penal systems are nearly immobile before a shaken society, which is making civil disobedience a civil (I dare say a religious) duty. The law is aligning itself more and more with forms of power whose existence is placed more and more in question. … So, if they would obey the law, [people] are being forced, in the present crucial instance, either to disobey God or to disobey the law of humanity.”
Let us not in this present historical period replicate our sins of the past. Let us affirm our faith by affirming our defiance, our willingness to engage in the acts of sustained civil disobedience against the forces of radical evil. Let future generations say of us that we tried, that we were not complicit through our collaboration or our silence. There will be a cost. History shows us that. All moral battles have a cost, and if there is not a cost then the battle is not moral. Accept becoming an outcast. Jesus, after all, was an outcast. We are called by God to defy radical evil. This defiance is the highest form of spirituality.
The Age of Radical Evil
Immanuel Kant coined the term “radical evil.” It was the privileging of one’s own interest over that of others, effectively reducing those around you to objects to be manipulated and used for your own ends. But Hannah Arendt, who also used the term “radical evil,” saw that it was worse than merely treating others as objects. Radical evil, she wrote, rendered vast numbers of people superfluous. They possessed no value at all. They were, once they could not be utilized by the powerful, discarded as human refuse.
We live in an age of radical evil. The architects of this evil are despoiling the earth and driving the human species toward extinction. They are stripping us of our most basic civil liberties and freedoms. They are orchestrating the growing social inequity, concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a cabal of global oligarchs. They are destroying our democratic institutions, turning elected office into a system of legalized bribery, stacking our courts with judges who invert constitutional rights so that unlimited corporate money invested in political campaigns is disguised as the right to petition the government or a form of free speech. Their seizure of power has vomited up demagogues and con artists including Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, each the distortion of a failed democracy. They are turning America’s poor communities into internal militarized colonies where police carry out lethal campaigns of terror and use the blunt instrument of mass incarceration as a tool of social control. They are waging endless wars in the Middle East and diverting half of all discretionary spending to a bloated military. They are placing the rights of the corporation above the rights of the citizen.
Arendt captured the radical evil of a corporate capitalism in which people are rendered superfluous—surplus labor as Karl Marx said—and pushed to the margins of society where they and their children are no longer considered to have value, value always determined by the amount of money produced and amassed. But as the Gospel of Luke reminds us, “what is prized by human beings is an abomination in the sight of God.”
Who are those who would sacrifice us on the altar of global capitalism? How did they amass the power to deny us a voice, to insist that the earth is an inert commodity they have a right to exploit until the ecosystem that sustains life collapses and the human species, along with most other species, becomes extinct?
These architects of radical evil have been here from the beginning. They are the slaveholders who crammed men, women and children into the holds of ships and sold them in auctions in Charleston and Montgomery, rending families apart, taking from them their names, language, religion and culture. They wielded the whips, the chains, the dogs and the slave patrols. They orchestrated the holocaust of slavery, and when slavery was abolished, after a war that left 700,000 dead, they used convict leasing—slavery by another name—along with lynching and black codes, to carry out a reign of terror that continues today in our deindustrialized cities and our prisons. Black and brown bodies are worth nothing to our corporate masters when on the streets of our decayed cities, but locked in cages they each generate 50 or 60 thousand dollars a year. Some people say the system does not work. They are wrong. The system works exactly as it is designed to work.
These architects of radical evil are the white militias and Army units that stole the land, decimated the herds of buffalo, signed the treaties that were promptly violated and carried out a campaign of genocide against indigenous people, penning the few who remained in prisoner of war camps. They are the gun thugs, Baldwin-Felts and Pinkerton agents who gunned down, by the hundreds, American workers struggling to organize, forces of the kind that today oversee the bonded labor of workers in China, Vietnam and Bangladesh. They are the oligarchs, J.P. Morgan, Rockefeller and Carnegie, who paid for these rivers of blood, and who today, like Tim Cook at Apple and Jeff Bezos at Amazon, amass staggering fortunes from human misery.
We know these architects of radical evil. They are the DNA of American capitalism. You can find them on the commodity desks at Goldman Sachs. The financial firm’s commodities index is the most heavily traded in the world. These traders buy up futures of rice, wheat, corn, sugar and livestock and jack up the commodity prices by as much as 200% on the global market so that the poor in Asia, Africa and Latin America can no longer afford basic staples, and starve. Hundreds of millions of people go hungry to feed this mania for profit, this radical evil that sees human beings, including children, as worth nothing.
These architects of radical evil extract the coal, oil and gas, poisoning our air, soil and water, while demanding huge taxpayer subsidies and blocking the urgent transition to renewable energy. They are the massive corporations that own the factory farms, egg hatcheries and dairy farms where tens of billions of animals endure horrendous abuse before being needlessly slaughtered, part of an animal agriculture industry that is one of the leading multifactorial causes of climate catastrophe. They are the generals and arms manufacturers. They are the bankers, hedge fund managers and global speculators who looted $7 trillion from the U.S. treasury after the pyramid schemes and fraud they carried out imploded the global economy in 2007-2008. They are the goons in state security who make us the most spied-upon, watched, monitored and photographed population in human history. When your government watches you 24 hours a day you cannot use the word “liberty.” This is the relationship between a master and a slave.
Corporate culture serves a faceless system. It is, as Hannah Arendt wrote, “the rule of nobody and for this very reason perhaps the least human and most cruel form of rulership.” It will stop at nothing. Anyone or any movement that attempts to impede their profits will be targeted for obliteration. These architects of radical evil are incapable of reform. Appealing to their better nature is a waste of time. They don’t have one. They have rigged the system, elections dominated by corporate money, the courts, the press a vast burlesque show for profit, which is why they spend so much time focused on Trump. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs or Exxon, Shell, BP and Chevron, which along with the other top 20 fossil fuel corporations have contributed 35% of all energy-related carbon dioxide and methane emissions worldwide—480 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent since 1965.
We know these architects of radical evil. They have been and always will be with us.
But who are those who resist? Where do they come from? What historical, social and cultural forces created them?
They too are familiar. They are Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, John Brown, Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. They are Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and Chief Joseph. They are Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Emma Goldman. They are “Big Bill” Haywood, Joe Hill and Eugene V. Debs. They are Woody Guthrie, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer. They are Andrea Dworkin and Caesar Chavez. They are those who from the beginning fought back, often to be defeated by this radical evil but knowing they were called to defy it, even at the cost of their own reputations, financial security, social standing and sometimes their lives.
The architects of radical evil are disemboweling every last social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to Social Security, because lives that do not swell their profits are considered superfluous. Let the sick die. Let many of the poor—41 million people, including children—go to bed hungry. Let families be tossed into the streets. Let the young graduate have no meaningful employment. Let the U.S. prison system, with 25% of the world’s prison population, swell. Let torture continue. Let assault rifles proliferate to fuel the epidemic of mass shootings. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools and libraries crumble or close. Let the rising temperatures, the freak weather patterns, the monster cyclones and hurricanes, the droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the wildfires, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned water systems and the polluted air worsen until the species dies.
Many in the church are complicit in this radical evil, failing to name it and denounce it, just as we failed to see in the thousands of men, women and children who were lynched the very crucifixion itself, as James Cone pointed out. And this complicity and silence condemns us. It is why W.E.B. Du Bois called “white religion” a “miserable failure.”
“Black people did not need to go to seminary and study theology to know that white Christianity was fraudulent,” Cone wrote in “The Cross and the Lynching Tree.” “As a teenager in the South where whites treated blacks with contempt, I and other blacks knew that the Christian identity of whites was not a true expression of what it means to follow Jesus. Nothing their theologians and preachers could say would convince us otherwise. We wondered how whites could live with their hypocrisy—such blatant contradiction of the man from Nazareth. (I am still wondering about that!) White conservative Christianity’s blatant endorsement of lynching as a part of its religion, and white liberal Christians’ silence about lynching placed both outside of Christian identity. I could not find one sermon or theological essay, not to mention a book, opposing lynching by a prominent liberal white preacher. There was no way a community could support or ignore lynching in America, while still representing in word and deed the one who was lynched by Rome.”
We have failed to denounce the Christian fascists who peddle a magic Jesus who will make us rich, a Jesus who blesses America above other countries and the white race above other races, a Jesus who turns the barbarity of war into a holy crusade, for the heretics they are. And we have failed, as well, to confront the radical evil of corporate capitalism. Let us not once again render our faith a miserable failure.
Defying evil cannot be rationally defended. It makes a leap into the moral, which is beyond rational thought. It refuses to place a monetary value on human life or the natural world. It refuses to see anyone as superfluous. It acknowledges human life, indeed all life, as sacred. And this is why, as Arendt points out, the only morally reliable people are not those who say “this is wrong” or “this should not be done,” but those who say “I can’t do this.”
Those who come out of a religious tradition, any religious tradition, have a responsibility to fight this latest iteration of radical evil, which is swiftly ensuring that our species and many other species will not have a future on this earth. It is our religious duty to place our bodies in front of the machine, as many of us did in the protests organized by Extinction Rebellion last week around the globe.
“The law, as presently revered and taught and enforced, is becoming an enticement to lawlessness,” Dan Berrigan wrote. “Lawyers and laws and courts and penal systems are nearly immobile before a shaken society, which is making civil disobedience a civil (I dare say a religious) duty. The law is aligning itself more and more with forms of power whose existence is placed more and more in question. … So, if they would obey the law, [people] are being forced, in the present crucial instance, either to disobey God or to disobey the law of humanity.”
Let us not in this present historical period replicate our sins of the past. Let us affirm our faith by affirming our defiance, our willingness to engage in the acts of sustained civil disobedience against the forces of radical evil. Let future generations say of us that we tried, that we were not complicit through our collaboration or our silence. There will be a cost. History shows us that. All moral battles have a cost, and if there is not a cost then the battle is not moral. Accept becoming an outcast. Jesus, after all, was an outcast. We are called by God to defy radical evil. This defiance is the highest form of spirituality.
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