https://www.catherineingram.com/facingextinction/
Facing Extinction
by Catherine Ingram
....
A couple small excerpts,
" Because the subject is so tragic and because it can scare or anger people, this is not an essay I ever wanted to write; it is one I would have wanted to read along the way. But the words on these pages are meant only for those who are ready for them. I offer no hope or solutions for our continuation, only companionship and empathy to you, the reader, who either knows or suspects that there is no hope or solution to be found. What we now need to find is courage "
" I am aware that virtually no one in my family and few of my friends are either ready to hear this information now or will be prepared to face what is ahead in time. It is pointless to try to warn them if they are not ready. My attempts at hinting usually lead to blank stares or agitation. I have come to accept that for some people, their fate is to continue the romp of life, oblivious to the dangers ahead. Maybe it is best that they enjoy whatever good times are left, even though there might be extreme panic in the last phase. Maybe it is just as well that they continue as they have been for as long as possible. Maybe it will postpone chaos and lawlessness the world over until the systems fully crash. But for those of us who cannot look away, we carry the anticipatory grief for those who cannot bear to look "
....
This brilliant missive, a must read. Are you ready?
Wednesday, January 15, 2020
Tuesday, January 14, 2020
SC204-7
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjan20/2020-instability1-20.html
Instability Rising: Why 2020 Will Be Different
Economically, the 11 years since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09 have been one relatively coherent era of modest growth, rising wealth/income inequality and coordinated central bank stimulus every time a crisis threatened to disrupt the domestic or global economy.
This era will draw to a close in 2020 and a new era of destabilization and uncertainty begins.
Why will all the policies that have worked so well for 11 years stop working in 2020?
All the monetary/fiscal policies of the past decade were simply extreme versions of tried-and-true policies that central banks and governments have used for the past 75 years to restore growth in a recession or financial crisis: lower interest rates, increase credit/liquidity, and ramp up government spending (i.e. deficit spending) to compensate for declining private-sector spending.
These policies were designed to be short-term stimulus programs to jump-start the economy out of a slowdown (recession), which typically lasted between 9 and 18 months.
These policies are now permanent, as the system is now dependent on these policies. Any reduction in central bank stimulus causes a market crash (witness the 20% drop in 2018 as the Fed slowly raised interest rates from near-zero) and any reduction in deficit spending threatens to trigger a recession.
The problem is that these policies create distortions that cannot be fixed with more of what caused the distortions in the first place: more extreme monetary and fiscal stimulus.
Systemic distortions include:
A. Soaring wealth-income inequality across the entire global economy.
B. Dependence on asset bubbles to generate the "wealth effect" that encourages spending by the top 5% who own two-thirds of the assets bubbling higher.
C. Dependence on asset bubbles to generate capital gains and property tax revenues for state/local governments.
D. Loss of cost discipline: the solution across the entire spectrum--government, corporate and household--is now to borrow more, not trim costs via innovation or increases in productivity and efficiency.
E. Reliance on debt to fund spending leads to rising defaults which will collapse the system. (Soaring auto-loan defaults are the canary in the coal mine.)
F. Zero interest rates have generated over-capacity/over-production as everyone seeks a return on capital by expanding market share. Now there are global gluts in everything from autos to natural gas to electronics.
G. With the yield on savings now less than zero due to inflation, investors must gamble in the asset-bubble casino as this is only available way to earn a return.
H. Buffers are thinning. I've discussed this in depth over the years; dependence on stimulus lowers systemic resilience, rendering the entire system increasingly vulnerable to a phase-shift that fatally destabilizes the system.
I. Prior to the 2008-2019 era, the "real economy" of sales, wages and profits led the stock market. Now the stock market dominates the real economy, as the central banks have turned the stock market into the 'signaling device' that all is well and the source of bringing demand forward (i.e. the wealth effect).
In Mohammed El-Erian's words: "The Fed can't pull back because it's worried it will disrupt markets that can be a spillover on the economy. The Fed's in a lose, lose, lose situation, they can't stay where they are, they can't do more, they can't do less."
In Andy Xie's words: "The Fed has gone from the financial bubble's hostage to its guardian."
J. There are limits on encouraging more borrowing by lowering interest rates to zero. Even at zero interest rates, income must be devoted to paying principal. At some point, all available income is already consumed in debt service. Anecdotally, we're already there: zombie corporations (that only survive by increasing their debt loads) are becoming more numerous, and households burdened with student loans, auto loans, credit cards and mortgages cannot afford more debt even at zero interest.
Policy makers are now trapped. Unable to reverse the policies that have created the distortions lest that crash the system, they only have two responses, neither of which actually address the distortions undermining the system:
1) push extremely distorting policies to new extremes, or
2) attempt policy-tweaks--higher taxes on the wealthy, etc.--that ignore the causes of the distortions. These policy tweaks are the classic "band-aids treating cancer."
The abject failure of these policies (short-term turned into permanent, with all the resulting long-term distortions) is now visible to all, and we're seeing articles in the most influential mainstream media outlets questioning the current versions of global capitalism; for example, the new issue of Foreign Affairs magazine is devoted to The Future of Capitalism, an implicit confirmation that the current version, dependent on extremes of debt, speculation and stimulus, has no future.
Is there a way out? No. That these policies have not restored "organic growth" (i.e. growth that isn't dependent on zero interest rates, speculative bubbles and tens of trillions of dollars in permanent stimulus) must be accepted, along with the need for a painful re-set.
The odds of this happening are near-zero, as politicians who cause economic pain lose the support of the populace.
This leaves us with the pain of ever-greater distortions, which will drive economic instability, fragmentation, social disorder and financial crashes.
Inherently unstable systems can appear stable for quite some time as the instability builds beneath the placid surface.
In 2020, increasing monetary and fiscal stimulus will be the equivalent of spraying gasoline on a fire to extinguish it. These two charts summarize the disastrous consequences of permanent monetary stimulus: wages' share of the economy are in relentless decline, while the equally relentless rise of financialization has generated soaring wealth / income inequality that increasingly threatens to rip our society and economy to shreds.
....
Net energy decline is increasing and as this occurs all of the myriad travails of collapsing societies will become more prevalent. The energy that made our world is waning and there is no solution for this predicament.
Instability Rising: Why 2020 Will Be Different
Economically, the 11 years since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09 have been one relatively coherent era of modest growth, rising wealth/income inequality and coordinated central bank stimulus every time a crisis threatened to disrupt the domestic or global economy.
This era will draw to a close in 2020 and a new era of destabilization and uncertainty begins.
Why will all the policies that have worked so well for 11 years stop working in 2020?
All the monetary/fiscal policies of the past decade were simply extreme versions of tried-and-true policies that central banks and governments have used for the past 75 years to restore growth in a recession or financial crisis: lower interest rates, increase credit/liquidity, and ramp up government spending (i.e. deficit spending) to compensate for declining private-sector spending.
These policies were designed to be short-term stimulus programs to jump-start the economy out of a slowdown (recession), which typically lasted between 9 and 18 months.
These policies are now permanent, as the system is now dependent on these policies. Any reduction in central bank stimulus causes a market crash (witness the 20% drop in 2018 as the Fed slowly raised interest rates from near-zero) and any reduction in deficit spending threatens to trigger a recession.
The problem is that these policies create distortions that cannot be fixed with more of what caused the distortions in the first place: more extreme monetary and fiscal stimulus.
Systemic distortions include:
A. Soaring wealth-income inequality across the entire global economy.
B. Dependence on asset bubbles to generate the "wealth effect" that encourages spending by the top 5% who own two-thirds of the assets bubbling higher.
C. Dependence on asset bubbles to generate capital gains and property tax revenues for state/local governments.
D. Loss of cost discipline: the solution across the entire spectrum--government, corporate and household--is now to borrow more, not trim costs via innovation or increases in productivity and efficiency.
E. Reliance on debt to fund spending leads to rising defaults which will collapse the system. (Soaring auto-loan defaults are the canary in the coal mine.)
F. Zero interest rates have generated over-capacity/over-production as everyone seeks a return on capital by expanding market share. Now there are global gluts in everything from autos to natural gas to electronics.
G. With the yield on savings now less than zero due to inflation, investors must gamble in the asset-bubble casino as this is only available way to earn a return.
H. Buffers are thinning. I've discussed this in depth over the years; dependence on stimulus lowers systemic resilience, rendering the entire system increasingly vulnerable to a phase-shift that fatally destabilizes the system.
I. Prior to the 2008-2019 era, the "real economy" of sales, wages and profits led the stock market. Now the stock market dominates the real economy, as the central banks have turned the stock market into the 'signaling device' that all is well and the source of bringing demand forward (i.e. the wealth effect).
In Mohammed El-Erian's words: "The Fed can't pull back because it's worried it will disrupt markets that can be a spillover on the economy. The Fed's in a lose, lose, lose situation, they can't stay where they are, they can't do more, they can't do less."
In Andy Xie's words: "The Fed has gone from the financial bubble's hostage to its guardian."
J. There are limits on encouraging more borrowing by lowering interest rates to zero. Even at zero interest rates, income must be devoted to paying principal. At some point, all available income is already consumed in debt service. Anecdotally, we're already there: zombie corporations (that only survive by increasing their debt loads) are becoming more numerous, and households burdened with student loans, auto loans, credit cards and mortgages cannot afford more debt even at zero interest.
Policy makers are now trapped. Unable to reverse the policies that have created the distortions lest that crash the system, they only have two responses, neither of which actually address the distortions undermining the system:
1) push extremely distorting policies to new extremes, or
2) attempt policy-tweaks--higher taxes on the wealthy, etc.--that ignore the causes of the distortions. These policy tweaks are the classic "band-aids treating cancer."
The abject failure of these policies (short-term turned into permanent, with all the resulting long-term distortions) is now visible to all, and we're seeing articles in the most influential mainstream media outlets questioning the current versions of global capitalism; for example, the new issue of Foreign Affairs magazine is devoted to The Future of Capitalism, an implicit confirmation that the current version, dependent on extremes of debt, speculation and stimulus, has no future.
Is there a way out? No. That these policies have not restored "organic growth" (i.e. growth that isn't dependent on zero interest rates, speculative bubbles and tens of trillions of dollars in permanent stimulus) must be accepted, along with the need for a painful re-set.
The odds of this happening are near-zero, as politicians who cause economic pain lose the support of the populace.
This leaves us with the pain of ever-greater distortions, which will drive economic instability, fragmentation, social disorder and financial crashes.
Inherently unstable systems can appear stable for quite some time as the instability builds beneath the placid surface.
In 2020, increasing monetary and fiscal stimulus will be the equivalent of spraying gasoline on a fire to extinguish it. These two charts summarize the disastrous consequences of permanent monetary stimulus: wages' share of the economy are in relentless decline, while the equally relentless rise of financialization has generated soaring wealth / income inequality that increasingly threatens to rip our society and economy to shreds.
....
Net energy decline is increasing and as this occurs all of the myriad travails of collapsing societies will become more prevalent. The energy that made our world is waning and there is no solution for this predicament.
Monday, January 13, 2020
SC204-6
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/how-democracies-die/
How Democracies Die
Leo Tolstoy wrote that happy families are all alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. So too with failed democracies. There is no one route to the dissolution of the open society, but the patterns are familiar, whether in ancient Athens, the Roman Republic or the collapse of the democracies in Italy and the Weimar Republic in Germany that led to fascism. The ills that beset Germany and Italy in the 1930s are sadly familiar to us—an ineffectual political system, a retreat by huge sectors of the population into a world where facts and opinions are interchangeable, the seizure of national economies by international banks, and global finance capital that has forced larger and larger segments of society into a subsistence existence, obliterating hope for the future. We too suffer from an epidemic of nihilistic violence, one that has included mass shootings and domestic terrorism. There is a rapacious and out-of-control militarism. Betrayed citizens, as in the 1930s, harbor an inchoate hatred for a ruling elite that is mired in corruption while it mouths empty platitudes about liberal, democratic values. There is a desperate yearning for a cult leader or demagogue who will exact vengeance on those who have betrayed us and usher in a return to a mythical past and lost glory.
This is not to equate Donald Trump with Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini. Nor is it to say that we endure the severe trauma that afflicted Germany after World War I, with its 1.7 million war dead and millions more wounded physically and psychologically. Weimar’s street violence and brawls, usually between the armed wings of the Nazi Party and the communists, were widespread and resulted in numerous fatalities. The economic crisis after the 1929 crash was catastrophic. By 1932 at least 40% of the insured German workforce, 6 million people, were out of work. Germans during the depression that followed the crash often struggled to get enough to eat. But we ignore our many similarities to the 1930s at our peril.
The business elites in Italy and Germany saw the fascists as buffoons, just as Wall Street views Trump and his enablers as an embarrassment. But the capitalists would rather have Trump as president than a reformer such as Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. The primacy of corporate profit, as in fascist Germany and Italy, makes the business elites willfully complicit in the destruction of democracy. These capitalists are oblivious to the danger their consolidation of wealth and power poses to democracy. They ram through tax cuts for the rich and austerity programs that exacerbate the despair and rage that fuel extremism. They make war on organized labor, suppressing wages and abolishing benefits.
At the start of the Trump administration, the traditional ruling class, much like its counterparts in Germany and Italy, held the naive belief that being in power moderates extremist leaders, or that extremists can be controlled by the “adults in the room.” It did not work in Germany or Italy; it has not worked in the United States. Politics, as in fascist Italy and Germany, has been replaced with spectacle and political theater. There is an unbridgeable gulf between rural voters—largely Nazi supporters in the Weimar Republic and largely Trump supporters in the United States—and the urban electorate. Vast parts of the population, beset by despair, have severed themselves from a fact-based world and embrace magic, conspiracy theories and fantasy. The military and the organs of state security are deified. War criminals are seen as patriots unjustly persecuted by the detested deep state and the liberal class. The norms, decorum, courtesy and mutual respect that are essential to a functioning democracy are replaced by vulgarity, insults, incitement to violence, racism, bigotry, contempt and lies. These ills of today’s United States mirror the political and moral rot of Italy and Germany on the eve of fascism.
The historian Fritz Stern, a refugee from Nazi Germany, told me that in Germany there had been “a yearning for fascism before the word ‘fascism’ was invented.” He warned about the mortal danger to our democracy from our bankrupt liberalism, which abandoned working men and women and refused to accept its responsibility in creating the fertile ground for fascism by scapegoating others—the most recent example being the Democratic Party attempt to blame Russia for Trump’s election.
Stern saw in our spiritual and political alienation—given expression through cultural hatreds, racism, Islamophobia, a demonization of immigrants and personal resentments—the seeds of an American fascism. This fascism, he said, found its ideological expression in the Christian right.
“They attacked liberalism,” Stern wrote of the German fascists in his book “The Politics of Cultural Despair,” “because it seemed to them the principal premise of modern society; everything they dreaded seemed to spring from it; the bourgeois life, Manchesterism [laissez-faire capitalism], materialism, parliament and the parties, the lack of political leadership. Even more, they sensed in liberalism the source of all their inner sufferings. Theirs was a resentment of loneliness; their one desire was for a new faith, a new community of believers, a world with fixed standards and no doubts, a new national religion that would bind all Germans together. All this, liberalism denied. Hence, they hated liberalism, blamed it for making outcasts of them, for uprooting them from their imaginary past, and from their faith.”
The U.S. Republican Party, replicating the fascist parties of the 1930s, is a personality cult. Those who do not bow obsequiously before the leader and carry out the leader’s demands are banished. The institutions tasked with defending morality, especially religious institutions, have failed miserably in the United States just as they failed in Italy and Germany. A Christianized fascism champions Trump as an agent of God while the traditional church refuses to denounce evangelical right-wing extremists as heretics and impostors. As the German social democrat Kurt Schumacher put it, fascism makes a “constant appeal to the inner swine in human beings.” It mobilizes “human stupidity,” what the writer Joseph Roth called “the auto-da-fé of the mind.”
Benjamin Carter Hett, in his book “The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic,” writes, “Thinking about the end of Weimar democracy in this way—as the result of a large protest movement colliding with complex patterns of elite self-interest, in a culture increasingly prone to aggressive mythmaking and irrationality—strips away the exotic and foreign look of swastika banners and goose-stepping Stormtroopers. Suddenly, the whole thing looks close and familiar. Alongside the viciousness of much of German politics in the Weimar years was an incongruous innocence; few people could imagine the worst possibilities. A civilized nation could not possibly vote for Hitler, some had thought. When he became chancellor nonetheless, millions expected his time in office to be short and ineffectual. Germany was a notoriously law-abiding as well as cultured land. How could a German government systematically brutalize its own people?”
Hett and other historians including Stern, Ian Kershaw, Richard J. Evans, Joachim E. Fest and Eric Voegelin have detailed how the willful destruction of democratic norms and procedures in Germany was usually done in the name of expediency or fiscal necessity. By 1933 the Nazis and the communists together held a slim majority of seats in the parliament, or Reichstag. They were deadlocked on every major issue, with the exception of declaring an amnesty for their imprisoned supporters. This “negative” majority made governing impossible. German democracy seized up. The socialist leader Friedrich Ebert, president from 1919 until 1925, and later Heinrich Brüning, chancellor from 1930 to 1932 and allied with President Paul von Hindenburg, had already begun to rule by decree to bypass the fractious parliament, relying on Article 48 of the Weimar constitution. Article 48, which granted the president the right in an emergency to issue decrees, was what Hett calls “a trapdoor through which Germany could fall into dictatorship.” Article 48 was the equivalent of the executive orders liberally used by President Barack Obama and now Trump.
Congress, in some ways, is even more dysfunctional than the Reichstag was. The German communists, at least, fought on behalf of workers. The Republicans and Democrats in Congress are antagonistic on the issues that do not count, united in their support for the corporate state and against the working class. They annually approve vast expenditures for the military and intelligence agencies to fuel the endless wars. They back austerity measures, trade agreements and tax cuts demanded by corporate power, accelerating the assault on the working class. At the same time, the courts, as was the case during fascism in Germany and Italy, are being stacked with extremists.
The Nazis responded to the February 1933 burning of Reichstag, which was probably carried out by the Nazis themselves, by using Article 48 to push through the emergency presidential decree “For the Protection of People and State.” It instantly snuffed out the democratic state. It legalized the imprisonment without trial of anyone deemed to be a threat to national security. It abolished freedom of speech, of association and of the press along with the privacy of postal and telephone communications. Few Germans understood the full ramifications of the decree at the time, much as Americans failed to fully understand the ramifications of the Patriot Act.
The Democratic-controlled House impeached Trump for two relatively minor constitutional violations. It left untouched the far more damaging violations that were normalized during the Obama and Bush administrations. Illegal wars, never declared by Congress as demanded by the Constitution, were launched by George W. Bush and continued by Obama. The U.S. public endures blanket government surveillance in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment. Torture and kidnapping and imprisoning terrorism suspects in black sites, along with targeted assassinations, now including senior foreign leaders, have become routine. When Edward Snowden provided documentation that our intelligence agencies are monitoring and spying on nearly every citizen and downloading our data and metrics into government computers where they will be stored for perpetuity, nothing was done. Obama misused the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force to erase due process and give the executive branch of government the right to act as judge, jury and executioner in assassinating U.S. citizens, starting with the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and, two weeks later, his 16-year-old son. Obama also signed into law Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, in effect overturning the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of the military as a domestic police force. Obama and Trump have violated clauses of treaties ratified by the Senate. They violated the Constitution by making appointments without seeking Senate confirmation. They bypassed Congress by abusing executive orders. These are very dangerous bipartisan tools in the hands of a demagogue. This steady corrosion of democracy, as in Germany and Italy, opened the door to fascism. The blame lies not with Trump but the ruling political elites who, as their predecessors did in the 1930s, abandoned the rule of law.
Peter Drucker, who was working in Germany as a journalist during Weimar, astutely observed that fascism succeeded in spite of the chronic lies spread by the Nazis, not because of them. The rise of Nazis, not unlike the rise of Trump, took place in the face of “a hostile press, a hostile radio, a hostile cinema, a hostile church, and a hostile government which untiringly pointed out the Nazi lies, the Nazi inconsistency, the unattainability of their promises, and the dangers and folly of their course.” Drucker, in a remark we should interpret as a grave warning, noted that no one “would have been a Nazi if rational belief in the Nazi promises had been a prerequisite.” As Hett writes, such hostility to reality translates “into contempt for politics, or, rather, desire for a politics that was somehow not political: a thing that can never be.”
“The people are tired of reason, tired of thought and reflection,” the left-wing playwright Ernst Toller wrote of Germans in the Weimar Republic. “They ask, what has reason done in the last few years, what good have insights and knowledge done us.”
When ruling elites are unable to protect the rights and needs of citizens, or no longer interested in doing so, they become disposable. An enraged public sees any political figure or political party willing to attack and belittle the traditional ruling elites as an ally. The more crude, irrational or vulgar the attack, the more the disenfranchised rejoice. Lies and truth no longer matter. This was the appeal of the fascists. It is the appeal of Trump. Democracy was not extinguished in 2016 when Trump was elected. It was slowly strangled to death by the Republican and Democratic parties on behalf of their corporate masters.
How Democracies Die
Leo Tolstoy wrote that happy families are all alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. So too with failed democracies. There is no one route to the dissolution of the open society, but the patterns are familiar, whether in ancient Athens, the Roman Republic or the collapse of the democracies in Italy and the Weimar Republic in Germany that led to fascism. The ills that beset Germany and Italy in the 1930s are sadly familiar to us—an ineffectual political system, a retreat by huge sectors of the population into a world where facts and opinions are interchangeable, the seizure of national economies by international banks, and global finance capital that has forced larger and larger segments of society into a subsistence existence, obliterating hope for the future. We too suffer from an epidemic of nihilistic violence, one that has included mass shootings and domestic terrorism. There is a rapacious and out-of-control militarism. Betrayed citizens, as in the 1930s, harbor an inchoate hatred for a ruling elite that is mired in corruption while it mouths empty platitudes about liberal, democratic values. There is a desperate yearning for a cult leader or demagogue who will exact vengeance on those who have betrayed us and usher in a return to a mythical past and lost glory.
This is not to equate Donald Trump with Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini. Nor is it to say that we endure the severe trauma that afflicted Germany after World War I, with its 1.7 million war dead and millions more wounded physically and psychologically. Weimar’s street violence and brawls, usually between the armed wings of the Nazi Party and the communists, were widespread and resulted in numerous fatalities. The economic crisis after the 1929 crash was catastrophic. By 1932 at least 40% of the insured German workforce, 6 million people, were out of work. Germans during the depression that followed the crash often struggled to get enough to eat. But we ignore our many similarities to the 1930s at our peril.
The business elites in Italy and Germany saw the fascists as buffoons, just as Wall Street views Trump and his enablers as an embarrassment. But the capitalists would rather have Trump as president than a reformer such as Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. The primacy of corporate profit, as in fascist Germany and Italy, makes the business elites willfully complicit in the destruction of democracy. These capitalists are oblivious to the danger their consolidation of wealth and power poses to democracy. They ram through tax cuts for the rich and austerity programs that exacerbate the despair and rage that fuel extremism. They make war on organized labor, suppressing wages and abolishing benefits.
At the start of the Trump administration, the traditional ruling class, much like its counterparts in Germany and Italy, held the naive belief that being in power moderates extremist leaders, or that extremists can be controlled by the “adults in the room.” It did not work in Germany or Italy; it has not worked in the United States. Politics, as in fascist Italy and Germany, has been replaced with spectacle and political theater. There is an unbridgeable gulf between rural voters—largely Nazi supporters in the Weimar Republic and largely Trump supporters in the United States—and the urban electorate. Vast parts of the population, beset by despair, have severed themselves from a fact-based world and embrace magic, conspiracy theories and fantasy. The military and the organs of state security are deified. War criminals are seen as patriots unjustly persecuted by the detested deep state and the liberal class. The norms, decorum, courtesy and mutual respect that are essential to a functioning democracy are replaced by vulgarity, insults, incitement to violence, racism, bigotry, contempt and lies. These ills of today’s United States mirror the political and moral rot of Italy and Germany on the eve of fascism.
The historian Fritz Stern, a refugee from Nazi Germany, told me that in Germany there had been “a yearning for fascism before the word ‘fascism’ was invented.” He warned about the mortal danger to our democracy from our bankrupt liberalism, which abandoned working men and women and refused to accept its responsibility in creating the fertile ground for fascism by scapegoating others—the most recent example being the Democratic Party attempt to blame Russia for Trump’s election.
Stern saw in our spiritual and political alienation—given expression through cultural hatreds, racism, Islamophobia, a demonization of immigrants and personal resentments—the seeds of an American fascism. This fascism, he said, found its ideological expression in the Christian right.
“They attacked liberalism,” Stern wrote of the German fascists in his book “The Politics of Cultural Despair,” “because it seemed to them the principal premise of modern society; everything they dreaded seemed to spring from it; the bourgeois life, Manchesterism [laissez-faire capitalism], materialism, parliament and the parties, the lack of political leadership. Even more, they sensed in liberalism the source of all their inner sufferings. Theirs was a resentment of loneliness; their one desire was for a new faith, a new community of believers, a world with fixed standards and no doubts, a new national religion that would bind all Germans together. All this, liberalism denied. Hence, they hated liberalism, blamed it for making outcasts of them, for uprooting them from their imaginary past, and from their faith.”
The U.S. Republican Party, replicating the fascist parties of the 1930s, is a personality cult. Those who do not bow obsequiously before the leader and carry out the leader’s demands are banished. The institutions tasked with defending morality, especially religious institutions, have failed miserably in the United States just as they failed in Italy and Germany. A Christianized fascism champions Trump as an agent of God while the traditional church refuses to denounce evangelical right-wing extremists as heretics and impostors. As the German social democrat Kurt Schumacher put it, fascism makes a “constant appeal to the inner swine in human beings.” It mobilizes “human stupidity,” what the writer Joseph Roth called “the auto-da-fé of the mind.”
Benjamin Carter Hett, in his book “The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic,” writes, “Thinking about the end of Weimar democracy in this way—as the result of a large protest movement colliding with complex patterns of elite self-interest, in a culture increasingly prone to aggressive mythmaking and irrationality—strips away the exotic and foreign look of swastika banners and goose-stepping Stormtroopers. Suddenly, the whole thing looks close and familiar. Alongside the viciousness of much of German politics in the Weimar years was an incongruous innocence; few people could imagine the worst possibilities. A civilized nation could not possibly vote for Hitler, some had thought. When he became chancellor nonetheless, millions expected his time in office to be short and ineffectual. Germany was a notoriously law-abiding as well as cultured land. How could a German government systematically brutalize its own people?”
Hett and other historians including Stern, Ian Kershaw, Richard J. Evans, Joachim E. Fest and Eric Voegelin have detailed how the willful destruction of democratic norms and procedures in Germany was usually done in the name of expediency or fiscal necessity. By 1933 the Nazis and the communists together held a slim majority of seats in the parliament, or Reichstag. They were deadlocked on every major issue, with the exception of declaring an amnesty for their imprisoned supporters. This “negative” majority made governing impossible. German democracy seized up. The socialist leader Friedrich Ebert, president from 1919 until 1925, and later Heinrich Brüning, chancellor from 1930 to 1932 and allied with President Paul von Hindenburg, had already begun to rule by decree to bypass the fractious parliament, relying on Article 48 of the Weimar constitution. Article 48, which granted the president the right in an emergency to issue decrees, was what Hett calls “a trapdoor through which Germany could fall into dictatorship.” Article 48 was the equivalent of the executive orders liberally used by President Barack Obama and now Trump.
Congress, in some ways, is even more dysfunctional than the Reichstag was. The German communists, at least, fought on behalf of workers. The Republicans and Democrats in Congress are antagonistic on the issues that do not count, united in their support for the corporate state and against the working class. They annually approve vast expenditures for the military and intelligence agencies to fuel the endless wars. They back austerity measures, trade agreements and tax cuts demanded by corporate power, accelerating the assault on the working class. At the same time, the courts, as was the case during fascism in Germany and Italy, are being stacked with extremists.
The Nazis responded to the February 1933 burning of Reichstag, which was probably carried out by the Nazis themselves, by using Article 48 to push through the emergency presidential decree “For the Protection of People and State.” It instantly snuffed out the democratic state. It legalized the imprisonment without trial of anyone deemed to be a threat to national security. It abolished freedom of speech, of association and of the press along with the privacy of postal and telephone communications. Few Germans understood the full ramifications of the decree at the time, much as Americans failed to fully understand the ramifications of the Patriot Act.
The Democratic-controlled House impeached Trump for two relatively minor constitutional violations. It left untouched the far more damaging violations that were normalized during the Obama and Bush administrations. Illegal wars, never declared by Congress as demanded by the Constitution, were launched by George W. Bush and continued by Obama. The U.S. public endures blanket government surveillance in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment. Torture and kidnapping and imprisoning terrorism suspects in black sites, along with targeted assassinations, now including senior foreign leaders, have become routine. When Edward Snowden provided documentation that our intelligence agencies are monitoring and spying on nearly every citizen and downloading our data and metrics into government computers where they will be stored for perpetuity, nothing was done. Obama misused the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force to erase due process and give the executive branch of government the right to act as judge, jury and executioner in assassinating U.S. citizens, starting with the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and, two weeks later, his 16-year-old son. Obama also signed into law Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, in effect overturning the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of the military as a domestic police force. Obama and Trump have violated clauses of treaties ratified by the Senate. They violated the Constitution by making appointments without seeking Senate confirmation. They bypassed Congress by abusing executive orders. These are very dangerous bipartisan tools in the hands of a demagogue. This steady corrosion of democracy, as in Germany and Italy, opened the door to fascism. The blame lies not with Trump but the ruling political elites who, as their predecessors did in the 1930s, abandoned the rule of law.
Peter Drucker, who was working in Germany as a journalist during Weimar, astutely observed that fascism succeeded in spite of the chronic lies spread by the Nazis, not because of them. The rise of Nazis, not unlike the rise of Trump, took place in the face of “a hostile press, a hostile radio, a hostile cinema, a hostile church, and a hostile government which untiringly pointed out the Nazi lies, the Nazi inconsistency, the unattainability of their promises, and the dangers and folly of their course.” Drucker, in a remark we should interpret as a grave warning, noted that no one “would have been a Nazi if rational belief in the Nazi promises had been a prerequisite.” As Hett writes, such hostility to reality translates “into contempt for politics, or, rather, desire for a politics that was somehow not political: a thing that can never be.”
“The people are tired of reason, tired of thought and reflection,” the left-wing playwright Ernst Toller wrote of Germans in the Weimar Republic. “They ask, what has reason done in the last few years, what good have insights and knowledge done us.”
When ruling elites are unable to protect the rights and needs of citizens, or no longer interested in doing so, they become disposable. An enraged public sees any political figure or political party willing to attack and belittle the traditional ruling elites as an ally. The more crude, irrational or vulgar the attack, the more the disenfranchised rejoice. Lies and truth no longer matter. This was the appeal of the fascists. It is the appeal of Trump. Democracy was not extinguished in 2016 when Trump was elected. It was slowly strangled to death by the Republican and Democratic parties on behalf of their corporate masters.
Sunday, January 12, 2020
SC204-5
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/01/13/iran-must-begin-acting-like-a-normal-nation-says-totally-normal-nation/
“Iran Must Begin Acting Like A Normal Nation,” Says Totally Normal Nation
The government which runs a globe-spanning empire led by a reality TV host keeps talking about the lack of normality in the nation of Iran.
“What we want all countries to join in,” said State Department Spokesperson Morgan Ortagus in a recent Fox News interview, “is to help us not only to de-escalate any tensions with Iran, but to help us bring Iran to a place where they are ready to stop their terrorist and malign behavior, and where they are ready to discuss with the United States, with Europe, with everyone, about how they can change their behavior to act like a normal nation.”
“We want Iran to simply behave like a normal nation,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a press statement the other day. “We believe that the sanctions we imposed today further that strategic objective.”
These would be the additional sanctions which have been expanded to include virtually the entire Iranian economy, deliberately targeting Iran’s already sanction-starved populace, with the explicit goal of fomenting a civil war in that nation.
Which is of course a perfectly normal thing to do, from a perfectly normal nation.
This would be the same Iran whose cultural heritage sites were threatened with destruction if it retaliated for the totally normal assassination of its top military official via flying robot. The same Iran whose financial system was just threatened with destruction using the totally normal hegemony of American central banking. Perfectly normal, perfectly healthy.
So what can Iran do to become a “normal nation”? Well, since it’s the United States making this demand, we can safely assume that it’s the model Iran should look to.
In order to become a normal nation, Iran will need to expand its interests from the region and begin toppling noncompliant governments and invading nations all around the world.
In order to become a normal nation, Iran will need to circle the planet with hundreds of Iranian military bases.
In order to become a normal nation, Iran will need to obtain thousands of nuclear weapons, and actually use a couple of them.
In order to become a normal nation, Iran will need to become the most dominant military, economic and cultural force in the world, and then use that dominance to destroy any government, political party, ideology, faction, movement or person who stands in its way.
In order to become a normal nation, Iran will need to arm violent extremist factions all around the world with the goal of eliminating all governments that refuse to bow to its interests.
In order to become a normal nation, Iran will need to become the dominant producer of films, music and TV shows and use this influence to propagandize its power structure’s ideology to every possible cultural sphere.
In order to become a normal nation, Iran will need to begin meddling in scores of democratic elections all around the world and then crying for years at the possibility of any nation returning the favor.
In order to become a normal nation, Iran will need to shore up economic control of the world so that it can crush any sort of disobedience by starving civilians and depriving them of medical care while pretending that it’s a force for peace.
In order to become a normal nation, Iran will need to indefinitely occupy a vast region on the other side of the planet with thousands upon thousands of troops and trillions of dollars in military equipment, to no benefit of a single ordinary Iranian, and against the will of the people who live there.
In order to become a normal nation, Iran will need to create a presidency led by a reality TV star oligarch who is only supported because Iran’s populace is so disgusted with the status quo of their government.
I am kidding, of course. The US government does not want Iran to become like the US. The US government does not want any nation to become like the US. The US likes its abnormality among nations just the way it is, thank you very much. The US is the exception to all its own rules. That’s how American exceptionalism works. This is one of those “do as I say, not as I do” situations.
The US doesn’t want Iran to be like America. The US wants Iran to be like the other nations which have allowed themselves to be absorbed into the blob of the US-centralized empire.
The US would be perfectly happy for Iran to begin acting like Saudi Arabia: arming terrorist factions, beheading heretics, committing war crimes and deliberately creating humanitarian disasters for geostrategic convenience, yet aligning fully with US military, financial, and resource control agendas.
The US would be perfectly happy for Iran to begin acting like Israel: a nuclear-armed military outpost which constantly bombs adjacent nations, interferes in the US and other nations’ politics to shore up support, works toward the slow extermination of its indigenous population and fires upon protesters with live ammunition.
The US would be perfectly happy for Iran to begin acting like Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand or the EU: obedient military/intelligence assets who function as extra American states when it comes to foreign policy and international affairs.
That is what the US means by acting “normal”. Not acting moral. Not acting healthy. Certainly not acting like the US. It means acting obedient, compliant, and enslaved.
Which is precisely what Iran is resisting.
“Iran Must Begin Acting Like A Normal Nation,” Says Totally Normal Nation
The government which runs a globe-spanning empire led by a reality TV host keeps talking about the lack of normality in the nation of Iran.
“What we want all countries to join in,” said State Department Spokesperson Morgan Ortagus in a recent Fox News interview, “is to help us not only to de-escalate any tensions with Iran, but to help us bring Iran to a place where they are ready to stop their terrorist and malign behavior, and where they are ready to discuss with the United States, with Europe, with everyone, about how they can change their behavior to act like a normal nation.”
“We want Iran to simply behave like a normal nation,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a press statement the other day. “We believe that the sanctions we imposed today further that strategic objective.”
These would be the additional sanctions which have been expanded to include virtually the entire Iranian economy, deliberately targeting Iran’s already sanction-starved populace, with the explicit goal of fomenting a civil war in that nation.
Which is of course a perfectly normal thing to do, from a perfectly normal nation.
This would be the same Iran whose cultural heritage sites were threatened with destruction if it retaliated for the totally normal assassination of its top military official via flying robot. The same Iran whose financial system was just threatened with destruction using the totally normal hegemony of American central banking. Perfectly normal, perfectly healthy.
So what can Iran do to become a “normal nation”? Well, since it’s the United States making this demand, we can safely assume that it’s the model Iran should look to.
In order to become a normal nation, Iran will need to expand its interests from the region and begin toppling noncompliant governments and invading nations all around the world.
In order to become a normal nation, Iran will need to circle the planet with hundreds of Iranian military bases.
In order to become a normal nation, Iran will need to obtain thousands of nuclear weapons, and actually use a couple of them.
In order to become a normal nation, Iran will need to become the most dominant military, economic and cultural force in the world, and then use that dominance to destroy any government, political party, ideology, faction, movement or person who stands in its way.
In order to become a normal nation, Iran will need to arm violent extremist factions all around the world with the goal of eliminating all governments that refuse to bow to its interests.
In order to become a normal nation, Iran will need to become the dominant producer of films, music and TV shows and use this influence to propagandize its power structure’s ideology to every possible cultural sphere.
In order to become a normal nation, Iran will need to begin meddling in scores of democratic elections all around the world and then crying for years at the possibility of any nation returning the favor.
In order to become a normal nation, Iran will need to shore up economic control of the world so that it can crush any sort of disobedience by starving civilians and depriving them of medical care while pretending that it’s a force for peace.
In order to become a normal nation, Iran will need to indefinitely occupy a vast region on the other side of the planet with thousands upon thousands of troops and trillions of dollars in military equipment, to no benefit of a single ordinary Iranian, and against the will of the people who live there.
In order to become a normal nation, Iran will need to create a presidency led by a reality TV star oligarch who is only supported because Iran’s populace is so disgusted with the status quo of their government.
I am kidding, of course. The US government does not want Iran to become like the US. The US government does not want any nation to become like the US. The US likes its abnormality among nations just the way it is, thank you very much. The US is the exception to all its own rules. That’s how American exceptionalism works. This is one of those “do as I say, not as I do” situations.
The US doesn’t want Iran to be like America. The US wants Iran to be like the other nations which have allowed themselves to be absorbed into the blob of the US-centralized empire.
The US would be perfectly happy for Iran to begin acting like Saudi Arabia: arming terrorist factions, beheading heretics, committing war crimes and deliberately creating humanitarian disasters for geostrategic convenience, yet aligning fully with US military, financial, and resource control agendas.
The US would be perfectly happy for Iran to begin acting like Israel: a nuclear-armed military outpost which constantly bombs adjacent nations, interferes in the US and other nations’ politics to shore up support, works toward the slow extermination of its indigenous population and fires upon protesters with live ammunition.
The US would be perfectly happy for Iran to begin acting like Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand or the EU: obedient military/intelligence assets who function as extra American states when it comes to foreign policy and international affairs.
That is what the US means by acting “normal”. Not acting moral. Not acting healthy. Certainly not acting like the US. It means acting obedient, compliant, and enslaved.
Which is precisely what Iran is resisting.
Saturday, January 11, 2020
SC204-4
https://srsroccoreport.com/the-renewable-green-energy-myth-50000-tons-of-non-recyclable-wind-turbine-blades-dumped-in-the-landfill/
THE RENEWABLE GREEN ENERGY MYTH: 50,000 Tons Of Non-Recyclable Wind Turbine Blades Dumped In The Landfill
Funny, no one seemed to consider what to do with the massive amount of wind turbine blades once they reached the end of their lifespan. Thus, the irony of the present-day Green Energy Movement is the dumping of thousands of tons of “non-recyclable” supposedly renewable wind turbine blades in the country’s landfills.
Who would have thought? What’s even worse, is that the amount of wind turbine blades slated for waste disposal is forecasted to quadruple over the next fifteen years as a great deal more blades reach their 15-20 year lifespan. Furthermore, the size and length of the newly installed wind turbine blades are now twice as large as they were 20-30 years ago.
(graphic courtesy of Ahlstrom-Munksjo.com)
Honestly, I hadn’t considered the tremendous amount of waste generated by the so-called “Renewable” wind power industry until a long-term reader sent me the link to the following article, Landfill begins burying non-recyclable Wind Turbine Blades:
Hundreds of giant windmill blades are being shipped to a landfill in Wyoming to be buried because they simply can’t be recycled. Local media reports several wind farms in the state are sending over 900 un-reusable blades to the Casper Regional Landfill to be buried. While nearly 90 percent of old or decommissioned wind turbines, like the motor housing, can be refurbished or at least crushed, fiberglass windmill blades present a problem due to their size and strength.
“Our crushing equipment is not big enough to crush them,” a landfill representative told NPR.
Prior to burying the cumbersome, sometimes nearly 300-foot long blades, the landfill has to cut them up into smaller pieces onsite and stack them in order to save space during transportation.
Wyoming isn’t the only landfill accepting worn-out wind turbine blades. They are also being dumped in IOWA and SOUTH DAKOTA. Although, there’s probably a lot more landfills across the country, especially in Texas, that are accepting old wind turbine blades. Texas has the largest amount of wind-generated energy in the United States at 27,036 MegaWatts, followed by Iowa (8,965 MW), Oklahoma (8,072 MW), Kansas (6,128 MW), and California (5,842 MW). (source: Wikipedia)
So, with Texas powering more wind energy than the next three states combined, they will be discarding an enormous amount of wind turbine blades in the state’s landfills over the next 10-20 years.
Now, why is the Wind Power Industry discarding its blades in landfills? Unfortunately, due to the way the blades are manufactured, it isn’t economical or practical to recycle them even though some small-scale recycling has been done. Here is an image from the Low-Tech Magazine website explaining why the large wind turbine blades aren’t recyclable:
(graphic courtesy of Low-Tech Magazine)
The wind turbine blades are a toxic amalgam of unique composites, fiberglass, epoxy, polyvinyl chloride foam, polyethylene terephthalate foam, balsa wood, and polyurethane coatings. So, basically, there is just too much plastic-composite-epoxy crapola that isn’t worth recycling. Again, even though there are a few small recycling centers for wind turbine blades, it isn’t economical to do on a large scale.
As I mentioned, the wind power units built today are getting much taller and larger. Check out the 83.5 meter (274 feet) long wind turbine blade being transported for a 7 MegaWatt system:
(photo courtesy of GCR – Global Construction Review)
This picture was taken in 2016. So, in about 15-20 years, this blade will need to be replaced. Just think of the cost to remove three massive blades this size, cut them up, transport them to the landfill and cover them with tons of soil. Now, multiply that by tens of thousands of blades. According to the data from Hochschule Bremerhaven & Ahlstrom-Munksjo, the wind industry will generate 50,000 tons of blade waste in 2020, but that will quadruple to 225,000 tons by 2034. I have read that some estimates show an even higher amount of blade waste over the next 10-20 years.
I don’t believe the public realizes what a horrible waste of resources that wind energy is when you start to look at the entire operation from beginning to end. Wind energy is definitely not RENEWABLE. And, even worse… the wind turbines are not lasting as long as the 20-25 years forecasted by the industry. A study that came out in 2012 by Gordon Hughes, researching the relatively mature Dutch and U.K. Wind Industry, suggested that only a few of the wind farms would be operating for more than 12-15 years.
Wind & Solar A Disaster On The Electric Grid
The one thing not mentioned by the “Renewable Energy Aficionados” is that the more solar and wind that is added to the grid, the more volatile and problematic it becomes. You see, the U.S. Electric Grid has been powered by BASELOAD energy from Coal, Natural Gas, and Nuclear… for the most part. This type of energy generation is very stable, which is precisely why it’s called BASELOAD ENERGY.
When wind and solar came onto the picture, the Renewable Energy Aficionados thought this “CLEAN GREEN ENERGY” was going to get rid of the dirty fossil fuel power plants. Unfortunately, the more wind and solar that are added, the more BASELOAD energy has to be removed. Why is that unfortunate? Because when the wind stops blowing and the sun stops shining, then the Electric Utility Industry is forced to TURN ON the Natural Gas Power Plants to make up the difference.
And let me tell you, this is becoming much more of a big problem when the wind energy that was generating 40% of the electricity in the area totally falls off the very next day when the wind stops blowing. I have read several articles showing examples of the extreme shut-in of wind and solar electric generation in a very short period of time.
There is so much information out there about this “Intermittency” problem, let me provide a perfect example taking place in Germany. Germany installed one hell of a lot of wind and solar, and it is now becoming a nightmare because they are suffering from black-outs, while at the same time their citizens are paying some of the highest electricity rates in Europe.
Germany’s Renewable Energy Disaster – Part 1: Wind & Solar Deemed ‘Technological Failures’
Germany’s wind and solar experiment have failed: the so-called ‘Energiewende’ (energy transition) has turned into an insanely costly debacle.
German power prices have rocketed; blackouts and load shedding are the norm; and idyllic rural communities are now industrial wastelands (see picture).
Hundreds of billions of euros have been squandered on subsidies to wind and solar, all in an effort to reduce carbon dioxide gas emissions. However, that objective has failed too: CO2 emissions continue to rise.
But you wouldn’t know it from what appears in the mainstream media. Its reticence to report on what’s actually going on in Germany probably stems from the adage about success having many fathers, and failure being an orphan. Having promoted Germany as the example of how we could all ‘transition’ to an all RE future, it’s pretty hard for them to suck it up and acknowledge that they were taken for fools.
REST OF ARTICLE HERE: Germany’s Renewable Energy Disaster – Part 1: Wind & Solar Deemed ‘Technological Failures’
That article above came from the website, StopTheseThings.com, which I highly recommend checking out. They put out a lot of excellent material on the global wind industry.
For example, I found this interesting article about a wind turbine that was purchased by Akron-Westfield’s School Board that went operational in 1999. The wind turbine was supposed to provide the School District with approximately (2) teachers’ salaries worth of revenue once the loan was paid off after ten years. According to the article from StopTheseThings.com, Turbine Trouble: School Board’s Wind Turbine ‘Investment’ Ends in Financial Disaster:
After a decade of dashed financial hopes, mechanical failures and punishingly costly repairs, the school has been left to lick its wounds and lament. The experience to date has been a total financial failure. And now comes the whopping cleanup bill to have the nightmare removed, for good.
A-W wind turbine removal may become budget item
The Akron Home Towner
Julie Ann Madden
11 October 2019
What will it cost to remove the Akron-Westfield’s inoperable wind turbine from its site?
According to A-W School Board Member Nick Mathistad, about $220,000:
$183,000 for disassembly and disposal of the wind turbine; and
$37,000 for foundation removal/disposal, dirt fill and seeding of site.
“These are budget numbers, and the scope of work would be bid out at a later date if it comes to that,” Mathistad explained in a text to The Akron Hometowner.
I recommend reading the entire article because it is worth a GOOD LAUGH. I believe the author of the article misunderstood and thought the town of Akron was in Ohio, but it was located in Iowa. Once you read the article, it plays like the typical TRAIL OF TEARS as the poor school board was plagued with mechanical failures and issues that cost one hell of a lot of money and just when the wind turbine was going to be paid off after ten years, it broke down for good… LOL.
That’s correct, and the wind turbine has been sitting there idle for nearly a decade… rotting away. And now, it seems that the school board is placing the $220,000 cost to disassemble and dispose of the wind turbine in their $5.2 million bond. Again… LOL.
I have to tell you; I am simply amazed at the level of INSANITY and STUPIDITY taking place by individuals, companies, corporations, and countries that are ramping up wind and solar energy. They are a complete disaster and will only get worse as time goes by.
Lastly, the world should have used the energy that has been investing in wind-solar and put it into transitioning our society to a smaller footprint or DEGROWTH. That was the smart and logical move. However, we are taking the last bit of good fossil fuel energy and putting into Non-Recyclable “supposedly renewable” Green Technology Boondoggles that will become serious liabilities in the future as we won’t have the available energy to properly disassemble and dispose of the tens of thousands of wind turbines dotting the landscape.
....
As fossil fuels availability continues to increasingly decline, renewable energy forms will never come even close to making up for the losses of hydrocarbon energy which runs and built modern complex societies.
THE RENEWABLE GREEN ENERGY MYTH: 50,000 Tons Of Non-Recyclable Wind Turbine Blades Dumped In The Landfill
Funny, no one seemed to consider what to do with the massive amount of wind turbine blades once they reached the end of their lifespan. Thus, the irony of the present-day Green Energy Movement is the dumping of thousands of tons of “non-recyclable” supposedly renewable wind turbine blades in the country’s landfills.
Who would have thought? What’s even worse, is that the amount of wind turbine blades slated for waste disposal is forecasted to quadruple over the next fifteen years as a great deal more blades reach their 15-20 year lifespan. Furthermore, the size and length of the newly installed wind turbine blades are now twice as large as they were 20-30 years ago.
(graphic courtesy of Ahlstrom-Munksjo.com)
Honestly, I hadn’t considered the tremendous amount of waste generated by the so-called “Renewable” wind power industry until a long-term reader sent me the link to the following article, Landfill begins burying non-recyclable Wind Turbine Blades:
Hundreds of giant windmill blades are being shipped to a landfill in Wyoming to be buried because they simply can’t be recycled. Local media reports several wind farms in the state are sending over 900 un-reusable blades to the Casper Regional Landfill to be buried. While nearly 90 percent of old or decommissioned wind turbines, like the motor housing, can be refurbished or at least crushed, fiberglass windmill blades present a problem due to their size and strength.
“Our crushing equipment is not big enough to crush them,” a landfill representative told NPR.
Prior to burying the cumbersome, sometimes nearly 300-foot long blades, the landfill has to cut them up into smaller pieces onsite and stack them in order to save space during transportation.
Wyoming isn’t the only landfill accepting worn-out wind turbine blades. They are also being dumped in IOWA and SOUTH DAKOTA. Although, there’s probably a lot more landfills across the country, especially in Texas, that are accepting old wind turbine blades. Texas has the largest amount of wind-generated energy in the United States at 27,036 MegaWatts, followed by Iowa (8,965 MW), Oklahoma (8,072 MW), Kansas (6,128 MW), and California (5,842 MW). (source: Wikipedia)
So, with Texas powering more wind energy than the next three states combined, they will be discarding an enormous amount of wind turbine blades in the state’s landfills over the next 10-20 years.
Now, why is the Wind Power Industry discarding its blades in landfills? Unfortunately, due to the way the blades are manufactured, it isn’t economical or practical to recycle them even though some small-scale recycling has been done. Here is an image from the Low-Tech Magazine website explaining why the large wind turbine blades aren’t recyclable:
(graphic courtesy of Low-Tech Magazine)
The wind turbine blades are a toxic amalgam of unique composites, fiberglass, epoxy, polyvinyl chloride foam, polyethylene terephthalate foam, balsa wood, and polyurethane coatings. So, basically, there is just too much plastic-composite-epoxy crapola that isn’t worth recycling. Again, even though there are a few small recycling centers for wind turbine blades, it isn’t economical to do on a large scale.
As I mentioned, the wind power units built today are getting much taller and larger. Check out the 83.5 meter (274 feet) long wind turbine blade being transported for a 7 MegaWatt system:
(photo courtesy of GCR – Global Construction Review)
This picture was taken in 2016. So, in about 15-20 years, this blade will need to be replaced. Just think of the cost to remove three massive blades this size, cut them up, transport them to the landfill and cover them with tons of soil. Now, multiply that by tens of thousands of blades. According to the data from Hochschule Bremerhaven & Ahlstrom-Munksjo, the wind industry will generate 50,000 tons of blade waste in 2020, but that will quadruple to 225,000 tons by 2034. I have read that some estimates show an even higher amount of blade waste over the next 10-20 years.
I don’t believe the public realizes what a horrible waste of resources that wind energy is when you start to look at the entire operation from beginning to end. Wind energy is definitely not RENEWABLE. And, even worse… the wind turbines are not lasting as long as the 20-25 years forecasted by the industry. A study that came out in 2012 by Gordon Hughes, researching the relatively mature Dutch and U.K. Wind Industry, suggested that only a few of the wind farms would be operating for more than 12-15 years.
Wind & Solar A Disaster On The Electric Grid
The one thing not mentioned by the “Renewable Energy Aficionados” is that the more solar and wind that is added to the grid, the more volatile and problematic it becomes. You see, the U.S. Electric Grid has been powered by BASELOAD energy from Coal, Natural Gas, and Nuclear… for the most part. This type of energy generation is very stable, which is precisely why it’s called BASELOAD ENERGY.
When wind and solar came onto the picture, the Renewable Energy Aficionados thought this “CLEAN GREEN ENERGY” was going to get rid of the dirty fossil fuel power plants. Unfortunately, the more wind and solar that are added, the more BASELOAD energy has to be removed. Why is that unfortunate? Because when the wind stops blowing and the sun stops shining, then the Electric Utility Industry is forced to TURN ON the Natural Gas Power Plants to make up the difference.
And let me tell you, this is becoming much more of a big problem when the wind energy that was generating 40% of the electricity in the area totally falls off the very next day when the wind stops blowing. I have read several articles showing examples of the extreme shut-in of wind and solar electric generation in a very short period of time.
There is so much information out there about this “Intermittency” problem, let me provide a perfect example taking place in Germany. Germany installed one hell of a lot of wind and solar, and it is now becoming a nightmare because they are suffering from black-outs, while at the same time their citizens are paying some of the highest electricity rates in Europe.
Germany’s Renewable Energy Disaster – Part 1: Wind & Solar Deemed ‘Technological Failures’
Germany’s wind and solar experiment have failed: the so-called ‘Energiewende’ (energy transition) has turned into an insanely costly debacle.
German power prices have rocketed; blackouts and load shedding are the norm; and idyllic rural communities are now industrial wastelands (see picture).
Hundreds of billions of euros have been squandered on subsidies to wind and solar, all in an effort to reduce carbon dioxide gas emissions. However, that objective has failed too: CO2 emissions continue to rise.
But you wouldn’t know it from what appears in the mainstream media. Its reticence to report on what’s actually going on in Germany probably stems from the adage about success having many fathers, and failure being an orphan. Having promoted Germany as the example of how we could all ‘transition’ to an all RE future, it’s pretty hard for them to suck it up and acknowledge that they were taken for fools.
REST OF ARTICLE HERE: Germany’s Renewable Energy Disaster – Part 1: Wind & Solar Deemed ‘Technological Failures’
That article above came from the website, StopTheseThings.com, which I highly recommend checking out. They put out a lot of excellent material on the global wind industry.
For example, I found this interesting article about a wind turbine that was purchased by Akron-Westfield’s School Board that went operational in 1999. The wind turbine was supposed to provide the School District with approximately (2) teachers’ salaries worth of revenue once the loan was paid off after ten years. According to the article from StopTheseThings.com, Turbine Trouble: School Board’s Wind Turbine ‘Investment’ Ends in Financial Disaster:
After a decade of dashed financial hopes, mechanical failures and punishingly costly repairs, the school has been left to lick its wounds and lament. The experience to date has been a total financial failure. And now comes the whopping cleanup bill to have the nightmare removed, for good.
A-W wind turbine removal may become budget item
The Akron Home Towner
Julie Ann Madden
11 October 2019
What will it cost to remove the Akron-Westfield’s inoperable wind turbine from its site?
According to A-W School Board Member Nick Mathistad, about $220,000:
$183,000 for disassembly and disposal of the wind turbine; and
$37,000 for foundation removal/disposal, dirt fill and seeding of site.
“These are budget numbers, and the scope of work would be bid out at a later date if it comes to that,” Mathistad explained in a text to The Akron Hometowner.
I recommend reading the entire article because it is worth a GOOD LAUGH. I believe the author of the article misunderstood and thought the town of Akron was in Ohio, but it was located in Iowa. Once you read the article, it plays like the typical TRAIL OF TEARS as the poor school board was plagued with mechanical failures and issues that cost one hell of a lot of money and just when the wind turbine was going to be paid off after ten years, it broke down for good… LOL.
That’s correct, and the wind turbine has been sitting there idle for nearly a decade… rotting away. And now, it seems that the school board is placing the $220,000 cost to disassemble and dispose of the wind turbine in their $5.2 million bond. Again… LOL.
I have to tell you; I am simply amazed at the level of INSANITY and STUPIDITY taking place by individuals, companies, corporations, and countries that are ramping up wind and solar energy. They are a complete disaster and will only get worse as time goes by.
Lastly, the world should have used the energy that has been investing in wind-solar and put it into transitioning our society to a smaller footprint or DEGROWTH. That was the smart and logical move. However, we are taking the last bit of good fossil fuel energy and putting into Non-Recyclable “supposedly renewable” Green Technology Boondoggles that will become serious liabilities in the future as we won’t have the available energy to properly disassemble and dispose of the tens of thousands of wind turbines dotting the landscape.
....
As fossil fuels availability continues to increasingly decline, renewable energy forms will never come even close to making up for the losses of hydrocarbon energy which runs and built modern complex societies.
Friday, January 10, 2020
SC204-3
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52834.htm
American Murder
Clausewitz said, “War is the continuation of politics by other means”, but American Presidents have modified his apothegm. No one knows when it was first judged--How to put it? Not legal, no; not moral, no, surely not. Conceiveable..? Permissible..?--politically safe, for a nation to assassinate a human being, a foreign enemy. There is no record of that meeting of our government’s most powerful men--only such a group could plan so radical an action--when one of them first dared to say, “Suppose we kill him?”
Those souls shocked and wounded by our latest murder, need to know that meeting was not recent: didn’t happen under the Suppurating Pustule that infects the White House today, nor the charming Grand Bullshitter who preceded him, nor the aphasic buffoon before him. It was a century ago. There’s no dating it to a particular hit but it was certainly held before our deviously arranged murder of Sandino in Nicaragua in 1934.
For the last century the US government has made it its regular business to execute, or to buy the execution of, men it deemed geopolitically damned. There isn’t space here to review the long roster of America’s secret victims, nor any need for that. The uninformed need to take their own education in hand or continue mooing meekly down the chute toward who knows what end? Perhaps even their own date with the stungun.
Skipping past our more notorious standard issue deep cover CIA murders--Lumumba, Che, Allende, Diem--and excepting killings during phony “police actions” and “incursions”, gets us to the phase of dedicated, clandestine extermination outfits, to the era of “terminating with extreme prejudice” by quasi-military units like the Phoenix Program that murdered thousands of Viet Cong and NVA. It was a short step then to creation of specialized military hit squads. Navy SEALS with their Osama murder are typical.
In this era of magical tech innovations--GPS wizardry, HUMINT, SIGINT, IMINT and MASINT--America vaunts the uncanny accuracy of drones that slaughter wedding parties instead of jihadi honchos, and Hellfire missiles that maim and eviscerate more peasant children than diabolized hajjis. Targeted assassination has, in its current iteration, thrown over the traces and expanded its lethal reach so that nailing its purported target is now irrelevant. Busloads of Yemeni kids will do. It’s now a case, as a Marine buddy told me in Khe Sanh, of “Kill ‘em all; let God sort ‘em out.”
It needs to be clear that none of this cowardly murder was done in the heat of authorized battle. None of it has come during legally declared war. These assassinations are just that: murders without acknowledgment, much less official justification that, when exposed, are flatly denied by implausible baldfaced bullshit from our robotic, faux-Christian Mandarins. Our government always keeps, among its court jongleurs, trained slugs whose unique sociopathic gift consists in being able to look a clueless public in the face and solemnly assure them that dogshit is ice cream.
What is notable about this sordid history is not that it happened, since this country has foisted the dirtiest, most flagrant deceptions on the world and its own people as a matter of course for generations, but this: that from the beginning of our state murder program enormous effort has gone into keeping the fact of it hidden or, at least, deniable. It remained to Jabba, the President, not only to end that charade, to blow that cover in the Soleimani murder, but also, with idiot vanity, to celebrate himself as its author.
Quite apart from being astoundingly, stupidly reckless, since The Empire’s functionaries, military and other, become immediate potential targets, it is an offence against the laws of nations and of war. America, the full rogue state, cares nothing for such laws, of course, but some quaint nations still do and it puts it in seriously bad odor with the few suckup lackeys it still may have despite Trump’s relentless campaign to demean and alienate them. Candidates for another “coalition of the willing” to mask America’s brute adventurism are going to be scarce as birdshit in a cuckoo clock.
So much for side effects. This murder of Soleimani was, to cop a line from Hamlet, a “Murder most foul, as in the best it is, but this most foul, strange, and unnatural”, because of his history as a once critical American ally. He, with forces loyal to him, was key in defeating ISIS after our multi-billion dollar, half-assed, spit-and-baling wire Iraqi Army’s meltdown and flight. America murdered no Takfiri barbarian, no crazed, fanatic Jihadi in him, but a temperate, judicious statesman, and a hero to most Iranian people.
If the intent was crude, direct provocation of war with Iran, that intent may now be realized. With millions of Persians in the streets mourning him and Khamenei vowing stern vengeance, symbolic rockets are no expression of that outrage. If retaliation does come, as it may, the world will know it.
At that point, Trump has to fish or cut bait. If his authority is heeded then-- which is not certain--by a military that much prefers no-risk bullying of weak entities that generate big money for little blood, and a Congress at once warmongering and cowardly, the balloon could go up. If so, speculation is useless beyond one ineluctable reality: the US will be, at a minimum, badly hurt and the world economy will be shaken to pieces. Needless to say, the results of Big Power war would be orders of magnitude more catastrophic.
Very Serious People, men who make regular appearances on the MSM-- the PR arm of the Deep State--and their owners who don’t, are betting that nothing so insane as Great Power war could come about as a result of this murder and they’re probably right. It would take an interlocking set of wild errors of judgment and calculation on the part of the powerful men who control world order, such as it is, for a major cataclysm to be triggered.
That was the case in 1914, as Tuchman detailed in The Guns Of August. Men of broad experience and vaunted acumen, in charge of armies, fleets, and nations, slow marched in their egotism, arrogance, and wilful rigidity, into the most devastating war in history, mesmerized by their own folly.
A wag has said that history doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes.
Wisdom and sound judgment are not unattainable by men who value them. They forever elude the arrogant, the egoist, and the sociopath. The men and women who now lead us are such people, enlisted by, and devoted to, our Capitalist rulers, and their voracious quest for dominion of the world and the acquisition of its wealth that is their only purpose and goal. People of this barren, soulless, biophobic creed are incapable of rational, humane, and life-affirming decisions. The impending dangers of rape economics, climate change, and world war do not appear to these defectives as the horrifying, immanent threats they are. We are hostage to their inadequacy.
It is not impossible that the murder of Soleimani could result in a disaster of greater magnitude than did that of the Archduke Ferdinand, and that we may, in the days ahead, suffer our own 1914 and its dreadful aftermath.
American Murder
Clausewitz said, “War is the continuation of politics by other means”, but American Presidents have modified his apothegm. No one knows when it was first judged--How to put it? Not legal, no; not moral, no, surely not. Conceiveable..? Permissible..?--politically safe, for a nation to assassinate a human being, a foreign enemy. There is no record of that meeting of our government’s most powerful men--only such a group could plan so radical an action--when one of them first dared to say, “Suppose we kill him?”
Those souls shocked and wounded by our latest murder, need to know that meeting was not recent: didn’t happen under the Suppurating Pustule that infects the White House today, nor the charming Grand Bullshitter who preceded him, nor the aphasic buffoon before him. It was a century ago. There’s no dating it to a particular hit but it was certainly held before our deviously arranged murder of Sandino in Nicaragua in 1934.
For the last century the US government has made it its regular business to execute, or to buy the execution of, men it deemed geopolitically damned. There isn’t space here to review the long roster of America’s secret victims, nor any need for that. The uninformed need to take their own education in hand or continue mooing meekly down the chute toward who knows what end? Perhaps even their own date with the stungun.
Skipping past our more notorious standard issue deep cover CIA murders--Lumumba, Che, Allende, Diem--and excepting killings during phony “police actions” and “incursions”, gets us to the phase of dedicated, clandestine extermination outfits, to the era of “terminating with extreme prejudice” by quasi-military units like the Phoenix Program that murdered thousands of Viet Cong and NVA. It was a short step then to creation of specialized military hit squads. Navy SEALS with their Osama murder are typical.
In this era of magical tech innovations--GPS wizardry, HUMINT, SIGINT, IMINT and MASINT--America vaunts the uncanny accuracy of drones that slaughter wedding parties instead of jihadi honchos, and Hellfire missiles that maim and eviscerate more peasant children than diabolized hajjis. Targeted assassination has, in its current iteration, thrown over the traces and expanded its lethal reach so that nailing its purported target is now irrelevant. Busloads of Yemeni kids will do. It’s now a case, as a Marine buddy told me in Khe Sanh, of “Kill ‘em all; let God sort ‘em out.”
It needs to be clear that none of this cowardly murder was done in the heat of authorized battle. None of it has come during legally declared war. These assassinations are just that: murders without acknowledgment, much less official justification that, when exposed, are flatly denied by implausible baldfaced bullshit from our robotic, faux-Christian Mandarins. Our government always keeps, among its court jongleurs, trained slugs whose unique sociopathic gift consists in being able to look a clueless public in the face and solemnly assure them that dogshit is ice cream.
What is notable about this sordid history is not that it happened, since this country has foisted the dirtiest, most flagrant deceptions on the world and its own people as a matter of course for generations, but this: that from the beginning of our state murder program enormous effort has gone into keeping the fact of it hidden or, at least, deniable. It remained to Jabba, the President, not only to end that charade, to blow that cover in the Soleimani murder, but also, with idiot vanity, to celebrate himself as its author.
Quite apart from being astoundingly, stupidly reckless, since The Empire’s functionaries, military and other, become immediate potential targets, it is an offence against the laws of nations and of war. America, the full rogue state, cares nothing for such laws, of course, but some quaint nations still do and it puts it in seriously bad odor with the few suckup lackeys it still may have despite Trump’s relentless campaign to demean and alienate them. Candidates for another “coalition of the willing” to mask America’s brute adventurism are going to be scarce as birdshit in a cuckoo clock.
So much for side effects. This murder of Soleimani was, to cop a line from Hamlet, a “Murder most foul, as in the best it is, but this most foul, strange, and unnatural”, because of his history as a once critical American ally. He, with forces loyal to him, was key in defeating ISIS after our multi-billion dollar, half-assed, spit-and-baling wire Iraqi Army’s meltdown and flight. America murdered no Takfiri barbarian, no crazed, fanatic Jihadi in him, but a temperate, judicious statesman, and a hero to most Iranian people.
If the intent was crude, direct provocation of war with Iran, that intent may now be realized. With millions of Persians in the streets mourning him and Khamenei vowing stern vengeance, symbolic rockets are no expression of that outrage. If retaliation does come, as it may, the world will know it.
At that point, Trump has to fish or cut bait. If his authority is heeded then-- which is not certain--by a military that much prefers no-risk bullying of weak entities that generate big money for little blood, and a Congress at once warmongering and cowardly, the balloon could go up. If so, speculation is useless beyond one ineluctable reality: the US will be, at a minimum, badly hurt and the world economy will be shaken to pieces. Needless to say, the results of Big Power war would be orders of magnitude more catastrophic.
Very Serious People, men who make regular appearances on the MSM-- the PR arm of the Deep State--and their owners who don’t, are betting that nothing so insane as Great Power war could come about as a result of this murder and they’re probably right. It would take an interlocking set of wild errors of judgment and calculation on the part of the powerful men who control world order, such as it is, for a major cataclysm to be triggered.
That was the case in 1914, as Tuchman detailed in The Guns Of August. Men of broad experience and vaunted acumen, in charge of armies, fleets, and nations, slow marched in their egotism, arrogance, and wilful rigidity, into the most devastating war in history, mesmerized by their own folly.
A wag has said that history doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes.
Wisdom and sound judgment are not unattainable by men who value them. They forever elude the arrogant, the egoist, and the sociopath. The men and women who now lead us are such people, enlisted by, and devoted to, our Capitalist rulers, and their voracious quest for dominion of the world and the acquisition of its wealth that is their only purpose and goal. People of this barren, soulless, biophobic creed are incapable of rational, humane, and life-affirming decisions. The impending dangers of rape economics, climate change, and world war do not appear to these defectives as the horrifying, immanent threats they are. We are hostage to their inadequacy.
It is not impossible that the murder of Soleimani could result in a disaster of greater magnitude than did that of the Archduke Ferdinand, and that we may, in the days ahead, suffer our own 1914 and its dreadful aftermath.
Thursday, January 9, 2020
SC204-2
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjan20/marx1-20.html
Was Marx Right about Capitalism Destroying Itself from Within?
One of the core tenets of Marx's work is that capitalism will be undone by internal contradictions that would manifest as ever-greater crises that would eventually destroy the system from within.
As the global economy continues to unravel beneath the surface, it's a good time to re-examine Marx's claim. If if turns out the current version of global capitalism is indeed unraveling due to its internal contradictions, it would be valuable to understand this now rather than later.
Sartre once observed that students are only taught enough about Marx's work to refute it. Despite the difficulty of Marx's writings (only German philosophers can be so convoluted), its elevation to scripture by various academic tribes, and his failure to describe his "scientific socialism" alternative to capitalism in the same detail he devoted to his critique of capitalism, Marx's work remains relevant and insightful.
Thus we continue to see articles such as Capitalism is unfolding exactly as Karl Marx predicted.
I'm not in either of the two camps, those trained to dismiss Marx's critiques or those who devote their careers to jousting over Marxist minutiae. It's been decades since I studied Marx in a college classroom, but I've continued to apply his core insights to our era.
To understand Marx's critique of capitalism, we have to understand that he came to economics via philosophy, specifically the writings of Hegel. In other words, Marx did not approach the study of capitalism from the abstractions of classical 19th century economics (Marx was born in 1818) but from a profound interest in history, social and spiritual development and human alienation. Marx ended up devoting his life to an understanding of capitalism because it is a world-system that drives history and society.
Hegel believed human history wasn't just "one damn thing after another;" he saw it as teleological, i.e. on a trajectory leading to higher social and spiritual development. Given this context, it's little wonder that Marx viewed capitalism as a necessary stage of history creating the conditions for the next advancement.
Prior to Marx, classical economic theories focused on the dynamics of supply and demand, trade, credit and money. Adam Smith was also a philosopher (and a close friend of David Hume), and he devoted an entire book to the moral foundations of capitalism, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, before he wrote The Wealth of Nations, which focused on what he termed "commercial society," what we now call political economy.
While Smith focused on the moral foundation of decentralized self-organizing markets that automatically benefit all participants (via "the invisible hand"), Marx focused on the conflicting interests of capital and labor, and on capitalism's unending disruption of the social and economic orders, a dynamic captured in Marx's famous observation that "everything melts into air."
What are the internal contradictions that could unravel capitalism from within? I don't claim this is an exhaustive list, or that it would gain the approval of academic overlords of Marxist scripture, but "in the spirit of Marxist thought," these are potentially fatal dynamics that are unfolding in real time in the current version of global/monopoly/finance capitalism.
Each of these deserves a serious essay but for now, let's just review the list in broad-brush.
1. Traditional social structures "melt into air" but have no replacement. The owners of Big tech would have us believe social media, search and endless entertainment are enough to to replace all that's being dismantled, but that claim is both self-serving and absurd. Society is unraveling before our eyes and an addiction to small screens is not a replacement for what's being lost.
2. Marx described the inevitability of overcapacity and overproduction as capital seeks to establish dominant market share (as one path to monopoly and pricing power), and we see this in industry after industry. As overcapacity expands, profits plummet, pushing capital into speculative gambles that inevitably blow up.
3. Capital gains, labor loses ground--to automation, over-supply of conventional labor and to consolidation as entire layers of management and distribution are wiped out. Thomas Piketty described how the rate of growth of capital far exceeds that of the real economy and labor's share of that economy. As a result, we are reaching extreme concentrations of wealth and political power that are unleashing destructive disorder as elites struggle to maintain their control of the downwardly mobile masses.
4. Monopolies and cartels push prices higher, but not wages. As many of us have noted, costs of big-ticket essentials have been soaring for two decades while wages have been stagnant (when measured by purchasing power) for the bottom 95%. The stop-gap "solution" is to borrow money from future earnings to pay for life today, but this is a self-liquidating dynamic: eventually incomes are too overcommitted to support more debt, and defaults take down the entire system of debt and consumption.
5. Finance capital, i.e. financialization, has reached diminishing returns: there's literally nothing left to monetize, leverage and securitize. Much of the "wealth" created in the 21st century is phantom wealth generated by financialization. There is no substitute sources for trillions of dollars in income and capital gains as the financialization sputters and then blows up as bets go bad, counterparties fail to pay and defaults overwhelm a system that must expand or die.
6. The unholy alliance of Capital and the State: we call it pay-to-play, but the unholy alliance of State and Capital goes much deeper. The State legalizes the looting and power of Capital, and Capital returns the favor.
7. Energy and waste. Marx did not foresee the depletion of irreplaceable energy sources, but the stupendous waste of resources built into our consumption-based, credit-based industrial economy falls within his critique of commodity fetishism.
That there is no substitute for high-density hydrocarbon fuels is a reality that elicits the most passionate forms of denial and magical thinking, and as we consume the cheapest-to-access energy to squander in global traffic jams, military misadventures, planned obsolescence, etc., the energy growth demanded by the system will fail to appear at a cost affordable to the bottom 80%. At that point the entire system implodes.
8. Marketing is the savior of capitalism. The most profitable and valuable enterprises globally are engaged in collecting and selling data--marketing. This is the savior of capitalism, which as noted above, has reached the end-game of financialization, globalization, etc.--what Immanuel Wallerstein characterized as "capitalism no longer works for capitalists."
The assumption that marketing will save the system by generating new trillions in income and wealth assumes consumers have abundant disposable income (or credit) to spend. If incomes decline, and/or rising costs strip disposable income to the bone, then how valuable is all the data that's being collected and sold as the key to profits and wealth? The unraveling of the credit-based consumer economy will also reveal the limits of marketing as the "industry" that will save capitalism from the decline of profits, capital and credit.
The power of this data-collection-as-unpaid-work is described in this article: You Are Literally Working for Silicon Valley and Don't Know It The digital economy has been called 'surveillance capitalism,' but that doesn't capture how insidious it really is.
A chart of the relentless concentration of wealth at the very apex of the wealth-power pyramid:
A chart of the relentless decline of wages' share of the economy's total income:
How many of these dynamics have to play out to collapse the current version of global/monopoly/finance capitalism? We have a ringside seat to the spectacle, and we'll likely know within the next decade.
Was Marx Right about Capitalism Destroying Itself from Within?
One of the core tenets of Marx's work is that capitalism will be undone by internal contradictions that would manifest as ever-greater crises that would eventually destroy the system from within.
As the global economy continues to unravel beneath the surface, it's a good time to re-examine Marx's claim. If if turns out the current version of global capitalism is indeed unraveling due to its internal contradictions, it would be valuable to understand this now rather than later.
Sartre once observed that students are only taught enough about Marx's work to refute it. Despite the difficulty of Marx's writings (only German philosophers can be so convoluted), its elevation to scripture by various academic tribes, and his failure to describe his "scientific socialism" alternative to capitalism in the same detail he devoted to his critique of capitalism, Marx's work remains relevant and insightful.
Thus we continue to see articles such as Capitalism is unfolding exactly as Karl Marx predicted.
I'm not in either of the two camps, those trained to dismiss Marx's critiques or those who devote their careers to jousting over Marxist minutiae. It's been decades since I studied Marx in a college classroom, but I've continued to apply his core insights to our era.
To understand Marx's critique of capitalism, we have to understand that he came to economics via philosophy, specifically the writings of Hegel. In other words, Marx did not approach the study of capitalism from the abstractions of classical 19th century economics (Marx was born in 1818) but from a profound interest in history, social and spiritual development and human alienation. Marx ended up devoting his life to an understanding of capitalism because it is a world-system that drives history and society.
Hegel believed human history wasn't just "one damn thing after another;" he saw it as teleological, i.e. on a trajectory leading to higher social and spiritual development. Given this context, it's little wonder that Marx viewed capitalism as a necessary stage of history creating the conditions for the next advancement.
Prior to Marx, classical economic theories focused on the dynamics of supply and demand, trade, credit and money. Adam Smith was also a philosopher (and a close friend of David Hume), and he devoted an entire book to the moral foundations of capitalism, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, before he wrote The Wealth of Nations, which focused on what he termed "commercial society," what we now call political economy.
While Smith focused on the moral foundation of decentralized self-organizing markets that automatically benefit all participants (via "the invisible hand"), Marx focused on the conflicting interests of capital and labor, and on capitalism's unending disruption of the social and economic orders, a dynamic captured in Marx's famous observation that "everything melts into air."
What are the internal contradictions that could unravel capitalism from within? I don't claim this is an exhaustive list, or that it would gain the approval of academic overlords of Marxist scripture, but "in the spirit of Marxist thought," these are potentially fatal dynamics that are unfolding in real time in the current version of global/monopoly/finance capitalism.
Each of these deserves a serious essay but for now, let's just review the list in broad-brush.
1. Traditional social structures "melt into air" but have no replacement. The owners of Big tech would have us believe social media, search and endless entertainment are enough to to replace all that's being dismantled, but that claim is both self-serving and absurd. Society is unraveling before our eyes and an addiction to small screens is not a replacement for what's being lost.
2. Marx described the inevitability of overcapacity and overproduction as capital seeks to establish dominant market share (as one path to monopoly and pricing power), and we see this in industry after industry. As overcapacity expands, profits plummet, pushing capital into speculative gambles that inevitably blow up.
3. Capital gains, labor loses ground--to automation, over-supply of conventional labor and to consolidation as entire layers of management and distribution are wiped out. Thomas Piketty described how the rate of growth of capital far exceeds that of the real economy and labor's share of that economy. As a result, we are reaching extreme concentrations of wealth and political power that are unleashing destructive disorder as elites struggle to maintain their control of the downwardly mobile masses.
4. Monopolies and cartels push prices higher, but not wages. As many of us have noted, costs of big-ticket essentials have been soaring for two decades while wages have been stagnant (when measured by purchasing power) for the bottom 95%. The stop-gap "solution" is to borrow money from future earnings to pay for life today, but this is a self-liquidating dynamic: eventually incomes are too overcommitted to support more debt, and defaults take down the entire system of debt and consumption.
5. Finance capital, i.e. financialization, has reached diminishing returns: there's literally nothing left to monetize, leverage and securitize. Much of the "wealth" created in the 21st century is phantom wealth generated by financialization. There is no substitute sources for trillions of dollars in income and capital gains as the financialization sputters and then blows up as bets go bad, counterparties fail to pay and defaults overwhelm a system that must expand or die.
6. The unholy alliance of Capital and the State: we call it pay-to-play, but the unholy alliance of State and Capital goes much deeper. The State legalizes the looting and power of Capital, and Capital returns the favor.
7. Energy and waste. Marx did not foresee the depletion of irreplaceable energy sources, but the stupendous waste of resources built into our consumption-based, credit-based industrial economy falls within his critique of commodity fetishism.
That there is no substitute for high-density hydrocarbon fuels is a reality that elicits the most passionate forms of denial and magical thinking, and as we consume the cheapest-to-access energy to squander in global traffic jams, military misadventures, planned obsolescence, etc., the energy growth demanded by the system will fail to appear at a cost affordable to the bottom 80%. At that point the entire system implodes.
8. Marketing is the savior of capitalism. The most profitable and valuable enterprises globally are engaged in collecting and selling data--marketing. This is the savior of capitalism, which as noted above, has reached the end-game of financialization, globalization, etc.--what Immanuel Wallerstein characterized as "capitalism no longer works for capitalists."
The assumption that marketing will save the system by generating new trillions in income and wealth assumes consumers have abundant disposable income (or credit) to spend. If incomes decline, and/or rising costs strip disposable income to the bone, then how valuable is all the data that's being collected and sold as the key to profits and wealth? The unraveling of the credit-based consumer economy will also reveal the limits of marketing as the "industry" that will save capitalism from the decline of profits, capital and credit.
The power of this data-collection-as-unpaid-work is described in this article: You Are Literally Working for Silicon Valley and Don't Know It The digital economy has been called 'surveillance capitalism,' but that doesn't capture how insidious it really is.
A chart of the relentless concentration of wealth at the very apex of the wealth-power pyramid:
A chart of the relentless decline of wages' share of the economy's total income:
How many of these dynamics have to play out to collapse the current version of global/monopoly/finance capitalism? We have a ringside seat to the spectacle, and we'll likely know within the next decade.
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