http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts07222011.html
An Economy Destroyed
Recently, the bond rating agencies that gave junk derivatives triple-A ratings threatened to downgrade US Treasury bonds if the White House and Congress did not reach a deficit reduction deal and debt ceiling increase. The downgrade threat is not credible, and neither is the default threat. Both are make-believe crises that are being hyped in order to force cutbacks in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.
If the rating agencies downgraded Treasuries, the company executives would be arrested for the fraudulent ratings that they gave to the junk that Wall Street peddled to the rest of the world. The companies would be destroyed and their ratings discredited. The US government will never default on its bonds, because the bonds, unlike those of Greece, Spain, and Ireland, are payable in its own currency. Regardless of whether the debt ceiling is raised, the Federal Reserve will continue to purchase the Treasury’s debt. If Goldman Sachs is too big to fail, then so is the US government.
There is no budget focus on the illegal wars and military occupations that the US government has underway in at least six countries or the 66-year old US occupations of Japan and Germany and the ring of military bases being constructed around Russia.
The total military/security budget is in the vicinity of $1.1-$1.2 trillion, or 70 per cent -75 per cent of the federal budget deficit.
In contrast, Social Security is solvent. Medicare expenditures are coming close to exceeding the 2.3 per cent payroll tax that funds Medicare, but it is dishonest for politicians and pundits to blame the US budget deficit on “entitlement programs.”
Entitlements are funded with a payroll tax. Wars are not funded. The criminal Bush regime lied to Americans and claimed that the Iraq war would only cost $70 billion at the most and would be paid for with Iraq oil revenues. When Bush’s chief economic advisor, Larry Lindsay, said the Iraq invasion would cost $200 billion, Bush fired him. In fact, Lindsay was off by a factor of 20. Economic and budget experts have calculated that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have consumed $4,000 billion in out-of-pocket and already incurred future costs. In other words, the ongoing wars and occupations have already eaten up the $4 trillion by which Obama hopes to cut federal spending over the next ten years. Bomb now, pay later.
As taxing the rich is not part of the political solution, the focus is on rewarding the insurance companies by privatizing Medicare at some future date with government subsidized insurance premiums, by capping Medicaid, and by loading the diminishing middle class with additional Social Security tax.
Washington’s priorities and those of its presstitutes could not be clearer. President Obama, like George W. Bush before him, both parties in Congress, the print and TV media, and National Public Radio have made it clear that war is a far more important priority than health care and old age pensions for Americans.
The American people and their wants and needs are not represented in Washington. Washington serves powerful interest groups, such as the military/security complex, Wall Street and the banksters, agribusiness, the oil companies, the insurance companies, pharmaceuticals, and the mining and timber industries. Washington endows these interests with excess profits by committing war crimes and terrorizing foreign populations with bombs, drones, and invasions, by deregulating the financial sector and bailing it out of its greed-driven mistakes after it has stolen Americans’ pensions, homes, and jobs, by refusing to protect the land, air, water, oceans and wildlife from polluters and despoilers, and by constructing a health care system with the highest costs and highest profits in the world.
The way to reduce health care costs is to take out gobs of costs and profits with a single payer system. A private health care system can continue to operate alongside for those who can afford it.
The way to get the budget under control is to stop the gratuitous hegemonic wars, wars that will end in a nuclear confrontation.
The US economy is in a deepening recession from which recovery is not possible, because American middle class jobs in manufacturing and professional services have been offshored and given to foreigners. US GDP, consumer purchasing power, and tax base have been handed over to China, India, and Indonesia in order that Wall Street, shareholders, and corporate CEOs can earn more.
When the goods and services produced offshore come back into America, they arrive as imports. The trade balance worsens, the US dollar declines further in exchange value, and prices rise for Americans, whose incomes are stagnant or falling.
This is economic destruction. It always occurs when an oligarchy seizes control of a government. The short-run profits of the powerful are maximized at the expense of the viability of the economy.
The US economy is driven by consumer demand, but with 22.3 per cent unemployment, stagnant and declining wages and salaries, and consumer debt burdens so high that consumers cannot borrow to spend, there is nothing to drive the economy.
Washington’s response to this dilemma is to increase the austerity! Cutting back Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, forcing down wages by destroying unions and offshoring jobs (which results in a labor surplus and lower wages), and driving up the prices of food and energy by depreciating the dollar further erodes consumer purchasing power. The Federal Reserve can print money to rescue the crooked financial institutions, but it cannot rescue the American consumer.
As a final point, confront the fact that you are even lied to about “deficit reduction.” Even if Obama gets his $4 trillion “deficit reduction” over the next decade, it does not mean that the current national debt will be $4 trillion less than it currently is. The “reduction” merely means that the growth in the national debt will be $4 trillion less than otherwise. Regardless of any “deficit reduction,” the national debt ten years from now will be much higher than it presently is.
Sunday, July 31, 2011
SC107-13
http://www.truth-out.org/you-cant-kill-planet-and-live-it-too/1310403275
You Can’t Kill A Planet And Live On It Too
Let’s expose the structure of violence that keeps the world economy running.
With an entire planet being slaughtered before our eyes, it’s terrifying to watch the very culture responsible for this – the culture of industrial civilization, fueled by a finite source of fossil fuels, primarily a dwindling supply of oil – thrust forward wantonly to fuel its insatiable appetite for “growth.”
Deluded by myths of progress and suffering from the psychosis of technomania complicated by addiction to depleting oil reserves, industrial society leaves a crescendo of atrocities in its wake.
A very partial list would include the Bhopal chemical disaster, numerous oil spills, the illegal depleted uranium-spewing occupations of Iraq, Afghanistan, mountaintop removal, thcted, that panders to desire rather than necessity, that delicately conceals the violence at the other end of this economy, a violence so widespread that we’re all not only complicit in it to a degree (e.g., if you’re a taxpayer, you help subsidize the manufacturing of weapons of mass destruction), but victims of it as well. As Chris Hedges admonished in his books, “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy” and the “Triumph of Spectacle,” any culture that cannot distinguish reality from illusion will kill itself.
Moreover, any culture that cannot distinguish reality from illusion will kill everything and everyone else in its path as well as itself.
As the world burns, as species die off, as mothers breastfeed their children with dioxin-tainted breast milk, as nuclear reactors melt down into the Pacific while the aerial deployment of depleted uranium damages innocent lives, it is perplexing that so few people fight back against a system that has horror as a reality for most living on the planet. And those who fight back, who stand in opposition to the culture behind such wholesale abuse and call it what it is – a genocidal mega-state (especially if you believe that the lives of nonhumans are as important to them as yours is to you and mine is to me) – are met with hostility and hatred, scoffed at, harassed, even tortured. With so much at stake, why aren’t more people deafening their ears to the nutcases who preach a future of infinite-growth economies? And why do so many people continue to put “the economy” first, to take industrial capitalism as we know it as a given and not fight back, defend what’s left of the natural world?
“One of the reasons there aren’t more people working to take down the system that’s killing the planet is because their lives depend on the system,” author and environmental activist Derrick Jensen told me from his home in California when I interviewed him on the phone recently. “If your experience is that your food comes from the grocery store and your water comes from the tap, then you are going to defend to the death the system that brings those to you because your life depends on them,” Jensen explained. “If your experience, however, is that your food comes from a land base and that your water comes from a stream, well, then you will defend to the death that land base and that stream. So part of the problem is that we have become so dependent upon this system that is killing and exploiting us, it has become almost impossible for us to imagine living outside of it and it’s very difficult physically for us to live outside of it.
“The other problem is that fear is the belief we have something left to lose. What I mean by this is that I really like my life right now, as do a lot of people. We have a lot to lose if this culture is to go down. A primary reason so many of us do not want to win this war – or even acknowledge that it’s going on – is that we materially benefit from this war’s plunder. I’m really unsure how many of us would be willing to give up our automobiles and cell phones, hot showers and electric lights, our grocery and clothing stores. But the truth is, the system that leads to these things, that leads to technological advancement and our identity as civilized beings, are killing us and, more importantly, killing the planet.”
Even in the absence of global warming, this culture would still be murdering the planet, bumping off pods of whales and flocks of birds; detonating mountaintops to access strata of coal and bauxite, eliminating entire ecosystems. All this violence inflicted upon an entire planet to run an economy based on the foolish and immoral notion that we can sustain industrial societies, all while trashing the planet’s land bases, ecosystems and life. And the fantastic rhetoric those who insist on adapting to these changes promulgate – that technology will find a fix, that we can adapt, that the planet can and will conform to fixes in the market – is dangerous.
“Another part of the problem,” Jensen told me, “is the narratives behind this culture’s way of living. The premises of these narratives grant us the exclusive rights and privileges of dominion over this planet. Whether you subscribe to the religion of Science or of Christianity, these narratives tell us that our intelligence and abilities permit us exclusive rights and privileges to work our will on the world that is here for us to use. The problem with these stories, whether you believe in them or not, is that they have real effects on the physical world. The stories we’re told about the world shape the way we perceive the world and the way we perceive the world shapes the way we behave in the world. The stories of industrial capitalism – that we can sustain infinite-growth economies – shapes the way this culture behaves in the world. And this behavior is killing the planet. Whether the stories we are told are fantasies or not doesn’t matter, what matters is that these narratives are physical: the stories of Christianity may be fantasy – let’s pretend for a moment that God doesn’t exist – well, the Crusades still happened; the notion of race or gender may be up for debate, but obviously, race and gender does matter and this postmodern attitude drives me crazy because, yeah, race and gender is not an actual thing, but it all has real-world effects – African Americans comprise 58 percent of the prison population and one-third of all black men between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine are under some sort of criminal justice supervision; as for gender, well real males rape females.
“Another example [of how things that truly aren't real still have real-world effects],” Jensen continued, “is there was this serial killer a while back who was killing women in Santa Cruz. Voices in his head were telling him that if he didn’t kill these women, then California would slide off into the ocean. It’s apparent this guy was delusional, a total nut job and sick in the head, but his delusions still resulted in real-world effects. Hitler too had the delusion that Jews were poisoning the race. That delusion had real-world effects. And we can sit around and discuss whether Weyerhaeuser truly exists, but forests still get deforested. Or better yet, it’s pretty clear that it’s silly to really believe that the world won’t run out of oil … and then it’s suddenly clear that it’s not so silly – there is a physical reality. In the real world, you can’t have a nature/culture split, but in this culture you do and it has real effects on the physical world. You can’t live on a planet and kill it at the same time.”
You find the problem with an industrial production economy when you unpack the word “production.” As Jensen makes clear in his book “The Culture of Make Believe,” production is essentially the conversion of the living to the dead: animals into cold cuts, mountains and rivers into aluminum beer cans, trees into toilet paper, oil into plastics and computers (one computer uses ten times its own mass in fossil fuels). To go paperless is not to go green, or maybe it is, depending on what shade of Green we’re talking about here. Basically, every commodity one comes in contact with is soaked in oil, made from resources, marked by, as Jensen puts it, the turning of the living to the dead: Industrial production.
And with conflicts and wars that are waged or instigated by this culture to access (steal) the resources needed to fuel this economy’s colossal machines, this culture winds up butchering entire non-industrialized communities of people … the elderly, children who cling to their mothers as drones hawk over staggered onlookers … the innocent and vulnerable written off as “collateral damage.” Himmler used a similar epithet for Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Serbs, Belarusians, and other Slavic peoples in a pamphlet he edited and had distributed by the SS Race and Settlement Head Office: “Untermenschen.”
This is an acceptable price we must pay it, so we are told.
In the US, more lives are lost weekly from preventable cancers and other illnesses than are lost in ten years from terrorist attacks. And the corporations this culture fights for overseas are the very organizations culpable for these domestic deaths every week.
The list of victims whose lives are subject to violent assault and extinction to feed this culture’s “production” is as long and as diverse as you want to make it.
“An infinite-growth economy is not only insane and impossible,” remarked Jensen, “it’s also abusive, by which I mean that it’s based on the same conceit as more personal forms of abuse. It is, in fact, the macroeconomic enshrinement of abusive behavior. The guiding principle of abusive behavior is that the abuser refuses to respect or abide by limits or boundaries put up by the victim. Growth economies are essentially unchecked and will push past any boundaries set up by anyone other than the perpetrators. And a successful abuser will always ensure that there are some ‘benefits’ for the victim, in this case, e.g., we can watch TV, we can have computer access and play games online – we get ‘benefits’ that essentially keep us in line.
“Furthermore, according to the stories of industrial capitalism, this economic system must constantly increase production to grow and what, after all, is production? It is indeed the conversion of the living to the dead, the conversion of living forests into two-by-fours, living rivers into stagnant pools for generating hydroelectricity, living fish into fish sticks and ultimately all of these into money. And really, what is gross national product? It’s a measure of this conversion of the living to the dead. The more quickly the living world is converted into dead products, the higher the GNP. And these simple equations are complicated by the fact that when GNP goes down, people often lose jobs. No wonder the world is getting killed.
“And if we take global warming into consideration here – oh and I believe the latest study on global warming mentioned something along the lines of the planet now being on track to heat up by 29 degrees in the next eighty years … if that isn’t curtailed immediately, no one will survive that … And so all the so-called solutions to global warming take industrial capitalism as a given. And here we see the same old abusive behavior: the narratives are not only created around the perceptions of the perpetrators, i.e. those in power, but are forced upon us by them as well, so we come to believe the narratives and accept them as a given. And, essentially, to take industrial capitalism as a given when it comes to solutions to global warming is absolutely absurd and insane. It’s out of touch with physical reality. Yet it has disastrous effects on the real physical world. If you force a planet to conform to ideology you get what you get.
“A while back I had a conversation with an anarchist who was complaining that I was ‘too ideological,’ and that my ideology was ‘the health of the earth.’ Well, actually, the earth is not and cannot ever be an ideology. The earth is physical. It is real. And it is primary. Without soil, you don’t have a healthy land base and without a healthy land base you don’t eat, you die. Without drinkable clean water you die.”
And this is one of the problems with our culture: its lack of ability to separate ideology – the kind that accommodates maximizing pleasure and domination – from the needs of the natural world. And, so, if solutions to global warming do not immediately address the basic needs of the planet, well … we’re fucked.
“One has to ask,” pressed Jensen, “if hammerhead sharks could provide solutions, if the indigenous could give solutions and if we would listen to the solutions they are already giving, would these solutions take industrial capitalism as a given? The bottom line is that capitalist solutions to global warming are coming from the capitalist boosters, from those in power who are responsible for exploiting and destroying us and more importantly, the planet.”
By the 1940s, in Germany, Arthur Nebe’s gassing van was in wide use. Those who drove Nebe’s death vans never thought of themselves as murderers, just as another somebody getting paid to drive a van, to do a job. Today, those who work for Boeing, Raytheon, Weyerhaeuser, Exxon Mobil, BP, the Pentagon … will always see themselves as employees, not murderers. They will always see themselves as working a job that needs to be done.
Those members of this culture who blindly go along without interrogating the culture’s narratives, who identify with the pathology of this culture, will always see themselves as just other members of society. For these people, the murder of a planet feels like economics; it feels normal after having been pushed out of consciousness by careers, styles and fashions; it may not even feel like anything at all after being psychically numbed by pop radio, sitcoms, smart phones, video games … But at the other end of all these glittery distractions is an unremitting array of violence, poverty, extinction, environmental degradation.
“I saw this right-wing bumper sticker the other day that read, ‘You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers,’ but it’s not just guns: we’re going to have to pry rigid claws off steering wheels, cans of hair spray, TV remote controls and two-liter bottles of Jolt Cola,” cautioned Jensen. “Each of these individually and all of these collectively are more important to many people than are lampreys, salmon, spotted owls, sturgeons, tigers, our own lives. And that is a huge part of the problem. So of course we don’t want to win. We’d lose our cable TV. But I want to win. With the world being killed, I want to win and will do whatever it takes to win.”
When Adolph Eichmann stood before the Jerusalem District Court and was asked why he agreed to the task of deporting Jews to the ghettos and concentration camps, his response was, No one ever told me what I was doing was wrong. Today, 200 species have become extinct; another indigenous community will disappear from this planet forever; an entire forest will be removed; and millions of human lives will be forced to endure the agonies of famine, war, disease, thirst, the loss of their land, their community, their way of life. Not enough people have stepped forward to say that what this culture is doing to the planet is wrong.
Well, here it is folks: What this culture is doing to our very selves, what it’s doing to the planet, is wrong. So damn wrong. And the sooner we replace this economy, the sooner we can dissolve these toxic illusions and their formative narratives. Only then, can we begin to live the free lives we were born to live and win the fight.
You Can’t Kill A Planet And Live On It Too
Let’s expose the structure of violence that keeps the world economy running.
With an entire planet being slaughtered before our eyes, it’s terrifying to watch the very culture responsible for this – the culture of industrial civilization, fueled by a finite source of fossil fuels, primarily a dwindling supply of oil – thrust forward wantonly to fuel its insatiable appetite for “growth.”
Deluded by myths of progress and suffering from the psychosis of technomania complicated by addiction to depleting oil reserves, industrial society leaves a crescendo of atrocities in its wake.
A very partial list would include the Bhopal chemical disaster, numerous oil spills, the illegal depleted uranium-spewing occupations of Iraq, Afghanistan, mountaintop removal, thcted, that panders to desire rather than necessity, that delicately conceals the violence at the other end of this economy, a violence so widespread that we’re all not only complicit in it to a degree (e.g., if you’re a taxpayer, you help subsidize the manufacturing of weapons of mass destruction), but victims of it as well. As Chris Hedges admonished in his books, “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy” and the “Triumph of Spectacle,” any culture that cannot distinguish reality from illusion will kill itself.
Moreover, any culture that cannot distinguish reality from illusion will kill everything and everyone else in its path as well as itself.
As the world burns, as species die off, as mothers breastfeed their children with dioxin-tainted breast milk, as nuclear reactors melt down into the Pacific while the aerial deployment of depleted uranium damages innocent lives, it is perplexing that so few people fight back against a system that has horror as a reality for most living on the planet. And those who fight back, who stand in opposition to the culture behind such wholesale abuse and call it what it is – a genocidal mega-state (especially if you believe that the lives of nonhumans are as important to them as yours is to you and mine is to me) – are met with hostility and hatred, scoffed at, harassed, even tortured. With so much at stake, why aren’t more people deafening their ears to the nutcases who preach a future of infinite-growth economies? And why do so many people continue to put “the economy” first, to take industrial capitalism as we know it as a given and not fight back, defend what’s left of the natural world?
“One of the reasons there aren’t more people working to take down the system that’s killing the planet is because their lives depend on the system,” author and environmental activist Derrick Jensen told me from his home in California when I interviewed him on the phone recently. “If your experience is that your food comes from the grocery store and your water comes from the tap, then you are going to defend to the death the system that brings those to you because your life depends on them,” Jensen explained. “If your experience, however, is that your food comes from a land base and that your water comes from a stream, well, then you will defend to the death that land base and that stream. So part of the problem is that we have become so dependent upon this system that is killing and exploiting us, it has become almost impossible for us to imagine living outside of it and it’s very difficult physically for us to live outside of it.
“The other problem is that fear is the belief we have something left to lose. What I mean by this is that I really like my life right now, as do a lot of people. We have a lot to lose if this culture is to go down. A primary reason so many of us do not want to win this war – or even acknowledge that it’s going on – is that we materially benefit from this war’s plunder. I’m really unsure how many of us would be willing to give up our automobiles and cell phones, hot showers and electric lights, our grocery and clothing stores. But the truth is, the system that leads to these things, that leads to technological advancement and our identity as civilized beings, are killing us and, more importantly, killing the planet.”
Even in the absence of global warming, this culture would still be murdering the planet, bumping off pods of whales and flocks of birds; detonating mountaintops to access strata of coal and bauxite, eliminating entire ecosystems. All this violence inflicted upon an entire planet to run an economy based on the foolish and immoral notion that we can sustain industrial societies, all while trashing the planet’s land bases, ecosystems and life. And the fantastic rhetoric those who insist on adapting to these changes promulgate – that technology will find a fix, that we can adapt, that the planet can and will conform to fixes in the market – is dangerous.
“Another part of the problem,” Jensen told me, “is the narratives behind this culture’s way of living. The premises of these narratives grant us the exclusive rights and privileges of dominion over this planet. Whether you subscribe to the religion of Science or of Christianity, these narratives tell us that our intelligence and abilities permit us exclusive rights and privileges to work our will on the world that is here for us to use. The problem with these stories, whether you believe in them or not, is that they have real effects on the physical world. The stories we’re told about the world shape the way we perceive the world and the way we perceive the world shapes the way we behave in the world. The stories of industrial capitalism – that we can sustain infinite-growth economies – shapes the way this culture behaves in the world. And this behavior is killing the planet. Whether the stories we are told are fantasies or not doesn’t matter, what matters is that these narratives are physical: the stories of Christianity may be fantasy – let’s pretend for a moment that God doesn’t exist – well, the Crusades still happened; the notion of race or gender may be up for debate, but obviously, race and gender does matter and this postmodern attitude drives me crazy because, yeah, race and gender is not an actual thing, but it all has real-world effects – African Americans comprise 58 percent of the prison population and one-third of all black men between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine are under some sort of criminal justice supervision; as for gender, well real males rape females.
“Another example [of how things that truly aren't real still have real-world effects],” Jensen continued, “is there was this serial killer a while back who was killing women in Santa Cruz. Voices in his head were telling him that if he didn’t kill these women, then California would slide off into the ocean. It’s apparent this guy was delusional, a total nut job and sick in the head, but his delusions still resulted in real-world effects. Hitler too had the delusion that Jews were poisoning the race. That delusion had real-world effects. And we can sit around and discuss whether Weyerhaeuser truly exists, but forests still get deforested. Or better yet, it’s pretty clear that it’s silly to really believe that the world won’t run out of oil … and then it’s suddenly clear that it’s not so silly – there is a physical reality. In the real world, you can’t have a nature/culture split, but in this culture you do and it has real effects on the physical world. You can’t live on a planet and kill it at the same time.”
You find the problem with an industrial production economy when you unpack the word “production.” As Jensen makes clear in his book “The Culture of Make Believe,” production is essentially the conversion of the living to the dead: animals into cold cuts, mountains and rivers into aluminum beer cans, trees into toilet paper, oil into plastics and computers (one computer uses ten times its own mass in fossil fuels). To go paperless is not to go green, or maybe it is, depending on what shade of Green we’re talking about here. Basically, every commodity one comes in contact with is soaked in oil, made from resources, marked by, as Jensen puts it, the turning of the living to the dead: Industrial production.
And with conflicts and wars that are waged or instigated by this culture to access (steal) the resources needed to fuel this economy’s colossal machines, this culture winds up butchering entire non-industrialized communities of people … the elderly, children who cling to their mothers as drones hawk over staggered onlookers … the innocent and vulnerable written off as “collateral damage.” Himmler used a similar epithet for Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Serbs, Belarusians, and other Slavic peoples in a pamphlet he edited and had distributed by the SS Race and Settlement Head Office: “Untermenschen.”
This is an acceptable price we must pay it, so we are told.
In the US, more lives are lost weekly from preventable cancers and other illnesses than are lost in ten years from terrorist attacks. And the corporations this culture fights for overseas are the very organizations culpable for these domestic deaths every week.
The list of victims whose lives are subject to violent assault and extinction to feed this culture’s “production” is as long and as diverse as you want to make it.
“An infinite-growth economy is not only insane and impossible,” remarked Jensen, “it’s also abusive, by which I mean that it’s based on the same conceit as more personal forms of abuse. It is, in fact, the macroeconomic enshrinement of abusive behavior. The guiding principle of abusive behavior is that the abuser refuses to respect or abide by limits or boundaries put up by the victim. Growth economies are essentially unchecked and will push past any boundaries set up by anyone other than the perpetrators. And a successful abuser will always ensure that there are some ‘benefits’ for the victim, in this case, e.g., we can watch TV, we can have computer access and play games online – we get ‘benefits’ that essentially keep us in line.
“Furthermore, according to the stories of industrial capitalism, this economic system must constantly increase production to grow and what, after all, is production? It is indeed the conversion of the living to the dead, the conversion of living forests into two-by-fours, living rivers into stagnant pools for generating hydroelectricity, living fish into fish sticks and ultimately all of these into money. And really, what is gross national product? It’s a measure of this conversion of the living to the dead. The more quickly the living world is converted into dead products, the higher the GNP. And these simple equations are complicated by the fact that when GNP goes down, people often lose jobs. No wonder the world is getting killed.
“And if we take global warming into consideration here – oh and I believe the latest study on global warming mentioned something along the lines of the planet now being on track to heat up by 29 degrees in the next eighty years … if that isn’t curtailed immediately, no one will survive that … And so all the so-called solutions to global warming take industrial capitalism as a given. And here we see the same old abusive behavior: the narratives are not only created around the perceptions of the perpetrators, i.e. those in power, but are forced upon us by them as well, so we come to believe the narratives and accept them as a given. And, essentially, to take industrial capitalism as a given when it comes to solutions to global warming is absolutely absurd and insane. It’s out of touch with physical reality. Yet it has disastrous effects on the real physical world. If you force a planet to conform to ideology you get what you get.
“A while back I had a conversation with an anarchist who was complaining that I was ‘too ideological,’ and that my ideology was ‘the health of the earth.’ Well, actually, the earth is not and cannot ever be an ideology. The earth is physical. It is real. And it is primary. Without soil, you don’t have a healthy land base and without a healthy land base you don’t eat, you die. Without drinkable clean water you die.”
And this is one of the problems with our culture: its lack of ability to separate ideology – the kind that accommodates maximizing pleasure and domination – from the needs of the natural world. And, so, if solutions to global warming do not immediately address the basic needs of the planet, well … we’re fucked.
“One has to ask,” pressed Jensen, “if hammerhead sharks could provide solutions, if the indigenous could give solutions and if we would listen to the solutions they are already giving, would these solutions take industrial capitalism as a given? The bottom line is that capitalist solutions to global warming are coming from the capitalist boosters, from those in power who are responsible for exploiting and destroying us and more importantly, the planet.”
By the 1940s, in Germany, Arthur Nebe’s gassing van was in wide use. Those who drove Nebe’s death vans never thought of themselves as murderers, just as another somebody getting paid to drive a van, to do a job. Today, those who work for Boeing, Raytheon, Weyerhaeuser, Exxon Mobil, BP, the Pentagon … will always see themselves as employees, not murderers. They will always see themselves as working a job that needs to be done.
Those members of this culture who blindly go along without interrogating the culture’s narratives, who identify with the pathology of this culture, will always see themselves as just other members of society. For these people, the murder of a planet feels like economics; it feels normal after having been pushed out of consciousness by careers, styles and fashions; it may not even feel like anything at all after being psychically numbed by pop radio, sitcoms, smart phones, video games … But at the other end of all these glittery distractions is an unremitting array of violence, poverty, extinction, environmental degradation.
“I saw this right-wing bumper sticker the other day that read, ‘You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers,’ but it’s not just guns: we’re going to have to pry rigid claws off steering wheels, cans of hair spray, TV remote controls and two-liter bottles of Jolt Cola,” cautioned Jensen. “Each of these individually and all of these collectively are more important to many people than are lampreys, salmon, spotted owls, sturgeons, tigers, our own lives. And that is a huge part of the problem. So of course we don’t want to win. We’d lose our cable TV. But I want to win. With the world being killed, I want to win and will do whatever it takes to win.”
When Adolph Eichmann stood before the Jerusalem District Court and was asked why he agreed to the task of deporting Jews to the ghettos and concentration camps, his response was, No one ever told me what I was doing was wrong. Today, 200 species have become extinct; another indigenous community will disappear from this planet forever; an entire forest will be removed; and millions of human lives will be forced to endure the agonies of famine, war, disease, thirst, the loss of their land, their community, their way of life. Not enough people have stepped forward to say that what this culture is doing to the planet is wrong.
Well, here it is folks: What this culture is doing to our very selves, what it’s doing to the planet, is wrong. So damn wrong. And the sooner we replace this economy, the sooner we can dissolve these toxic illusions and their formative narratives. Only then, can we begin to live the free lives we were born to live and win the fight.
SC107-12
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28693.htm
Fundamentalism Kills
The gravest threat we face from terrorism, as the killings in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik underscore, comes not from the Islamic world but the radical Christian right and the secular fundamentalists who propagate the bigoted, hateful caricatures of observant Muslims and those defined as our internal enemies. The caricature and fear are spread as diligently by the Christian right as they are by atheists such as Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. Our religious and secular fundamentalists all peddle the same racist filth and intolerance that infected Breivik. This filth has poisoned and degraded our civil discourse. The looming economic and environmental collapse will provide sparks and tinder to transform this coarse language of fundamentalist hatred into, I fear, the murderous rampages experienced by Norway. I worry more about the Anders Breiviks than the Mohammed Attas.
The battle under way in America is not between religion and science. It is not between those who embrace the rational and those who believe in biblical myth. It is not between Western civilization and Islam. The blustering televangelists and the New Atheists, the television pundits and our vaunted Middle East specialists and experts, are all part of our vast, simplistic culture of mindless entertainment. They are in show business. They cannot afford complexity. Religion and science, facts and lies, truth and fiction, are the least of their concerns. They trade insults and clichés like cartoon characters. They don masks. One wears the mask of religion. One wears the mask of science. One wears the mask of journalism. One wears the mask of the terrorism expert. They jab back and forth in predictable sound bites. It is a sterile and useless debate between bizarre subsets of American culture. Some use the scientific theory of evolution to explain the behavior and rules for complex social and political systems, and others insist that the six-day creation story in Genesis is a factual account. The danger we face is not in the quarrel between religion advocates and evolution advocates, but in the widespread mental habit of fundamentalism itself.
We live in a fundamentalist culture. Our utopian visions of inevitable human progress, obsession with endless consumption, and fetish for power and unlimited growth are fed by illusions that are as dangerous as fantasies about the Second Coming. These beliefs are the newest expression of the infatuation with the apocalypse, one first articulated to Western culture by the early church. This apocalyptic vision was as central to the murderous beliefs of the French Jacobins, the Russian Bolsheviks and the German fascists as it was to the early Christians. The historian Arnold Toynbee argues that racism in Anglo-American culture was given a special virulence after the publication of the King James Bible. The concept of “the chosen people” was quickly adopted, he wrote, by British and American imperialists. It fed the disease of white supremacy. It gave them the moral sanction to dominate and destroy other races, from the Native Americans to those on the subcontinent.
Our secular and religious fundamentalists come out of this twisted yearning for the apocalypse and belief in the “chosen people.” They advocate, in the language of religion and scientific rationalism, the divine right of our domination, the clash of civilizations. They assure us that we are headed into the broad, uplifting world of universal democracy and a global free market once we sign on for the subjugation and extermination of those who oppose us. They insist—as the fascists and the communists did—thn available to us, given what Islamists believe.”
“We are at war with Islam,” Harris goes on. “It may not serve our immediate foreign policy objectives for our political leaders to openly acknowledge this fact, but it is unambiguously so. It is not merely that we are at war with an otherwise peaceful religion that has been ‘hijacked’ by extremists. We are at war with precisely the vision of life that is prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran, and further elaborated in the literature of the hadith, which recounts the sayings and teachings of the Prophet.”
Harris assures us that “the Koran mandates such hatred,” that “the problem is with Islam itself.” He writes that “Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death.”
A culture that exalts its own moral certitude and engages in uncritical self-worship at the expense of conscience commits moral and finally physical suicide. Our fundamentalists busy themselves with their pathetic little monuments to Jesus, to reason, to science, to Western civilization and to new imperial glory. They peddle a binary view of the world that divides reality between black and white, good and evil, right and wrong. We are taught in a fundamentalist culture to view other human beings, especially Muslims, not as ends but as means. We abrogate the right to exterminate all who do not conform.
Fundamentalists have no interest in history, culture or social or linguistic differences. They are a remarkably uncurious, self-satisfied group. Anything outside their own narrow bourgeois life, petty concerns and physical comforts bores them. They are provincials. They do not investigate or seek to understand the endemic flaws in human nature. The only thing that matters is the coming salvation of humanity, or at least that segment of humanity they deem worthy of salvation. They peddle a route to assured collective deliverance. And they sanction violence and the physical extermination of other human beings to get there.
All fundamentalists worship the same gods—themselves. They worship the future prospect of their own empowerment. They view this empowerment as a necessity for the advancement and protection of civilization or the Christian state. They sanctify the nation. They hold up the ability the industrial state has handed to them as a group and as individuals to shape the world according to their vision as evidence of their own superiority. Fundamentalists express the frustrations of a myopic and morally stunted middle class. They cling, under their religious or scientific veneer, to the worst values of the petite bourgeois. They are suburban mutations, products of an American landscape that has been perverted by a destruction of community and a long and successful war against complex thought. The self-absorbed worldview of these fundamentalists brings smiles of indulgence from the corporatists who profit, at our expense, from the obliteration of moral and intellectual inquiry.
Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s “Ulysses” acidly condemned all schemes to purify the world and serve human progress through violence. He said that “history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Dedalus in the same passage responded to the schoolmaster Deasy’s claim that “the ways of the Creator are not our ways,” and that “all history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.” A soccer goal is jubilantly scored by boys in the yard outside the school window as Deasy expounds on divine will. God, Dedalus tells Deasy as the players yell in glee over the goal, is no more than the screams from the schoolyard —“a shout in the street.” Joyce, like Samuel Beckett, excoriated the Western belief in historical teleology—the notion that history has a purpose or is moving toward a goal. The absurdity of this belief, they wrote, always feeds fanatics and undermines the possibility of human community. These writers warned us about all those—religious and secular—who call for salvation through history.
There are tens of millions of Americans who in their desperation and insecurity yearn for the assurance and empowerment offered by a clearly defined war against an external evil. They are taught in our fundamentalist culture that this evil is the root of their misery. They embrace a war against this evil as a solution to the drift in their lives, their economic deprivation and the moral and economic morass of the nation. They see in this conflict with these dark forces a way to overcome their own alienation. They find in it certitude, meaning and structure. They believe that once this evil is vanquished, an evil that extends from Muslims to undocumented workers, liberals, intellectuals, homosexuals and feminists, they can transform America into a land of plenty and virtue. But this fundamentalism, which cloaks itself in the jargon of scientific rationality, Christian piety and nativism, is a recipe for fanaticism. All those who embrace other ways of being and believing are viewed, as Breivik apparently viewed his victims, as contaminates that must be eliminated.
This fundamentalist ideology, because it is contradictory and filled with myth, is immune to critiques based on reason, fact and logic. This is part of its appeal. It obliterates doubt, nuance, intellectual and scientific rigor and moral conscience. All has been predicted or decided. Life is reduced to following a simple black-and-white road map. The contradictions in these belief systems—for example the championing of the “rights of the unborn” while calling for wider use of the death penalty or the damning of Muslim terrorists while promoting pre-emptive war, which delivers more death and misery in the Middle East than any jihadist organization—inoculate followers from rational discourse. Life becomes a crusade.
All fundamentalists, religious and secular, are ignoramuses. They follow the lines of least resistance. They already know what is true and what is untrue. They do not need to challenge their own beliefs or investigate the beliefs of others. They do not need to bother with the hard and laborious work of religious, linguistic, historical and cultural understanding. They do not need to engage in self-criticism or self-reflection. It spoils the game. It ruins the entertainment. They see all people, and especially themselves, as clearly and starkly defined. The world is divided into those who embrace or reject their belief systems. Those who support these belief systems are good and forces for human progress. Those who oppose these belief systems are stupid, at best, and usually evil. Fundamentalists have no interest in real debate, real dialogue, real intellectual thought. Fundamentalism, at its core, is about self-worship. It is about feeling holier, smarter and more powerful than everyone else. And this comes directly out of the sickness of our advertising age and its exaltation of the cult of the self. It is a product of our deep and unreflective cultural narcissism.
Our faith in the inevitability of human progress constitutes an inability to grasp the tragic nature of history. Human history is one of constant conflict between the will to power and the will to nurture and protect life. Our greatest achievements are always intertwined with our greatest failures. Our most exalted accomplishments are always coupled with our most egregious barbarities. Science and industry serve as instruments of progress as well as instruments of destruction. The Industrial Age has provided feats of engineering and technology, yet it has also destroyed community, spread the plague of urbanization, uprooted us all, turned human beings into cogs and made possible the total war and wholesale industrial killing that has marked the last century. These technologies, even as we see them as our salvation, are rapidly destroying the ecosystem on which we depend for life.
There is no linear movement in history. Morality and ethics are static. Human nature does not change. Barbarism is part of the human condition and we can all succumb to its basest dimensions. This is the tragedy of history. Human will is morally ambiguous. The freedom to act as often results in the construction of new prisons and systems of repression as it does the safeguarding of universal human rights. The competing forces of love and of power define us, what Sigmund Freud termed Eros and Thanatos. Societies have, throughout history, ignored calls for altruism and mutuality in times of social upheaval and turmoil. They have wasted their freedom in the self-destructive urges that currently envelope us. These urges are very human and very dangerous. They are fired by utopian visions of inevitable human progress. When this progress stalls or is reversed, when the dreams of advancement and financial stability are thwarted, when a people confronts its own inevitable downward spiral, dark forces of vengeance and retribution are unleashed. Fundamentalists serve an evil that is unseen and unexamined. And the longer this evil is ignored the more dangerous and deadly it becomes. Those who seek through violence the Garden of Eden usher in the apocalypse.
Fundamentalism Kills
The gravest threat we face from terrorism, as the killings in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik underscore, comes not from the Islamic world but the radical Christian right and the secular fundamentalists who propagate the bigoted, hateful caricatures of observant Muslims and those defined as our internal enemies. The caricature and fear are spread as diligently by the Christian right as they are by atheists such as Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. Our religious and secular fundamentalists all peddle the same racist filth and intolerance that infected Breivik. This filth has poisoned and degraded our civil discourse. The looming economic and environmental collapse will provide sparks and tinder to transform this coarse language of fundamentalist hatred into, I fear, the murderous rampages experienced by Norway. I worry more about the Anders Breiviks than the Mohammed Attas.
The battle under way in America is not between religion and science. It is not between those who embrace the rational and those who believe in biblical myth. It is not between Western civilization and Islam. The blustering televangelists and the New Atheists, the television pundits and our vaunted Middle East specialists and experts, are all part of our vast, simplistic culture of mindless entertainment. They are in show business. They cannot afford complexity. Religion and science, facts and lies, truth and fiction, are the least of their concerns. They trade insults and clichés like cartoon characters. They don masks. One wears the mask of religion. One wears the mask of science. One wears the mask of journalism. One wears the mask of the terrorism expert. They jab back and forth in predictable sound bites. It is a sterile and useless debate between bizarre subsets of American culture. Some use the scientific theory of evolution to explain the behavior and rules for complex social and political systems, and others insist that the six-day creation story in Genesis is a factual account. The danger we face is not in the quarrel between religion advocates and evolution advocates, but in the widespread mental habit of fundamentalism itself.
We live in a fundamentalist culture. Our utopian visions of inevitable human progress, obsession with endless consumption, and fetish for power and unlimited growth are fed by illusions that are as dangerous as fantasies about the Second Coming. These beliefs are the newest expression of the infatuation with the apocalypse, one first articulated to Western culture by the early church. This apocalyptic vision was as central to the murderous beliefs of the French Jacobins, the Russian Bolsheviks and the German fascists as it was to the early Christians. The historian Arnold Toynbee argues that racism in Anglo-American culture was given a special virulence after the publication of the King James Bible. The concept of “the chosen people” was quickly adopted, he wrote, by British and American imperialists. It fed the disease of white supremacy. It gave them the moral sanction to dominate and destroy other races, from the Native Americans to those on the subcontinent.
Our secular and religious fundamentalists come out of this twisted yearning for the apocalypse and belief in the “chosen people.” They advocate, in the language of religion and scientific rationalism, the divine right of our domination, the clash of civilizations. They assure us that we are headed into the broad, uplifting world of universal democracy and a global free market once we sign on for the subjugation and extermination of those who oppose us. They insist—as the fascists and the communists did—thn available to us, given what Islamists believe.”
“We are at war with Islam,” Harris goes on. “It may not serve our immediate foreign policy objectives for our political leaders to openly acknowledge this fact, but it is unambiguously so. It is not merely that we are at war with an otherwise peaceful religion that has been ‘hijacked’ by extremists. We are at war with precisely the vision of life that is prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran, and further elaborated in the literature of the hadith, which recounts the sayings and teachings of the Prophet.”
Harris assures us that “the Koran mandates such hatred,” that “the problem is with Islam itself.” He writes that “Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death.”
A culture that exalts its own moral certitude and engages in uncritical self-worship at the expense of conscience commits moral and finally physical suicide. Our fundamentalists busy themselves with their pathetic little monuments to Jesus, to reason, to science, to Western civilization and to new imperial glory. They peddle a binary view of the world that divides reality between black and white, good and evil, right and wrong. We are taught in a fundamentalist culture to view other human beings, especially Muslims, not as ends but as means. We abrogate the right to exterminate all who do not conform.
Fundamentalists have no interest in history, culture or social or linguistic differences. They are a remarkably uncurious, self-satisfied group. Anything outside their own narrow bourgeois life, petty concerns and physical comforts bores them. They are provincials. They do not investigate or seek to understand the endemic flaws in human nature. The only thing that matters is the coming salvation of humanity, or at least that segment of humanity they deem worthy of salvation. They peddle a route to assured collective deliverance. And they sanction violence and the physical extermination of other human beings to get there.
All fundamentalists worship the same gods—themselves. They worship the future prospect of their own empowerment. They view this empowerment as a necessity for the advancement and protection of civilization or the Christian state. They sanctify the nation. They hold up the ability the industrial state has handed to them as a group and as individuals to shape the world according to their vision as evidence of their own superiority. Fundamentalists express the frustrations of a myopic and morally stunted middle class. They cling, under their religious or scientific veneer, to the worst values of the petite bourgeois. They are suburban mutations, products of an American landscape that has been perverted by a destruction of community and a long and successful war against complex thought. The self-absorbed worldview of these fundamentalists brings smiles of indulgence from the corporatists who profit, at our expense, from the obliteration of moral and intellectual inquiry.
Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s “Ulysses” acidly condemned all schemes to purify the world and serve human progress through violence. He said that “history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Dedalus in the same passage responded to the schoolmaster Deasy’s claim that “the ways of the Creator are not our ways,” and that “all history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.” A soccer goal is jubilantly scored by boys in the yard outside the school window as Deasy expounds on divine will. God, Dedalus tells Deasy as the players yell in glee over the goal, is no more than the screams from the schoolyard —“a shout in the street.” Joyce, like Samuel Beckett, excoriated the Western belief in historical teleology—the notion that history has a purpose or is moving toward a goal. The absurdity of this belief, they wrote, always feeds fanatics and undermines the possibility of human community. These writers warned us about all those—religious and secular—who call for salvation through history.
There are tens of millions of Americans who in their desperation and insecurity yearn for the assurance and empowerment offered by a clearly defined war against an external evil. They are taught in our fundamentalist culture that this evil is the root of their misery. They embrace a war against this evil as a solution to the drift in their lives, their economic deprivation and the moral and economic morass of the nation. They see in this conflict with these dark forces a way to overcome their own alienation. They find in it certitude, meaning and structure. They believe that once this evil is vanquished, an evil that extends from Muslims to undocumented workers, liberals, intellectuals, homosexuals and feminists, they can transform America into a land of plenty and virtue. But this fundamentalism, which cloaks itself in the jargon of scientific rationality, Christian piety and nativism, is a recipe for fanaticism. All those who embrace other ways of being and believing are viewed, as Breivik apparently viewed his victims, as contaminates that must be eliminated.
This fundamentalist ideology, because it is contradictory and filled with myth, is immune to critiques based on reason, fact and logic. This is part of its appeal. It obliterates doubt, nuance, intellectual and scientific rigor and moral conscience. All has been predicted or decided. Life is reduced to following a simple black-and-white road map. The contradictions in these belief systems—for example the championing of the “rights of the unborn” while calling for wider use of the death penalty or the damning of Muslim terrorists while promoting pre-emptive war, which delivers more death and misery in the Middle East than any jihadist organization—inoculate followers from rational discourse. Life becomes a crusade.
All fundamentalists, religious and secular, are ignoramuses. They follow the lines of least resistance. They already know what is true and what is untrue. They do not need to challenge their own beliefs or investigate the beliefs of others. They do not need to bother with the hard and laborious work of religious, linguistic, historical and cultural understanding. They do not need to engage in self-criticism or self-reflection. It spoils the game. It ruins the entertainment. They see all people, and especially themselves, as clearly and starkly defined. The world is divided into those who embrace or reject their belief systems. Those who support these belief systems are good and forces for human progress. Those who oppose these belief systems are stupid, at best, and usually evil. Fundamentalists have no interest in real debate, real dialogue, real intellectual thought. Fundamentalism, at its core, is about self-worship. It is about feeling holier, smarter and more powerful than everyone else. And this comes directly out of the sickness of our advertising age and its exaltation of the cult of the self. It is a product of our deep and unreflective cultural narcissism.
Our faith in the inevitability of human progress constitutes an inability to grasp the tragic nature of history. Human history is one of constant conflict between the will to power and the will to nurture and protect life. Our greatest achievements are always intertwined with our greatest failures. Our most exalted accomplishments are always coupled with our most egregious barbarities. Science and industry serve as instruments of progress as well as instruments of destruction. The Industrial Age has provided feats of engineering and technology, yet it has also destroyed community, spread the plague of urbanization, uprooted us all, turned human beings into cogs and made possible the total war and wholesale industrial killing that has marked the last century. These technologies, even as we see them as our salvation, are rapidly destroying the ecosystem on which we depend for life.
There is no linear movement in history. Morality and ethics are static. Human nature does not change. Barbarism is part of the human condition and we can all succumb to its basest dimensions. This is the tragedy of history. Human will is morally ambiguous. The freedom to act as often results in the construction of new prisons and systems of repression as it does the safeguarding of universal human rights. The competing forces of love and of power define us, what Sigmund Freud termed Eros and Thanatos. Societies have, throughout history, ignored calls for altruism and mutuality in times of social upheaval and turmoil. They have wasted their freedom in the self-destructive urges that currently envelope us. These urges are very human and very dangerous. They are fired by utopian visions of inevitable human progress. When this progress stalls or is reversed, when the dreams of advancement and financial stability are thwarted, when a people confronts its own inevitable downward spiral, dark forces of vengeance and retribution are unleashed. Fundamentalists serve an evil that is unseen and unexamined. And the longer this evil is ignored the more dangerous and deadly it becomes. Those who seek through violence the Garden of Eden usher in the apocalypse.
SC107-11
http://carolynbaker.net/2011/07/24/1807/
“The End of Growth”
While “experts” assure us that the economy is slowly emerging from recession, a growing camp of well-informed dissenters thinks not. The scant evidence of recovery, insists this group, is not an anomaly but the sign of a profound sea change. The End of Growth, one book unequivocally calls it, next to a cover image of a burst balloon and a pin. The book’s author, Richard Heinberg, makes his case by far the most eloquently and comprehensively—and though it may be a decidedly unwelcome one for those now struggling, that doesn’t detract from its validity.
The limits-to-growth debate began in 1972 with the MIT report of the same name. That seminal study concluded that without preventive action, sometime early this century the global economy would collide catastrophically with hard ecological limits. No one acted, and now the economy is, in Heinberg’s judgment, trapped in a rut from which there’s no escape. Heinberg is a leading authority on one critical natural limit precluding further growth, that of oil supply—on which his The Party’s Over is a standard reference. In this new book, he argues that industrial economies are on the eve of a great contraction. Though we may see temporary revivals of growth hereafter, even ones lasting entire quarters or years, the overall trend line will be pointed steeply downward.
Whether unending growth is a fundamental good or the root of all evil, the simple fact is that it’s the basic characteristic of modern-day “developed” economies—as well as an impossibility. Industrial economies must continually grow, yet they can’t grow forever because that’s impossible in a finite world. An expanding economy requires ever-increasing quantities of natural resources, and unfortunately many of these resources are in decline or face imminent decline. For example, conventional oil production peaked in 2005 and total liquid fuels production, which includes unconventional sources like ethanol and tar sands, may now also be in terminal decline. These facts are common knowledge among those who follow the issues, but are hard to find on the radar screen of the general public.
What has many believing that the U.S. economy in particular is in recovery is the steady rise in GDP since the third quarter of 2009. But Heinberg dismisses this growth as almost entirely due to government stimulus spending; and anyway, he argues, GDP is a poor measure of economic health, revealing nothing about income distribution, non-monetary transactions or people’s overall well-being. For example, if you eat at home instead of at restaurants and grow your own food rather than buying it, you’re hurting GDP even as you practice thrift and self-reliance. And even granting that the economy really has resumed growth, it’s done so against what Heinberg calls an unhealthy backdrop of dramatically higher unemployment and severely reduced tax revenues compared to pre-recession levels.
The End of Growth provides a brief but sweeping account of economic history, which Heinberg says can be condensed into one sentence: “As societies have grown more complex, larger, more far-flung, and diverse, the tribe-based gift economy has shrunk in importance, while the trade economy has grown to dominate most aspects of people’s lives, and has expanded in scope to encompass the entire planet.” In ancient gift economies, community members shared with one another and trade occurred only among strangers, since trade within a community would have been taken as an affront. Then along came money, fractional reserve banking, interest and other innovations that steadily propelled humankind from the gift economy to today’s trade economies marked by fierce competition.
Heinberg sees the dogfighting between Keynesian New Deal economics and the “trickle-down” Reaganomics of 50 years later as effectively over, with both sides having fallen flat on their faces. The fantastic sums that governments spent trying to restart growth during the recent recession brought no lasting growth at all. And the lavish corporate bonuses given at a time when people at large had scarcely had it so badly showed how wrong the trickle-down ideal had been. Both Keynesism and Reaganism were doomed because both believed in perpetual growth. And their mutual demise leaves us with “a crisis not just of the economy, but also of economic theory and philosophy,” writes Heinberg.
Technology boosters like pointing to the incredible breakthroughs in computer technology in recent times as proof that human innovation can solve all our problems. They invoke something called Moore’s law, the observation that every two years sees a doubling in how many transistors can fit onto a microchip. But as Heinberg and others have noted, computers are able to advance so quickly because they’re small and have rapid inventory turnovers. Our monetary and energy systems, in contrast, are anything but small and require great foresight and planning. Thus, in Heinberg’s view, “[w]e’re counting on Moore’s law while setting the stage for Murphy’s.”
In his discussion of the limits to innovation, Heinberg brings up a little-known book titled The Limits of Business Development and Economic Growth. Its author, Swedish business consultant Mats Larsson, suggests that human beings have a finite ability to invent truly new activities. Most recent inventions, he argues, have been just slight improvements in the speed of rudimentary things that we’ve long been doing anyway, such as travel, transport, communication and trade. Larsson sees the big international corporations becoming ever more evenly matched due to the general slowdown in innovation. And at the time of the book’s writing in 2004 he predicted that we’d begin seeing hard limits to business development around 2005 to 2015. For obvious reasons, his book received no mainstream attention.
Like most sensible observers of our predicament, Heinberg sees little chance that industrial societies will voluntarily adopt the self-restraint needed to avert disaster. He believes that necessity will be the driver of change, and that governments and other large-scale institutions will be of limited usefulness. Thus, his recommendations focus on what individuals, families and communities can do to better weather the transition. The common thread throughout these suggestions is the need to revive community cohesiveness and long-abandoned systems of local organization.
The unprecedented mobility that people enjoyed during the abundant-oil era led to a society in which close neighbors have become complete strangers. Heinberg calls this a “bizarre situation” that will prove dangerous as people once again have to rely on one another for help. But he sees promise in a number of current relocalization efforts, including Rob Hopkins’ Transition Town movement and the Common Security Clubs (the latter seeking to provide personal and economic security to jobless among the community). Heinberg also has some interesting thoughts on how to put these and other initiatives on the map, such as relocating existing community organizations to prominent storefronts.
Some other recommendations include the outlawing of usury, a “haircut” approach to debt jubilee and a system of debt-free money issued by governments or central banks. Heinberg sees particular promise in the haircut idea, which would work by lopping down all debts, investments and savings alike by a certain percentage, while leaving assets worth less than, say, $25,000 untouched. This would obviously be unpopular among the well-off, but would be a huge relief to those on fixed incomes.
In the several years or so since peak oil began generating significant literature and debate, it has attracted a diverse array of thinkers. To name a few, there are insiders like Colin Campbell and Ken Deffeyes who sounded the first warnings; a clinical psychologist in the field of “peak oil blues,” Kathy McMahon; an archdruid practiced in nature’s less readily perceptible energies, John Michael Greer; and a couple of social critics/comedians, Jim Kunstler and Dmitry Orlov. Richard Heinberg’s distinction is that he’s hands-down the most prolific peak oil author, now having written half a dozen books on the subject and a few others touching on it tangentially. He’s hardly done, and I think I speak for most when I say that it’ll be exciting to see what he comes up with next.
“The End of Growth”
While “experts” assure us that the economy is slowly emerging from recession, a growing camp of well-informed dissenters thinks not. The scant evidence of recovery, insists this group, is not an anomaly but the sign of a profound sea change. The End of Growth, one book unequivocally calls it, next to a cover image of a burst balloon and a pin. The book’s author, Richard Heinberg, makes his case by far the most eloquently and comprehensively—and though it may be a decidedly unwelcome one for those now struggling, that doesn’t detract from its validity.
The limits-to-growth debate began in 1972 with the MIT report of the same name. That seminal study concluded that without preventive action, sometime early this century the global economy would collide catastrophically with hard ecological limits. No one acted, and now the economy is, in Heinberg’s judgment, trapped in a rut from which there’s no escape. Heinberg is a leading authority on one critical natural limit precluding further growth, that of oil supply—on which his The Party’s Over is a standard reference. In this new book, he argues that industrial economies are on the eve of a great contraction. Though we may see temporary revivals of growth hereafter, even ones lasting entire quarters or years, the overall trend line will be pointed steeply downward.
Whether unending growth is a fundamental good or the root of all evil, the simple fact is that it’s the basic characteristic of modern-day “developed” economies—as well as an impossibility. Industrial economies must continually grow, yet they can’t grow forever because that’s impossible in a finite world. An expanding economy requires ever-increasing quantities of natural resources, and unfortunately many of these resources are in decline or face imminent decline. For example, conventional oil production peaked in 2005 and total liquid fuels production, which includes unconventional sources like ethanol and tar sands, may now also be in terminal decline. These facts are common knowledge among those who follow the issues, but are hard to find on the radar screen of the general public.
What has many believing that the U.S. economy in particular is in recovery is the steady rise in GDP since the third quarter of 2009. But Heinberg dismisses this growth as almost entirely due to government stimulus spending; and anyway, he argues, GDP is a poor measure of economic health, revealing nothing about income distribution, non-monetary transactions or people’s overall well-being. For example, if you eat at home instead of at restaurants and grow your own food rather than buying it, you’re hurting GDP even as you practice thrift and self-reliance. And even granting that the economy really has resumed growth, it’s done so against what Heinberg calls an unhealthy backdrop of dramatically higher unemployment and severely reduced tax revenues compared to pre-recession levels.
The End of Growth provides a brief but sweeping account of economic history, which Heinberg says can be condensed into one sentence: “As societies have grown more complex, larger, more far-flung, and diverse, the tribe-based gift economy has shrunk in importance, while the trade economy has grown to dominate most aspects of people’s lives, and has expanded in scope to encompass the entire planet.” In ancient gift economies, community members shared with one another and trade occurred only among strangers, since trade within a community would have been taken as an affront. Then along came money, fractional reserve banking, interest and other innovations that steadily propelled humankind from the gift economy to today’s trade economies marked by fierce competition.
Heinberg sees the dogfighting between Keynesian New Deal economics and the “trickle-down” Reaganomics of 50 years later as effectively over, with both sides having fallen flat on their faces. The fantastic sums that governments spent trying to restart growth during the recent recession brought no lasting growth at all. And the lavish corporate bonuses given at a time when people at large had scarcely had it so badly showed how wrong the trickle-down ideal had been. Both Keynesism and Reaganism were doomed because both believed in perpetual growth. And their mutual demise leaves us with “a crisis not just of the economy, but also of economic theory and philosophy,” writes Heinberg.
Technology boosters like pointing to the incredible breakthroughs in computer technology in recent times as proof that human innovation can solve all our problems. They invoke something called Moore’s law, the observation that every two years sees a doubling in how many transistors can fit onto a microchip. But as Heinberg and others have noted, computers are able to advance so quickly because they’re small and have rapid inventory turnovers. Our monetary and energy systems, in contrast, are anything but small and require great foresight and planning. Thus, in Heinberg’s view, “[w]e’re counting on Moore’s law while setting the stage for Murphy’s.”
In his discussion of the limits to innovation, Heinberg brings up a little-known book titled The Limits of Business Development and Economic Growth. Its author, Swedish business consultant Mats Larsson, suggests that human beings have a finite ability to invent truly new activities. Most recent inventions, he argues, have been just slight improvements in the speed of rudimentary things that we’ve long been doing anyway, such as travel, transport, communication and trade. Larsson sees the big international corporations becoming ever more evenly matched due to the general slowdown in innovation. And at the time of the book’s writing in 2004 he predicted that we’d begin seeing hard limits to business development around 2005 to 2015. For obvious reasons, his book received no mainstream attention.
Like most sensible observers of our predicament, Heinberg sees little chance that industrial societies will voluntarily adopt the self-restraint needed to avert disaster. He believes that necessity will be the driver of change, and that governments and other large-scale institutions will be of limited usefulness. Thus, his recommendations focus on what individuals, families and communities can do to better weather the transition. The common thread throughout these suggestions is the need to revive community cohesiveness and long-abandoned systems of local organization.
The unprecedented mobility that people enjoyed during the abundant-oil era led to a society in which close neighbors have become complete strangers. Heinberg calls this a “bizarre situation” that will prove dangerous as people once again have to rely on one another for help. But he sees promise in a number of current relocalization efforts, including Rob Hopkins’ Transition Town movement and the Common Security Clubs (the latter seeking to provide personal and economic security to jobless among the community). Heinberg also has some interesting thoughts on how to put these and other initiatives on the map, such as relocating existing community organizations to prominent storefronts.
Some other recommendations include the outlawing of usury, a “haircut” approach to debt jubilee and a system of debt-free money issued by governments or central banks. Heinberg sees particular promise in the haircut idea, which would work by lopping down all debts, investments and savings alike by a certain percentage, while leaving assets worth less than, say, $25,000 untouched. This would obviously be unpopular among the well-off, but would be a huge relief to those on fixed incomes.
In the several years or so since peak oil began generating significant literature and debate, it has attracted a diverse array of thinkers. To name a few, there are insiders like Colin Campbell and Ken Deffeyes who sounded the first warnings; a clinical psychologist in the field of “peak oil blues,” Kathy McMahon; an archdruid practiced in nature’s less readily perceptible energies, John Michael Greer; and a couple of social critics/comedians, Jim Kunstler and Dmitry Orlov. Richard Heinberg’s distinction is that he’s hands-down the most prolific peak oil author, now having written half a dozen books on the subject and a few others touching on it tangentially. He’s hardly done, and I think I speak for most when I say that it’ll be exciting to see what he comes up with next.
Saturday, July 23, 2011
SC107-10
http://kunstler.com/blog/2011/07/the-amazing-dissolving-nation.html
The Amazing Dissolving Nation
Going broke fast is a very compelling problem. For ordinary people it tends to induce chicken-with-no-head syndrome - a mad burst of pointless locomotion ending in sudden collapse. If the US debt ceiling is raised - which I think is a 90 percent bet - there will be a sigh of relief that resounds from the lobster pounds of Penobscot Bay to the parking lots of Silicon Valley... and poor dissolving America will still be stuck in its essential predicament of being broke. So a lot of pointless locomotion will continue in the form of positioning among a troop of clown candidates for the dumbshow of the 2012 election. I wonder lately whether that election will actually happen.
Europe is arguably worse off money-wise, more broke, flimsier, crapped out, crippled, and paralyzed. Sad, because in outward appearance Europe is - how shall I put this? - better turned out than America. Europe is a fit, silver-haired gentleman in a sleek Italian suit and a pair of Michael Toschi swing lace wingtips, holding a serious-looking Chiarugi leather briefcase. America is pear-shaped blob of semi-formed male flesh, in ankle-length cargo shorts, a black T-shirt featuring skull motifs, tattoos randomly assigned (as if by lottery) to visible flesh, a Sluggo buzz-cut, and a low-rider sports cap designed to make your head look flat. In other words, he lacks a certain savoir-faire compared to his European cousin. But both are broke. Neither has any idea what he will do next - though, for the American, it will probably involve the ingestion of melted cheese or drugs (or both). When the European collapses, a certain air of delicacy will attend his demise; the expired American will go up in flames in a trailer and they'll have to sort out his remains from the melted goop of his dwelling-place with a front-end loader.
This is the way the world ends for the OECD, the nations that affected to be developed and civilized. This phase of globalism is certainly not the end of history, but it is looking like the end of accounting tricks, and possibly democracy, which has discredited itself with accounting tricks. At a certain point in time, the sickening recognition sets in that appearances are not the same as reality - and then, all of a sudden, you're in a political maelstrom. Citizens of the various lands will discover that the money being argued over, shifted around from column A to column B, assigned to this or that actuarial table or budget line or account or obligation or vault or "structured vehicle"- that money is just... not... there. There's no money. It was pretend money. From now on, none of you will get paid. Imagine a world where nobody gets paid.
Europe has run the money string to its bitter end and now it just remains to be seen how each country blows up and where the dust settles. Greece and Portugal may just shrug and retire on an economy based on goat-cheese and olives. Ireland will get drunk and pass out for at least a century. Spain sinks back into an age-old catatonic daze, having gone broke spectacularly once before. Italy strings up Mr. Berlusconi on a lamp-post and breaks up into 112 warring city-states. France elects DSK, whose first act is to declare war on the City of New York. Religious wars leave England in embers. And Germany becomes the world's first "green" police state.
It's conceivable to me that Barack Obama may be the last president - for a while. He was a decent fellow but, in the end, ineffectual, and of course he got no help from the legislative branch, including especially colleagues in his own party, a most remarkable class of maundering chickenshits and grifters. Our money problems will not go away and after a while this land will not be governable by familiar means. In case you haven't noticed, the rule of law is already AWOL in many sectors of our national life, most particularly money matters, but before long on every street-corner, every highway strip, plus every GMO cornfield, and brownfield. The two parties are unreformable and the Tea Party is the stooge of one of the two parties, and there is no other party of earnest, decisive, and sane individuals anywhere near the horizon. So some kind of convulsion is in the cards and it will be the unfortunate duty of some dutiful officer to step in and set an agenda based on something other than bluster, fakery, and pocket pool.
While there's a good chance the US debt ceiling will be extended, it seems to me that meanwhile we have crossed an invisible line into a place where untoward things happen.
The Amazing Dissolving Nation
Going broke fast is a very compelling problem. For ordinary people it tends to induce chicken-with-no-head syndrome - a mad burst of pointless locomotion ending in sudden collapse. If the US debt ceiling is raised - which I think is a 90 percent bet - there will be a sigh of relief that resounds from the lobster pounds of Penobscot Bay to the parking lots of Silicon Valley... and poor dissolving America will still be stuck in its essential predicament of being broke. So a lot of pointless locomotion will continue in the form of positioning among a troop of clown candidates for the dumbshow of the 2012 election. I wonder lately whether that election will actually happen.
Europe is arguably worse off money-wise, more broke, flimsier, crapped out, crippled, and paralyzed. Sad, because in outward appearance Europe is - how shall I put this? - better turned out than America. Europe is a fit, silver-haired gentleman in a sleek Italian suit and a pair of Michael Toschi swing lace wingtips, holding a serious-looking Chiarugi leather briefcase. America is pear-shaped blob of semi-formed male flesh, in ankle-length cargo shorts, a black T-shirt featuring skull motifs, tattoos randomly assigned (as if by lottery) to visible flesh, a Sluggo buzz-cut, and a low-rider sports cap designed to make your head look flat. In other words, he lacks a certain savoir-faire compared to his European cousin. But both are broke. Neither has any idea what he will do next - though, for the American, it will probably involve the ingestion of melted cheese or drugs (or both). When the European collapses, a certain air of delicacy will attend his demise; the expired American will go up in flames in a trailer and they'll have to sort out his remains from the melted goop of his dwelling-place with a front-end loader.
This is the way the world ends for the OECD, the nations that affected to be developed and civilized. This phase of globalism is certainly not the end of history, but it is looking like the end of accounting tricks, and possibly democracy, which has discredited itself with accounting tricks. At a certain point in time, the sickening recognition sets in that appearances are not the same as reality - and then, all of a sudden, you're in a political maelstrom. Citizens of the various lands will discover that the money being argued over, shifted around from column A to column B, assigned to this or that actuarial table or budget line or account or obligation or vault or "structured vehicle"- that money is just... not... there. There's no money. It was pretend money. From now on, none of you will get paid. Imagine a world where nobody gets paid.
Europe has run the money string to its bitter end and now it just remains to be seen how each country blows up and where the dust settles. Greece and Portugal may just shrug and retire on an economy based on goat-cheese and olives. Ireland will get drunk and pass out for at least a century. Spain sinks back into an age-old catatonic daze, having gone broke spectacularly once before. Italy strings up Mr. Berlusconi on a lamp-post and breaks up into 112 warring city-states. France elects DSK, whose first act is to declare war on the City of New York. Religious wars leave England in embers. And Germany becomes the world's first "green" police state.
It's conceivable to me that Barack Obama may be the last president - for a while. He was a decent fellow but, in the end, ineffectual, and of course he got no help from the legislative branch, including especially colleagues in his own party, a most remarkable class of maundering chickenshits and grifters. Our money problems will not go away and after a while this land will not be governable by familiar means. In case you haven't noticed, the rule of law is already AWOL in many sectors of our national life, most particularly money matters, but before long on every street-corner, every highway strip, plus every GMO cornfield, and brownfield. The two parties are unreformable and the Tea Party is the stooge of one of the two parties, and there is no other party of earnest, decisive, and sane individuals anywhere near the horizon. So some kind of convulsion is in the cards and it will be the unfortunate duty of some dutiful officer to step in and set an agenda based on something other than bluster, fakery, and pocket pool.
While there's a good chance the US debt ceiling will be extended, it seems to me that meanwhile we have crossed an invisible line into a place where untoward things happen.
Saturday, July 16, 2011
SC107-9
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/
How Not to Play the Game
It’s been more than a year now since the theme of “green wizardry” became central to the posts here on The Archdruid Report, and I’ve pretty much covered the first two of the three themes I mean to discuss before it becomes time to shift the conversation elsewhere. We’ve discussed organic gardening and its associated arts, and we’ve discussed homescale energy production and conservation. At this point, before we go on to the third leg of the tripod, which used to be called “recycling” thirty years ago and deserves a more robust name now, I’d like to step back for a moment and talk a bit about strategy.
Yes, there’s a strategy underlying the selection of projects and possibilities I’ve been discussing here. The focus on Seventies-era organic gardening, appropriate technology, and the like is not merely a matter of nostalgia for a time when America seemed to be on the brink of taking its future seriously, before it collectively took the coward’s way out, nor is it simply a recognition that we don’t have a lot of time left and would be wise to concentrate on options that have already had the bugs worked out – though this latter may well be a point worth making. Rather, by some combination of prudence, prescience, and sheer dumb luck, the toolkit of ecotechnic options pieced together by the backyard farmers, basement inventors, shoestring-budget nonprofits and local government initiatives of that time happen to be very nearly uniquely suited to one of the dominant features of the future ahead of us.
To understand the way this works, it’s going to be necessary to look at some of the least welcoming features of that future, and that in turn is going to require a look back at a vision of history I first sketched out here years ago, and developed in more detail in the pages of my book The Ecotechnic Future. That look is going to require close attention to some of the least pleasant features of where we’re headed as a society. Unwelcome as that may be, it can’t be avoided, for it’s precisely as a response to the more troubling dimensions of our future that the strategy I have in mind has its place.
The fast version of the take on the future I want to discuss divides it up into four overlapping phases or periods, labeled according to the basic modes of economic production that predominate during each one. The first of these, the one in which most of us grew up and to which nearly all current political, economic and social thought is attuned, is abundance industrialism. This is the phase in which the supply of goods and services available to people in the world’s industrial nations by and large increases with each passing year. Yes, I know, it’s heresy to suggest this, but my take is that what drove that increase was not the growth of human knowledge, or any of the other comforting mantras offered by the publicists of science and industry over the last century or so. Rather, what drove it was simply an exponential increase in consumption of the Earth’s finite reserves of fossil fuels.
With the arrival of geological limits to fossil fuel production, we enter the second phase, scarcity industrialism. This is the phase in which the supply of goods and services available to people in the industrial nations peaks and begins to contract. According to mainstream economic doctrines, that can’t happen, which may be one of the reasons why we’ve become so good at ignoring it. Few people notice, for example, that most of what’s for sale in supermarkets is a little smaller and a little more shoddily made with every passing year, while the price stays level or creeps upwards; few people talk about the disappearance of scores of once-common services – try to get a perfectly good shoe with a worn heel repaired in most American cities nowadays – or think about the way that municipal services always seem to contract while the cost always seems to expand.
All these are part of the same process, the rise and fall of scarcity industrialism, which ends when the level of goods and services being produced drops below the level needed to support any kind of industrial system at all. After that come salvage societies, which no longer have the energy per capita that would be needed for industrial modes of production at all, and concentrate on extracting value from the legacy left behind by the industrial past. Later on – probably some centuries later – the salvage era winds down as the salvage runs out, and new societies depending on natural, renewable resources take their place. In a fit of optimism, I labeled this latter phase the ecotechnic era, and suggested that it could potentially see some amount of relatively advanced technology supported on a truly sustainable basis; I still think that’s possible, though it’s going to take quite a bit of work now, and even more in the centuries to come, to make it likely.
Still, it’s the age of scarcity industrialism that deserves close attention right now, since most of the world’s industrial nations are somewhere along the trajectory that leads there. It’s tough to make predictions, as Yogi Berra once pointed out, especially about the future. Some of the main features of developed societies in the age of scarcity industrialism aren’t too difficult to predict, though, partly because equivalent processes have happened before, and partly because some nations right now are much further along the trajectory than others and provide a useful glimpse ahead.
The role of social conflict is one of the features that’s fairly predictable. In an age of abundance, the easiest way to deal with social conflict is to buy off the disaffected. That’s how industrial societies over the last century came to provide welfare for the poor, mortgage guarantees and college grants for the middle class, subsidies for farmers, tax breaks for businesses – name a group that’s had enough political savvy to organize and raise a ruckus, and you can just as quickly name the arrangements by which they were paid off to minimize the risk of disruptions to the system. That was politically feasible in an expanding economy; even when the shares of the existing pie were grossly unequal, the fact that everyone could have at least a little more each year made those with smaller slices willing to work with the system in order to get their cut.
In an age of scarcity, that easy option no longer exists, and social conflicts heat up rapidly. That’s the unmentioned subtext for much of what’s going on in politics on both sides of the Atlantic just now. The middle class, who shrugged and turned its collective back when the working classes of Europe and America were thrown to the sharks thirty years ago, are now discovering to their horror that they’re next on the list, as the rentier class – the relatively privileged fraction of industrial society that makes its living from investments rather than salaries – struggles to maintain its prosperity at everyone else’s expense. (The middle class did exactly the same thing when it had the chance – ask any impoverished working class family in Pittsburgh or Glasgow – so sympathy cards sent their way may be misplaced.) The gutting of social safety nets, the slashing of salaries and benefits, and the impoverishment of millions of previously affluent people are part of that process, and lead to a rising spiral of social conflict that may well push a good many nations into crisis or collapse.
Not, it’s probably worth noting, into revolution. It’s an interesting detail of history that revolutions rarely happen in ages of decline; the classic recipe for revolution is an extended period of economic improvement for the bulk of the population, followed by a standstill or a reversal. (The government of China would do well to take note of this.) In times of decline, the class and group solidarity essential to an effective revolution dissolves into a scramble for slices of a shrinking pie, in which your own peers are usually your worst enemies. Mind you, social hierarchies get fed through a blender in times of decline; the former holders of wealth and power tolerably often end up starving in alleys if they don’t simply get their throats cut, while sufficiently ruthless individuals from well down the ladder can climb right up to the top. Sill, the general trend in ages of scarcity is that the circle of people who have access to wealth and privilege narrows step by step, leaving most of their former peers to scramble for scraps or to claw their way into the charmed circle by fair means or foul.
Now it might in theory be possible for a country to extract itself from this kind of spiral descent into the kind of social conflict that normally ends in some form of authoritarianism. The chance that the United States will manage such a last-minute save, though, is pretty slim at this point if it exists at all. We’re already seeing even the most basic services provided by local government slashed to a degree unequalled in the industrial world; what remains of a social safety net that was already an embarrassment among developed nations is pretty clearly headed for the chopping block; the machinery of government in state houses and Congress alike is jamming up as pressure groups of every kind launch increasingly frenzied efforts to cling to wealth and influence at everyone else’s expense. The "health care reform" pushed through by the Obama administration, a political absurdity meant to prop up a faltering medical-pharmaceutical industry by mandating that people who can’t afford health insurance have to pay for it anyway, is as good an example as any.
It’s not a pretty picture, and it’s unlikely to get any more attractive any time soon. Still, it’s important to understand why societies in decline so often plunge into this sort of self-defeating spiral. One of the major problems faced by any society in decline is the almost universal unwillingness of such societies to deal with the fact that they are indeed in decline. It’s a problem rather than a predicament; that is to say, it has a solution; but the solution – accepting that the glory days of the past are over, and that the new and unwelcome reality of contraction and limitation will be around for the foreseeable future – is normally accepted only after every other imaginable response or nonresponse is tried out, and found wanting. A rising spiral of absurd beliefs, grandiose projects, and violent political passions is a standard part of the evasive maneuvering that goes into avoiding that one necessary step, and we’ve got plenty of examples currently, of course.
Here again, though, we’re dealing with a problem rather than a predicament, because there’s at least one way out of the trap I’ve just outlined. The declining years of a rich and powerful society resemble nothing so much as a game of musical chairs in which, in the end, all the chairs will be taken away. What’s the winning strategy in a game in which everyone inevitably loses sooner or later? That’s a simpler question than it sounds: the way to win is not to play the game.
And that, in turn, is what we’ve been talking about for the last year: how not to play the game.
The struggles of the age of scarcity industrialism will focus with increasing bitterness and intensity on access to the remaining benefits of industrial society as we’ve known it – above all, the cheap abundant energy that powers automobiles and planes, keeps wall sockets supplied with electricity, brings foodstuffs and consumer goods from around the world, and provides the context and the income for jobs in the increasingly overlapping spheres of business, government, and the military. The struggles for these things, if historical equivalents are anything to go by, will focus on certain geographical and social battlefields and have increasingly limited effects anywhere else. Those who turn their backs on the things being fought over, and distance themselves from the battlefields, have a very good chance of staying clear of the resulting difficulties.
That’s what the green wizard toolkit is meant to do. Those who have a place in the country or can get one won’t have any need to depend on a faltering corporate food system for their daily meals; those who focus instead on the small-city approach will be able to supplement sacks of bulk grains and legumes from the farm belt with produce from a backyard garden, amplified with henhouse and/or rabbit hutch as circumstances permit. Those in either situation who know how to insulate and weatherize, and provide the small amount of energy they need from homescale sources, will be able to ignore the decline of the electrical grid. Those who learn how to get the things they need from salvage, instead of relying on global supply chains fed from rapidly depleting resource stocks, will be able to stand aside as what’s left of the global economy circles the drain and goes down it. Those who do these things, teach these things to neighbors and friends, and help build local networks of mutual exchange and support, will be creating the social frameworks of the next stage of the future – the stage of salvage societies – within the crumbling skeleton of the old industrial order.
Now it’s common enough, when a plan such as this is suggested, for people to insist that it’s all very well and good, but the government, or the corporations, or roving hordes of zombies, or somebody else equally colorful and convenient will inevitably come and take it all away. That seems logical, but it only seems logical because the people who suggest it haven’t grasped the implications of the toolkit I’ve been suggesting here. That is to say, they haven’t noticed that the lifestyles that are possible when your food comes from a backyard garden, your heat comes from a wood stove, and your job comes from refurbishing salvage of one kind or another, are not comfortable middle class American lifestyles, or anything like ithem.
What we are talking about, to borrow a phrase from Henry David Thoreau, is voluntary poverty. The founders of the modern movement of "voluntary simplicity" backed away uncomfortably from the noun in Thoreau’s phrase, and thereby did themselves and their movement a huge disservice; it’s all too easy to turn "voluntary simplicity" into a sales pitch for yet another round of allegedly simple products at fashionably high prices. The concept of voluntary poverty does not lend itself anything like so well to such evasions. The idea, Thoreau’s idea, is to deliberately embrace being poor, in every material sense, in order to avoid the common fate of being possessed by your possessions.
That’s a valid choice at any phase of history’s wheel, but it takes on a great deal more importance than usual in an age when being anything but poor makes you a target for practitioners of involuntary poverty who are fixated on scrambling over you on their way back up toward a fading vision of extravagant wealth. This is why monasticism works so well in the declining years of civilizations and the dark ages that follow them, for successful monastic traditions invariably embrace strict poverty. Having nothing to steal, they don’t need to worry about thieves, and a traditional habit of choosing locations well away from the centers of wealth and power is also worth noting – Monte Cassino in Italy, the Shaolin Monastery in China, and Koyasan in Japan, where St. Benedict, Bodhidharma, and Kobo Daishi respectively founded three of the world’s great monastic traditions, were all more or less in the middle of nowhere when the first simple dwellings were erected there.
What most Americans do not know, and have no interest in learning, is that it’s possible to be poor in relative comfort. (One of the advantages of a writer’s career, with its traditional slow start, is that I had ample opportunity to learn this.) The central secret of green wizardry is that one way to be poor and comfortable is to learn how to work with nature, so that natural processes take care of many of the needs you’d otherwise have to spend money to meet. The appropriate technology movement of the Seventies was predisposed to develop along this path by its roots in the Sixties counterculture, which however briefly and inconsistently held up the ideal of voluntary poverty to a mostly baffled consumer economy. Where most of today’s chatter about solar technology focuses on grid-tied PV systems, vast arrays of mirrors in the Nevada desert, solar satellites, and the like – all things that can be built only in an economy of abundance with resources to spare, and thus are useless in the future we’re facing – the equivalent talk in the Seventies as often as not focused on homebuilt solar water heaters, bsolar ovens, and other things that could be cobbled together in a basement out of salvaged materials, and thus are relevant to our time and the time ahead of us.
It’s quite possible that some of the things I’ve been discussing will end up being used in monasteries during the dark age that follows the decline and fall of our civilization. Still, that’s for the future to decide. The present concern, at least for me, is getting these things remembered in time to make it through the next forty or fifty years of crisis, the next step down on the road to that future dark age, as America’s global empire comes unglued and a nation used to living on a quarter of the world’s energy supply and a third of its industrial products gets to learn what it’s like to live on a great deal less. If the things we’ve been discussing here get pulled out of the dumpster where America puts its unwanted heritage, and are put to use by people who aren’t terrified of the concept of voluntary poverty, the Benedicts, Bodhidharmas, and Kobo Daishis of the future will at least have the option open to them, and so will a great many less exalted individuals whose lives could well be made happier and better by the application of a little ecotechnic knowledge and a few pieces of highly appropriate technology; and so, dear reader, may you.
How Not to Play the Game
It’s been more than a year now since the theme of “green wizardry” became central to the posts here on The Archdruid Report, and I’ve pretty much covered the first two of the three themes I mean to discuss before it becomes time to shift the conversation elsewhere. We’ve discussed organic gardening and its associated arts, and we’ve discussed homescale energy production and conservation. At this point, before we go on to the third leg of the tripod, which used to be called “recycling” thirty years ago and deserves a more robust name now, I’d like to step back for a moment and talk a bit about strategy.
Yes, there’s a strategy underlying the selection of projects and possibilities I’ve been discussing here. The focus on Seventies-era organic gardening, appropriate technology, and the like is not merely a matter of nostalgia for a time when America seemed to be on the brink of taking its future seriously, before it collectively took the coward’s way out, nor is it simply a recognition that we don’t have a lot of time left and would be wise to concentrate on options that have already had the bugs worked out – though this latter may well be a point worth making. Rather, by some combination of prudence, prescience, and sheer dumb luck, the toolkit of ecotechnic options pieced together by the backyard farmers, basement inventors, shoestring-budget nonprofits and local government initiatives of that time happen to be very nearly uniquely suited to one of the dominant features of the future ahead of us.
To understand the way this works, it’s going to be necessary to look at some of the least welcoming features of that future, and that in turn is going to require a look back at a vision of history I first sketched out here years ago, and developed in more detail in the pages of my book The Ecotechnic Future. That look is going to require close attention to some of the least pleasant features of where we’re headed as a society. Unwelcome as that may be, it can’t be avoided, for it’s precisely as a response to the more troubling dimensions of our future that the strategy I have in mind has its place.
The fast version of the take on the future I want to discuss divides it up into four overlapping phases or periods, labeled according to the basic modes of economic production that predominate during each one. The first of these, the one in which most of us grew up and to which nearly all current political, economic and social thought is attuned, is abundance industrialism. This is the phase in which the supply of goods and services available to people in the world’s industrial nations by and large increases with each passing year. Yes, I know, it’s heresy to suggest this, but my take is that what drove that increase was not the growth of human knowledge, or any of the other comforting mantras offered by the publicists of science and industry over the last century or so. Rather, what drove it was simply an exponential increase in consumption of the Earth’s finite reserves of fossil fuels.
With the arrival of geological limits to fossil fuel production, we enter the second phase, scarcity industrialism. This is the phase in which the supply of goods and services available to people in the industrial nations peaks and begins to contract. According to mainstream economic doctrines, that can’t happen, which may be one of the reasons why we’ve become so good at ignoring it. Few people notice, for example, that most of what’s for sale in supermarkets is a little smaller and a little more shoddily made with every passing year, while the price stays level or creeps upwards; few people talk about the disappearance of scores of once-common services – try to get a perfectly good shoe with a worn heel repaired in most American cities nowadays – or think about the way that municipal services always seem to contract while the cost always seems to expand.
All these are part of the same process, the rise and fall of scarcity industrialism, which ends when the level of goods and services being produced drops below the level needed to support any kind of industrial system at all. After that come salvage societies, which no longer have the energy per capita that would be needed for industrial modes of production at all, and concentrate on extracting value from the legacy left behind by the industrial past. Later on – probably some centuries later – the salvage era winds down as the salvage runs out, and new societies depending on natural, renewable resources take their place. In a fit of optimism, I labeled this latter phase the ecotechnic era, and suggested that it could potentially see some amount of relatively advanced technology supported on a truly sustainable basis; I still think that’s possible, though it’s going to take quite a bit of work now, and even more in the centuries to come, to make it likely.
Still, it’s the age of scarcity industrialism that deserves close attention right now, since most of the world’s industrial nations are somewhere along the trajectory that leads there. It’s tough to make predictions, as Yogi Berra once pointed out, especially about the future. Some of the main features of developed societies in the age of scarcity industrialism aren’t too difficult to predict, though, partly because equivalent processes have happened before, and partly because some nations right now are much further along the trajectory than others and provide a useful glimpse ahead.
The role of social conflict is one of the features that’s fairly predictable. In an age of abundance, the easiest way to deal with social conflict is to buy off the disaffected. That’s how industrial societies over the last century came to provide welfare for the poor, mortgage guarantees and college grants for the middle class, subsidies for farmers, tax breaks for businesses – name a group that’s had enough political savvy to organize and raise a ruckus, and you can just as quickly name the arrangements by which they were paid off to minimize the risk of disruptions to the system. That was politically feasible in an expanding economy; even when the shares of the existing pie were grossly unequal, the fact that everyone could have at least a little more each year made those with smaller slices willing to work with the system in order to get their cut.
In an age of scarcity, that easy option no longer exists, and social conflicts heat up rapidly. That’s the unmentioned subtext for much of what’s going on in politics on both sides of the Atlantic just now. The middle class, who shrugged and turned its collective back when the working classes of Europe and America were thrown to the sharks thirty years ago, are now discovering to their horror that they’re next on the list, as the rentier class – the relatively privileged fraction of industrial society that makes its living from investments rather than salaries – struggles to maintain its prosperity at everyone else’s expense. (The middle class did exactly the same thing when it had the chance – ask any impoverished working class family in Pittsburgh or Glasgow – so sympathy cards sent their way may be misplaced.) The gutting of social safety nets, the slashing of salaries and benefits, and the impoverishment of millions of previously affluent people are part of that process, and lead to a rising spiral of social conflict that may well push a good many nations into crisis or collapse.
Not, it’s probably worth noting, into revolution. It’s an interesting detail of history that revolutions rarely happen in ages of decline; the classic recipe for revolution is an extended period of economic improvement for the bulk of the population, followed by a standstill or a reversal. (The government of China would do well to take note of this.) In times of decline, the class and group solidarity essential to an effective revolution dissolves into a scramble for slices of a shrinking pie, in which your own peers are usually your worst enemies. Mind you, social hierarchies get fed through a blender in times of decline; the former holders of wealth and power tolerably often end up starving in alleys if they don’t simply get their throats cut, while sufficiently ruthless individuals from well down the ladder can climb right up to the top. Sill, the general trend in ages of scarcity is that the circle of people who have access to wealth and privilege narrows step by step, leaving most of their former peers to scramble for scraps or to claw their way into the charmed circle by fair means or foul.
Now it might in theory be possible for a country to extract itself from this kind of spiral descent into the kind of social conflict that normally ends in some form of authoritarianism. The chance that the United States will manage such a last-minute save, though, is pretty slim at this point if it exists at all. We’re already seeing even the most basic services provided by local government slashed to a degree unequalled in the industrial world; what remains of a social safety net that was already an embarrassment among developed nations is pretty clearly headed for the chopping block; the machinery of government in state houses and Congress alike is jamming up as pressure groups of every kind launch increasingly frenzied efforts to cling to wealth and influence at everyone else’s expense. The "health care reform" pushed through by the Obama administration, a political absurdity meant to prop up a faltering medical-pharmaceutical industry by mandating that people who can’t afford health insurance have to pay for it anyway, is as good an example as any.
It’s not a pretty picture, and it’s unlikely to get any more attractive any time soon. Still, it’s important to understand why societies in decline so often plunge into this sort of self-defeating spiral. One of the major problems faced by any society in decline is the almost universal unwillingness of such societies to deal with the fact that they are indeed in decline. It’s a problem rather than a predicament; that is to say, it has a solution; but the solution – accepting that the glory days of the past are over, and that the new and unwelcome reality of contraction and limitation will be around for the foreseeable future – is normally accepted only after every other imaginable response or nonresponse is tried out, and found wanting. A rising spiral of absurd beliefs, grandiose projects, and violent political passions is a standard part of the evasive maneuvering that goes into avoiding that one necessary step, and we’ve got plenty of examples currently, of course.
Here again, though, we’re dealing with a problem rather than a predicament, because there’s at least one way out of the trap I’ve just outlined. The declining years of a rich and powerful society resemble nothing so much as a game of musical chairs in which, in the end, all the chairs will be taken away. What’s the winning strategy in a game in which everyone inevitably loses sooner or later? That’s a simpler question than it sounds: the way to win is not to play the game.
And that, in turn, is what we’ve been talking about for the last year: how not to play the game.
The struggles of the age of scarcity industrialism will focus with increasing bitterness and intensity on access to the remaining benefits of industrial society as we’ve known it – above all, the cheap abundant energy that powers automobiles and planes, keeps wall sockets supplied with electricity, brings foodstuffs and consumer goods from around the world, and provides the context and the income for jobs in the increasingly overlapping spheres of business, government, and the military. The struggles for these things, if historical equivalents are anything to go by, will focus on certain geographical and social battlefields and have increasingly limited effects anywhere else. Those who turn their backs on the things being fought over, and distance themselves from the battlefields, have a very good chance of staying clear of the resulting difficulties.
That’s what the green wizard toolkit is meant to do. Those who have a place in the country or can get one won’t have any need to depend on a faltering corporate food system for their daily meals; those who focus instead on the small-city approach will be able to supplement sacks of bulk grains and legumes from the farm belt with produce from a backyard garden, amplified with henhouse and/or rabbit hutch as circumstances permit. Those in either situation who know how to insulate and weatherize, and provide the small amount of energy they need from homescale sources, will be able to ignore the decline of the electrical grid. Those who learn how to get the things they need from salvage, instead of relying on global supply chains fed from rapidly depleting resource stocks, will be able to stand aside as what’s left of the global economy circles the drain and goes down it. Those who do these things, teach these things to neighbors and friends, and help build local networks of mutual exchange and support, will be creating the social frameworks of the next stage of the future – the stage of salvage societies – within the crumbling skeleton of the old industrial order.
Now it’s common enough, when a plan such as this is suggested, for people to insist that it’s all very well and good, but the government, or the corporations, or roving hordes of zombies, or somebody else equally colorful and convenient will inevitably come and take it all away. That seems logical, but it only seems logical because the people who suggest it haven’t grasped the implications of the toolkit I’ve been suggesting here. That is to say, they haven’t noticed that the lifestyles that are possible when your food comes from a backyard garden, your heat comes from a wood stove, and your job comes from refurbishing salvage of one kind or another, are not comfortable middle class American lifestyles, or anything like ithem.
What we are talking about, to borrow a phrase from Henry David Thoreau, is voluntary poverty. The founders of the modern movement of "voluntary simplicity" backed away uncomfortably from the noun in Thoreau’s phrase, and thereby did themselves and their movement a huge disservice; it’s all too easy to turn "voluntary simplicity" into a sales pitch for yet another round of allegedly simple products at fashionably high prices. The concept of voluntary poverty does not lend itself anything like so well to such evasions. The idea, Thoreau’s idea, is to deliberately embrace being poor, in every material sense, in order to avoid the common fate of being possessed by your possessions.
That’s a valid choice at any phase of history’s wheel, but it takes on a great deal more importance than usual in an age when being anything but poor makes you a target for practitioners of involuntary poverty who are fixated on scrambling over you on their way back up toward a fading vision of extravagant wealth. This is why monasticism works so well in the declining years of civilizations and the dark ages that follow them, for successful monastic traditions invariably embrace strict poverty. Having nothing to steal, they don’t need to worry about thieves, and a traditional habit of choosing locations well away from the centers of wealth and power is also worth noting – Monte Cassino in Italy, the Shaolin Monastery in China, and Koyasan in Japan, where St. Benedict, Bodhidharma, and Kobo Daishi respectively founded three of the world’s great monastic traditions, were all more or less in the middle of nowhere when the first simple dwellings were erected there.
What most Americans do not know, and have no interest in learning, is that it’s possible to be poor in relative comfort. (One of the advantages of a writer’s career, with its traditional slow start, is that I had ample opportunity to learn this.) The central secret of green wizardry is that one way to be poor and comfortable is to learn how to work with nature, so that natural processes take care of many of the needs you’d otherwise have to spend money to meet. The appropriate technology movement of the Seventies was predisposed to develop along this path by its roots in the Sixties counterculture, which however briefly and inconsistently held up the ideal of voluntary poverty to a mostly baffled consumer economy. Where most of today’s chatter about solar technology focuses on grid-tied PV systems, vast arrays of mirrors in the Nevada desert, solar satellites, and the like – all things that can be built only in an economy of abundance with resources to spare, and thus are useless in the future we’re facing – the equivalent talk in the Seventies as often as not focused on homebuilt solar water heaters, bsolar ovens, and other things that could be cobbled together in a basement out of salvaged materials, and thus are relevant to our time and the time ahead of us.
It’s quite possible that some of the things I’ve been discussing will end up being used in monasteries during the dark age that follows the decline and fall of our civilization. Still, that’s for the future to decide. The present concern, at least for me, is getting these things remembered in time to make it through the next forty or fifty years of crisis, the next step down on the road to that future dark age, as America’s global empire comes unglued and a nation used to living on a quarter of the world’s energy supply and a third of its industrial products gets to learn what it’s like to live on a great deal less. If the things we’ve been discussing here get pulled out of the dumpster where America puts its unwanted heritage, and are put to use by people who aren’t terrified of the concept of voluntary poverty, the Benedicts, Bodhidharmas, and Kobo Daishis of the future will at least have the option open to them, and so will a great many less exalted individuals whose lives could well be made happier and better by the application of a little ecotechnic knowledge and a few pieces of highly appropriate technology; and so, dear reader, may you.
SC107-8
http://survivalacres.com/wordpress/
Endgame Strategy - Why The Revolution Must Start In America
The unrest in the Middle East, the convulsions in Ivory Coast, the hunger sweeping across failed states such as Somalia, the freak weather patterns and the systematic unraveling of the American empire do not signal a lurch toward freedom and democracy but the catastrophic breakdown of globalization. The world as we know it is coming to an end. And what will follow will not be pleasant or easy.
The bankrupt corporate power elite, who continue to serve the dead ideas of unfettered corporate capitalism, globalization, profligate consumption and an economy dependent on fossil fuels, as well as endless war, have proven incapable of radically shifting course or responding to our altered reality. They react to the great unraveling by pretending it is not happening. They are desperately trying to maintain a doomed system of corporate capitalism. And the worse it gets the more they embrace, and seek to make us embrace, magical thinking. Dozens of members of Congress in the United States have announced that climate change does not exist and evolution is a hoax. They chant the mantra that the marketplace should determine human behavior, even as the unfettered and unregulated marketplace threw the global economy into a seizure and evaporated some $40 trillion in worldwide wealth. The corporate media retreats as swiftly from reality into endless mini-dramas revolving around celebrities or long discussions about the inane comments of a Donald Trump or a Sarah Palin. The real world – the one imploding in our faces – is ignored.
The deadly convergence of environmental and economic catastrophe is not coincidental. Corporations turn everything, from human beings to the natural world, into commodities they ruthlessly exploit until exhaustion or death. The race of doom is now between environmental collapse and global economic collapse. Which will get us first? Or will they get us at the same time?
Carbon emissions continue to soar upward, polar ice sheets continue to melt at an alarming rate, hundreds of species are vanishing, fish stocks are being dramatically depleted, droughts and floods are destroying cropland and human habitat across the globe, water sources are being poisoned, and the great human migration from coastlines and deserts has begun. As temperatures continue to rise huge parts of the globe will become uninhabitable. The continued release of large quantities of methane, some scientists have warned, could actually asphyxiate the human species.
And accompanying the assault on the ecosystem that sustains human life is the cruelty and stupidity of unchecked corporate capitalism that is creating a global economy of masters and serfs and a world where millions will be unable to survive.
We continue to talk about personalities – Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama or Stephen Harper – although the heads of state and elected officials have become largely irrelevant. Corporate lobbyists write the bills.
Lobbyists get them passed. Lobbyists make sure you get the money to be elected. And lobbyists employ you when you get out of office. Those who hold actual power are the tiny elite who manage the corporations. The share of national income of the top 0.1 percent of Americans since 1974 has grown from 2.7 to 12.3 percent. One in six American workers may be without a job. Some 40 million Americans may live in poverty, with tens of millions more living in a category called “near poverty.” Six million people may be forced from their homes in the United States because of foreclosures and bank repossessions. But while the masses suffer, Goldman Sachs, one of the financial firms most responsible for the evaporation of $17 trillion in wages, savings and wealth of small investors and shareholders in the United States, is giddily handing out $17.5 billion in compensation to its managers, including $12.6million to its CEO, Lloyd Blankfein.
The massive redistribution of wealth happened because lawmakers and public officials were, in essence, hired to permit it to happen. It was not a conspiracy. The process was transparent. It did not require the formation of a new political party or movement. It was the result of inertia by our political and intellectual class, which in the face of expanding corporate power found it personally profitable to facilitate it or look the other way. The armies of lobbyists, who write the legislation, bankroll political campaigns and disseminate propaganda, have been able to short-circuit the electorate.
Our political vocabulary continues to sustain the illusion of participatory democracy. The Democrats and the Liberal Party in Canada offer minor palliatives and a feel-your-pain language to mask the cruelty and goals of the corporate state. Neofeudalism will be cemented into place whether it is delivered by Democrats and the Liberals, who are pushing us there at 60 miles an hour, or by Republicans and the Conservatives, who are barreling toward it at 100 miles an hour.
“By fostering an illusion among the powerless classes that it can make their interests a priority,” Sheldon Wolin writes, “the Democratic Party pacifies and thereby defines the style of an opposition party in an inverted totalitarian system.” The Democrats and the Liberals are always able to offer up a least-worst alternative while, in fact, doing little or nothing to thwart the march toward corporate collectivism.
It is not that the public in the United States does not want a good healthcare system, programs that provide employment, quality public education or an end to Wall Street’s looting of the U.S. Treasury. Most polls suggest Americans do. But it has become impossible for most citizens in these corporate states to find out what is happening in the centers of power. Television news celebrities dutifully present two opposing sides to every issue, although each side is usually lying. The viewer can believe whatever he or she wants to believe. Nothing is actually elucidated or explained. The sound bites by Republicans or Democrats, the Liberals or the Conservatives, are accepted at face value. And once the television lights are turned off, the politicians go back to the business of serving business.
Human history, rather than being a chronicle of freedom and democracy, is characterized by ruthless domination. Our elites have done what all elites do. They have found sophisticated mechanisms to thwart popular aspirations, disenfranchise the working and increasingly the middle class, keep us passive and make us serve their interests. The brief democratic opening in our society in the early 20th century, made possible by radical movements, unions and a vigorous press, has again been shut tight. We were mesmerized by political charades, cheap consumerism, spectacle and magical thinking as we were ruthlessly stripped of power.
Adequate food, clean water and basic security are now beyond the reach of half the world’s population. Food prices have risen 61 percent globally since December 2008, according to the International Monetary Fund. The price of wheat has exploded, more than doubling in the last eight months to $8.56 a bushel. When half of your income is spent on food, as it is in countries such as Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia, Somalia and Ivory Coast, price increases of this magnitude bring with them widespread malnutrition and starvation. Food prices in the United States have risen over the past three months at an annualized rate of five percent. There are some 40 million poor in the United States who devote 35 percent of their after-tax incomes to pay for food. As the cost of fossil fuel climbs, as climate change continues to disrupt agricultural production and as populations and unemployment swell, we will find ourselves convulsed in more global and domestic unrest. Food riots and political protests will be frequent, as will malnutrition and starvation. Desperate people employ desperate measures to survive. And the elites will use the surveillance and security state to attempt to crush all forms of popular dissent.
The last people who should be in charge of our food supply or our social and political life, not to mention the welfare of sick children, are corporate capitalists and Wall Street speculators. But none of this is going to change until we turn our backs on the wider society, denounce the orthodoxies peddled in our universities and in the press by corporate apologists and construct our opposition to the corporate state from the ground up. It will not be easy. It will take time.
And it will require us to accept the status of social and political pariahs, especially as the lunatic fringe of our political establishment steadily gains power as the crisis mounts. The corporate state has nothing to offer the left or the right but fear. It uses fear to turn the population into passive accomplices. And as long as we remain afraid, or believe that the formal mechanisms of power can actually bring us real reform, nothing will change.
It does not matter, as writers such as John Ralston Saul have pointed out, that every one of globalism’s promises has turned out to be a lie. It does not matter that economic inequality has gotten worse and that most of the world’s wealth has become concentrated in a few hands. It does not matter that the middle class – the beating heart of any democracy – is disappearing and that the rights and wages of the working class have fallen into precipitous decline as labor regulations, protection of our manufacturing base and labor unions have been demolished. It does not matter that corporations have used the destruction of trade barriers as a mechanism for massive tax evasion, a technique that allows conglomerates such as General Electric or Bank of America to avoid paying any taxes. It does not matter that corporations are exploiting and killing the ecosystem for profit. The steady barrage of illusions disseminated by corporate systems of propaganda, in which words are often replaced with music and images, are impervious to truth. Faith in the marketplace replaces for many faith in an omnipresent God. And those who dissent are banished as heretics.
The aim of the corporate state is not to feed, clothe or house the masses but to shift all economic, social and political power and wealth into the hands of the tiny corporate elite. It is to create a world where the heads of corporations make $900,000 an hour and four-job families struggle to survive. The corporate elite achieves its aims of greater and greater profit by weakening and dismantling government agencies and taking over or destroying public institutions. Charter schools, mercenary armies, a for-profit health insurance industry and outsourcing every facet of government work, from clerical tasks to intelligence, feed the corporate beast at our expense. The decimation of labor unions, the twisting of education into mindless vocational training and the slashing of social services leave us ever more enslaved to the whims of corporations. The intrusion of corporations into the public sphere destroys the concept of the common good. It erases the lines between public and private interests. It creates a world that is defined exclusively by naked self-interest.
Many of us are seduced by childish happy talk. Who wants to hear that we are advancing not toward a paradise of happy consumption and personal prosperity but toward disaster? Who wants to confront a future in which the rapacious and greedy appetites of our global elite, who have failed to protect the planet, threaten to produce widespread anarchy, famine, environmental catastrophe, nuclear terrorism and wars for diminishing resources? Who wants to shatter the myth that the human race is evolving morally, that it can continue its giddy plundering of nonrenewable resources and its hedonistic levels of consumption, that capitalist expansion is eternal and will never cease?
Dying civilizations often prefer hope, even absurd hope, to truth. It makes life easier to bear. It lets them turn away from the hard choices ahead to bask in a comforting certitude that God or science or the market will be their salvation. This is why these apologists for globalism continue to find a following. And their systems of propaganda have built a vast, global Potemkin village to entertain us. The tens of millions of impoverished Americans, whose lives and struggles rarely make it onto television, are invisible. So are most of the world’s billions of poor, crowded into fetid slums. We do not see those who die from drinking contaminated water or being unable to afford medical care. We do not see those being foreclosed from their homes. We do not see the children who go to bed hungry. We busy ourselves with the absurd.
The game is over. We lost. The corporate state will continue its inexorable advance until two-thirds of the nation and the planet is locked into a desperate, permanent underclass. Most of us will struggle to make a living while the Blankfeins and our political elites wallow in the decadence and greed of the Forbidden City and Versailles. These elites do not have a vision. They know only one word: more. They will continue to exploit the nation, the global economy and the ecosystem. And they will use their money to hide in gated compounds when it all implodes. Do not expect them to take care of us when it starts to unravel. We will have to take care of ourselves. We will have to rapidly create small, monastic communities where we can sustain and feed ourselves. It will be up to us to keep alive the intellectual, moral and cultural values the corporate state has attempted to snuff out. It is either that or become drones and serfs in a global corporate dystopia. It is not much of a choice. But at least we still have one.
Endgame Strategy - Why The Revolution Must Start In America
The unrest in the Middle East, the convulsions in Ivory Coast, the hunger sweeping across failed states such as Somalia, the freak weather patterns and the systematic unraveling of the American empire do not signal a lurch toward freedom and democracy but the catastrophic breakdown of globalization. The world as we know it is coming to an end. And what will follow will not be pleasant or easy.
The bankrupt corporate power elite, who continue to serve the dead ideas of unfettered corporate capitalism, globalization, profligate consumption and an economy dependent on fossil fuels, as well as endless war, have proven incapable of radically shifting course or responding to our altered reality. They react to the great unraveling by pretending it is not happening. They are desperately trying to maintain a doomed system of corporate capitalism. And the worse it gets the more they embrace, and seek to make us embrace, magical thinking. Dozens of members of Congress in the United States have announced that climate change does not exist and evolution is a hoax. They chant the mantra that the marketplace should determine human behavior, even as the unfettered and unregulated marketplace threw the global economy into a seizure and evaporated some $40 trillion in worldwide wealth. The corporate media retreats as swiftly from reality into endless mini-dramas revolving around celebrities or long discussions about the inane comments of a Donald Trump or a Sarah Palin. The real world – the one imploding in our faces – is ignored.
The deadly convergence of environmental and economic catastrophe is not coincidental. Corporations turn everything, from human beings to the natural world, into commodities they ruthlessly exploit until exhaustion or death. The race of doom is now between environmental collapse and global economic collapse. Which will get us first? Or will they get us at the same time?
Carbon emissions continue to soar upward, polar ice sheets continue to melt at an alarming rate, hundreds of species are vanishing, fish stocks are being dramatically depleted, droughts and floods are destroying cropland and human habitat across the globe, water sources are being poisoned, and the great human migration from coastlines and deserts has begun. As temperatures continue to rise huge parts of the globe will become uninhabitable. The continued release of large quantities of methane, some scientists have warned, could actually asphyxiate the human species.
And accompanying the assault on the ecosystem that sustains human life is the cruelty and stupidity of unchecked corporate capitalism that is creating a global economy of masters and serfs and a world where millions will be unable to survive.
We continue to talk about personalities – Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama or Stephen Harper – although the heads of state and elected officials have become largely irrelevant. Corporate lobbyists write the bills.
Lobbyists get them passed. Lobbyists make sure you get the money to be elected. And lobbyists employ you when you get out of office. Those who hold actual power are the tiny elite who manage the corporations. The share of national income of the top 0.1 percent of Americans since 1974 has grown from 2.7 to 12.3 percent. One in six American workers may be without a job. Some 40 million Americans may live in poverty, with tens of millions more living in a category called “near poverty.” Six million people may be forced from their homes in the United States because of foreclosures and bank repossessions. But while the masses suffer, Goldman Sachs, one of the financial firms most responsible for the evaporation of $17 trillion in wages, savings and wealth of small investors and shareholders in the United States, is giddily handing out $17.5 billion in compensation to its managers, including $12.6million to its CEO, Lloyd Blankfein.
The massive redistribution of wealth happened because lawmakers and public officials were, in essence, hired to permit it to happen. It was not a conspiracy. The process was transparent. It did not require the formation of a new political party or movement. It was the result of inertia by our political and intellectual class, which in the face of expanding corporate power found it personally profitable to facilitate it or look the other way. The armies of lobbyists, who write the legislation, bankroll political campaigns and disseminate propaganda, have been able to short-circuit the electorate.
Our political vocabulary continues to sustain the illusion of participatory democracy. The Democrats and the Liberal Party in Canada offer minor palliatives and a feel-your-pain language to mask the cruelty and goals of the corporate state. Neofeudalism will be cemented into place whether it is delivered by Democrats and the Liberals, who are pushing us there at 60 miles an hour, or by Republicans and the Conservatives, who are barreling toward it at 100 miles an hour.
“By fostering an illusion among the powerless classes that it can make their interests a priority,” Sheldon Wolin writes, “the Democratic Party pacifies and thereby defines the style of an opposition party in an inverted totalitarian system.” The Democrats and the Liberals are always able to offer up a least-worst alternative while, in fact, doing little or nothing to thwart the march toward corporate collectivism.
It is not that the public in the United States does not want a good healthcare system, programs that provide employment, quality public education or an end to Wall Street’s looting of the U.S. Treasury. Most polls suggest Americans do. But it has become impossible for most citizens in these corporate states to find out what is happening in the centers of power. Television news celebrities dutifully present two opposing sides to every issue, although each side is usually lying. The viewer can believe whatever he or she wants to believe. Nothing is actually elucidated or explained. The sound bites by Republicans or Democrats, the Liberals or the Conservatives, are accepted at face value. And once the television lights are turned off, the politicians go back to the business of serving business.
Human history, rather than being a chronicle of freedom and democracy, is characterized by ruthless domination. Our elites have done what all elites do. They have found sophisticated mechanisms to thwart popular aspirations, disenfranchise the working and increasingly the middle class, keep us passive and make us serve their interests. The brief democratic opening in our society in the early 20th century, made possible by radical movements, unions and a vigorous press, has again been shut tight. We were mesmerized by political charades, cheap consumerism, spectacle and magical thinking as we were ruthlessly stripped of power.
Adequate food, clean water and basic security are now beyond the reach of half the world’s population. Food prices have risen 61 percent globally since December 2008, according to the International Monetary Fund. The price of wheat has exploded, more than doubling in the last eight months to $8.56 a bushel. When half of your income is spent on food, as it is in countries such as Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia, Somalia and Ivory Coast, price increases of this magnitude bring with them widespread malnutrition and starvation. Food prices in the United States have risen over the past three months at an annualized rate of five percent. There are some 40 million poor in the United States who devote 35 percent of their after-tax incomes to pay for food. As the cost of fossil fuel climbs, as climate change continues to disrupt agricultural production and as populations and unemployment swell, we will find ourselves convulsed in more global and domestic unrest. Food riots and political protests will be frequent, as will malnutrition and starvation. Desperate people employ desperate measures to survive. And the elites will use the surveillance and security state to attempt to crush all forms of popular dissent.
The last people who should be in charge of our food supply or our social and political life, not to mention the welfare of sick children, are corporate capitalists and Wall Street speculators. But none of this is going to change until we turn our backs on the wider society, denounce the orthodoxies peddled in our universities and in the press by corporate apologists and construct our opposition to the corporate state from the ground up. It will not be easy. It will take time.
And it will require us to accept the status of social and political pariahs, especially as the lunatic fringe of our political establishment steadily gains power as the crisis mounts. The corporate state has nothing to offer the left or the right but fear. It uses fear to turn the population into passive accomplices. And as long as we remain afraid, or believe that the formal mechanisms of power can actually bring us real reform, nothing will change.
It does not matter, as writers such as John Ralston Saul have pointed out, that every one of globalism’s promises has turned out to be a lie. It does not matter that economic inequality has gotten worse and that most of the world’s wealth has become concentrated in a few hands. It does not matter that the middle class – the beating heart of any democracy – is disappearing and that the rights and wages of the working class have fallen into precipitous decline as labor regulations, protection of our manufacturing base and labor unions have been demolished. It does not matter that corporations have used the destruction of trade barriers as a mechanism for massive tax evasion, a technique that allows conglomerates such as General Electric or Bank of America to avoid paying any taxes. It does not matter that corporations are exploiting and killing the ecosystem for profit. The steady barrage of illusions disseminated by corporate systems of propaganda, in which words are often replaced with music and images, are impervious to truth. Faith in the marketplace replaces for many faith in an omnipresent God. And those who dissent are banished as heretics.
The aim of the corporate state is not to feed, clothe or house the masses but to shift all economic, social and political power and wealth into the hands of the tiny corporate elite. It is to create a world where the heads of corporations make $900,000 an hour and four-job families struggle to survive. The corporate elite achieves its aims of greater and greater profit by weakening and dismantling government agencies and taking over or destroying public institutions. Charter schools, mercenary armies, a for-profit health insurance industry and outsourcing every facet of government work, from clerical tasks to intelligence, feed the corporate beast at our expense. The decimation of labor unions, the twisting of education into mindless vocational training and the slashing of social services leave us ever more enslaved to the whims of corporations. The intrusion of corporations into the public sphere destroys the concept of the common good. It erases the lines between public and private interests. It creates a world that is defined exclusively by naked self-interest.
Many of us are seduced by childish happy talk. Who wants to hear that we are advancing not toward a paradise of happy consumption and personal prosperity but toward disaster? Who wants to confront a future in which the rapacious and greedy appetites of our global elite, who have failed to protect the planet, threaten to produce widespread anarchy, famine, environmental catastrophe, nuclear terrorism and wars for diminishing resources? Who wants to shatter the myth that the human race is evolving morally, that it can continue its giddy plundering of nonrenewable resources and its hedonistic levels of consumption, that capitalist expansion is eternal and will never cease?
Dying civilizations often prefer hope, even absurd hope, to truth. It makes life easier to bear. It lets them turn away from the hard choices ahead to bask in a comforting certitude that God or science or the market will be their salvation. This is why these apologists for globalism continue to find a following. And their systems of propaganda have built a vast, global Potemkin village to entertain us. The tens of millions of impoverished Americans, whose lives and struggles rarely make it onto television, are invisible. So are most of the world’s billions of poor, crowded into fetid slums. We do not see those who die from drinking contaminated water or being unable to afford medical care. We do not see those being foreclosed from their homes. We do not see the children who go to bed hungry. We busy ourselves with the absurd.
The game is over. We lost. The corporate state will continue its inexorable advance until two-thirds of the nation and the planet is locked into a desperate, permanent underclass. Most of us will struggle to make a living while the Blankfeins and our political elites wallow in the decadence and greed of the Forbidden City and Versailles. These elites do not have a vision. They know only one word: more. They will continue to exploit the nation, the global economy and the ecosystem. And they will use their money to hide in gated compounds when it all implodes. Do not expect them to take care of us when it starts to unravel. We will have to take care of ourselves. We will have to rapidly create small, monastic communities where we can sustain and feed ourselves. It will be up to us to keep alive the intellectual, moral and cultural values the corporate state has attempted to snuff out. It is either that or become drones and serfs in a global corporate dystopia. It is not much of a choice. But at least we still have one.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
