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Excellent 15 minute video here:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33585.htm

Chris Hedges on Gun Rights, Obama's Empire, and Serious Revolt

Abby Martin interviews Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Chris Hedges, about activism and journalism, Obama's presidency, the death of the liberal class and the second amendment.

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http://kulturcritic.wordpress.com/posts/thrown-under-the-bus/

Thrown Under the Bus!

Wow, do I feel lucky today. January 1st 2013 and my Congress and President kept me from falling off that dreaded fiscal cliff. Whew, was that a close call: down to the wire, a frightening ordeal… especially the way those boys and girls in the newsrooms made our collective demise seem more than inevitable. I thought for sure they would throw us all under the bus. But, I am lucky to have a wise Uncle Sam watching my back… just as Erika Menendez was watching the back of that poor Hindu-American businessman before she pushed him to his death in front of an onrushing subway train in New York City last week. They say Sunando Sen was just chasing his American Dream. Little did he realize that another American dreamer, one a bit more disillusioned and delusional, was chasing him as well; and then she did throw him under the… subway car. Well, perhaps she took all this talk about the fiscal cliff literally and decided it was time to take matters into her own hands. She just didn’t want her fellow traveler to suffer through the final moments of collapse. Of course, my Uncle Sam would never do that to me; throw me under the bus, I mean.

OK, so now the media is telling us that Erika was a little berserk – well, who isn’t these days, seems to be in style “from sea to shining sea;” and she understandably mistook the dark-skinned Hindu immigrant for a dreaded Muslim terrorist, you know, one of those bad guys that Uncle Sam and his media friends have constantly reminded us to be wary of. And this woman reiterated that same sense of dread in her own words when questioned earlier this week; she wanted to get back at all those Muslims who got us on September 11th. She sounded no more irrational to me than GW Bush did to his fellow Americans over a decade ago. In fact this woman said she has been “beating them (Muslims) up” ever since that dreaded day. Well, what do you know, it is not unlike what Uncle Sam has been doing around the globe, especially in MENA, since that day as well. After all, she thought the darker-skinned man was a Muslim so it was justified in her mind, never mind that she was mistaken and that he became just some collateral damage in her private war on terror: a minor error in judgment resulting from her rather hasty miscalculation.

That’s the price of war, declared or not. And Uncle Sam knows all about collateral damage and the price of undeclared war; speaking of prices… here we are back to that fiscal cliff thingy again. Perhaps that’s what all the deaths are about the past few years in the good old USA, just a lot of collateral damage resulting from the disillusioned judgment of brainwashed and delusional citizens defending their misguided conception of rights and entitlements – home and homeland. The average American has had it drilled into her/his head that the enemy must be stopped at all costs. Sieg heil! That message has gone hand-in-glove with the general background noise of American exceptionalism, manifest destiny, might makes right, infinite expansion, continual progress, perfection, and an ontological apperception of guilt that haunts every John or Jane Doe who feels themselves under-appreciated, devalued, debased, abused, unsuccessful, virtualized, or otherwise marginalized by the dominant psychotic culture of competitive consumption.

I think the incidents in Connecticut and New York this holiday season aptly summarize the state of our nation and the spiraling lunacy characterizing our self-destructive descent. They seem to encapsulate the speed and trajectory of our decline, just as hurricane Sandy made it clear that our technologies and our systems will not survive the onslaught of a scorned mother nature. If the dominant culture is focused on extracting the last pound of flesh from each and every citizen-subject, as it clearly is on sucking the life out of Gaia, then one cannot expect all of the body politic to remain quietly in line waiting for their next beating. There are a certain percentage of folks already on the edge and struggling to make sense (or find a place) in a world where only the senseless (those without feeling) survive.

Don’t misread me. I am not trying to defend the heinous acts of Erika Menendez, James Holmes, Jacob Tyler Roberts, Adam Lanza, et. al. Nor, am I suggesting that their motives were by any means identical. What is apparently the case, I fear, is that our culture is leading more and more individuals over the edge: hyper-rationality breeds insanity. Hyper-individualism breeds contempt. Hyper-nationalism breeds fear and reprisal. Hyper-competitiveness breeds jealousy. But, on top of these diseases of the soul, our political system itself is a joke, with fattened hucksters living off their wealthy sponsors and power-brokered relations. The financial system is a sham, with other fattened hucksters sucking the life-blood out of us, its victims. The economic system is a con-game of indentured servitude within a labyrinth of serial and exponentially increasing consumption. At the macro-level, this society takes from all peoples and places globally, and returns little of real value.

Children, we know, learn from watching their elders. In a culture stuck at our infantile stage of psychological maturation, the weakest among us will unthinkingly follow the sad example of their leaders. And, as far as the most vulnerable members of our society, we will continue to allow them to play with powerful toys and without proper adult supervision. We encourage and applaud their delusions of greatness and their solipsistic ejaculations of self-adulation; then we watch in horror as they come to realize there is no exit, and that the only recourse is to strike-out or strike-back. And, the result is most often deadly. Just look at Erika, Adam, or yes, even Barry.

Once an entire culture loses its sense of connectedness to the earthly sensuous, its fundamental rootedness and intertwining with nature – where everything outside itself becomes simply another sign of Otherness to be manipulated, controlled or eliminated - there the arrogance of transcendental consciousness takes hold of the soul, transforming it into an otherworldly spirit on a divine mission… whether it is the mission of POTUS coolly selecting assassination targets overseas, Lloyd Blankfein dutifully “doing God’s work” at Goldman Sachs by rifling grandma’s retirement account, or Erika Menendez throwing a suspected ‘Muslim’ under the bus. Who among these has committed the more heinous crime?

Anyway, if you are buying the bullshit story of the Pres. and the press that the fiscal cliff deal was your saving grace, think again, and follow the money trail back to Wall Street –the same Wall Street that financed and orchestrated the snuffing out of the OWS movement. And if you further believe that we all are being just a bit too paranoid, then sit back and reflect on the involuntary release of documents from the Domestic Security Alliance Council. So, who is getting thrown under the bus now?

.....And here is part of the first comment to this missive:

Disaffected says:
January 4, 2013 at 6:47 am

Happy New Year Sandy! It’s 2013 now and the kid gloves are off all around. I think it’s safe to say that from here on out the corporate/government noose is only going to get tighter for us all – an entirely foreseeable and natural response to the end of the fossil fuel enabled industrial capitalist era that has kept us all warm and comfy for the past 200 years or so. The ride down the far side of Hubbert’s Peak promises to be every bit as interesting as the prognosticators have been forecasting – and to think, we’re just getting started! It’s safe to say now that the US government – a wholly owned subsidiary of Wall St Inc. now – is entirely committed to the idea of wringing every last drop from the current oil economy, looming epic environmental and economic catastrophes notwithstanding. And in the end, what other choice did they/we have past about 1970 or so? It’s looking increasingly like that was the inflection point for the current state of affairs; the last chance for the earth and humans in the face of what has turned out to be a monumentally stupid gamble on our part to embrace the allures of an energy source that made us seem like gods, but in the end only revealed our basic petty thieving natures all the more efficiently.

At this point, the only question to my mind is which catastrophe is going to get to feed on our carcasses first (and in actuality, it will likely be a combination of hammer blows from them all): will it be the financial sorting out (which is already in progress and could collapse precipitously at any time) and plain old fashioned starvation/deprivation, or will it be the resource wars (ditto) and quick annihilation, or will it be death due to “natural disaster,” as the planet repudiates with extreme prejudice all of our current stupidity? I would only add, the current conflagration does seem historically noteworthy in that all of these factors seem to have “peaked” simultaneously, which probably shouldn’t be surprising, as they all have the same root cause. An historically anomalous one time only gift of concentrated energy of almost unimaginable proportions that laid dormant for millions of years, just waiting for us to come along and unlock its potential for both good and evil in our decidedly unevolved hands......

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http://kunstler.com/blog/2012/12/forecast-2013-contraction-contagion-and-contradiction.html

Forecast 2013: Contraction, Contagion, and Contradiction

The people who like to think they are managing the world's affairs seem fiercely determined to ignore the world's true condition -- namely, the permanent contraction of industrial economies. They just can't grok it. Two hundred years of cheap fossil fuel programmed mankind to expect limitless goodies forever on an upward-swinging arc of techno miracles. Now that the cheap fossil fuels have plateaued, with decline clearly in view, the hope remains that all the rackets of modernity can keep going on techno miracles alone.

Meanwhile, things and events are in revolt, especially the human race's financial operating system, the world's weather, and the angry populations of floundering nations. The Grand Vizier of this blog, that is, Yours Truly, makes no great claims for his crystal ball gazing (Dow at 4,000 - ha!), but he subscribes to the dictums of two wise men from the realm of major league baseball: Satchel Paige, who famously stated, "Don't look back," and Yogi Berra, who remarked of a promising rookie, "His whole future's ahead of him!"

In that spirit, and as for looking back, suffice it to say that in 2012, the world's managers -- and by this I do not mean some occult cabal but the visible leaders in politics, banking, business, and news media -- pulled out all the stops to suppress the appearance of contraction, and in so doing only supplied more perversion and distortion to the train of events that leads implacably to an agonizing workout, or readjustment of reality's balance sheet. There's a fair chance that these restraints will unravel in 2013, exposing civilization to a harsh new leasing agreement with its landlord, the Planet Earth.

On a personal note, I published a book in 2012 titled Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation. By an interesting coincidence, folks in the USA were engaged that year in manifold strenuous exercises in wishful thinking, ranging from fantasies of "energy independence," to belief that central bank interventions could take the place of productive economic activity, to the idea that winks, suggestions, and guidelines were an adequate substitute for the rule of law, to the omnipresent mantra invoking "technology" as the sovereign remedy every problem of existence (including the problems caused by technology), to the dominions of utter stupidity where climate change deniers hold hands with the funders of "creation" museums. Since wishful thinkers, by definition, are allergic to arguments against wishfulness, my book failed to make an impression. Anyway, gales of propaganda were blowing across the land, especially from the oil and gas fraternity, with the added cognitive dissonance hoopla of a presidential election -- so the public was left wishfully bamboozled as it whirled around the drain of its hopes and dreams.

The Oil and Money Predicament

If you understand the basic formula that ever-increasing cheap energy resources were the fundamental condition for industrial growth for two centuries, then you must realize that they are also behind the modern operations of capital, especially the mechanism that allows massive volumes of interest on debt to be repaid -- hence behind all of contemporary banking. And if you get that, it is easy to see how the end of cheap energy has screwed the pooch for modern finance.

In fact, let's step back for a panoramic view of what happened with that relationship in recent times: In 1970 you get American peak oil production at just under 10 mmbd (million barrels a day). This chart tells the story:

That event was little noted at the time, but by 1973, the rest of the world was paying attention, especially the OPEC countries led by the big exporters in the Middle East. All they had to do was look at the published production figures and by 1973 the trend was apparent. They apprehended that US production had entered decline -- predicted by American geologist M. King Hubbert -- and that they, OPEC, could now put the screws to the USA. Which they commenced to do during a decade of rather messy oil crises (messy because they were accompanied by geopolitical events such as the Yom Kippur War and the 1979 revolution in Iran). OPEC could put the screws to the USA because our still-growing industrial economy required a still-growing oil supply -- the growth of which now had to be furnished by imports from other nations. The catch was that those other nations raised the price substantially, virtually overnight, and since everything in the US economy used oil in one way or another, the entire cost structure of our manufacture, supply, distribution, and retail chains was thrown askew.

The net effect for the USA was that our economy went off the rails for a decade and lots of strange things started happening in the financial sector. They called it "stagflation" -- stagnant economic activity + rising prices. It was hardly a conundrum. The OPEC price-jackings of 1973 and 1979 made everything Americans had to buy more costly, in effect devaluing the dollar while throwing sand in the gears of industrial production. Meanwhile, dazed and confused American industry started losing out to Japan and Europe in things like electronics and cars. Price inflation was running over 13 percent in the late '70s. Interest rates skyrocketed. When Federal Reserve chair Paul Volker aggressively squashed inflation with a punitive prime rate of 20 percent in 1981, the economy promptly tanked.

Notice that our oil consumption kept rising from the early 1980s until the middle of the early 2000s. Now look at the circle in the chart below. That rise of production from the late 1970s to about 1990 is mostly about production from the Prudhoe Bay oil fields in Alaska -- one of the last great discoveries of the oil age (along with the North Sea and the fields of Siberia). US production did not regain the 1970 peak level, but it put a smile on the so-called Reagan Revolution and on Margaret Thatcher's exertions to revive comatose Great Britain.

Now look at the price of oil (chart below). You can see what a fiasco the period 1973 to 1981 was for US oil prices: huge rapid price rises in '73 and '79. But then the price started to fall steeply after 1981 and stayed around the same price levels as its pre-1973 lows.

Notice the price started to fall after 1981 and landed close to its pre-1973 levels by 1986 and hung out there (though more erratically) until the mid-2000s. Because of those aforementioned last great giant oil field discoveries, OPEC lost its price leverage over world oil markets. Through the 1980s and 90s the price of oil went down until it reached the modern low of about $11 a barrel. That was when The Economist magazine ran a cover story that declared the world was "drowning in oil." It was the age of "Don't worry, be happy."

The price behavior of the oil markets after 1981 had interesting reverberations in both the macro economy and the financial sector (which is supposed to be part of the macro economy, not a replacement for it). A consensus formed in business and politics that it was okay to yield manufacturing to other nations. It was dirty and nasty and caused pollution, so let other countries have it. We followed the siren call of clean and tidy forms of production: "knowledge work!" The computer revolution had begun in earnest. The financial sector began its metastasis from 5 percent of the economy to, eventually, 40 percent, and really cheap oil prompted the last great suburban sprawl-building pulsation into the Martha Stewart bedecked McMansion exurbs. In effect, financial shenanigans and sprawl-building became the basis for the vaunted "Next Economy." It lasted about 20 years.

That incarnation of the US economy failed spectacularly as soon as oil prices started to creep up in the early 2000s. And, of course, the final suburban sprawl boom went hand-in-hand with all the shenanigans in banking. So when it all blew up, beginning in 2007 with the collapse of Bear Stearns, the USA was left with a gutted economy, insolvent banks, and a living arrangement with no future.

The Current Situation

We're now entering the seventh year of a smoke-and-mirrors, extend-and-pretend, can-kicking phase of history in which everything possible is being done to conceal the true condition of the economy, with the vain hope of somehow holding things together until a miracle rescue remedy -- some new kind of cheap or even free energy -- comes on the scene to save all our complex arrangements from implosion. The chief device to delay the reckoning has been accounting fraud in banking and government, essentially misreporting everything on all balance sheets and in statistical reports to give the appearance of well-being where there is actually grave illness, like the cosmetics and prosthetics Michael Jackson used in his final years to pretend he still had a face on the front of his head.

The secondary tactic has been intervention in markets wherever possible and the intemperate manipulation of interest rates, all of which has the effect of defeating the principle purpose of markets: price discovery -- the process by which the true value of things is established based on what people will freely pay. For instance the price of money-on-loan. The functionally less-than-zero percent interest rates on money loaned between giant institutions like central banks and their client "primary dealers" (the Too Big To Fails) essentially pays these outfits for borrowing, which is obviously a distortion in the natural order of things (because it violates the second law of thermodynamics: entropy) as well as an arrant racket. The campaign of intervention and manipulation also deeply impairs the other purpose of markets, capital formation, by the resultant mismanagement and misallocation of whatever real surplus wealth remains in this society. What's more, it allows these TBTF banks to become ever-bigger monsters which hold everybody else hostage by threatening to crash the system if they are molested or interfered with.

Which brings us to the third tactic for pretending everything is all right: complete lack of enforcement and regulation by all the authorities charged with making sure that rules are followed in money matters. This includes the alphabet soup of agencies from the Securities and Exchange Commission to the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, to the Federal Housing Authority, and so on (the list of responsible parties is very long) not to mention the Big Kahunas: the US Department of Justice, and the federal and state courts. Aside from Bernie Madoff and a few Hedge Fund mavericks nipped for insider trading and arrant fraud, absolutely nobody in the TBTF banking community has been prosecuted or even charged for the monumental swindles of our time, while the regulators have behaved in ways that would be considered criminally negligent at best, and sheer racketeering at less-than-best, in any self-respecting polity. The crime runs so deep and thick through all the levels of money management and regulation that one can say the whole system has gone rogue, up to the President of the US himself, the chief enforcement officer of the land, who has not lifted a finger to discipline any of the parties involved. The fact that Jon Corzine, late of MF Global, is still at large says it all.

Fourth-and-finally, the news media in league with the public relations industry have undertaken a campaign of happy talk to persuade the public that everything is okay and all the machinations cited above are kosher so that there is absolutely no political agitation over these crimes against their own interest, which is to say, the public interest. The PR/media happy talk racket is also aimed at maintaining various subsidiary fictions about the economy, such as the fibs that the housing market is bouncing back, that "recovery" is ongoing, and that the channel-stuffing monkeyshines of the car industry amount to booming sales of new vehicles. Perhaps the most pernicious big lie is the bundle of fairy tales surrounding shale oil and shale gas, including the idea that America will shortly become "energy independent" or that we have "a hundred years of shale gas" as President Obama was mis-advised to tell the nation. It is pernicious because it gives us collectively an excuse to do nothing about changing our behavior or preparing for the new arrangements in daily life that the future will require of us.

The Shale Ponzi

Well, because that's what it is: a Ponzi scheme, aimed at gathering in sucker-investors to boost share prices of oil and gas companies, with the hope that some miracle will occur to make financially broke societies capable of paying three or four times the price for oil and gas than their infrastructure for daily life was set up to run on, back when it seemed to be running okay. This is just not going to happen.

Let's start with shale gas. The gas is there in the "tight" rock strata, all right, but it is difficult and expensive to get out. The process is nothing like the old conventional process of sticking a pipe in the ground and getting "flow." It's not necessary to go into the techno-details (you can read about that elsewhere) but to give you a rough idea, it takes four times as much steel pipe to get shale gas out of the ground. I have previously touched on the impairment of capital formation due to machinations in banking - themselves a perverse response to the loss of capacity to pay back interest at all levels of the money system, which was caused by the world's running out of cheap oil and gas. (Note emphasis on cheap.) The net effect of all that turns out to be scarcity in another resource: capital, i.e. money, rather specifically money for investment in things like shale oil and gas.

Ironically, plenty of money was available around 2004-5 when the campaign to go after shale oil and gas got ramped up over premonitions of global peak oil. How come there was money then and not now? Because we were at peak cheap oil and hence peak credit back then, which is to say peak available real capital. So, the oil and gas companies were able then to attract lots of investment money to set out on this campaign. They brought as many drilling rigs as they could into the shale oil and gas play regions and they drilled the shit out of them. Natural gas was selling for over $13 a unit (thousand cubic feet) around 2005, and it was that high precisely because conventional cheap nat gas production was in substantial decline.

That was then, this is now. As a result of drilling the shit out of the gas plays, the producers created a huge glut for a brief time. They queered their own market long enough to wreck their business model. Unlike oil, nat gas is much more difficult to export -- it requires expensive tankers, compression and refrigeration of the gas to a liquid, seaboard terminals to accomplish all that (which we don't have), so there was no way to fob off the surplus gas on other nations. The domestic market was overwhelmed and there was no more room to store the stuff. So, for a few years the price sank and sank until it was under $2 a unit by 2011. Since shale gas production is just flat-out uneconomical at that price, the companies engaged in it began to suffer hugely.

In the process of all this a pattern emerged showing that shale gas wells typically went into depletion very quickly after year one. So all of the activity from 2004 to 2011 was a production bubble, aimed at proving what a bonanza shale gas was to stimulate more investment. It required a massive rate of continuous drilling and re-drilling just to keep the production rate level -- to maintain the illusion of a 100-year bonanza -- and that required enormous quantities of capital. So the shale gas play began to look like a hamster wheel of futility. After 2011 the rig count began to drop and of course production leveled off and the price began to go up again. As I write the price is $3.31 a unit, which is still way below the level where natural gas is profitable for companies to produce --say, above $8. The trouble is, once the price rises into that range it becomes too expensive for many of its customers, especially in a contracting economy with a shrinking middle class, falling incomes, and failing businesses. So what makes it economical for the producers (high price) will make it unaffordable for the customers (no money). Because of the complex nature of these operations, with all the infrastructure required, and all the money needed to provide it, the shale gas industry will not be able to go through more than a couple of boom / bust cycles before it begins to look like a fool's game and the big companies throw in the towel. The catch is: there are no small companies that can carry on operations as complex and expensive as shale requires. Only big companies can make shale gas happen. So a lot of gas will remain trapped in the "tight" rock very far into the future.

Obviously I haven't even mentioned the "fracking" process, which is hugely controversial in regard to groundwater pollution, and a subject which I will not elaborate on here, except to say that there's a lot to be concerned about. However, I believe that the shale gas campaign will prove to be a big disappointment to its promoters and will founder on its own defective economics rather than on the protests of environmentalists.

Much of what I wrote about shale gas is true for shale oil with some departures. One is that the price of oil did not go down when US shale oil production rose. That's because the amount of shale oil produced -- now about 900,000 barrels a day -- is working against the headwinds of domestic depletion in regular oil + world consumption shifting to China and the rest of Asia + the declining ability of the world's exporters to keep up their levels of export oil available to the importers (us). We still import 42 percent of the oil we use every day.

The fundamental set up of life in the USA -- suburban sprawl with mandatory driving for everything -- hasn't changed during the peak cheap oil transition and represents too much "previous investment" for the public to walk away from. So we're stuck with it until it manifestly fails. (Life is tragic and history doesn't excuse our poor choices.) The price of oil has stayed around the $90 a barrel range much of 2012. Oil companies can make a profit in shale oil at that price. However, that's the price at which the US economy wobbles and tanks, which is exactly what is happening. The US cannot run economically on $90 oil. If the price were to go down to a level the economy might be able to handle, say $40 a barrel, the producers of shale oil would go broke getting it out of the ground. This brings us back to the fact that the issue is cheap oil, not just available oil. As the US economy stumbles, and the banking system implodes on the incapacity of debt repayment, there will be less and less capital available for investment in shale oil. As with shale gas, the shale oil wells deplete very rapidly, too, and production requires constant re-drilling, meaning more rigs, more employees, more trucks hauling fracking fluid, and more capital investment. This is referred to as "the Red Queen syndrome," from Lewis Carrol's Through the Looking Glass tale in which the Red Queen tells Alice that she has to run as fast as she can to stay where she is.

The bottom line for shale oil is that we're likely to see production fall in the years directly ahead, to the shock and dismay of the 'energy independence' for lunch bunch. 2012 may have been peak shale oil. If the price of oil does go down to a level that seems affordable, it will be because the US economy has been crushed and America is mired in a depression at least as bad as the 1930s, in which case a lot of people will be too broke to even pay for cheaper oil. Hence, the only possibility that America will become energy independent would be a total collapse of the modern technological-industrial economy. The shale oil and gas campaign therefore must be regarded as a desperate gambit by a society in deep trouble engaging in wishing and fantasy to preserve a set of behaviors that can no longer be justified by the circumstances reality presents.

Macro-economic Issues

Major fissures began to show in the Ponzified global financial system in 2012 and it is hard to imagine them not yawning open dangerously in 2013. All the Eurozone countries are in trouble. Its collective economy has been tanking faster than the US economy because the member nations can't print their own money and it is harder to conceal the financial tensions between debt accumulation and government expenditures. These tensions end up expressed as "austerity" -- meaning fewer and fewer people get paid, which makes people angry and makes governments unstable. Bailout procedures are transparently laughable under the European Central Bank and the other bank-like "facilities," giving money to governments so that they can give it to insolvent banks, so the banks can buy government bonds, which only stuff the banks with more bad paper, and take the national debts higher. Several Euro member countries are contenders for default this coming year: Greece, Spain, possibly Italy, and perhaps even France, which is now a basket-case dressed in Hollandaise sauce.

A perfect storm in the global bond market has formed with Europe crippled, Canada and Australia entering their own (long-delayed and spectacular) housing bubble busts, the USA sharply losing credibility as it fails to politically address its balance sheet problems -- or even continue to pretend that it might -- and Japan utterly floundering under a new lack of commitment to nuclear power, the need to import virtually all the fossil fuels it needs for its industrial economy, a consequent negative balance of trade (for the first time in decades), and a deadly debt-to-GDP ratio around 240 percent. Many observers see the new Japanese government under Shinzo Abe as determined to inflate his own currency away to nothing in an effort to unload exports and erase debt, and nobody understands how that strategy turns out well. My own view, expressed here before, is that Japan is on a fast track to become the first advanced nation to opt out of industrialism and go medieval. It might sound like a joke, but its not. And it would be consistent with Japan's historic cultural personality of making stark choices, even if it was not clearly articulated in the political theater. The journey to that destination could include a war with China, which also would be consistent with Japan's suicidal inclinations, so clearly displayed in its last major war with the US.

The global bond market is held together with baling wire and hose clamps. Since money is loaned into existence (in the words of Chris Martenson) the global financial system is underwritten by its bonds, and the bonds are underwritten only by the faith that issuers can pay the interest due to bondholders. Risk rises in an exact ratio as that faith wanes. And interest rates must rise hand-in-hand with that rising risk -- unless the ruling authorities (central banks and governments) conspire to repress them. These "unnatural" interventions will only cause the trouble to be expressed elsewhere in collapsing currencies and economies. It is already happening under the various ZIRP regimes, setting up a feedback loop in which it becomes even less likely that bond-holders will be paid and more faith erodes until nobody wants any bonds and the market for them seizes up and all that paper becomes worthless.

These days, the only sovereign nation in the Eurozone with real financial credibility (i.e. tangible surplus wealth) is Germany. The European Central Bank has only a printing press and the European Financial Stability Facility only pretends to have access to pretend money. At some point, the Germans will have to decide whether they truly want to pick up the tab for all the unpaid bills of the Eurozone. Either they pay for life support for their customers or they let them go under and either way, they end up in the black hole of a contracting export economy, which is to say depression. Now, imagine Germany having to bail out France. Wouldn't that be a moment of plangent historical symmetry? I'm not the only one to propose that Germany may shock the world in 2013 by pulling out of the Euro on short notice and taking shelter behind the Deutschmark. It may limit the damage, but otherwise they are stuck where they are geographically and as the other nations in Europe ride their economies down, Germany's will contract, too.

One idea behind the Eurozone was to get its members so economically interdependent that war would be an unthinkable option. The period following the Napoleonic Wars (1815 - 1914) was exceptionally peaceful in Europe, too. Then, the 20th century rolled onstage with the unspeakable horror of two consecutive "world wars." They occurred amid a phenomenal uptrend of increasing industrial wealth and burgeoning technology. Note that the defeat of the French army at Waterloo in 1815 was accomplished by a coalition of British and German (Prussian) forces. (The teams change through history.) Note also that the end of the long peace of the 19th century, the First World War, was a trauma the real cause of which continues to mystify the historians -- did England, France, Germany care that much about Serbia to destroy their economies? The Second World War was an extension of the unresolved business of the first, especially the question of who owed what to whom for all the damage. One thing we do know: the world was not prepared for the consequences of industrial-strength warfare with high tech weapons: the massacres of the trenches, aerial bombing of cities full of civilians, and the assembly-line style crematorium.

The atom bomb finally sobered folks up in 1945. The ensuing period has been another age of peace and plenty in Europe. The next act there will be played out against the backdrop of declining wealth and unraveling techno-industrial complexity. It may be a set of low-grade grinding struggles rather than an operatic debacle like the two world wars, and it will surely include internal civil strife in this-or-that country, which could turn outward and become contagious. The next time Europe finds itself a smoldering ruin, the capital will not be there to rebuild it. I'm not sure whether it matters all that much whether the single currency Euro survives or not. Everything economic is hitting the skids in Europe now led by plunging car sales. Record high youth unemployment is epidemic, including now in France. The debt problems there can only be solved by deleveraging and/or default. The chance of coordinated cooperative fiscal discipline among the Euro member nations is nil. I see Europe poised to follow Japan into a re-run of the medieval period, though much less willingly. The quandary is: how do you have a wonderful and peaceful modern culture without an economy to support it.

The United Kingdom stands outside the Euro currency club (though it is in the European Union of trade agreements) but London remains the financial hub of the continent, if not the money-laundering center of the universe. The financial mischief there is allowed to go on because washing and rinsing money is the only major industry left in Old Blighty. Its own finances are in terrible disarray, the people have been subject to painful "austerity" for some time before the PIIGS started squealing, and its energy resources are dwindling away to nothing. The governing coalition of David Cameron's Tories and the Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrats is cracking up under the austerity strain, with Nigel Farage's Independence Party creeping up in the polls. With the LIBOR scandal entering the adjudication phase, monkey business in the London gold and silver bullion market, and half the world's daily churn of interest rate derivatives, "the City" (London's Wall Street) is one black swan away from provoking a world-scale financial accident that could daisy-chain through all the world's big banks and create a "nuclear winter" of capital. It's too bad the UK didn't keep making chocolate bars and those wonderful tin soldiers I played with as a child. Instead, the nation became a casino with a lot of excellent Asian restaurants. It is nicely positioned to be the whipping boy for the rest of Europe as everybody's fortunes turn down, but it has enough military hardware to strike back and cause a whole lot more trouble. Imagine England becoming the Bad Boy of Europe in the 21st century, having to be disciplined now by the Germans!

Russia is a few wealthy cities in an enormous flat alternative universe of ice and fir trees. Perhaps global warming will perk up the long-suffering Russian people. Meanwhile, 50 percent of Russia's economy is tied to its oil and gas production. Their great Siberian fields are petering out just like the Alaskan and North Sea giants that were discovered around the same time. They have been throwing huge numbers of drilling rigs into depleting fields to keep production up and pursuing some "tight" rock plays with help from the USA's Halliburton and Schlumberger, with few environmental protests in the wilds of Siberia, and. I'm not persuaded that exploration for oil in the offshore Arctic region will have a great outcome. Where does the capital investment come from if every other advanced industrial economy is broke? Even if the sea ice melts it will be difficult and expensive to work in the Arctic seas, and the thawing permafrost of Siberia will leave an endless soggy patch of mosquito-infested mush between the offshore rigs and customers in Europe and elsewhere. Anyway, those customers will be increasingly impoverished and hard-pressed to pay for ever more pricey oil. The Russians may be hopeful that climate change will boost their crop yields and make their portion of the earth comparatively more habitable -- but it's more likely that thawing permafrost will prang the entire human experiment.

There are fewer cheerleaders for China and its economic fortunes than a year or so ago, as deep problems in banking and politics reveal themselves, along with the troubles plainly visible in their slumping export markets. If people in the USA and Europe don't buy all the flat screen TVs and plastic stuff then China is going to choke on industrial overcapacity. (It already is.) They have accomplished some marvelous things recently, especially compared to the cretinous lethargy of the USA -- for instance, building a great continental high speed railroad line and a huge solar energy industry -- but they face the same fundamental quandary as all the other industrial nations: declining fossil fuel resources with no comparable replacement on the horizon. Their positioning for the coming great contraction vis-à-vis the aforementioned advantages in solar and rail transport must be offset by an opaque, corrupt, and despotic political regime, a huge and potentially restive population of laid-off urban factory workers, and a chaotic banking system. They have laid in a lot of "reserves" in the way of US treasury paper and stockpiled much valuable construction material (steel, copper, cement, etc), but what does that really mean? If they dumped the treasuries, or even systematically divested, they could trash the bond market and the dollar. And what might they do with all the construction material in an economy with sinking demand for new buildings? Will they need more super-highways as the price of gasoline makes car ownership less affordable?

China appears to be accumulating big supplies of gold bullion -- they have also become the world's number one producer of mined gold, eclipsing played-out South Africa. That could give them a lot more room to maneuver in a world of vanishing resources and collapsing economies, at least in terms of being able to swap for food and fuel. They may be attempting to establish a gold-backed currency to replace the dollar for international trade settlements. Doings at the ASEAN Summit in November suggests they are engineering just such a new reserve currency for the world to run shrieking to when America's foolishness and cowboy swagger becomes too much to take -- though US dollar dominance was based as much on America's (now bygone) rule of law in money matters as America's sheer economic power, and China remains Dodge City where the rule of law is concerned. The world might not be so eager to be pushed around by the Yuan. But it may be accomplished by financial coup d'état whether the world likes it or not. My forecast for China in 2013 is a widening crack in the political façade of the formerly omnipotent ruling party, organized agitation by unemployed factory workers (with government blowback), bullying of their senile neighbor (and historical enemy) Japan, and sullen, peevish behavior toward their ailing trade partners, Europe and especially the USA. Worldwide economic entropy cancels out China's putative advantages in cash reserves, stockpiles of "stuff," and government that can do what it pleases without a loyal opposition tossing sand in its gears.

Contrary to the wishful thinking of Tom Friedman, globalism is winding down. The g
reat contraction leads back to a regional and local reorganization of activity in all nations. The world becomes a bigger place again with more space between the players and a larger array of players as big nations break up into autonomous states. This is really a new phase of history, though it is only just beginning in 2013.

Outlying Territories

Literally anything can happen in the Middle East, up to the initiation of an event that resembles a world war. As a general proposition, there are just too many people inhabiting this region of the world and the political tensions among them reached critical mass in 2013. The meltdown will continue with enough critical frailty to prang the region's oil exporting capacity, it's main source of wealth and power. It just wouldn't take much. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is pushing 90. His subjects are getting more numerous, collectively poorer, and more anxious about their future. The country is surrounded by failing regimes. I forecast overthrow of the Saud family's long grip on power this year, with a struggle among other entitled families there and finally an Islamic revolution adding spice to the political upheaval.

I doubt that Israel will try to attack Iran's nuclear factories without overt consent from the US government, which will be withheld from Israel, on account of the difficulties ongoing in the US economy.

Overall I expect gross deterioration of civil order, living standards, and oil export markets in the Middle East. The US will be foolish to intervene.

South America gets a little poorer, Argentina defaults again, but this continent remains a sleeping backwater in the world -- perhaps proof that the hedge funders fleeing to sanctuaries in backwaters like Uruguay may have made a great call.

Mexico is the exception. Whatever economic and political sickness the US suffers will infect our neighbor to the south. Too many people there competing for not enough stuff. There will be blood (as the old movie title goes).

Turning 9,000 miles to the east, can Pakistan become a worse basket-case of a nation. I suppose they could, if taken over by their homegrown Islamic maniacs. India next door will be rocked by the great global economic contraction. The two countries, well armed with atomic bombs are a bad combo. Unfortunately, a distracted world cannot pay much attention.

Woe to Markets

Between government and central bank interventions, accounting fraud, control fraud, the computer hugger-mugger of algorithmic trading, and AWOL rule of law, the financial markets have practically destroyed themselves. They can't be depended on to express the real value of things and capital formation struggles against the headwinds of peak cheap energy on top of massive fraud and swindling. The markets can only blow up. When the wreckage clears and new, smaller markets form, as they will, they must operate differently, with new rules and restraints, because the blow up of today's markets will be such a trauma that nobody will venture to engage with them if they don't. A world without simplified and honest capital, commodity, and equity markets would beat a quick path back to a dark age, and in the process a lot of people will die of cold and starvation.

The full workout of all that may be some years further out, but the blowout will commence in 2013. The glue that held these markets together was faith that they meant something -- and that faith has been pissed away by fools in high places who drained all the honesty out of them. It was a classic case out of the Joseph Tainter playbook: diminishing returns of ever-increasing complexity addressed with ever-more layers of complexity, larded with systematic lying based on mystifying, opaque jargon, sanctioned statistical misreporting, felonious cronyism, and scuttling of the rule of law. In short, the markets have been taken over in effect by a criminal racketeering syndicate. In doing this, so much resilience has been removed from these market structures that they are riddled with rot, like a mansion infested with carpenter ants. In other words, borrowing a term from Taleb, they are hopelessly fragile. Any little vibration could reduce the whole creaking arrangement into a heap of rubble and ashes. There's plenty of vibration available out there. Events are humming.

The debt mountains in the USA and elsewhere far overshadow the equity and commodity market molehills, and unpaid debt will eventually overcome all the forces of untruth. Debt is a subsidiary of the force known as reality. Its will cannot be denied, even by Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, the US Treasury, and the Federal Open Markets Committee. And the unwinding of unpaid debt, honestly acknowledged or not, will thunder through the system sucking wealth out of advanced societies so efficiently that it will make the Seven Plagues of the Bible look like a flat tire on a sunny day.

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http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/

The Beginning of the World

Last Friday was, as I’m sure most of my readers noticed, an ordinary day. Here in the north central Appalachians, it was chilly but not unseasonably so, with high gray clouds overhead and a lively wind setting the dead leaves aswirl; wrens and sparrows hopped here and there in my garden, poking among the recently turned soil of the beds. No cataclysmic earth changes, alien landings, returning messiahs, or vast leaps of consciousness disturbed their foraging. They neither knew nor cared that one of the great apocalyptic delusions of modern times was reaching its inevitable end around them.

The inimitable Dr. Rita Louise, on whose radio talk show I spent a couple of hours on Friday, may have summed it up best when she wished her listeners a happy Mayan Fools Day. Not that the ancient Mayans themselves were fools, far from it, but then they had precisely nothing to do with the competing fantasies of doom and universal enlightenment that spent the last decade and more buzzing like flies around last Friday’s date.

It’s worth taking a look back over the genesis of the 2012 hysteria, if only because we’re certain to see plenty of reruns in the years ahead. In the first half of the 20th century, as archeologists learned to read dates in the Mayan Long Count calendar, it became clear that one of the major cycles of the old Mayan timekeeping system would roll over on that day. By the 1970s, that detail found its way into alternative culture in the United States, setting off the first tentative speculations about a 2012 apocalypse, notably drug guru Terence McKenna’s quirky "Timewave Zero" theory.

It was the late New Age promoter Jose Arguelles, though, who launched the 2012 fad on its way with his 1984 book The Mayan Factor and a series of sequels, proclaiming that the rollover of the Mayan calendar in 2012 marked the imminent transformation of human consciousness that the New Age movement was predicting so enthusiastically back then. The exactness of the date made an intriguing contrast with the vagueness of Arguelles’ predictions about it, and this contrast left ample room for other authors in the same field to jump on the bandwagon and redefine the prophecy to fit whatever their own eschatological preferences happened to be. This they promptly did.

Early on, 2012 faced plenty of competition from alternative dates for the great transformation. The year 2000 had been a great favorite for a century, and became 2012’s most important rival, but it came and went without bringing anything more interesting than another round of sordid business as usual. Thereafter, 2012 reigned supreme, and became the center of a frenzy of anticipation that was at least as much about marketing as anything else. I can testify from my own experience that for a while there, late in the last decade, if you wanted to write a book about anything even vaguely tangential to New Age subjects and couldn’t give it a 2012 spin, many publishers simply weren’t interested.

So the predictions piled up. The fact that no two of them predicted the same thing did nothing to weaken the mass appeal of the date. Neither did the fact, which became increasingly clear as the last months of 2012 approached, that a great many people who talked endlessly about the wonderful or terrible things that were about to happen weren’t acting as though they believed a word of it. That was by and large as true of the New Age writers and pundits who fed the hysteria as it was of their readers and audiences; I long ago lost track of the number of 2012 prophets who, aside from scheduling a holiday trip to the Yucatan or some other fashionable spot for the big day, acted in all respects as though they expected the world to keep going in its current manner straight into 2013 and beyond.

That came as a surprise to me. Regular readers may recall my earlier speculation that 2012 would see scenes reminiscent of the "Great Disappointment" of 1844, with crowds of true believers standing on hilltops waiting for their first glimpse of alien spacecraft descending from heaven or what have you. Instead, in the last months of this year, some of the writers and pundits most deeply involved in the 2012 hysteria started claiming that, well, actually, December 21st wasn’t going to be the day everything changed; it would, ahem, usher in a period of transition of undefined length during which everything would sooner or later get around to changing. The closer last Friday came, the more evasive the predictions became, and Mayan Fools Day and its aftermath were notable for the near-total silence that spread across the apocalyptic end of the blogosphere. Say what you will about Harold Camping, at least he had the courage to go on the air after his May prophecy flopped and admit that he must have gotten his math wrong somewhere.

Now of course Camping went on at once to propose a new date for the Rapture, which flopped with equal inevitability a few months later. It’s a foregone conclusion that some of the 2012 prophets will do the same thing shortly, if only to kick the apocalypse marketing machine back into gear. It’s entirely possible that they’ll succeed in setting off a new frenzy for some other date, because the social forces that make apocalyptic fantasies so tempting to believe just now have not lost any of their potency.

The most important of those forces, as I’ve argued in previous posts, is the widening mismatch between the fantasy of entitlement that has metastasized through contemporary American society, on the one hand, and the ending of an age of fossil-fueled imperial extravagance on the other. As the United States goes bankrupt trying to maintain its global empire, and industrial civilization as a whole slides down the far side of a dizzying range of depletion curves, it’s becoming harder by the day for Americans to make believe that the old saws of upward mobility and an ever brighter future have any relevance to their own lives—and yet those beliefs are central to the psychology, the self-image, and the worldview of most Americans. The resulting cognitive dissonance is hard to bear, and apocalyptic fantasies offer a convenient way out. They promise that the world will change, so that the believers don’t have to.

That same frantic desire to ignore the arrival of inescapable change pervades today’s cultural scene, even in those subcultures that insist most loudly that change is what they want. In recent months, to cite only one example, nearly every person who’s mentioned to me the claim that climate change could make the Earth uninhabitable has gone on to ask, often in so many words, "So why should I consume less now?" The overt logic here is usually that individual action can’t possibly be enough. Whether or not that’s true is anyone’s guess, but cutting your own carbon footprint actually does something, which is more than can be said for sitting around enjoying a standard industrial world lifestyle while waiting for that imaginary Kum Ba Ya moment when everyone else in the world will embrace limits not even the most ardent climate change activists are willing to accept themselves.

Another example? Consider the rhetoric of elite privilege that clusters around the otherwise inoffensive label "1%." That rhetoric plays plenty of roles in today’s society, but one of them pops up reliably any time I talk about using less. Why, people ask me in angry tones, should they give up their cars when the absurdly rich are enjoying gigantic luxury yachts? Now of course we could have a conversation about the total contribution to global warming of cars owned by people who aren’t rich, compared to that of the fairly small number of top-end luxury yachts that usually figure in such arguments, but there’s another point that needs to be raised. None of the people who make this argument to me have any control over whether rich people have luxury yachts. All of them have a great deal of control over whether and how often they themselves use cars. Blaming the global ecological crisis on the very rich thus functions, in practice, as one more way to evade the necessity of unwelcome change.

Along these same lines, dear reader, as you surf the peak oil and climate change blogosphere and read the various opinions on display there, I’d encourage you to ask yourself what those opinions amount to in actual practice. A remarkably large fraction of them, straight across the political landscape from furthest left to furthest right and including all stops in between, add up to demands that somebody else, somewhere else, do something. Since the people making such demands rarely do anything to pressure, or even to encourage, those other people elsewhere to do whatever it is they’re supposed to do, it’s not exactly hard to do the math and recognize that here again, these opinions amount to so many ways of insisting that the people holding them don’t have to give up the extravagant and unsustainable lifestyles most people in the industrial world think of as normal and justifiable.

There’s another way to make the same point, which is that most of what you’ll see being proposed in the peak oil and climate change blogosphere has been proposed over and over and over again already, without the least impact on our predicament. From the protest marches and the petitions, through the latest round of grand plans for energy futures destined to sit on the shelves cheek by jowl with the last round, right up to this week’s flurry of buoyantly optimistic blog posts lauding any technofix you care to name from cold fusion and algal biodiesel to shale gas and drill-baby-drill: been there, done that, used the T-shirt to wipe another dozen endangered species off the face of the planet, and we’re still stuck in the same place. The one thing next to nobody wants to talk about is the one thing that distinguished the largely successful environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s from the largely futile environmental movement since that time, which is that activists in the earlier movement were willing to start the ball rolling by making the necessary changes in their own lives first.

The difficulty, of course, is that making these changes is precisely what many of today’s green activists are desperately trying to avoid. That’s understandable, since transitioning to a lifestyle that’s actually sustainable involves giving up many of the comforts, perks, and privileges central to the psychology and identity of people in modern industrial societies. In today’s world of accelerating downward mobility, especially, the thought of taking any action that might result in being mistaken for the poor is something most Americans in particular can’t bear to contemplate—even when those same Americans recognize on some level that sooner or later, like it or not, they’re going to end up poor anyway.

Those of my readers who would like to see this last bit of irony focused to incandescence need only get some comfortably middle class eco-liberal to start waxing lyrical about life in the sustainable world of the future, when we’ll all have to get by on a small fraction of our current resource base. This is rarely difficult; I field such comments quite often, sketching out a rose-colored contrast between today’s comfortable but unsatisfying lifestyles and the more meaningful and fulfilling existence that will be ours in a future of honest hard work in harmony with nature. Wait until your target is in full spate, and then point out that he could embrace that more meaningful and fulfilling lifestyle right now by the simple expedient of discarding the comforts and privileges that stand in the way. You’ll get to watch backpedaling on a heroic scale, accompanied by a flurry of excuses meant to justify your target’s continued dependence on the very comforts and privileges he was belittling a few moments before.

What makes the irony perfect is that, by and large, the people whom you’ll hear criticizing the modern lifestyles they themselves aren’t willing to renounce aren’t just mouthing verbal noises. They realize, many of them, that the lifestyles that industrial societies provide even to their more privileged inmates are barren of meaning and value, that the pursuit and consumption of an endless series of increasingly shoddy manufactured products is a very poor substitute for a life well lived, and that stepping outside the narrowing walls of a world defined by the perks of the consumer economy is the first step toward a more meaningful existence. They know this; what they lack, by and large, is the courage to act on that knowledge, and so they wander the beach like J. Alfred Prufrock in Eliot’s poem, letting the very last inch or so of the waves splash over their feet—the bottoms of their trousers rolled up carefully, to be sure, to keep them from getting wet—when they know that a running leap into the green and foaming water is the one thing that can save them. Thus it’s not surprising that their daydreams cluster around imaginary tidal waves that will come rolling in from the deep ocean to sweep them away and make the whole question moot.

This is why it’s as certain as anything can be that within a year or so at most, a good many of the people who spent the last decade or so talking endlessly about last Friday will have some other date lined up for the end of the world, and will talk about it just as incessantly. It’s that or face up to the fact that the only way to live up to the ideals they think they espouse is to walk straight toward the thing they most fear, which is the loss of the perks and privileges and comforts that define their identity—an identity many of them hate, but still can’t imagine doing without.

Meanwhile, of course, the economy, the infrastructure, and the resource flows that make those perks and privileges and comforts possible are coming apart around them. There’s a great deal of wry amusement to be gained from watching one imaginary cataclysm after another seize the imagination of the peak oil scene or society as a whole, while the thing people think they’re talking about—the collapse of industrial civilization—has been unfolding all around them for several years now, in exactly the way that real collapses of real civilizations happen in the real world.

Look around you, dear reader, as the economy stumbles through another round of contraction papered over with increasingly desperate fiscal gimmicks, the political system of your country moves ever deeper into dysfunction, jobs and livelihoods go away forever, whatever social safety net you’re used to having comes apart, towns and neighborhoods devastated by natural disasters are abandoned rather than being rebuilt, and the basic services that once defined a modern society stop being available to a larger and larger fraction of the people of the industrial world. This is what collapse looks like. This is what people in the crumbling Roman Empire and all those other extinct civilizations saw when they looked out the window. To those in the middle of the process, as I’ve discussed in previous posts, it seems slow, but future generations with the benefit of hindsight will shake their heads in wonder at how fast industrial civilization went to pieces.

I commented in a post at the start of this year that the then-current round of fast-collapse predictions—the same predictions, mind you, that had been retailed at the start of the year before, the year before that, and so on—were not only wrong, as of course they turned out to be, but missed the collapse that was already under way. The same point holds good for the identical predictions that will no doubt be retailed over the next few weeks, insisting that this is the year when the stock market will plunge to zero, the dollar and/or the Euro will lose all their value, the economy will seize up completely and leave the grocery shelves bare, and so on endlessly; or, for that matter, that this is the year when cold fusion or algal biodiesel or some other vaporware technology will save us, or the climate change Kum Ba Ya moment I mentioned earlier will get around to happening, or what have you.

It’s as safe as a bet can be that none of these things will happen in 2013, either. Here again, though, the prophecies in question are not so much wrong as irrelevant. If you’re on a sinking ocean liner and the water’s rising fast belowdecks, it’s not exactly useful to get into heated debates with your fellow passengers about whether the ship is most likely to be vaporized by aliens or eaten by Godzilla. In the same way, it’s a bit late to speculate about how industrial civilization will collapse, or how to prevent it from collapsing, when the collapse is already well under way. What matters at that stage in the game is getting some sense of how the process will unfold, not in some abstract sense but in the uncomfortably specific sense of where you are, with what you have, in the days and weeks and months and years immediately ahead of you; that, and then deciding what you are going to do about it.

With that in mind, dear reader, I’d like to ask you to do something right now, before going on to the paragraph after this one. If you’re in the temperate or subarctic regions of the northern hemisphere, and you’re someplace where you can adjust the temperature, get up and go turn the thermostat down three degrees; if that makes the place too chilly for your tastes, take another moment or two to put on a sweater. If you’re in a different place or a different situation, do something else simple to decrease the amount of energy you’re using at this moment. Go ahead, do it now; I’ll wait for you here.

Have you done it? If so, you’ve just accomplished something that all the apocalyptic fantasies, internet debates, and protest marches of the last two decades haven’t: you’ve decreased, by however little, the amount of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere. That sweater, or rather the act of putting it on instead of turning up the heat, has also made you just a little less dependent on fossil fuels. In both cases, to be sure, the change you’ve made is very small, but a small change is better than no change at all—and a small change that can be repeated, expanded, and turned into a stepping stone on the way to bigger changes, is infinitely better than any amount of grand plans and words and handwaving that never quite manage to accomplish anything in the real world.

Turning down your thermostat, it’s been said repeatedly, isn’t going to save the world. That’s quite true, though it’s equally true that the actions that have been pursued by climate change and peak oil activists to date don’t look particularly likely to save the world, either, and let’s not even talk about what wasn’t accomplished by all the wasted breath over last Friday’s nonevent. That being the case, taking even the smallest practical steps in your own life and then proceeding from there will take you a good deal further than waiting for the mass movements that never happen, the new technologies that never pan out, or for that matter the next deus ex machina some canny marketer happens to pin onto another arbitrary date in the future, as a launching pad for the next round of apocalyptic hysteria.

Meanwhile, a world is ending. The promoters of the 2012 industry got that right, though they missed just about everything else; the process has been under way for some years now, and it won’t reach its conclusion in our lifetimes, but what we may as well call the modern world is coming to an end around us. The ancient Mayans knew, however, that the end of one world is always the beginning of another, and it’s an interesting detail of all the old Mesoamerican cosmological myths that the replacement for the old world doesn’t just pop into being. Somebody has to take action to make the world begin....

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http://carolynbaker.net/2012/12/18/2012-what-we-can-learn-from-drought-disaster-and-devastating-violence-by-carolyn-baker/

2012: What We Can Learn From Drought, Disaster, And Devastating Violence

On some level, it is tempting to say, “goodbye and good riddance” to 2012. For all the positive experiences it may have brought us, those were overshadowed by losses that will live with us for a very long time. But no matter how much we would like to “put them behind us” and declare their end, the truth is that they mark the beginning of a new era of deepening loss and cultural chaos. I assume that the reader understands this, but at the same time, I believe it is crucial to evaluate the lessons which this formidable year offers us.

2012 was the year in which more citizens and luminaries on earth verbalized the reality of climate change than ever before. Undoubtedly, the magnitude of drought and natural disasters throughout the planet rendered continued denial absurd, but so did a plethora of documentation of warming temperatures, polar ice melting, and rising sea levels. [See my recent article “The Sixth Extinction”] It is now obvious that it may only be a matter of decades, not centuries, before humans will have produced a planet where significant portions of it are uninhabitable.

Drought

In the summer of 2012 the United States experienced the worst drought since the Dust Bowl of the Great Depression era. As the drought expanded to encompass nearly two-thirds of the nation and as other droughts around the world signaled unprecedented warming of the planet, a plethora of reports began attributing this ecological and economic tragedy to climate change. US farmers were economically devastated by scorched crops that could only be plowed under, and many were forced to sell large amounts of livestock which they had no hay to feed.

As we approach Christmas Day, the American drought continues with insignificant amounts of precipitation experienced in the Midwest and Eastern Seaboard, with the exception of Superstorm Sandy and its devastation. The water level of the Mississippi River is so low that a shipping crisis on the river is imminent. It is entirely possible, perhaps likely, that the drought of 2012 will subtly or blatantly continue throughout the winter and on into yet another record-breaking, torrid summer of 2013. In any event, 2012 has dramatically broken records for heat, drought, and weather extremes.

Disaster

2012 also broke records for natural disasters around the world, and myriad studies and reports are linking those with climate change. Climate Central reports that “studies have increasingly found that global warming is already making certain types of extreme weather events, such as heat waves and precipitation extremes, more likely to occur and more severe.

From wildfires in the mountain West to an above-normal number of tornados in the Midwest to Superstorm Sandy in the New York and New Jersey areas, 2012 may rank as the second-most disastrous year since 1980. Moreover, for the first time in our history an American governor, Andrew Cuomo of New York, made a direct link with natural disasters and global warming saying that “Hurricane Sandy Shows That We Need To Prepare For Climate Change.”

Devastating Violence

As I write these words, funerals for 20 children and 6 adults are beginning in Newtown, Connecticut where on December 14, 20 year-old Adam Lanza massacred them at an elementary school then took his own life. This at the end of a year in which a number of other dramatic mass shootings occurred such as the July 20 massacre at an Aurora, Colorado movie theater, another a few days later at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, and yet another at a Portland, Oregon shopping mall just three days before the carnage in Newtown. [For a complete list of mass shootings in the US in 2012, see this Washington Post report.]

While politicians turn themselves inside out to make this an issue of gun

control—or not, the horror of gun violence in the United States is beyond the scope of anything that could be done to alleviate it through legislation. Once again, the compulsion to “do something” rather than thoroughly explore the roots of the madness that penetrate into the depths of the American psyche leaves our hearts and souls even more disquieted because it signals yet another band aid that guarantees many more senseless bloodbaths.

If we were to undertake a thorough, incisive, painfully honest exploration of the psychology of gun violence, we would quickly discover that the dynamics of our species that allow us to murder the planet and render it uninhabitable are the same dynamics that allow us to murder each other with impunity. If industrial civilization is killing the planet and everything on it as Guy McPherson and Derrick Jensen have been proclaiming for some time, then we as a species have become profoundly homicidal and suicidal. And as Jensen argues, we really can’t kill a planet and live on it at the same time.

The University Of Life In 2013

As I have been asserting in recent months, climate change is now driving the train from hell, closely followed by economic collapse and peak oil. While all the cars on this train are connected, climate change has rapidly become the runaway engine on this runaway train that cannot be reversed in 2013—or ever.

I happen to believe that life itself is a kind of university in which we have chosen to enroll for reasons of which we may not even be aware, but certainly part of our responsibility in any university is to understand why we chose to enroll and allow that knowledge to inform our student participation. Sometimes we like the education we are receiving, and sometimes we don’t. Nevertheless, we are enrolled, and unless we see no way of continuing our education and are willing to subject ourselves and our loved ones to the pain of our dis-enrollment, it may be wiser to commit to the curriculum rather than resist it.

Another way to frame our experience is in more psychological terms as John Michael Greer has done in many of his writings. Greer argues and demonstrates that the myth of progress is crumbling before our eyes. While we may know that intellectually, the impact may not have fully registered in the nervous system, and certainly, few of our fellow-earthlings have understood the extent to which progress is over and “re-gress” is the new normal. I often speak in terms of having passed from the Age of Enlightenment to the Age of Endarkenment as author Michael Ventura has named it. As the myth of progress continues to crumble and humans feel that re-gress is devouring them, we are going to see and are already seeing what Greer calls a “psychotic break on an individual and collective scale.”

Here are some suggestions for how we can respond to the very challenging curriculum of the future:

1) Understand that 2013 is going to harder than 2012. Whatever the planet experienced in 2012, we are likely to see more blatant severity in similar experiences in 2013. The psychotic break that we are witnessing throughout industrial civilization will only intensify, and we will be more directly and dauntingly challenged—physically, mentally, and emotionally as we attempt to navigate it.

2) There’s nowhere else to go. Relocation may be an option and may work for some, but in terms of climate change, economic collapse, and peak oil, there really is no “safe” place on earth where the repercussions of these will not affect everyone. Consider adapting in place instead of relocating.

3) You’re on your own in community. Both are true, and we need to fully grasp the implications of this. We cannot function exclusively alone and survive, nor can we be totally dependent on the community. When natural disasters ravage the landscape and possibly our homes and individual lives, no government program is going to save us or even alleviate much of our suffering at all. Whether it’s George W. Bush, Jr. and his empty promises for Katrina victims in New Orleans or Obama talking sweet nothings to Staten Island Hurricane Sandy survivors, help is not on the way. The only help you can receive or give will be constructed in advance through your connectedness with the community and through your own efforts.

At some point the only food to which you will have access is the food you have stored, grown, or know how to grow. Perhaps even sooner than famine, we will all be confronted with untenable water shortages that will invariably end the lives of millions of human beings.

4) Your ultimate mission in this life is to serve. Take care of yourself and your family? Yes. Prepare mightily? Yes. And if these are all that matter, you will be haunted by an empty meaninglessness that nothing can assuage except compassionate service that taps the treasure-trove of the many gifts you brought with you to this planet. The expression of your gifts does not need to be elaborate. In fact, one of the simplest and more heartful ways to serve is to take every opportunity, every day to create beauty.

You may also want to consider taking these trainings:

**Emergency Response Training which you can learn more about through a number of service providers in your community

**Training in dealing with trauma—your own and the trauma of others. A number of resources can be found online.

5) Develop a new relationship with the body and the emotions. Those who are attached to living in their heads and disregarding their physical well being are destined to perish. So also are those who refuse to work consciously and constructively with their emotional landscape. While there is nowhere to go on the external landscape, there is definitely somewhere to go on the internal one. Lovingly care for the body and soul, and begin living now as if the only healthcare that will ever be available to you is what you can provide for yourself through alternative treatment. Fundamental to your self-care are a diet of natural, whole, organic foods and daily exercise, preferably in nature.

6) Become a student of how other people in other cultures have survived the unraveling of their societies or have lived through collective trauma. It is not only important to learn about how some survived but also to learn about how others did not.

7) Become a student of your own demise. Contrary to popular opinion, the contemplation of one’s own death, if it is truly contemplative, does not automatically lead to depression. While I understand that my audience is not primarily Buddhist monks, I am aware that those folks are required to spend many hours a week contemplating death. Some report that rather than feeling depressed, they feel exhilarated and exceedingly grateful for their lives. Regardless of what happens in 2013, none of us gets out of here alive. Given the realities of climate change and peak oil, it is possible that our status is similar to that of the hospice patient, whether we aware of it or not. One half of preparing for the future is preparing to survive; the other half is preparing not to.

8) Discern the difference between joy and happiness. Consumer culture has muddied the meaning of “the pursuit of happiness” and made happiness synonymous with having lots of stuff and a cushy lifestyle. Happiness, in fact, is transient—it comes and goes with circumstances. Joy, however, is a condition of the soul resulting from a sense of meaning and purpose, regardless of one’s circumstances. Many individuals suffering deep pain and loss still possess a sense of joy in their depths. Discover and create your radical joy for hard times.

Few constants are available to us, and so as we transition to 2013, I offer this wisdom from the poet, Rebecca del Rio:

Constant

We live for constants,
Rain in winter, the cat
Curled like a furry comma
On the edge of the bed.

Sometimes, many times
These don’t come, instead
There is drought, the father dies,
The mother grows old.

The constant is this:
The mind insists, persists in the insane
Circle of creation from chaos.
Make order of mystery.

“Listen to me,” it shouts.
So we listen.
Constant chatter, constant need
Growing like a curse.

The constant is this:
Life is chaos, disintegration, blooming
Anew into order and collapsing
Again to blossom into something more perfect,
Then chaos, disintegration and on.

We watch helplessly, entranced
Like the magician’s audience,
The hypnotist’s mark.

Nothing to do but join hands,
Bow heads, say blessings
To the capricious, wild original god.

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http://kulturcritic.wordpress.com/posts/songs-of-innocence-the-end-of-the-world/

Songs Of Innocence & The End Of The World

The senseless death of innocence! No, this is not a recently discovered poem by William Blake, or one of James Joyce’s lost novels. But how does the self-described avant-garde master of Western civilization, i.e., the most hierarchically-driven, dominion-focused, militarized nation on earth react to the incomprehensible violence of a schoolyard murder-suicide, where a lone young-adult shooter leaves two score of dead children and countless broken hearts or destroyed families in their wake? Of course, they call in the paramilitary State militia, the Swat team with semi-automatic weapons at the ready, fully locked and loaded, costumed in fatigues and riot gear. Is that really the way to deal with a domestic tragedy of this nature: with a show of militaristic force – a post-modern, post-mortem surge, if you will – in Newtown, Connecticut? A little too much swagger, and just a tad bit too late for those whose world ended far too early, earlier last week.

This scene alone would inspire a whole squad of domestic(ated) terrorists, patriotic psychopaths chasing down the dream or just disgusted with the entire game, just waiting for the end of the world and the chance to show us they have what it takes – “the right stuff.”

There is apparent escalation in the frequency and brutality of mass murders in this country, almost proportionate to the rather obvious increase and viciousness of natural disasters, all in lock-step with mounting war carnage and collateral damage brought to you courtesy of the US Military Inc. Look at the events just last week at the mall in Portland, Oregon, during an ordinary round of holiday consumption; but the seismic after-shock in Connecticut this week was substantially worse than the prior tremor. Perhaps this is what insurrection looks like in a “real” democracy; momentum building around all the edges until the center finally can no longer hold .

Let us swoon over and eulogize the fallen assassin from Seal Team 6 who was killed rescuing an American doctor last week in Afghanistan, let us sing a chorus of hallelujahs to the death of sundry enemies of our lavish lifestyle; but whatever we do, let’s make sure we keep fanning the flames of vengence, violence, death, and discontentment. Let us applaud the Israelis for their viciously patriotic stand against the boogeyman of “terror,” as they unleashed their own barrage of real terror on neighboring woman and children, and just as we here in the homeland foment violence elsewhere around the globe; let us torture those we mistrust or who mistrust us – whether in Quantico Virginia, Guantanamo Bay, or elsewhere in some undisclosed locations around the world; yet we will still scratch our heads and wonder why there is so much violence, so much death and destruction visited upon the homeland by our very own citizens. Well, when you feed your citizens on the meat and potatoes of competition, violence, and death in pursuit of some imaginary exclusivity or elusive promise of living the American dream, this is what you get; each disenchanted citizen looking to outdo the previous one in carnage and publicity. We learned from a very early age that Madison Avenue sells, that propaganda is the coin of the realm. So let’s go out with a big bang and that fifteen minutes of fame. Or maybe it is even simpler than that. Perhaps when you declare that your citizens can be assassinated at will by the regime, perhaps then life no longer means much to some of them.

Folks, when you set your foundations upon the moral necessity, indeed, presumed the righteousness of the American Way, upon uncompromising competitive advantage in a zero-sum game, until the other guy submits and cries uncle; when you recognize as god-like those diverse victors in competitive sport, business takeover, and imperial warfare; and, when you continue to militarize and securitize your own State, pitting person against person, citizen against the State, body politic against the regime, then the steam in the pressure-cooker is bound to expand, creating the perfect conditions for continual explosiveness, along with the normalization of death-dealing and murder in the homeland. When you struggle to maintain diverse wars – against a nation, terror, cancer, drugs, or the president’s new one – the war on ‘gun violence’; when you threaten your citizens with arrest, torture, or even assassination by drone, simply on a vague suspicion of aiding an ill-defined and elusive enemy, you breed the sort of contempt and viral energy that is now fully grown and living off its own host in the homeland.

We did not care so much that the Israeli military recently and callously exterminated hundreds of Palestinian children and other innocents in Gaza. Yet, we are in shock and horror over twenty dead ones here in the homeland. Why do we mourn our own, yet callously kill untold women and children abroad, cavalierly dismissing their deaths as collateral damage? What about the innocents in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Iran, Afghanistan, or elsewhere who have died as a result of our covert or direct support of regime change. Tell me, what is the difference between an afflicted twenty-year old running wildly around a schoolyard shooting up the place, and a barrage of bombs falling willy-nilly around Gaza, killing whomever might be accidentally at hand. Tell me, are these not senseless loses as well? And when one of our own allegedly sought to bring some of empire’s more recent warts and senseless carnage of innocence to light, he himself became the enemy, a victim to be abused, tortured, defamed, and possibly hung by the neck until dead. When will the carnage stop? When will this empire stop itself from engaging in acts of terror and death-dealing? I tell you; it will stop only when the last drop of oil is burned-up, the last tilled field has produced nothing edible, and the last man is standing looking for his next fix.

Shame on you America! Get over yourself! But I hear a faint chorus of retorts from the back-benchers: ‘How dare those Moslems come over here, terrorizing and killing our innocents, taking away our innocence. Let us just go over there and pay them back, terrorize and murder their innocents – show them we got what it takes.’ Recognize that you feed this virus daily with every vote you cast, with every tax dollar you donate, with your shameless and relentless consumption of frivolity and novelty, and yes, with your deafening silence in the face of genocide, assassination, and the public evisceration of your own Bill of Rights committed in your names by an immoral, impervious hegemony running your country, America. Wake up, folks; smell the stench of death. It is of your own making, and something to which you need to get accustomed, or reverse the entire direction of your current trajectory – as if mother nature, our rape of the earth, catastrophic resource depletion, and our increasing belligerence weren’t already taking care of that reversal for us.

Pit company against company, corporate raider against raider, captain of industry against captain of industry; congratulate those financial hooligans who run your banks and steal whatever they can hoist out of your paychecks and your pensions, and then reward them by giving them from the very public trust they pillaged. Glorify the assassination of an unarmed Osama bin Laden, and the special ops team that got him. Demonize Private Bradley Manning or Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange and criminalize protest; promote fake-reality TV shows to the unwashed masses for their entertainment and punch-drunk consumption. Then sit back and watch how life will imitate your art, how an increasing number of your citizens will act out belligerently and callously, perhaps less deftly then the professionals, but just as effectively making their case for “doing god’s work.” As we get closer to global collapse, the social, economic, and psychological indicators are going to go even more haywire, particularly as a population raised on the promise of “freedom and plenty” begins to wonder what those words really mean and how far they may be pushed: standby as we recognize that we can no longer control the vertical, no longer control the horizontal. They are controlling you.

The horrendously violent death of children in Newtown, Connecticut, is the darkest of tragedies. As a father of a young boy, those families’ losses cut deep into my soul. To say I feel their pain is fake; I can never feel their pain. But, to focus on the shooter, his family, his personal or psychological issues, is the eternal mistake of our society and its effete elites. To demand the suspension of gun sales, or the right to bear arms is only an answer if we also agree to disarm the military, the police, the national guard, the CIA, and homeland security. We are “not seeing the forest for the trees.” The problem is not crazy people with guns, it is a sickened Empire with an obsession for violence and conquest, still marching onward in the throes of its own death; it is a culture of excess – excessive security, excessive needs, excessive consumption, excessive expectations – bursting with excessive violence. It is a culture that self-righteously strikes out at anyone even tangentially in its way. It is this all-consuming selfishness that leads individuals in this culture to demand that their interests and their voices be heard, as they struggle to compete against all the noise that routinely and relentlessly bombards us all.

We have entered into the cyclone my friends, the course is already laid out, as we set sail. The beginning of the end, the long emergency, has already begun. Happy December 21st, 2012.

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http://www.blacklistednews.com/Guest_Post%3A_All_I_want_for_Christmas_is_the_Truth%21/22889/0/0/0/Y/M.html

All I want for Christmas is the Truth!

“Eyes blinded by the fog of things
cannot see truth.
Ears deafened by the din of things
cannot hear truth.
Brains bewildered by the whirl of things
cannot think truth.
Hearts deadened by the weight of things
cannot feel truth.
Throats choked by the dust of things
cannot speak truth.”
Harald Bell Wright – The Uncrowned King

I consider myself a seeker of truth. It isn’t easy finding it in todays’ world. In an alternate version of the famous scene from A Few Good Men, I picture myself telling Turbo Tax Timmy Geithner that I want the truth and his angry truthful response:

“Son, we live in a world that has Wall Street banks, and those banks have to be guarded by puppet politicians in Washington D.C. with lobbyist written laws and Madison Avenue PR maggots with media propaganda. Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Representative Paul? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for the average middle class American family, and you curse the ruling oligarchs. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That the death of the American middle class, while tragic, probably saved the bonuses of thousands of Wall Street bankers. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, increases the wealth of these same bankers who destroyed the worldwide economic system in 2008. You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about in the food bank line, you want me on Wall Street, you need me on Wall Street. We use words like derivative, fiscal stimulus, quantitative easing. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent syphoning off the wealth of the nation. You use them as a punch line. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very debt that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you pick up 1000 shares of Apple, and hope our high frequency trading supercomputers can ramp the market for a while longer. Either way, I don’t give a damn what you think you are entitled to.”

I find myself more amazed than ever at the ability of those in power to lie, misinform and obfuscate the truth, while millions of Americans willfully choose to be ignorant of the truth and yearn to be misled. It’s a match made in heaven. Acknowledging the truth of our society’s descent from a country of hard working, self-reliant, charitable, civic minded citizens into the abyss of entitled, dependent, greedy, materialistic consumers is unacceptable to the slave owners and the slaves. We can’t handle the truth because that would require critical thought, hard choices, sacrifice, and dealing with the reality of an unsustainable economic and societal model. It’s much easier to believe the big lies that allow us to sleep at night. The concept of lying to the masses and using propaganda techniques to manipulate and form public opinion really took hold in the 1920s and have been perfected by the powerful ruling elite that control the reins of finance, government and mass media.

Peddlers of Propaganda

“Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.” – Aldous Huxley – Brave New World

Adolf Hitler understood the power of the big lie over the ignorant masses who want to believe:

“All this was inspired by the principle–which is quite true within itself–that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.” – Adolf Hitler – Mein Kampf

We are all liars. We lie to friends, family and co-workers. We convince ourselves they are only small lies and just protect others from being hurt. We would rather be lied to than face the blunt truth about our deficiencies, shortcomings and failures. Willfully believing mistruths allows a person to become dependent upon those promulgating the mistruths. It relieves them of their responsibility to act upon the knowledge that something is wrong and must be fixed. It is a cowardly path to ultimate servitude and destruction. The German people chose this path in the 1930s and the American people have chosen a similar and ultimately destructive path today. The United States Office of Strategic Services prepared a psychological profile report during the war describing Adolf Hitler’s method for controlling the minds of the German masses:

“His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”

America’s corruptible politicians, greedy corporate chieftains, criminal banking overlords, and despicable media manipulators all learned the sordid lessons of mass propaganda from the masters. Our willingness to lie and be lied to set us up to be manipulated by those who understood the mass psychology of a nation. Goebbels and Hitler were heavily influenced by the father of propaganda – Edward Bernays. He and his disciples are professional poisoners of the public mind, exploiters of public foolishness and ignorance, and never allow truth to interfere with a good story. What master manipulators realized is that it is easier to change the attitude of millions than the attitude of one man. By analyzing and understanding the process and motives of how the group mind works, the invisible government has been able to manipulate and regulate the masses according to their will without the masses knowing they are being managed. Bernays described this elitist view of the world in 1928:

“Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our lives whether in the sphere of politics or business in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.” – Edward Bernays – Propaganda

The super-rich elite believe they are more intelligent, more capable of managing the affairs of state, masters of the financial world, and chosen to decide what is best for the masses. In reality, they are egocentric, psychotic, power hungry, myopic, self-serving ravenous vultures, feasting upon the carcass of a once great nation. Truth is inconsequential and irritating to their plans for world domination and control. Therefore, no truth will be forthcoming from any organization or person that is associated with the existing political, economic, financial or social order. Every bit of information that is permitted into the public realm has been vetted, manipulated and spun for public consumption. The public does not like bad news. They do not like hard facts. They do not like to think or do math. They want to be spoon fed mindless sound bites and happy talk. The oligarchs need to keep the masses sedated and subservient while they continue to plunder and pillage, so all data is massaged to provide a happy ending.

This is where I deviate from the ideologue one-trick ponies that refuse to see both sides of the issue. The ruling oligarchs are wealthy, influential, psychotic, amoral, and few. The masses are relatively poor, easily influenced, willfully ignorant, and many. The ruling oligarchs are most certainly evil, but the masses are not the hard working, stoic, downtrodden portrayed by liberal ideologues. One just needs to walk down the street in one of our urban enclaves, saunter through a suburban mall, or click on People of Wal-Mart to witness the tattooed, pierced, butt crack showing, slovenly, obese, and ignorant, attached to their electronic iGadgets, to understand how far our society has deteriorated. Every individual born into this world has the capability to become educated, think critically, not follow the herd, live beneath their means, and not be influenced by propaganda. Aldous Huxley understood in 1931 that those in power could use material goods to invoke passivity and egotism among the populace. He feared that truth would be obscured by an avalanche of irrelevance (500 Reality TV shows), cultural trivialities (Lady Gaga, Lindsey Lohan), distractions (Professional sports), and pharmaceutical enhanced escape (Prozac). He saw the possibility that we would grow to love our servitude as the pleasures of life provided by our controllers overwhelmed any desire to think or question authority.

“There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it.” Aldous Huxley

By 1962 when Huxley wrote his last book, he was certain that his worst dystopian nightmares had been unleashed. His description of Western society fifty years ago could have been written today and accurately reflected our current economic paradigm. War, debt and consumption still make our world go round, but the end is nigh.

“Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence – those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you’d collapse. And while you people are over-consuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.” – Aldous Huxley – Island

The pillars are crumbling. The $1.4 trillion wasted on two worthless wars of choice in the Middle East, the trillions wasted and liberties sacrificed for the never ending unwinnable War on Terror, the Keynesian spending frenzy that has driven the National Debt from $9 trillion to $16.3 trillion in the last five years, the looting of the American taxpayer by Wall Street and their co-conspirators at the Federal Reserve and in Congress, and the belief that ramping up the debt driven consumption that drives 71% of our GDP is our path to prosperity is absolutely freaking nuts. The pillars will not be abolished willingly. The ruling class depends upon their continued existence and expansion. There is the rub. The math doesn’t work. We’ve reached the point where continued expansion of debt and money printing no longer works. With a national debt to GDP ratio of 102% and a total credit market debt to GDP ratio of 350%, we have passed the Rogoff & Reinhart point of no return. This time is not different. A country cannot run trillion dollar deficits indefinitely and expect to not suffer the consequences. This is why those in power are increasingly resorting to propaganda, data manipulation, and outright lies to convince the masses of their omnipotence and brilliance in managing the fiscal affairs of the state.

“One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.” – Aldous Huxley – Brave New World

Through decades of mass media messaging the masses have been conditioned to believe whatever those in power want them to believe. To our invisible government rulers we are nothing but rats to be manipulated through food pellets and shock therapy. Pleasure and fear of pain are the drivers of our warped society. The ruling oligarchs truly think they know what is best for the masses and believe any means is worthwhile as long as the ends support their agenda. This is blatantly obvious to anyone with their eyes open and their brain functioning. Sadly, the government run educational system produces mostly drones that are barely able to tie their own shoes, spell Cat, or make change from a one dollar bill. Only 20% of all high school seniors score high enough on the SAT test to get a B minus in college and most of these kids come from private and parochial schools. This is exactly what those in power prefer. They want non-critical thinking, mindless consumers, who don’t understand the criminal nature of Federal Reserve created inflation or their enslavement in the chains of debt at the hands of their Wall Street slave owners. They certainly don’t want the masses to understand that real median household net worth is lower today than it was in 1969. Luckily for the oligarchs, 95% of the public couldn’t define the terms: real, median or net worth. Math is hard.

The average person is inundated on a 24/7 basis with pabulum from liberal network media talking heads, CNBC Wall Street shills regurgitating whatever their sponsors desire, Fox News blonde bimbos and neo-con war mongers programmed to spew Rupert Murdoch talking points, MSNBC tingling leg faux journalists, NYT intellectually corrupt Nobel prize winners, NAR nitwits repeating “best time to buy” on a daily basis for the last 12 years, and government agencies whose sole purpose is to manipulate data in a way that supports the agenda of those in power. The intellectually lazy and willfully ignorant masses are no match for those who control the message and the media. How else can you explain their ability to convince millions of drones to line up for hours in front of a store and stampede like crazed hyenas to grab a $5 crockpot, the Chinese produced gadget of the moment or a designer top made by slave labor in safety conscious Bangladesh factories? How else can you explain a population willing to be molested by government TSA dregs in the name of security from phantom terrorists, the passive acceptance of military exercises in US cities, unquestioning submissiveness as Presidential Executive Orders allow the government dictatorial powers based on their judgment, the monitoring of internet and voice correspondence of all citizens, and believing that FBI agents luring clueless teenage Muslim dupes into fake terrorist plots, providing the fake explosives, and then announcing with great fanfare how they saved us from another 9/11?

But, the prize for boldest, most outrageous, blatant use of propaganda and misinformation to cover-up their criminal looting of America goes to Ben Bernanke, his cronies at the Federal Reserve, and the Wall Street banks that own and control our Central Bank. Having the gall to portray themselves as the stabilizer of our economic system over the last 100 years is a putrid joke on the dying and broke middle class. Their mandate has been stable prices, full employment, and avoiding financial crisis. It is a tribute to Bernays and the rest of the public relations swine that the average American actually believes inflation is a good thing and it is under control despite the FACT that 96.2% of their purchasing power has disappeared since 1900, with the most rapid decline occurring since Nixon closed the gold window in 1971.

The average American actually believes Ben Bernanke saved us from a Great Depression when in actuality he saved the owners of the Federal Reserve from accepting the losses they generated through the greatest financial fraud in history. His “solutions” have zombified our economic system, just as the Japanese Central Bank did 20 years ago. He has destroyed the concept of saving, while rewarding the indebted and profligate with his QE to Infinity money printing policies. And the ignorant masses have been convinced by the corporate media and their corrupt government lackeys that Ben did this for them. Kyle Bass knows otherwise. He knows how the Fed and their backers have preyed upon the masses through their understanding of human psychology:

“Humans are optimistic by nature. People’s lives are driven by hopes and dreams which are all second derivatives of their innate optimism. Humans also suffer from optimistic biases driven by the first inalienable right of human nature which is self-preservation. It is this reflex mechanism in our cognitive pathways that makes difficult situations hard to reflect and opine on. These biases are extended to economic choices and events. The primary difficulty with this train of thought is the bias that most investors have for the baseline facts: they tend to believe that the central bankers, politicians, and other governmental agencies are omnipotent due to their success in averting a financial meltdown in 2009.

Central banks have become the great enablers of fiscal profligacy. The overarching belief is that there will always be someone or something there to act as the safety net. The safety nets worked so well recently that investors now trust they will be underneath them ad-infinitum. Markets and economists alike now believe that quantitative easing (“QE”) will always “work” by flooding the market with relatively costless capital. Unlimited QE and the zero lower bound (“ZLB”) are likely to bankrupt pension funds whose expected returns happen to be a good 600 basis points (or more) higher than the 10?year “risk-free” rate. The ZLB has many unintended consequences that are impossible to ignore.

Our belief is that markets will eventually take these matters out of the hands of the central bankers. These events will happen with such rapidity that policy makers won’t be able to react fast enough. The fallacy of the belief that countries that print their own currency are immune to sovereign crisis will be disproven in the coming months and years. Trillions of dollars of debts will be restructured and millions of financially prudent savers will lose large percentages of their real purchasing power at exactly the wrong time in their lives. Again, the world will not end, but the social fabric of the profligate nations will be stretched and in some cases torn. Sadly, looking back through economic history, all too often war is the manifestation of simple economic entropy played to its logical conclusion. We believe that war is an inevitable consequence of the current global economic situation.” – Kyle Bass

What’s Normal in a Profoundly Abnormal Society?

“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.” They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.” – Aldous Huxley – Brave New World Revisited

No sane person could honestly say that what has happened to our society over the last forty years, and particularly in the last five years, is normal. But somehow those in power have convinced the masses that $1.2 trillion deficits, 0% interest rates, declining real wages, the highest average gas prices in history, pre-emptive wars, policing the world and buying rubber dog shit produced in China with a credit card is normal and beneficial to our economy. It seems that I and a few million other people in this country are the abnormal ones. We choose not to be led to slaughter by our masters. The seekers of truth have turned to the alternative media and are able to connect with like-minded critical thinking individuals on websites like Zero Hedge, Jesse’s Americain Café, Of Two Minds, Mish, among many other truth seeking blogs. This is dangerous to the powers that be and they are using their political clout and extreme wealth to try and lock down and control free speech on the internet. If this is accomplished all hope at disseminating truth will be lost.

Abraham Lincoln once said that he believed in the people and that if you told them the truth and gave them the cold hard facts they would meet any crisis. That may have been true in 1860, but not today. The cold hard facts are available for all to see:

A $16.3 trillion National Debt
47 million people on food stamps
Over $222 trillion of unfunded Federal entitlement liabilities
Over $50 trillion of unfunded State entitlement liabilities
True unemployment above 20%.
True inflation above 5%.
A stock market at the same level as 1999, with a 10 year expected annual return of less than 4% – Stocks for the really, really long run. 10 year bond returns of 0% will be a miracle.
A savings rate of 3.7% and with Bernanke’s ZIRP, no incentive to save. Real hourly earnings continue to fall.

Baby Boomers within 10 years of retirement have saved an average of only $78,000, and more than a third of them have less than $25,000. More than half of U.S. workers have no retirement plan at all.
A crumbling, decaying infrastructure, with 150,000 structurally deficient bridges, bursting water mains, and an overstressed electrical grid.
Horrific government public education producing millions of low functioning morons.
Rotting social fabric, with 40% of children born out of wedlock (72% of black children) and a 50% divorce rate.
An energy policy based upon unicorns farting rainbows and press releases about green energy and the miracle of shale fracking, as average gas prices in 2012 and 2011 were the highest in U.S. history.
As the pitiful excuses for statesmen in Washington D.C. pander and posture about the dreaded fiscal cliff which was purposely created by the oligarchs as a show for the masses, none of the true issues above are being addressed. The dramatic compromise that will ultimately be reached between the equally corrupt parties will be hailed by the corporate media and Wall Street shysters and an HFT supercomputer engineered stock market rally will ensue. The cowardice of these politicians is revolting. As Huxley knew in 1958, politicians and propagandists prefer nonsense and storylines to truth, knowledge and honesty.

“Human beings act in a great variety of irrational ways, but all of them seem to be capable, if given a fair chance, of making a reasonable choice in the light of available evidence. Democratic institutions can be made to work only if all concerned do their best to impart knowledge and to encourage rationality. But today, in the world’s most powerful democracy, the politicians and the propagandists prefer to make nonsense of democratic procedures by appealing almost exclusively to the ignorance and irrationality of the electors.” – Aldous Huxley – Brave New World Revisited

We want to be lied to because the truth is too painful. Hope and denial with a dash of delusion is the recipe the mindless masses prefer. The average person doesn’t want to understand the chart below. They want to believe the U.S. will dominate economically and lead the world for decades to come. We are still the bright shining beacon of democracy on the mountaintop. Even though the facts unequivocally reveal a declining empire, the masses desperately grasp at straws in the wind. The United States share of world GDP will be vastly lower in 2021, as the hubris of declining empires never allows them to take the necessary steps to reverse the decline (Rome, Great Britain).

It is fitting that during this magical Christmas season of fantasy, delusion, debt fueled material over-consumption and fairy tales, we look at the biggest fairy tale of all – the great jobs recovery. I know from the two thousand Obama campaign commercials I was forced to watch in the last few months and 500 robo-calls at dinner every night that we’ve added 4 million jobs due to Obama’s wise economic policies. The magical journey from a 10.3% unemployment rate to a 7.9% rate is a humdinger. I stumbled across a myriad of charts on those truth-telling websites that I had previously mentioned.

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.” Aldous Huxley

The first chart that grabbed my attention shows the historical relationship between the U3 unemployment rate reported to the masses versus the U6 truer picture of unemployment, along with the percentage of people unemployed for longer than 15 weeks. A funny thing happened shortly after the election of Barack Obama. From 1994 through 2008 the gap between the U3 and U6 rates consistently ranged between 3% and 4%. Suddenly, the gap surged to 7% and currently sits at almost 8%. The figure reported to the masses of 7.9% is so much easier to digest than the 15% to 17% that captures the truer level of unemployment. If the gap between these two figures had remained at the levels of the previous 14 years, the unemployment that should be reported to the masses would be 11%. That is unacceptable to those in power, so the data is massaged and the propaganda machine spins the storyline necessary to confuse and mislead the masses.

The next two charts from Mike Shedlock again reveal truths the existing social order doesn’t want you to know. Even though the working age population has grown by 10 million people since 2008, the BLS expects critical thinking people to believe the labor force has only grown by 1.3 million people. You see, the unemployment rate is calculated using the labor force. If your economic policies don’t create jobs, just adjust the labor force dramatically lower based on nothing. In desperate economic times, people do not voluntarily leave the workforce. Only a non-thinking drone would believe that 8.7 million Americans voluntarily left the workforce since 2008, when only 4 million left the workforce from 2003 through 2007. It is not a coincidence that student loan debt, which was taken over by the Obama administration in 2009 rose by $300 billion. Those in power have doled out these billions with no concern for credit risk or academic credentials in order to reduce the number of people in the labor force. Unemployed union Twinkie workers seeking a new career in lesbian studies can get a $20,000 loan from the American taxpayer to sit in their basement along with the 500,000 other University of Phoenix enrollees. The future $300 billion taxpayer bailout was worth it to keep the unemployment rate low enough to insure Obama’s re-election.

The Obama PR machine never fails to expound upon the fact that the economy added 4.9 million jobs since January 2009. In the same timeframe, uncovered employment rose by 6.6 million. Inquiring minds might want to know what an “uncovered” job entails. Selling your accumulated Chinese crap on Ebay is an uncovered job. Calling yourself a consultant while sleeping until noon is an uncovered job. Day trading Facebook and Apple stock is an uncovered job. Trash picking is an uncovered job. The truth is that real jobs are 1.7 million lower than they were at the depths of the recession, while bullshit jobs paying virtually nothing and offering no benefits have surged by 6.6 million. These facts don’t make a great campaign commercial. The number of employed Americans is at the same level as mid-2005, even though the working age population has grown by 18 million. Since 2008 there are 3 million less full-time jobs and 3 more part-time jobs. This trend is accelerating as small businesses react rationally to the oncoming Obamacare train, resulting in aggregate work hours declining and wage growth stagnating.

Zero Hedge reveals more truth about our glorious jobs recovery with the following two charts. They obliterate the false narrative spun by liberal ideologues that the reason for the increase of those not in the labor force is due to Baby Boomers retiring. The truth is that while those in the 55-69 age brackets have gained nearly 4 million jobs under President Obama, everyone else has lost just over 2.5 million jobs. Is this a positive development or a sign of extreme desperation among older Americans who have seen their interest income vaporized by Ben Bernanke and there food, energy, and healthcare expenses skyrocket?

Those in their prime earning years of 25 to 54 still have a net cumulative loss of 2.2 million jobs since 2009. Recent college graduates, with their billions of student loan debt, have nabbed 400,000 TGI Fridays jobs, singing happy birthday to 3 year olds, with their newly minted college degrees. This is the “normal” healthy jobs market sold to the American public by the propagandists and politicians.

The final jobs chart that portrays the truth of what has been a decades’ long spiral downward paints a picture of a country that once created wealth through producing goods from the 1940s through 1970. Since 1970 we’ve degenerated into a debt creating country that consumes foreign produced goods and makes entitlement promises it can never keep. Selling houses to each other, peddling crap on Ebay, and eating out three times a week has shockingly failed to propel our economy. The jobs picture has deteriorated rapidly since 2008 and is not improving, despite the best propaganda money can buy. There is absolutely no chance of any substantive improvement over the next four years based on the policies in place and refusal to acknowledge the economic realities that we face.

The accumulation of material possessions through the use of consumer debt, peddled by bankers and reinforced through relentless corporate marketing propaganda has left the country’s citizens weary, miserable, greedy, indebted and sick. Our obsession with technology has merely provided another means of distracting ourselves from confronting the dire challenges that must be addressed. We can ignore the facts but that doesn’t mean they do not exist. The abnormality that grips this nation is breathtaking to behold, as the status quo cheer on and encourage consumers to buy more things with money they don’t have in order to support an economic recovery that is dependent upon zero interest rates for Wall Street banks, QE to infinity, and the delusional desire for a miraculous return to the good old days when getting something for nothing was possible. We can no longer deny reality. If we want to add 30 million people to Medicaid, it must be paid for. If we want to wage never ending wars and police the world, it must be paid for. If we want a Federal government to spend $3.8 trillion per year, it must be paid for. Nothing is free in this world, but more than 50% of Americans seem to believe that to be true.

“Our economy is based on spending billions to persuade people that happiness is buying things, and then insisting that the only way to have a viable economy is to make things for people to buy so they’ll have jobs and get enough money to buy things.” – Philip Elliot Slater

We are seen by those in control as nothing more than common house flies caught in their web of lies. Your owners don’t care about you. They only care about their own wealth and power. They want to control and manipulate you. They want to keep you enslaved in debt and running on the treadmill of consumption. They want passive, non-critical thinking drones to do the menial service jobs that remain in this country, while they use their control of our financial, political, tax, and legal systems to ransack and pillage the wealth of the dwindling middle class. The truth is the continuation of our current economic system is mathematically impossible. Your owners know this. This is why the use of propaganda, misinformation, fake data, and false storylines has taken on astronomical proportions. The time for passivity and accepting the deceitfulness of our leaders is coming to an end. While you’re waiting in line this Christmas season at Wal-Mart to purchase a fabulously priced shirt that only required the deaths of 112 Bangladesh slave laborers, try to figure out how we got here. Your owners think they have you by the balls.

“They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want—they don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interest. You know something, they don’t want people that are smart enough to sit around their kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. Because the owners of this country know the truth, it’s called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.” – George Carlin

How many Americans are awake enough to handle the truth?

All I want for Christmas is the truth.