https://srsroccoreport.com/areas-of-the-world-more-vulnerable-to-collapse/
Areas Of The World More Vulnerable To Collapse
Certain areas of the world are more vulnerable to economic and societal collapse. While most analysts gauge the strength or weakness of an economy based on its outstanding debt or debt to GDP ratio, there is another factor that is a much better indicator. To understand which areas and regions in the world that will suffer a larger degree of collapse than others, we need to look at their energy dynamics.
For example, while the United States is still the largest oil consumer on the planet, it is no longer the number one oil importer. China surpassed the United States by importing a record 8.9 million barrels per day (mbd) in 2017. This data came from the recently released BP 2018 Statistical Review. Each year, BP publishes a report that lists each countries’ energy production and consumption figures.
BP also lists the total oil production and consumption for each area (regions and continents). I took BP’s figures and calculated the Net Oil Exports for each area. As we can see, the Middle East has the highest amount of net oil exports with 22.3 million barrels per day in 2017:
The figures in the chart above are shown in “thousand barrels per day.” Russia and CIS (Commonwealth Independent States) came in second with 10 mbd of net oil exports followed by Africa with 4 mbd and Central and South America with 388,000 barrels per day. The areas with the negative figures are net oil importers.
The area in the world with the largest net oil imports was the Asia-Pacific region at 26.6 mbd followed by Europe with 11.4 mbd and North America (Canada, USA & Mexico) at 4.1 mbd.
Now, that we understand the energy dynamics shown in the chart above, the basic rule of thumb is that the areas in the world that are more vulnerable to collapse are those with the highest amount of net oil imports. Of course, it is true that the Middle Eastern or African countries with significant oil exports can suffer a collapse due to geopolitics and civil wars (example, Iraq, and Libya), but this was not a result of domestic oil supply and demand forces. Rather the collapse of Iraq and Libya can be blamed on certain superpowers desire to control the oil market as they are strategic net oil importers.
The areas with the largest net oil imports, Asia-Pacific and Europe, have designed complex economies that are highly dependent on significant oil supplies to function. Thus, the areas and countries with the largest net oil imports will experience a higher degree of collapse. Yes, there’s more to it than the amount of net oil imports, but that is easy gauge to use. I will explain the other factors shortly. If we look at the Asia-Pacific countries with the largest net oil imports, China, India, and Japan lead the pack:
China is a net importer of nearly 9 mbd of oil, followed by India at 4 mbd and Japan with 3.9 mbd. Thus, as these net oil imports decline, so will the degree of economic activity. However, when net oil imports fall to a certain level, then a more sudden collapse of the economy will result… resembling the Seneca Cliff.
We must remember, a great deal of the economic infrastructure (Skyscrapers, commercial buildings, retail stores, roads, equipment, buses, trucks, automobiles, etc and, etc.) only function if a lot of oil continually runs throughout the system. Once the oil supply falls to a certain level, then the economic system disintegrates.
While China is the largest net oil importer, the United States is still the largest consumer of oil in the world. Being the largest oil consumer is another very troubling sign. The next chart shows the countries with the highest oil consumption in the world and their percentage of net oil imports:
Due to the rapid increase in domestic shale oil production, the United States net oil imports have fallen drastically over the past decade. At one point, the U.S. was importing nearly three-quarters (75%) of its oil but is now only importing 34%. Unfortunately, this current situation will not last for long. As quickly as shale oil production surged, it will decline in the same fashion… or even quicker.
You will notice that Saudi Arabia is the sixth largest oil consumer in the world followed by Russia. Both Saudi Arabia and Russia export a much higher percentage of oil than they consume. However, Russia will likely survive a much longer than Saudi Arabia because Russia can provide a great deal more than just oil. Russia and the Commonwealth Independent States can produce a lot of food, goods, commodities, and metals domestically, whereas Saudi Arabia must import most of these items.
Of the largest consumers of oil in the chart above, Japan and South Korea import 100% (or nearly 100%) of their oil needs. According to the data put out by BP 2018 Statistical Review, they did not list any individual oil production figures for Japan or South Korea. However, the U.S. Energy Information Agency reported in 2015 that Japan produced 139,000 bd of total petroleum liquids while S. Korea supplied 97,000 bd. Production of petroleum liquids from Japan and South Korea only account for roughly 3% of their total consumption…. peanuts.
Analysts or individuals who continue to believe the United States will become energy independent are ignorant to the impacts of the Falling EROI – Energy Returned On Investment or the Thermodynamics of oil depletion. Many analysts believe that if the price of oil gets high enough, say $100 or $150; then shale oil would be hugely profitable. The error in their thinking is the complete failure to comprehend this simple relationship… that as oil prices rise, SO DO the COSTS… LOL.
Do you honestly believe a trucking company that transports fracking sand, water or oil for the shale oil industry is going to provide the very same costs when the oil price doubles???? We must remember, the diesel price per gallon increases significantly as the oil price moves higher. Does the energy analyst believe the trucking companies are just going to eat that higher cost for the benefit of the shale oil industry?? This is only one example, but as the oil price increases, inflationary costs will thunder throughout the shale oil industry.
If the oil price shoots up to $100 or higher and stays there (which I highly doubt), then costs will start to surge once again for the shale oil industry. As costs increase, we can kiss goodbye the notion of higher shale oil profits. But as I mentioned in the brackets (), I don’t see the oil price jumping to $100 and staying there. Yes, we could see an oil price spike, but not a long-term sustained price as the current economic cycle is getting ready to roll over. And with it, we are going to experience one hell of a deflationary collapse. This will take the oil price closer to $30 than $100.
Regardless, the areas and countries with the highest oil consumption and net oil imports will be more vulnerable to collapse and will fall the hardest. Just imagine the U.S. economy consuming 5 million barrels of oil per day, rather than the current 20 mbd. The United States just has more stuff that will become worthless and dysfunctional than other countries.
Lastly, the end game suggests that the majority of countries will experience an economic collapse due to the upcoming rapid decline in global oil production. However, some countries will likely be able to transition better than others, as the leverage and complexity of the economies aren’t as dependent on oil as the highly advanced Western and Eastern countries.
Monday, June 18, 2018
Friday, June 15, 2018
SC167-8
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/49646.htm
How the Last Superpower Was Unchained
American Wars and Self-Decline
Think of it as the all-American version of the human comedy: a great power that eternally knows what the world needs and offers copious advice with a tone deafness that would be humorous, if it weren’t so grim. If you look, you can find examples of this just about anywhere. Here, for instance, is a passage in the New York Times from a piece on the topsy-turvy Trumpian negotiations that preceded the Singapore summit. “The Americans and South Koreans,” wrote reporter Motoko Rich, “want to persuade the North that continuing to funnel most of the country’s resources into its military and nuclear programs shortchanges its citizens’ economic well-being. But the North does not see the two as mutually exclusive.”
Think about that for a moment. The U.S. has, of course, embarked on a trillion-dollar-plus upgrade of its already massive nuclear arsenal (and that’s before the cost overruns even begin). Its Congress and president have for years proven eager to sink at least a trillion dollars annually into the budget of the national security state (a figure that’s still rising and outpaces by far that of any other power on the planet), while its own infrastructure sags and crumbles. And yet it finds the impoverished North Koreans puzzling when they, too, follow such an extreme path.
Clueless is not a word Americans ordinarily apply to themselves as a country, a people, or a government. Yet how applicable it is.
And when it comes to cluelessness, there’s another, far stranger path the United States has been following since at least the George W. Bush moment that couldn’t be more consequential and yet somehow remains the least noticed of all. On this subject, Americans don’t have a clue. In fact, if you could put the United States on a psychiatrist’s couch, this might be the place to start.
America Contained
In a way, it's the oldest story on Earth: the rise and fall of empires. And note the plural there. It was never -- not until recently at least -- empire, always empires. Since the fifteenth century, when the fleets of the first European imperial powers broke into the larger world with subjugation in mind, it was invariably a contest of many. There were at least three or sometimes significantly more imperial powers rising and contesting for dominance or slowly falling from it. This was, by definition, the history of great powers on this planet: the challenging rise, the challenged decline. Think of it for so many centuries as the essential narrative of history, the story of how it all happened until at least 1945, when just two “superpowers,” the United States and the Soviet Union, found themselves facing off on a global scale.
Of the two, the U.S. was always stronger, more powerful, and far wealthier. It theoretically feared the Russian Bear, the Evil Empire, which it worked assiduously to “contain” behind that famed Iron Curtain and whose adherents in this country, always modest in number, were subjected to a mania of fear and suppression. However, the truth -- at least in retrospect -- was that, in the Cold War years, the Soviets were actually doing Washington a strange, if unnoted, favor. Across much of the Eurasian continent, and other places from Cuba to the Middle East, Soviet power and the never-ending contest for influence and dominance that went with it always reminded American leaders that their own power had its limits. This, as the twenty-first century should have (but hasn’t) made clear, was no small thing. It still seemed obvious then that American power could not be total. There were things it could not do, places it could not control, dreams its leaders simply couldn’t have. Though no one ever thought of it that way, from 1945 to 1991, the United States, like the Soviet Union, was, after a fashion, “contained.”
In those years, the Russians were, in essence, saving Washington from itself. Soviet power was a tangible reminder to American political and military leaders that certain areas of the planet remained no-go zones (except in what, in those years, were called “the shadows”). The Soviet Union, in short, rescued Washington from both the fantasy and the hell of going it alone, even if Americans only grasped that reality at the most subliminal of levels.
That was the situation until December 1991 when, at the end of a centuries-long imperial race for power (and the never-ending arms race that went with it), there was just one gigantic power left standing on Planet Earth. It told you something about the thinking then that, when the Soviet Union imploded, the initial reaction in Washington wasn’t triumphalism (though that came soon enough) but utter shock, a disbelieving sense that something no one had expected, predicted, or even imagined had nonetheless happened. To that very moment, Washington had continued to plan for a two-superpower world until the end of time.
America Uncontained
Soon enough, though, the Washington elite came to see what happened as, in the phrase of the moment, “the end of history.” Given the wreckage of the Soviet Union, it seemed that an ultimate victory had been won by the very country its politicians would soon come to call “the last superpower,” the “indispensable” nation, the “exceptional” state, a land great beyond imagining (until, at least, Donald Trump hit the campaign trail with a slogan that implied greatness wasn’t all-American anymore).
In reality, there were a variety of paths open to the “last superpower” at that moment. There was even, however briefly, talk of a “peace dividend” -- of the possibility that, in a world without contesting superpowers, taxpayer dollars might once again be invested not in the sinews of war-making but of peace-making (particularly in infrastructure and the well-being of the country’s citizens).
Such talk, however, lasted only a year or two and always in a minor key before being relegated to Washington’s attic. Instead, with only a few rickety “rogue” states left to deal with -- like... gulp... North Korea, Iraq, and Iran -- that money never actually headed home and neither did the thinking that went with it.
Consider it the good fortune of the geopolitical dreamers soon to take the reins in Washington that the first Gulf War of 1990-1991, which ended less than a year before the Soviet Union collapsed, prepared the way for quite a different style of thinking. That instant victory led to a new kind of militarized dreaming in which a highly tech-savvy military, like the one that had driven Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein’s forces out of Kuwait in such short order, would be capable of doing anything on a planet without serious opposition.
And yet, from the beginning, there were signs suggesting a far grimmer future. To take but one infamous example, Americans still remember the Black Hawk Down moment of 1993 when the world’s greatest military fell victim to a Somali warlord and local militias and found itself incapable of imposing its will on one of the least impressive not-quite-states on the planet (a place still frustrating that military a quarter-century later).
In that post-1991 world, however, few in Washington even considered that the twentieth century had loosed another phenomenon on the world, that of insurgent national liberation movements, generally leftist rebellions, across what had been the colonial world -- the very world of competing empires now being tucked into the history books -- and it hadn’t gone away. In the twenty-first century, such insurgent movements, now largely religious, or terror-based, or both, would turn out to offer a grim new version of containment to the last superpower.
Unchaining the Indispensable Nation
On September 11, 2001, a canny global jihadist by the name of Osama bin Laden sent his air force (four hijacked U.S. passenger jets) and his precision weaponry (19 suicidal, mainly Saudi followers) against three iconic targets in the American pantheon: the Pentagon, the World Trade Center, and undoubtedly the Capitol or the White House (neither of which was hit because one of those jets crashed in a field in Pennsylvania). In doing so, in a sense bin Laden not only loosed a literal hell on Earth, but unchained the last superpower.
Shakespeare would have had a word for what followed: hubris. But give the top officials of the Bush administration (and the neocons who supported them) a break. There had never been a moment like it: a moment of one. A single great power left alone, triumphant, on planet Earth. Just one superpower -- wealthy beyond compare, its increasingly high-tech military unmatched, its only true rival in a state of collapse -- had now been challenged by a small jihadist group.
To President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and the rest of their crew, it seemed like nothing short of a heaven-sent opportunity. As they came out of the shock of 9/11, of that “Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century,” it was as if they had found a magic formula in the ruins of those iconic buildings for the ultimate control of the planet. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld would instruct an aide at the Pentagon that day, “Go massive. Sweep it up. Things related and not.”
Within days, things related and not were indeed being swept up. The country was almost instantly said to be “at war” and soon that conflict even had a name, the Global War on Terror. Nor was that war to be against just al-Qaeda, or even one country, an Afghanistan largely ruled by the Taliban. More than 60 countries said to have “terror networks” of various sorts found themselves almost instantly in the administration’s potential gun sights. And that was just to be the beginning of it all.
In October 2001, the invasion of Afghanistan was launched. In the spring of 2003, the invasion of Iraq followed, and those were only the initial steps in what was increasingly envisioned as the imposition of a Pax Americana on the Greater Middle East. There could be no doubt, for instance, that Iran and Syria, too, would soon go the way of Iraq and Afghanistan. Bush's top officials had been nursing just such dreams since, in 1997, many of them formed a think tank (the first ever to enter the White House) called the Project for the New American Century and began to write out what were then the fantasies of figures nowhere near power. By 2003, they were power itself and their dreams, if anything, had grown even more grandiose.
In addition to imagining a political Pax Republicana in the United States, they truly dreamed of a future planetary Pax Americana in which, for the first time in history, a single power would, in some fashion, control the whole works, the Earth itself. And this wasn’t to be a passing matter either. The Bush administration’s “unilateralism” rested on a conviction that it could actually create a future in which no country or even bloc of countries would ever come close to matching or challenging U.S. military power. The administration's National Security Strategy of 2002 put the matter bluntly: the U.S. was to “build and maintain” a military, in the phrase of the moment, “beyond challenge.”
They had little doubt that, in the face of the most technologically advanced, bulked-up, destructive force on Earth, hostile states would be “shocked and awed” by a simple demonstration of its power, while friendly ones would have little choice but to come to heel as well. After all, as President Bush said at a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in 2007, the U.S. military was “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known.”
Though there was much talk at the time about the “liberation” of Afghanistan and then Iraq, at least in their imaginations the true country being liberated was the planet’s lone superpower. Although the Bush administration was officially considered a “conservative” one, its key officials were geopolitical dreamers of the first order and their vision of the world was the very opposite of conservative. It harkened back to nothing and looked forward to everything. It was radical in ways that should have, but didn’t, take the American public’s breath away; radical in ways that had never been seen before.
Shock and Awe for the Last Superpower
Think of what those officials did in the post-9/11 moment as the ultimate act of greed. They tried to swallow a whole planet. They were determined to make it a planet of one in a way that had never before been seriously imagined.
It was, to say the least, a vision of madness. Even in a moment when it truly did seem -- to them at least -- that all constraints had been taken off, an administration of genuine conservatives might have hesitated. Its top officials might, at least, have approached the post-Soviet situation with a modicum of caution and modesty. But not George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and pals. In the face of what seemed like the ultimate in possibilities they proved clueless when it came to the possibility that anything on Earth might have a shot at containing them.
Even among their critics, who could have imagined then that, more than 16 years later, having faced only lightly armed enemies of various sorts, still wealthy beyond compare, still with a military funded in a way the next seven countries couldn’t cumulatively match, the United States would have won literally nothing? Who could have imagined that, unlike so many preceding imperial powers (including the U.S. of the earlier Cold War era), it would have been able to establish control over nothing at all; that, instead, from Afghanistan to Syria, Iraq deep into Africa, it would find itself in a state of “infinite war” and utter frustration on a planet filled with ever more failed states, destroyed cities, displaced people, and right-wing “populist” governments, including the one in Washington? Who could have imagined that, with a peace dividend no longer faintly conceivable, this country would have found itself not just in decline, but -- a new term is needed to catch the essence of this curious moment -- in what might be called self-decline?
Yes, a new power, China, is finally rising -- and doing so on a planet that seems itself to be going down. Here, then, is a conclusion that might be drawn from the quarter-century-plus in which America was both unchained and largely alone. The Earth is admittedly a small orb in a vast universe, but the history of this century so far suggests one reality about which America’s rulers proved utterly clueless: after so many hundreds of years of imperial struggle, this planet still remains too big, too disparate, too ornery to be controlled by a single power. What the Bush administration did was simply take one gulp too many and the result has been a kind of national (and planetary) indigestion.
Despite what it looked like in Washington once upon a time, the disappearance of the Soviet Union proved to be no gift at all, but a disaster of the first order. It removed all sense of limits from America’s political class and led to a tale of greed on a planetary scale. In the process, it also set the U.S. on a path to self-decline.
The history of greed in our time has yet to be written, but what a story it will someday make. In it, the greed of those geopolitical dreamers will intersect with the greed of an ever wealthier, ever more gilded 1%, of the billionaires who were preparing to swallow whole the political system of that last superpower and grab so much of the wealth of the planet, leaving so little for others.
Whether you’re talking about the urge to control the planet militarily or financially, what took place in these years could, in the end, result in ruin of a historic kind. To use a favored phrase from the Bush years, one of these days we may be facing little short of “regime change” on a planetary scale. And what a piece of shock and awe that’s likely to prove to be.
All of us, of course, now live on the planet Bush’s boys tried to swallow whole. They left us in a world of infinite war, infinite harm, and in Donald Trump’s America where cluelessness has been raised to a new power.
How the Last Superpower Was Unchained
American Wars and Self-Decline
Think of it as the all-American version of the human comedy: a great power that eternally knows what the world needs and offers copious advice with a tone deafness that would be humorous, if it weren’t so grim. If you look, you can find examples of this just about anywhere. Here, for instance, is a passage in the New York Times from a piece on the topsy-turvy Trumpian negotiations that preceded the Singapore summit. “The Americans and South Koreans,” wrote reporter Motoko Rich, “want to persuade the North that continuing to funnel most of the country’s resources into its military and nuclear programs shortchanges its citizens’ economic well-being. But the North does not see the two as mutually exclusive.”
Think about that for a moment. The U.S. has, of course, embarked on a trillion-dollar-plus upgrade of its already massive nuclear arsenal (and that’s before the cost overruns even begin). Its Congress and president have for years proven eager to sink at least a trillion dollars annually into the budget of the national security state (a figure that’s still rising and outpaces by far that of any other power on the planet), while its own infrastructure sags and crumbles. And yet it finds the impoverished North Koreans puzzling when they, too, follow such an extreme path.
Clueless is not a word Americans ordinarily apply to themselves as a country, a people, or a government. Yet how applicable it is.
And when it comes to cluelessness, there’s another, far stranger path the United States has been following since at least the George W. Bush moment that couldn’t be more consequential and yet somehow remains the least noticed of all. On this subject, Americans don’t have a clue. In fact, if you could put the United States on a psychiatrist’s couch, this might be the place to start.
America Contained
In a way, it's the oldest story on Earth: the rise and fall of empires. And note the plural there. It was never -- not until recently at least -- empire, always empires. Since the fifteenth century, when the fleets of the first European imperial powers broke into the larger world with subjugation in mind, it was invariably a contest of many. There were at least three or sometimes significantly more imperial powers rising and contesting for dominance or slowly falling from it. This was, by definition, the history of great powers on this planet: the challenging rise, the challenged decline. Think of it for so many centuries as the essential narrative of history, the story of how it all happened until at least 1945, when just two “superpowers,” the United States and the Soviet Union, found themselves facing off on a global scale.
Of the two, the U.S. was always stronger, more powerful, and far wealthier. It theoretically feared the Russian Bear, the Evil Empire, which it worked assiduously to “contain” behind that famed Iron Curtain and whose adherents in this country, always modest in number, were subjected to a mania of fear and suppression. However, the truth -- at least in retrospect -- was that, in the Cold War years, the Soviets were actually doing Washington a strange, if unnoted, favor. Across much of the Eurasian continent, and other places from Cuba to the Middle East, Soviet power and the never-ending contest for influence and dominance that went with it always reminded American leaders that their own power had its limits. This, as the twenty-first century should have (but hasn’t) made clear, was no small thing. It still seemed obvious then that American power could not be total. There were things it could not do, places it could not control, dreams its leaders simply couldn’t have. Though no one ever thought of it that way, from 1945 to 1991, the United States, like the Soviet Union, was, after a fashion, “contained.”
In those years, the Russians were, in essence, saving Washington from itself. Soviet power was a tangible reminder to American political and military leaders that certain areas of the planet remained no-go zones (except in what, in those years, were called “the shadows”). The Soviet Union, in short, rescued Washington from both the fantasy and the hell of going it alone, even if Americans only grasped that reality at the most subliminal of levels.
That was the situation until December 1991 when, at the end of a centuries-long imperial race for power (and the never-ending arms race that went with it), there was just one gigantic power left standing on Planet Earth. It told you something about the thinking then that, when the Soviet Union imploded, the initial reaction in Washington wasn’t triumphalism (though that came soon enough) but utter shock, a disbelieving sense that something no one had expected, predicted, or even imagined had nonetheless happened. To that very moment, Washington had continued to plan for a two-superpower world until the end of time.
America Uncontained
Soon enough, though, the Washington elite came to see what happened as, in the phrase of the moment, “the end of history.” Given the wreckage of the Soviet Union, it seemed that an ultimate victory had been won by the very country its politicians would soon come to call “the last superpower,” the “indispensable” nation, the “exceptional” state, a land great beyond imagining (until, at least, Donald Trump hit the campaign trail with a slogan that implied greatness wasn’t all-American anymore).
In reality, there were a variety of paths open to the “last superpower” at that moment. There was even, however briefly, talk of a “peace dividend” -- of the possibility that, in a world without contesting superpowers, taxpayer dollars might once again be invested not in the sinews of war-making but of peace-making (particularly in infrastructure and the well-being of the country’s citizens).
Such talk, however, lasted only a year or two and always in a minor key before being relegated to Washington’s attic. Instead, with only a few rickety “rogue” states left to deal with -- like... gulp... North Korea, Iraq, and Iran -- that money never actually headed home and neither did the thinking that went with it.
Consider it the good fortune of the geopolitical dreamers soon to take the reins in Washington that the first Gulf War of 1990-1991, which ended less than a year before the Soviet Union collapsed, prepared the way for quite a different style of thinking. That instant victory led to a new kind of militarized dreaming in which a highly tech-savvy military, like the one that had driven Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein’s forces out of Kuwait in such short order, would be capable of doing anything on a planet without serious opposition.
And yet, from the beginning, there were signs suggesting a far grimmer future. To take but one infamous example, Americans still remember the Black Hawk Down moment of 1993 when the world’s greatest military fell victim to a Somali warlord and local militias and found itself incapable of imposing its will on one of the least impressive not-quite-states on the planet (a place still frustrating that military a quarter-century later).
In that post-1991 world, however, few in Washington even considered that the twentieth century had loosed another phenomenon on the world, that of insurgent national liberation movements, generally leftist rebellions, across what had been the colonial world -- the very world of competing empires now being tucked into the history books -- and it hadn’t gone away. In the twenty-first century, such insurgent movements, now largely religious, or terror-based, or both, would turn out to offer a grim new version of containment to the last superpower.
Unchaining the Indispensable Nation
On September 11, 2001, a canny global jihadist by the name of Osama bin Laden sent his air force (four hijacked U.S. passenger jets) and his precision weaponry (19 suicidal, mainly Saudi followers) against three iconic targets in the American pantheon: the Pentagon, the World Trade Center, and undoubtedly the Capitol or the White House (neither of which was hit because one of those jets crashed in a field in Pennsylvania). In doing so, in a sense bin Laden not only loosed a literal hell on Earth, but unchained the last superpower.
Shakespeare would have had a word for what followed: hubris. But give the top officials of the Bush administration (and the neocons who supported them) a break. There had never been a moment like it: a moment of one. A single great power left alone, triumphant, on planet Earth. Just one superpower -- wealthy beyond compare, its increasingly high-tech military unmatched, its only true rival in a state of collapse -- had now been challenged by a small jihadist group.
To President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and the rest of their crew, it seemed like nothing short of a heaven-sent opportunity. As they came out of the shock of 9/11, of that “Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century,” it was as if they had found a magic formula in the ruins of those iconic buildings for the ultimate control of the planet. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld would instruct an aide at the Pentagon that day, “Go massive. Sweep it up. Things related and not.”
Within days, things related and not were indeed being swept up. The country was almost instantly said to be “at war” and soon that conflict even had a name, the Global War on Terror. Nor was that war to be against just al-Qaeda, or even one country, an Afghanistan largely ruled by the Taliban. More than 60 countries said to have “terror networks” of various sorts found themselves almost instantly in the administration’s potential gun sights. And that was just to be the beginning of it all.
In October 2001, the invasion of Afghanistan was launched. In the spring of 2003, the invasion of Iraq followed, and those were only the initial steps in what was increasingly envisioned as the imposition of a Pax Americana on the Greater Middle East. There could be no doubt, for instance, that Iran and Syria, too, would soon go the way of Iraq and Afghanistan. Bush's top officials had been nursing just such dreams since, in 1997, many of them formed a think tank (the first ever to enter the White House) called the Project for the New American Century and began to write out what were then the fantasies of figures nowhere near power. By 2003, they were power itself and their dreams, if anything, had grown even more grandiose.
In addition to imagining a political Pax Republicana in the United States, they truly dreamed of a future planetary Pax Americana in which, for the first time in history, a single power would, in some fashion, control the whole works, the Earth itself. And this wasn’t to be a passing matter either. The Bush administration’s “unilateralism” rested on a conviction that it could actually create a future in which no country or even bloc of countries would ever come close to matching or challenging U.S. military power. The administration's National Security Strategy of 2002 put the matter bluntly: the U.S. was to “build and maintain” a military, in the phrase of the moment, “beyond challenge.”
They had little doubt that, in the face of the most technologically advanced, bulked-up, destructive force on Earth, hostile states would be “shocked and awed” by a simple demonstration of its power, while friendly ones would have little choice but to come to heel as well. After all, as President Bush said at a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in 2007, the U.S. military was “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known.”
Though there was much talk at the time about the “liberation” of Afghanistan and then Iraq, at least in their imaginations the true country being liberated was the planet’s lone superpower. Although the Bush administration was officially considered a “conservative” one, its key officials were geopolitical dreamers of the first order and their vision of the world was the very opposite of conservative. It harkened back to nothing and looked forward to everything. It was radical in ways that should have, but didn’t, take the American public’s breath away; radical in ways that had never been seen before.
Shock and Awe for the Last Superpower
Think of what those officials did in the post-9/11 moment as the ultimate act of greed. They tried to swallow a whole planet. They were determined to make it a planet of one in a way that had never before been seriously imagined.
It was, to say the least, a vision of madness. Even in a moment when it truly did seem -- to them at least -- that all constraints had been taken off, an administration of genuine conservatives might have hesitated. Its top officials might, at least, have approached the post-Soviet situation with a modicum of caution and modesty. But not George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and pals. In the face of what seemed like the ultimate in possibilities they proved clueless when it came to the possibility that anything on Earth might have a shot at containing them.
Even among their critics, who could have imagined then that, more than 16 years later, having faced only lightly armed enemies of various sorts, still wealthy beyond compare, still with a military funded in a way the next seven countries couldn’t cumulatively match, the United States would have won literally nothing? Who could have imagined that, unlike so many preceding imperial powers (including the U.S. of the earlier Cold War era), it would have been able to establish control over nothing at all; that, instead, from Afghanistan to Syria, Iraq deep into Africa, it would find itself in a state of “infinite war” and utter frustration on a planet filled with ever more failed states, destroyed cities, displaced people, and right-wing “populist” governments, including the one in Washington? Who could have imagined that, with a peace dividend no longer faintly conceivable, this country would have found itself not just in decline, but -- a new term is needed to catch the essence of this curious moment -- in what might be called self-decline?
Yes, a new power, China, is finally rising -- and doing so on a planet that seems itself to be going down. Here, then, is a conclusion that might be drawn from the quarter-century-plus in which America was both unchained and largely alone. The Earth is admittedly a small orb in a vast universe, but the history of this century so far suggests one reality about which America’s rulers proved utterly clueless: after so many hundreds of years of imperial struggle, this planet still remains too big, too disparate, too ornery to be controlled by a single power. What the Bush administration did was simply take one gulp too many and the result has been a kind of national (and planetary) indigestion.
Despite what it looked like in Washington once upon a time, the disappearance of the Soviet Union proved to be no gift at all, but a disaster of the first order. It removed all sense of limits from America’s political class and led to a tale of greed on a planetary scale. In the process, it also set the U.S. on a path to self-decline.
The history of greed in our time has yet to be written, but what a story it will someday make. In it, the greed of those geopolitical dreamers will intersect with the greed of an ever wealthier, ever more gilded 1%, of the billionaires who were preparing to swallow whole the political system of that last superpower and grab so much of the wealth of the planet, leaving so little for others.
Whether you’re talking about the urge to control the planet militarily or financially, what took place in these years could, in the end, result in ruin of a historic kind. To use a favored phrase from the Bush years, one of these days we may be facing little short of “regime change” on a planetary scale. And what a piece of shock and awe that’s likely to prove to be.
All of us, of course, now live on the planet Bush’s boys tried to swallow whole. They left us in a world of infinite war, infinite harm, and in Donald Trump’s America where cluelessness has been raised to a new power.
Wednesday, June 13, 2018
SC167-7
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/49632.htm
The Real Economic Numbers: 21.5 Percent Unemployment, 10 Percent Inflation And Negative Economic Growth
Every time the mainstream media touts some “wonderful new economic numbers” I just want to cringe. Yes, it is true that the economic numbers have gotten slightly better since Donald Trump entered the White House, but the rosy economic picture that the mainstream media is constantly painting for all of us is completely absurd. As you are about to see, if honest numbers were being used all of our major economic numbers would be absolutely terrible. Of course we can hope for a major economic turnaround for America under Donald Trump, but we certainly are not there yet. Economist John Williams of shadowstats.com has been tracking what our key economic numbers would look like if honest numbers were being used for many years, and he has gained a sterling reputation for being accurate. And according to him, it looks like the U.S. economy has been in a recession and/or depression for a very long time.
Let’s start by talking about unemployment. We are being told that the unemployment rate in the United States is currently “3.8 percent”, which would be the lowest that it has been “in nearly 50 years”.
To support this claim, the mainstream media endlessly runs articles declaring how wonderful everything is. For example, the following is from a recent New York Times article entitled “We Ran Out of Words to Describe How Good the Jobs Numbers Are”…
The real question in analyzing the May jobs numbers released Friday is whether there are enough synonyms for “good” in an online thesaurus to describe them adequately.
So, for example, “splendid” and “excellent” fit the bill. Those are the kinds of terms that are appropriate when the United States economy adds 223,000 jobs in a month, despite being nine years into an expansion, and when the unemployment rate falls to 3.8 percent, a new 18-year low.
Doesn’t that sound great?
It would be great, if the numbers that they were using were honest.
The truth, of course, is that the percentage of the population that is employed has barely budged since the depths of the last recession. According to John Williams, if honest numbers were being used the unemployment rate would actually be 21.5 percent today.
So what is the reason for the gaping disparity?
As I have explained repeatedly, the government has simply been moving people from the “officially unemployed” category to the “not in the labor force” category for many, many years.
If we use the government’s own numbers, there are nearly 102 million working age Americans that do not have a job right now. That is higher than it was at any point during the last recession.
We are being conned. I have a friend down in south Idaho that is a highly trained software engineer that has been out of work for two years.
If the unemployment rate is really “3.8 percent”, why can’t he find a decent job?
By the way, if you live in the Boise area and you know of an opening for a quality software engineer, please let me know and I will get the information to him.
Next, let’s talk about inflation.
According to Williams, the way inflation has been calculated in this country has been repeatedly changed over the decades…
Williams argues that U.S. statistical agencies overestimate GDP data by underestimating the inflation deflator they use in the calculation.
Manipulating the inflation rate, Williams argues in Public Comment on Inflation Measurement , also enables the US government to pay out pensioners less than they were promised, by fudging cost of living adjustments.
This manipulation has ironically taken place quite openly over decades, as successive Republican and Democratic administrations made “improvements” in the way they calculated the data.
If inflation was still calculated the way that it was in 1990, the inflation rate would be 6 percent today instead of about 3 percent.
And if inflation was still calculated the way that it was in 1980, the inflation rate would be about 10 percent today.
Doesn’t that “feel” more accurate to you? We have all seen how prices for housing, food and health care have soared in recent years. After examining what has happened in your own life, do you believe that the official inflation rates of “2 percent” and “3 percent” that we have been given in recent years are anywhere near accurate?
Because inflation is massively understated, that has a tremendous effect on our GDP numbers as well.
If accurate inflation numbers were being used, we would still be in a recession right now.
In fact, John Williams insists that we would still be in a recession that started back in 2004.
And without a doubt, a whole host of other more independent indicators point in that direction too. The following comes from an excellent piece by Peter Diekmeyer…
Williams’ findings, while controversial, corroborate a variety of other data points. Median wage gains have been stagnant for decades. The U.S. labour force participation rate remains at multi-decade lows. Even our own light-hearted Big Mac deflator suggests that the U.S. economy is in a depression.
Another clue is to evaluate the U.S. economy just as economists would a third world nation whose data they don’t trust. They do this by resorting to figures that are hard to fudge.
There, too, by a variety of measures—ranging from petroleum consumption to consumer goods production to the Cass Freight Index—the U.S. economy appears to have not grown much, if at all, since the turn of the millennium.
In the end, all that any of us really need to do is to just open our eyes and look at what is happening all around us. We are on pace for the worst year for retail store closings in American history, and this “retail apocalypse” is hitting rural areas harder than anywhere else…
This city’s Target store is gone.
So is Kmart, MC Sports, JCPenney, Vanity and soon Herberger’s, a department store.
“The mall is pretty sad,” says Amanda Cain, a teacher and mother. “Once Herberger’s closes, we’ll have no anchors.”
About two-thirds of Ottumwa’s Quincy Place Mall will be empty with Herberger’s loss.
Of course it isn’t just the U.S. economy that is troubled either.
We are living in the terminal phase of the greatest debt bubble in global history, many nations around the globe are already experiencing a very deep economic downturn, and our planet is literally in the process of dying.
So please don’t believe the hype.
Yes, we definitely hope that things will get better, but the truth is that things have not been “good” for the U.S. economy for a very, very long time.
....
The world's complex economies have no choice but increasing contraction, with declining net energy and critical resources being the biggest reasons. Climate change will also be getting more and more severe, causing massive infrastructure damage which will add even more stresses to human habitat and living arrangements.
The Real Economic Numbers: 21.5 Percent Unemployment, 10 Percent Inflation And Negative Economic Growth
Every time the mainstream media touts some “wonderful new economic numbers” I just want to cringe. Yes, it is true that the economic numbers have gotten slightly better since Donald Trump entered the White House, but the rosy economic picture that the mainstream media is constantly painting for all of us is completely absurd. As you are about to see, if honest numbers were being used all of our major economic numbers would be absolutely terrible. Of course we can hope for a major economic turnaround for America under Donald Trump, but we certainly are not there yet. Economist John Williams of shadowstats.com has been tracking what our key economic numbers would look like if honest numbers were being used for many years, and he has gained a sterling reputation for being accurate. And according to him, it looks like the U.S. economy has been in a recession and/or depression for a very long time.
Let’s start by talking about unemployment. We are being told that the unemployment rate in the United States is currently “3.8 percent”, which would be the lowest that it has been “in nearly 50 years”.
To support this claim, the mainstream media endlessly runs articles declaring how wonderful everything is. For example, the following is from a recent New York Times article entitled “We Ran Out of Words to Describe How Good the Jobs Numbers Are”…
The real question in analyzing the May jobs numbers released Friday is whether there are enough synonyms for “good” in an online thesaurus to describe them adequately.
So, for example, “splendid” and “excellent” fit the bill. Those are the kinds of terms that are appropriate when the United States economy adds 223,000 jobs in a month, despite being nine years into an expansion, and when the unemployment rate falls to 3.8 percent, a new 18-year low.
Doesn’t that sound great?
It would be great, if the numbers that they were using were honest.
The truth, of course, is that the percentage of the population that is employed has barely budged since the depths of the last recession. According to John Williams, if honest numbers were being used the unemployment rate would actually be 21.5 percent today.
So what is the reason for the gaping disparity?
As I have explained repeatedly, the government has simply been moving people from the “officially unemployed” category to the “not in the labor force” category for many, many years.
If we use the government’s own numbers, there are nearly 102 million working age Americans that do not have a job right now. That is higher than it was at any point during the last recession.
We are being conned. I have a friend down in south Idaho that is a highly trained software engineer that has been out of work for two years.
If the unemployment rate is really “3.8 percent”, why can’t he find a decent job?
By the way, if you live in the Boise area and you know of an opening for a quality software engineer, please let me know and I will get the information to him.
Next, let’s talk about inflation.
According to Williams, the way inflation has been calculated in this country has been repeatedly changed over the decades…
Williams argues that U.S. statistical agencies overestimate GDP data by underestimating the inflation deflator they use in the calculation.
Manipulating the inflation rate, Williams argues in Public Comment on Inflation Measurement , also enables the US government to pay out pensioners less than they were promised, by fudging cost of living adjustments.
This manipulation has ironically taken place quite openly over decades, as successive Republican and Democratic administrations made “improvements” in the way they calculated the data.
If inflation was still calculated the way that it was in 1990, the inflation rate would be 6 percent today instead of about 3 percent.
And if inflation was still calculated the way that it was in 1980, the inflation rate would be about 10 percent today.
Doesn’t that “feel” more accurate to you? We have all seen how prices for housing, food and health care have soared in recent years. After examining what has happened in your own life, do you believe that the official inflation rates of “2 percent” and “3 percent” that we have been given in recent years are anywhere near accurate?
Because inflation is massively understated, that has a tremendous effect on our GDP numbers as well.
If accurate inflation numbers were being used, we would still be in a recession right now.
In fact, John Williams insists that we would still be in a recession that started back in 2004.
And without a doubt, a whole host of other more independent indicators point in that direction too. The following comes from an excellent piece by Peter Diekmeyer…
Williams’ findings, while controversial, corroborate a variety of other data points. Median wage gains have been stagnant for decades. The U.S. labour force participation rate remains at multi-decade lows. Even our own light-hearted Big Mac deflator suggests that the U.S. economy is in a depression.
Another clue is to evaluate the U.S. economy just as economists would a third world nation whose data they don’t trust. They do this by resorting to figures that are hard to fudge.
There, too, by a variety of measures—ranging from petroleum consumption to consumer goods production to the Cass Freight Index—the U.S. economy appears to have not grown much, if at all, since the turn of the millennium.
In the end, all that any of us really need to do is to just open our eyes and look at what is happening all around us. We are on pace for the worst year for retail store closings in American history, and this “retail apocalypse” is hitting rural areas harder than anywhere else…
This city’s Target store is gone.
So is Kmart, MC Sports, JCPenney, Vanity and soon Herberger’s, a department store.
“The mall is pretty sad,” says Amanda Cain, a teacher and mother. “Once Herberger’s closes, we’ll have no anchors.”
About two-thirds of Ottumwa’s Quincy Place Mall will be empty with Herberger’s loss.
Of course it isn’t just the U.S. economy that is troubled either.
We are living in the terminal phase of the greatest debt bubble in global history, many nations around the globe are already experiencing a very deep economic downturn, and our planet is literally in the process of dying.
So please don’t believe the hype.
Yes, we definitely hope that things will get better, but the truth is that things have not been “good” for the U.S. economy for a very, very long time.
....
The world's complex economies have no choice but increasing contraction, with declining net energy and critical resources being the biggest reasons. Climate change will also be getting more and more severe, causing massive infrastructure damage which will add even more stresses to human habitat and living arrangements.
SC167-6
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/49622.htm
Putin and Xi top the G6+1
East vs. West: the contrast between the “dueling summits” this weekend was something for the history books.
All hell broke loose at the G6+1, otherwise known as G7, in La Malbaie, Canada, while all focused on divine Eurasian integration at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in China’s Qingdao in Shandong, the home province of Confucius.
US President Donald Trump was the predictable star of the show in Canada. He came late. He left early. He skipped a working breakfast. He disagreed with everybody. He issued a “free trade proclamation”, as in no barriers and tariffs whatsoever, everywhere, after imposing steel and aluminum tariffs on Europe and Canada. He proposed that Russia should be back at the G8 (Putin said he has other priorities). He signed the final communiqué and then he didn’t.
Trump’s “I don’t give a damn” attitude drove the European leaders assembled in Canada crazy. After the official photo shoot, the US president grabbed the arm of new Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and said, in ecstasy, “You’ve had a great electoral victory!”
The Euros were not pleased and forced Conte to abide by the official EU, as in German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s, policy: no G8 readmission to Russia as long as Moscow does not respect the Minsk agreements. In fact it is Ukraine that is not respecting the Minsk agreements; Trump and Conte are fully aligned on Russia.
Merkel, in extremis, proposed a “shared evaluation mechanism”, lasting roughly two weeks, to try to defuse rising trade tensions. Yet the Trump administration does not seem to be interested.
“Strategic” game-changer
Meanwhile, over in Qingdao, the stunning takeaway was offered predictably by Chinese President Xi Jinping; “President Putin and I both think that the China-Russia comprehensive strategic partnership is mature, firm and stable.”
This is a massive game-changer because officially, so far, this was a “comprehensive partnership.” It’s the first time on record that Xi has put the stress on “strategic”. Again, in his own words: “It is the highest-level, most profound and strategically most significant relationship between major countries in the world.”
And if that was not far-reaching enough, it’s also personal. Xi, referring to Putin and perhaps channeling Trump’s bonhomie with leaders he likes, said, “He is my best, most intimate friend.”
Heavy business, as usual, was in order. The Chinese partnered with Russian nuclear energy giant Rosatom to get advanced nuclear technologies and diversify nuclear power contracts beyond its current Western suppliers. That’s the “strategic” energy alliance component of the partnership.
In a trilateral Russia-China-Mongolia meeting, they all vowed to go full steam ahead with the China-Mongolia-Russia Economic Corridor – one of the key planks of the New Silk Roads, known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
Mongolia once again volunteered to become a transit hub for Russian gas to China, diversifying from Gazprom’s current direct pipelines from Blagoveshchensk, Vladivostok and Altai. According to Putin, the Eastern Route pipeline remains on schedule, as does the US$27 billion liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant in Yamal being financed by Russian and Chinese companies.
On the Arctic, Putin and Xi went all the way for developing the Northern Sea Route, including crucial modernization of deep-water ports such as Murmansk and Arkhangelsk, and investment in infrastructure. The added geopolitical cachet is self-evident.
Putin had said last week that annual trade between Moscow and Beijing will soon reach US$100 billion. Currently, it stands at US$86 billion. Now Russian businesses venture the possibility of reaching US$200 billion by 2020 as feasible.
All this frenzy of activity is now openly described by Putin as the interconnectivity of BRI and the Russia-led Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU). Not to mention that the SCO itself interconnects with both BRI and the EAEU.
Putin told Chinese TV channel CGTN that though the SCO began as a “low-profile organization” [back in 2001] that sought merely to “solve border issues” between China, Russia and former Soviet countries, it is now evolving into a much bigger global force.
In parallel, according to Yu Jianlong, secretary general of the China Chamber of International Commerce, the SCO has now gathered extra collective strength to harness BRI expansion to increase business across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
So it’s no wonder companies from SCO nations are now being “encouraged” to use their own currencies to seal deals, bypassing the US dollar, as well as building e-commerce platforms, Alibaba-style. So far, Beijing has invested US$84 billion in other SCO members, mostly in energy, minerals, transportation (including, for instance, the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan highway), construction and manufacturing.
Putin also met with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on the sidelines of the SCO and vowed in no uncertain terms to preserve the Iranian nuclear deal, known as the JCPOA.
Iran is a current SCO observer nation. Putin once again reaffirmed he wants Tehran as a full member. The SCO charter determines that “a dialogue partner status can be granted to a country that shares the goals and principles of the SCO and wants to establish relations based on equal and mutually profitable relationship.”
Iran, as an observer, fulfills the commitment. The spanner in the works happens to be tiny Tajikistan.
Enter the trademark convoluted internal politics of the Central Asian stans, in this case revolving around Tajik president Emomali Rahmon accepting Saudi Arabia’s acquisition of a 51% stake in Tajikistan’s largest bank. Nobody else wanted it; Riyadh was just buying influence.
All SCO full members must be approved unanimously. Still, that won’t prevent larger economic integration between Iran, Russia and China. The talk in the SCO corridors was that Chinese companies expect an extra bonanza in the Iranian market after the unilateral Trump pullout of the JCPOA.
Behind closed doors, as diplomats told Asia Times, the SCO also discussed the crucial plan devised by the SCO-Afghanistan Contact Group, an Asia-wide peace process with Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan trying to finally solve the decades-long tragedy without Western interference.
So what about a G3?
The “dueling summits” clearly set the scene. The G7 meeting at La Malbaie represented the dysfunctional old order, dilacerated by largely self-inflicted chaos and its apoplexy at the Rise of the East – from the integration of BRI, EAEU, SCO and BRICS, to the yuan-based gold-backed oil futures market.
In contrast to the G7’s full spectrum dominance doctrine of total military superiority, Qingdao represented the new groove. Implacably derided by the old order as autocratic and filled with “democraships” bent on “aggression”, in fact it was a graphic illustration of multi-polarity at work, the intersection of four great civilizations, an Eurasian Café debating that another, non-War Party conducted future is possible.
In parallel, diplomats in Brussels confirmed to Asia Times there are insistent rumbles about Trump possibly dreaming of a G3 composed of just US, Russia and China. Trump, after all, personally admires the leadership qualities of both Putin and Xi, while deriding the Kafkaesque EU bureaucratic maze and its weaklings, currently represented by the M3 (Merkel, Macron, May).
In Europe, no one seems to be listening to informed advice, such as provided by Belgian economist Paul de Grauwe, who’s pleading for Frankfurt and Berlin to manage a common debt, without which the EU won’t survive the sovereign crises of individual members.
Trump, for all his dizzying inconsistencies, seems to have understood that the G7 is a Walking Dead, and the heart of the action revolves around China, Russia and India, which not by accident form the hard node of BRICS.
The problem is the US national security strategy, as well as the national defense strategy, advocate no less than Cold War 2.0 against both China and Russia all across Eurasia. All bets are off, however, on who blinks first.
Putin and Xi top the G6+1
East vs. West: the contrast between the “dueling summits” this weekend was something for the history books.
All hell broke loose at the G6+1, otherwise known as G7, in La Malbaie, Canada, while all focused on divine Eurasian integration at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in China’s Qingdao in Shandong, the home province of Confucius.
US President Donald Trump was the predictable star of the show in Canada. He came late. He left early. He skipped a working breakfast. He disagreed with everybody. He issued a “free trade proclamation”, as in no barriers and tariffs whatsoever, everywhere, after imposing steel and aluminum tariffs on Europe and Canada. He proposed that Russia should be back at the G8 (Putin said he has other priorities). He signed the final communiqué and then he didn’t.
Trump’s “I don’t give a damn” attitude drove the European leaders assembled in Canada crazy. After the official photo shoot, the US president grabbed the arm of new Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and said, in ecstasy, “You’ve had a great electoral victory!”
The Euros were not pleased and forced Conte to abide by the official EU, as in German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s, policy: no G8 readmission to Russia as long as Moscow does not respect the Minsk agreements. In fact it is Ukraine that is not respecting the Minsk agreements; Trump and Conte are fully aligned on Russia.
Merkel, in extremis, proposed a “shared evaluation mechanism”, lasting roughly two weeks, to try to defuse rising trade tensions. Yet the Trump administration does not seem to be interested.
“Strategic” game-changer
Meanwhile, over in Qingdao, the stunning takeaway was offered predictably by Chinese President Xi Jinping; “President Putin and I both think that the China-Russia comprehensive strategic partnership is mature, firm and stable.”
This is a massive game-changer because officially, so far, this was a “comprehensive partnership.” It’s the first time on record that Xi has put the stress on “strategic”. Again, in his own words: “It is the highest-level, most profound and strategically most significant relationship between major countries in the world.”
And if that was not far-reaching enough, it’s also personal. Xi, referring to Putin and perhaps channeling Trump’s bonhomie with leaders he likes, said, “He is my best, most intimate friend.”
Heavy business, as usual, was in order. The Chinese partnered with Russian nuclear energy giant Rosatom to get advanced nuclear technologies and diversify nuclear power contracts beyond its current Western suppliers. That’s the “strategic” energy alliance component of the partnership.
In a trilateral Russia-China-Mongolia meeting, they all vowed to go full steam ahead with the China-Mongolia-Russia Economic Corridor – one of the key planks of the New Silk Roads, known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
Mongolia once again volunteered to become a transit hub for Russian gas to China, diversifying from Gazprom’s current direct pipelines from Blagoveshchensk, Vladivostok and Altai. According to Putin, the Eastern Route pipeline remains on schedule, as does the US$27 billion liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant in Yamal being financed by Russian and Chinese companies.
On the Arctic, Putin and Xi went all the way for developing the Northern Sea Route, including crucial modernization of deep-water ports such as Murmansk and Arkhangelsk, and investment in infrastructure. The added geopolitical cachet is self-evident.
Putin had said last week that annual trade between Moscow and Beijing will soon reach US$100 billion. Currently, it stands at US$86 billion. Now Russian businesses venture the possibility of reaching US$200 billion by 2020 as feasible.
All this frenzy of activity is now openly described by Putin as the interconnectivity of BRI and the Russia-led Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU). Not to mention that the SCO itself interconnects with both BRI and the EAEU.
Putin told Chinese TV channel CGTN that though the SCO began as a “low-profile organization” [back in 2001] that sought merely to “solve border issues” between China, Russia and former Soviet countries, it is now evolving into a much bigger global force.
In parallel, according to Yu Jianlong, secretary general of the China Chamber of International Commerce, the SCO has now gathered extra collective strength to harness BRI expansion to increase business across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
So it’s no wonder companies from SCO nations are now being “encouraged” to use their own currencies to seal deals, bypassing the US dollar, as well as building e-commerce platforms, Alibaba-style. So far, Beijing has invested US$84 billion in other SCO members, mostly in energy, minerals, transportation (including, for instance, the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan highway), construction and manufacturing.
Putin also met with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on the sidelines of the SCO and vowed in no uncertain terms to preserve the Iranian nuclear deal, known as the JCPOA.
Iran is a current SCO observer nation. Putin once again reaffirmed he wants Tehran as a full member. The SCO charter determines that “a dialogue partner status can be granted to a country that shares the goals and principles of the SCO and wants to establish relations based on equal and mutually profitable relationship.”
Iran, as an observer, fulfills the commitment. The spanner in the works happens to be tiny Tajikistan.
Enter the trademark convoluted internal politics of the Central Asian stans, in this case revolving around Tajik president Emomali Rahmon accepting Saudi Arabia’s acquisition of a 51% stake in Tajikistan’s largest bank. Nobody else wanted it; Riyadh was just buying influence.
All SCO full members must be approved unanimously. Still, that won’t prevent larger economic integration between Iran, Russia and China. The talk in the SCO corridors was that Chinese companies expect an extra bonanza in the Iranian market after the unilateral Trump pullout of the JCPOA.
Behind closed doors, as diplomats told Asia Times, the SCO also discussed the crucial plan devised by the SCO-Afghanistan Contact Group, an Asia-wide peace process with Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan trying to finally solve the decades-long tragedy without Western interference.
So what about a G3?
The “dueling summits” clearly set the scene. The G7 meeting at La Malbaie represented the dysfunctional old order, dilacerated by largely self-inflicted chaos and its apoplexy at the Rise of the East – from the integration of BRI, EAEU, SCO and BRICS, to the yuan-based gold-backed oil futures market.
In contrast to the G7’s full spectrum dominance doctrine of total military superiority, Qingdao represented the new groove. Implacably derided by the old order as autocratic and filled with “democraships” bent on “aggression”, in fact it was a graphic illustration of multi-polarity at work, the intersection of four great civilizations, an Eurasian Café debating that another, non-War Party conducted future is possible.
In parallel, diplomats in Brussels confirmed to Asia Times there are insistent rumbles about Trump possibly dreaming of a G3 composed of just US, Russia and China. Trump, after all, personally admires the leadership qualities of both Putin and Xi, while deriding the Kafkaesque EU bureaucratic maze and its weaklings, currently represented by the M3 (Merkel, Macron, May).
In Europe, no one seems to be listening to informed advice, such as provided by Belgian economist Paul de Grauwe, who’s pleading for Frankfurt and Berlin to manage a common debt, without which the EU won’t survive the sovereign crises of individual members.
Trump, for all his dizzying inconsistencies, seems to have understood that the G7 is a Walking Dead, and the heart of the action revolves around China, Russia and India, which not by accident form the hard node of BRICS.
The problem is the US national security strategy, as well as the national defense strategy, advocate no less than Cold War 2.0 against both China and Russia all across Eurasia. All bets are off, however, on who blinks first.
SC167-5
https://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html
What's Wrong with the Economy: 9 Toxic Dynamics
Beneath the surface signals of an eternally rising stock market and expanding GDP, we all sense something is deeply, systemically wrong with the U.S. economy. These nine structural dynamics generate secondary dynamics, all of which are toxic to social mobility, sustainable prosperity, accountability and democracy:
1. The financialization of the economy, which transformed services, credit, risk and labor into commodities that could be traded globally. Financialization generates enormously asymmetric returns: those with access to low-cost credit, global markets and expertise in finance collect the lion's share of gains in income and wealth.
2. The technological transformation of the economy, which has placed a substantial scarcity premium on specific tech/managerial/communication skills and devalued ordinary labor and capital. As a result, the majority of gains in wealth and income flow to those with the scarce skills and forms of capital, leaving little for ordinary labor and capital.
3. The end of cheap fossil fuels. The fracking boom/bubble has obscured the long-term secular trend: the depletion of cheap-to-access and process oil. As many analysts have observed (Nate Hagens, Gail Tverberg, Richard Heinberg, Chris Martenson et al.), the global economy only grows if energy and credit are both cheap.
4. Globalization, which transformed the developing world into the environmental dumping ground of the wealthy nations and enabled the owners of capital to offshore waste and labor.
5. The destructive consequences of "growth at any cost" are piling up. "Growth" is the one constant of all existing political-economic systems, and none of the current Modes of Production (i.e. the structures that organize production, consumption, the economy and society) recognize that "growth" is not sustainable.
The first two dynamics drive three other dynamics that have hollowed out the productive economy:
6. The dominance of debt-funded speculation as the means of "getting ahead" as opposed to producing products and services of intrinsic value that serve the core needs of communities.
7. The economy's gains in income and wealth are concentrated in the very top of the wealth-power pyramid: the top 5%--entrepreneurs, professionals and technocrats, etc., and within this class, most of the gains go to the top 1/10th of 1% --the existing owners of wealth, and financiers/speculators with access to cheap credit.
The net result is the bottom 95% have few opportunities to "get ahead" outside of gambling in the asset bubbles du jour: the stock and housing market. While the average middle class household may be able to borrow enough to speculate in the housing bubble, two factors limit the odds of success for ordinary investors/gamblers:
A. The gains in housing are concentrated in specific markets; outside these hot markets, gains are modest.
B. Asset bubbles eventually pop, leaving those still owning the assets with losses. The risks are thus intrinsic and high. The average investor/gambler lacks the experience needed to recognize the bubble has stopped expanding and exit the market before ll the other speculators rush for the narrowing exit.
8. The devaluation of ordinary labor and capital means the bottom 60% of the economy that lacks the requisite skills with a scarcity premium in the Emerging Economy have lost easy access to the ladder of social mobility.
9. The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the self-serving few corrupts the economy and democracy. The U.S. economy is dominated by insider and elite rackets, skims, scams and cartels/quasi-monopolies, all of which corrupt the economy by creating perverse incentives for exploitation and gaming the system to benefit the few at the expense of the many.
This corruption in service of maximizing private/personal gains at the expense of the system itself also corrupts the mechanisms of governance, which are now little more than cloaking devices that protect insiders and elites from scrutiny and consequences.
The 20% above the bottom 60% may appear to have some access to social/economic mobility, but this is largely an artifact of the bubble economy since 2009. Once the bubble deflates, the illusion of social mobility for the "middle class" between the bottom 60% and the upper 20% vanishes.
The "upper middle class" between the bottom 80% and the top 5% is being squeezed by the over-production of elites, i.e. the over-abundance of those with college degrees and the relative scarcity of secure jobs within the top 5%. As a result, credential inflation is rampant, with Masters Degrees replacing Bachelors Degrees as the default for a white-collar job, and PhDs replacing Masters diplomas as the new default for positions that lack security and upward mobility.
In other words, the number of people who qualify for and desire a slot in the elite class (top 5%) far exceeds the number of slots available. As Peter Turchin has explained, this competition generates social disorder at the top of economic heap as the top 20% fight over the few positions open in the top 5%. The disgruntled, frustrated losers far outnumber the relatively few winners.
These nine dynamics are mutually reinforcing, meaning that each dynamic strengthens one or more of the others, reinforcing each other so the sum of the nine is far more powerful than a mere addition might suggest.
What's Wrong with the Economy: 9 Toxic Dynamics
Beneath the surface signals of an eternally rising stock market and expanding GDP, we all sense something is deeply, systemically wrong with the U.S. economy. These nine structural dynamics generate secondary dynamics, all of which are toxic to social mobility, sustainable prosperity, accountability and democracy:
1. The financialization of the economy, which transformed services, credit, risk and labor into commodities that could be traded globally. Financialization generates enormously asymmetric returns: those with access to low-cost credit, global markets and expertise in finance collect the lion's share of gains in income and wealth.
2. The technological transformation of the economy, which has placed a substantial scarcity premium on specific tech/managerial/communication skills and devalued ordinary labor and capital. As a result, the majority of gains in wealth and income flow to those with the scarce skills and forms of capital, leaving little for ordinary labor and capital.
3. The end of cheap fossil fuels. The fracking boom/bubble has obscured the long-term secular trend: the depletion of cheap-to-access and process oil. As many analysts have observed (Nate Hagens, Gail Tverberg, Richard Heinberg, Chris Martenson et al.), the global economy only grows if energy and credit are both cheap.
4. Globalization, which transformed the developing world into the environmental dumping ground of the wealthy nations and enabled the owners of capital to offshore waste and labor.
5. The destructive consequences of "growth at any cost" are piling up. "Growth" is the one constant of all existing political-economic systems, and none of the current Modes of Production (i.e. the structures that organize production, consumption, the economy and society) recognize that "growth" is not sustainable.
The first two dynamics drive three other dynamics that have hollowed out the productive economy:
6. The dominance of debt-funded speculation as the means of "getting ahead" as opposed to producing products and services of intrinsic value that serve the core needs of communities.
7. The economy's gains in income and wealth are concentrated in the very top of the wealth-power pyramid: the top 5%--entrepreneurs, professionals and technocrats, etc., and within this class, most of the gains go to the top 1/10th of 1% --the existing owners of wealth, and financiers/speculators with access to cheap credit.
The net result is the bottom 95% have few opportunities to "get ahead" outside of gambling in the asset bubbles du jour: the stock and housing market. While the average middle class household may be able to borrow enough to speculate in the housing bubble, two factors limit the odds of success for ordinary investors/gamblers:
A. The gains in housing are concentrated in specific markets; outside these hot markets, gains are modest.
B. Asset bubbles eventually pop, leaving those still owning the assets with losses. The risks are thus intrinsic and high. The average investor/gambler lacks the experience needed to recognize the bubble has stopped expanding and exit the market before ll the other speculators rush for the narrowing exit.
8. The devaluation of ordinary labor and capital means the bottom 60% of the economy that lacks the requisite skills with a scarcity premium in the Emerging Economy have lost easy access to the ladder of social mobility.
9. The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the self-serving few corrupts the economy and democracy. The U.S. economy is dominated by insider and elite rackets, skims, scams and cartels/quasi-monopolies, all of which corrupt the economy by creating perverse incentives for exploitation and gaming the system to benefit the few at the expense of the many.
This corruption in service of maximizing private/personal gains at the expense of the system itself also corrupts the mechanisms of governance, which are now little more than cloaking devices that protect insiders and elites from scrutiny and consequences.
The 20% above the bottom 60% may appear to have some access to social/economic mobility, but this is largely an artifact of the bubble economy since 2009. Once the bubble deflates, the illusion of social mobility for the "middle class" between the bottom 60% and the upper 20% vanishes.
The "upper middle class" between the bottom 80% and the top 5% is being squeezed by the over-production of elites, i.e. the over-abundance of those with college degrees and the relative scarcity of secure jobs within the top 5%. As a result, credential inflation is rampant, with Masters Degrees replacing Bachelors Degrees as the default for a white-collar job, and PhDs replacing Masters diplomas as the new default for positions that lack security and upward mobility.
In other words, the number of people who qualify for and desire a slot in the elite class (top 5%) far exceeds the number of slots available. As Peter Turchin has explained, this competition generates social disorder at the top of economic heap as the top 20% fight over the few positions open in the top 5%. The disgruntled, frustrated losers far outnumber the relatively few winners.
These nine dynamics are mutually reinforcing, meaning that each dynamic strengthens one or more of the others, reinforcing each other so the sum of the nine is far more powerful than a mere addition might suggest.
Tuesday, June 12, 2018
SC167-4
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/49610.htm
A Tale of Two Summits
It’s almost a surreal spectacle to see the world order shifting before our very eyes. The sight of the Western G7 summit collapsing in acrimony at the weekend was in stark contrast to a positive, resplendent Shanghai Cooperation Organization conference hosted at the same time in China.
Over the weekend, the tale of two summits illustrated more than ever an historic shift in the global order. The US-led Western order is evidently breaking down, giving way to a new multilateral paradigm led primarily by China and Russia. Potentially, the latter trajectory is one marked by genuine cooperation and peaceful relations, as opposed to the old US-led order marked by hegemony and unipolar ambitions which inevitably foment conflict.
US President Donald Trump’s abrupt and abrasive departure from the G7 summit in Canada spoke volumes. Over the weekend, Trump sparred with the other Western leaders plus Japan’s Shinzo Abe over various trade disputes. Then Trump pointedly bailed out early from the gathering in a snub to host Canadian premier Justin Trudeau, bound for Singapore to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un.
The symbolism was expansive. It was as if the American leader was showing disdain for an ineffectual forum, pursuing far more important matters. The rendezvous for Trump and Kim in Singapore also spoke of the Eastern impetus of a new geopolitical energy.
Trump is the first serving American president to ever meet a North Korean leader. Technically, the two countries are still at war from never having signed a peace treaty to end the 1950-53 war. That animus could all change this week if the two leaders strike up a rapport, possibly leading to de-escalation of military forces on the Korean Peninsula.
Kim arrived in Singapore two days before his scheduled historic meeting with Trump on Tuesday. The latter also arrived a day early. Kim’s highly unusual overseas trip – reportedly his third-ever as North Korean leader – was on board an Air China 747 courtesy of the Beijing government. Again, the symbolism was resonant. China was pragmatically facilitating this crucial encounter between the two adversaries.
The G7 summit Trump left behind was an embarrassing debacle. The leaders of Britain, Germany, France, Canada as well as European Union senior officials were incensed by the American president’s high-handed disdain for multilateral accord. Trump boorishly browbeat the supposed American “allies’ with complaints about “unfair” trade tariffs. It’s hard to know who is right in the trade dispute. But one thing was clear: the G7 group of Western nations plus Japan – a forum set up some 43 years ago – was in complete disarray from deep disaffection.
Trump’s combative stance threw the summit sideways before he even arrived in Quebec when he announced while leaving Washington that Russia should be readmitted to the G7. Russia was expelled from the former G8 back in 2014 over Western claims about Moscow interfering in Ukraine’s sovereignty.
The other G7 members, especially Britain’s premier Theresa May, were indignant at Trump’s offer to Russia. Only Italy’s newcomer populist Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte agreed with Trump’s position, which is consistent with how the new government in Rome wants to restore European relations with Russia. Another telltale sign of Eastward movement in international politics.
When the American president ambled into the G7 summit to be greeted by Canada’s Trudeau the body language was one of reluctance and awkwardness. The weekend descended into spats and insults. Trump even called Trudeau “dishonest” and “weak”. Meanwhile, French President Emmanuel Macron showed no fawning bromance as he had previously done towards Trump. Macron even called for a new G6 format without US “hegemony”.
The contrast with proceedings at the SCO summit in China could not have been greater. President Xi Jinping warmly greeted Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin as well as the leaders of India, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Iran. The convivial unity of those leaders was in sharp contrast to the disunity and bickering at the G7.
The presence of India and Pakistan as two new members of the SCO seated together after decades of war and conflict was a powerful testimony to the new geopolitical paradigm rising in the East.
The SCO nations vowed to redouble efforts for partnership in economic development and mutual security. President Xi said a new global order beckoned, based on partnership, not hegemony of one power asserting itself over the others, as is the case of the US-led order.
Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani expressed gratitude to Xi and Putin for leading the way in building a new global format based on multilateral respect. The Iranian leader thanked China and Russia for their steadfast support of the international nuclear accord, which Trump is trying to undermine by unilaterally withdrawing the US. It remains to be seen if the Europeans will adequately support the nuclear accord; but their ineffectualness in standing up to Trump at the latest G7 summit suggests that they won’t have the mettle to deliver on their avowed commitments.
Xi and Putin rightly reminded through public statements during the SCO gathering that the Trump-Kim meeting in Singapore this week is following their earlier endorsements for peaceful dialogue between the US and North Korea. Last year, when Trump and Kim were engaging in fiery rhetorical exchanges threatening nuclear war, it was China and Russia that both admonished peaceful dialogue as the only way forward.
The post-Second World War Western order that prevailed for over seven decades is undoubtedly waning. That order, dominated by the US, was always something of an illusion. Far from mutual partnership and high-browed virtuous claims, the US-led order was always about the dominance of American capitalism and imperialist objectives.
The Europeans were never really allies. They were appendages to American power. Now that American power has ebbed, the inter-Western rivalries are gaining sharper edges. American desire for hegemonic control is limited by its waning power, and so Washington is resorting to more brazen bullying tactics towards its supposed allies who are now realizing their true role as nothing more than vassals.
However, American unipolar “exceptionalism” is anathema in today’s world of global interconnectedness and consciousness of the principles of equality and diplomacy.
China and Russia, under the leadership of Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, are on an evolutionary level of political awareness that exceeds that of the US and its coterie of Western flunkies.
The SCO summit demonstrated starkly the new global order of partnership for progress and peace. The squabbling, backbiting G7 is the ashes of an old order.
This does not guarantee that world peace will prevail. The vision is surely there and growing thanks to China and Russia and others from the Eastern hemisphere. The crucial challenge is how the dying US-led Western empire of capitalist hegemony and imperialism can be safely transformed into peaceful, multilateral partnership.
A Tale of Two Summits
It’s almost a surreal spectacle to see the world order shifting before our very eyes. The sight of the Western G7 summit collapsing in acrimony at the weekend was in stark contrast to a positive, resplendent Shanghai Cooperation Organization conference hosted at the same time in China.
Over the weekend, the tale of two summits illustrated more than ever an historic shift in the global order. The US-led Western order is evidently breaking down, giving way to a new multilateral paradigm led primarily by China and Russia. Potentially, the latter trajectory is one marked by genuine cooperation and peaceful relations, as opposed to the old US-led order marked by hegemony and unipolar ambitions which inevitably foment conflict.
US President Donald Trump’s abrupt and abrasive departure from the G7 summit in Canada spoke volumes. Over the weekend, Trump sparred with the other Western leaders plus Japan’s Shinzo Abe over various trade disputes. Then Trump pointedly bailed out early from the gathering in a snub to host Canadian premier Justin Trudeau, bound for Singapore to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un.
The symbolism was expansive. It was as if the American leader was showing disdain for an ineffectual forum, pursuing far more important matters. The rendezvous for Trump and Kim in Singapore also spoke of the Eastern impetus of a new geopolitical energy.
Trump is the first serving American president to ever meet a North Korean leader. Technically, the two countries are still at war from never having signed a peace treaty to end the 1950-53 war. That animus could all change this week if the two leaders strike up a rapport, possibly leading to de-escalation of military forces on the Korean Peninsula.
Kim arrived in Singapore two days before his scheduled historic meeting with Trump on Tuesday. The latter also arrived a day early. Kim’s highly unusual overseas trip – reportedly his third-ever as North Korean leader – was on board an Air China 747 courtesy of the Beijing government. Again, the symbolism was resonant. China was pragmatically facilitating this crucial encounter between the two adversaries.
The G7 summit Trump left behind was an embarrassing debacle. The leaders of Britain, Germany, France, Canada as well as European Union senior officials were incensed by the American president’s high-handed disdain for multilateral accord. Trump boorishly browbeat the supposed American “allies’ with complaints about “unfair” trade tariffs. It’s hard to know who is right in the trade dispute. But one thing was clear: the G7 group of Western nations plus Japan – a forum set up some 43 years ago – was in complete disarray from deep disaffection.
Trump’s combative stance threw the summit sideways before he even arrived in Quebec when he announced while leaving Washington that Russia should be readmitted to the G7. Russia was expelled from the former G8 back in 2014 over Western claims about Moscow interfering in Ukraine’s sovereignty.
The other G7 members, especially Britain’s premier Theresa May, were indignant at Trump’s offer to Russia. Only Italy’s newcomer populist Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte agreed with Trump’s position, which is consistent with how the new government in Rome wants to restore European relations with Russia. Another telltale sign of Eastward movement in international politics.
When the American president ambled into the G7 summit to be greeted by Canada’s Trudeau the body language was one of reluctance and awkwardness. The weekend descended into spats and insults. Trump even called Trudeau “dishonest” and “weak”. Meanwhile, French President Emmanuel Macron showed no fawning bromance as he had previously done towards Trump. Macron even called for a new G6 format without US “hegemony”.
The contrast with proceedings at the SCO summit in China could not have been greater. President Xi Jinping warmly greeted Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin as well as the leaders of India, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Iran. The convivial unity of those leaders was in sharp contrast to the disunity and bickering at the G7.
The presence of India and Pakistan as two new members of the SCO seated together after decades of war and conflict was a powerful testimony to the new geopolitical paradigm rising in the East.
The SCO nations vowed to redouble efforts for partnership in economic development and mutual security. President Xi said a new global order beckoned, based on partnership, not hegemony of one power asserting itself over the others, as is the case of the US-led order.
Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani expressed gratitude to Xi and Putin for leading the way in building a new global format based on multilateral respect. The Iranian leader thanked China and Russia for their steadfast support of the international nuclear accord, which Trump is trying to undermine by unilaterally withdrawing the US. It remains to be seen if the Europeans will adequately support the nuclear accord; but their ineffectualness in standing up to Trump at the latest G7 summit suggests that they won’t have the mettle to deliver on their avowed commitments.
Xi and Putin rightly reminded through public statements during the SCO gathering that the Trump-Kim meeting in Singapore this week is following their earlier endorsements for peaceful dialogue between the US and North Korea. Last year, when Trump and Kim were engaging in fiery rhetorical exchanges threatening nuclear war, it was China and Russia that both admonished peaceful dialogue as the only way forward.
The post-Second World War Western order that prevailed for over seven decades is undoubtedly waning. That order, dominated by the US, was always something of an illusion. Far from mutual partnership and high-browed virtuous claims, the US-led order was always about the dominance of American capitalism and imperialist objectives.
The Europeans were never really allies. They were appendages to American power. Now that American power has ebbed, the inter-Western rivalries are gaining sharper edges. American desire for hegemonic control is limited by its waning power, and so Washington is resorting to more brazen bullying tactics towards its supposed allies who are now realizing their true role as nothing more than vassals.
However, American unipolar “exceptionalism” is anathema in today’s world of global interconnectedness and consciousness of the principles of equality and diplomacy.
China and Russia, under the leadership of Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, are on an evolutionary level of political awareness that exceeds that of the US and its coterie of Western flunkies.
The SCO summit demonstrated starkly the new global order of partnership for progress and peace. The squabbling, backbiting G7 is the ashes of an old order.
This does not guarantee that world peace will prevail. The vision is surely there and growing thanks to China and Russia and others from the Eastern hemisphere. The crucial challenge is how the dying US-led Western empire of capitalist hegemony and imperialism can be safely transformed into peaceful, multilateral partnership.
Monday, June 11, 2018
SC167-3
https://www.peakprosperity.com/blog/114097/facing-horrible-future
Facing The (Horrible) Future
Our fate directly depends on our courage to change it
I’d like to tell you a short story based on a movie that has had a profound impact on me.
I'll get to the story in a moment, but first, a little background on the movie...
It's called Griefwalker (by Tim Wilson) and it focuses on the life and wisdom of Stephen Jenkinson, a theologian and philosopher who worked as an end-of-life specialist for many years. Because we all must face death in our lives, inevitably our own someday, I highly recommend this movie and Stephen’s work to everyone.
After sitting at the death beds of a thousand individuals, Stephen has accumulated a wisdom regarding the process of dying that is perhaps unmatched in our modern times. His views and insights are extraordinarily powerful and extremely well-delivered in the movie.
Stephen is a blunt yet thoughtful man, and my own interview with him (Living with Meaning) remains one of my all-time favorites.
At one point in Griefwalker, Stephen was lobbed what I’m sure the interviewer thought was a soft-ball question. From memory, and I last watched the movie a few years ago so I’m certain to have this inexactly recalled, it was along the lines of “So, Stephen, you’ve learned how to ease people through the process of dying. How is that done?” I guess the idea was that after being so steeped and skilled at shepherding people through the process of dying, Stephen had arrived at some tidy formula for making it as gentle as possible.
Without blinking Stephen said, “Oh no. Dying for most people these days is horrible.” After a few shocked fumbly moments by the interviewer, and I confess to having been shocked too, Stephen continued, explaining that the physical process of dying can certainly be managed easily and well with palliative care, but the emotional journey can be quite terrifying (at first).
The reason why is because most people spend their entire lives pretending as if death is somehow avoidable. So when they find themselves dying, they suddenly have to confront the fact that they may have forgotten to fully 'live' during their one and only shot at life.
To suddenly realize the most precious thing you had was barely treasured along the way, never to be recovered, can indeed be a horrible moment.
As far as we know, we’ve only got one life to live -- and facing our end puts that into sharp focus. As Stephen says in his book Money and the Soul’s Desires, “Not success. Not growth. Not happiness. The cradle of your love of life … is death.”
To look back on one’s time on Earth and realize how much of it was spent not really being alive, not loving, not noticing, not being present with what is, is to realize that your one glorious ride was largely spent without reflection, depth or meaning. It was squandered. And there’s no undoing that fact. Again, that moment of realization is a bad moment.
I'm not writing this to push you to ponder your own demise, though that may be a healthy pursuit for many of us. Rather, I want to direct your attention towards a moment of horror that I think is coming – for all of us.
Where We're Headed
Travel with me to the future. Imagine that the year is now 2040.
If we suddenly woke in that year, what would we see in the world? More importantly, what would we not see? Which species would be missing? Which ecosystems will have utterly collapsed?
By extrapolating trends already in place (many of which are accelerating) we can easily predict a future world where there are no large animals left. Perhaps the last giraffe was killed and eaten by a hungry mob back in 2033, joining the White Rhino which was lost back in 2018.
Lions and tigers can no longer be found in the wild; their genetic stock hopelessly compressed into a few zoos and frozen test-tubes, should humans ever rally to justify the expense of trying to resurrect those species.
There are no coral reefs anywhere in the oceans, and essentially no diversity of life left in the seas at all. Acidification has upset and mostly ruined the ocean ecology from the bottom up.
First, we noticed that the oysters no longer successfully made it out of the larval stage. But by the time the scientists delivered a loud enough warning for all of the missing copepods and other vital zooplankton, it was already too late. The jellyfish had taken over. Nobody has a clue how to get the ecology to return to one that can support tuna, rockfish, dolphins, whales, seals and seabirds. Those are all gone -- starved, fished or hunted to extinction.
Worse, the ubiquitous jellyfish are entirely too efficient. In addition to decimating the zooplankton, the jellyfish are eating the phytoplankton responsible for generating most of the world’s oxygen -- their levels too low to continue being a positive force for oxygen release into the atmosphere. “Don’t worry!” scream the Tweets, "Scientists have found a new and better way in the lab to harness the sun to split water. We can make our own oxygen!" However, after the past 1,000+ lab 'miracle breakthroughs' that proved to be duds when attempted at scale, few have hope that this time will prove any different.
The vast systems offered by Nature -- more accurately, that were offered by Nature -- once taken for granted, are now fully appreciated by the people left on Earth. But it’s too late.
The insects are mostly gone, at least in terms of diversity. The terrestrial ecosystem balance that people knew and loved back in “the twenty teens” is gone and has been replaced by something far simpler and painfully less interesting. The failure to block neonicotinoid pesticides in time, as well as their more morally repugnant (yet legal!) derivations that outpaced activist’s ability to fight them, meant that entire classes of pollinators were lost.
With those, entire species of plants disappeared because they were utterly dependent on highly-specific pollinator services. Mankind's few lame attempts at creating “drone pollinators” were so utterly unfit for the task that the term became a profoundly disparaging insult, most frequently applied to ineffective politicians. “Looks like another useless bill being put up by the drone pollinator from New York.”
A few hardy bugs and roaches, lots and lots of ants (where are they all coming from?), and very few flying insects remain. No more large moths in the temperate climates, with such splendid examples as the Luna and Hawk moths now only existing as dead specimens in a few museums, right next to the dodo and African elephant displays.
And it’s been over 15 years since "the dawn chorus of birds" was a phrase that had any meaning. Nearly all of the migratory birds are gone, along with all of the insect eating species. It’s eerily silent outside in the morning. The sight of a single bumblebee, or a flash of colorful plumage, is cause for a quickening of your pulse -- the same physical reaction people once had when as noticing a movie star at a café.
Life, where it now exists in pockets, is revered. In nearly every place it remains, human guardians quickly dispatch any poachers or defilers, burying the bodies without remorse. Non-human life has become more valuable than human life.
Fossil fuels began peaking in 2030 in terms of total BTUs from all sources: oil, gas and coal. And while not crashing, they've unable to provide more, which exposed the 'continuous growth' model as being a cruelly-attractive mirage. Its handmaiden, debt-based money, was also revealed to be an artifact of the surplus energy from fossil fuels. Both models have failed.
As has retirement, a several-generation luxury never to be repeated again in human history. Everyone left alive has to work, if they want to eat.
With the loss of those fantasies, everything is now a difficult trade-off. Not surprising, many people are unable to cope with the consequences. Suicides are a leading cause of death, especially among those born during earlier and more abundant times.
Worst of all, food is now increasingly scarce due to a horrid combination of ruined soils and ever more frequent and destructive climate disruptions. Rains fall where they shouldn't and fail increasingly to fall where they should. Or they fall too hard, and too fast. Summers with temperatures of over 50C baked crops compounding water shortages, with several years' harvests lost entirely because the overnight temperatures did not cool sufficiently to allow for the open-air pollination of corn. Who knew?
How did we ever get to 9 billion people on Earth without considering that this moment might have arrived?
How did we allow ourselves to pretend that it wouldn't?
Why did we let the fantasy of relocating to Mars capture such a broad swath of our imagination and focus? Sure, we put an outpost there for a few years in the 2020’s, but – guess what? – it turns out that Mars is a hostile planet to life. It's utterly lacking in resources, it's much farther from the sun than the Earth, and managing a high-tech existence there was a colossal struggle. Of course we should have realized that going in and not placed so much of our species' odds on that hope. We spent hundreds of billions getting to Mars at the same time we were spending trillions to destroy Earth. What a horrible idea that was. In retrospect, it’s all so terribly obvious.
Another forlorn diversion was vertical farming, which posited that we’d just grow salad greens in container boxes. Of course, with some simple math and logic, we should have been able to realize that plants are calorie conversion machines, turning light energy into food energy. The idea that we were going to meaningfully replace the sun’s free and intense full-spectrum light with our own manufactured lighting, at scale and in sufficient quantities to meaningfully address the caloric needs of 9 billion people was…not very well thought through. Actually, in retrospect, that’s being too kind. We were deluding ourselves.
And so, out here in 2040, looking back, we humans have suddenly come to our collective moment of horrible realization. Because we could not face the idea that our specie's pursuit of collective growth had a predictable end, we forgot to properly care for the one planet we have.
Now that life on Earth is dying, the regret comes pouring out. Oh, how much we’d give to once again be able to hear a cacophony of birds in the morning! Or to swim over a thriving coral reef! Or to boat over an ocean teeming with fishes, whales and sea birds. Instead, the waters are now blank, sterile and depressing.
Remorse and regret. How could we have been so utterly stupid? How could we not have rallied in response to the warning signs, the endless string of increasingly desperate red flashing warning lights any one of which could have -- and should have -- been sufficient to motivate us?
Oh, what we would give to get one more chance! To go back in time and do things differently, protecting and preserving the Earth’s treasures as if…as if we were deeply in love with all of them.
Our Last Chance
In Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Scrooge is given the chance to return to his present and get another shot at life. If the 2040 vision I’ve painted terrifies you on a fundamental level as it does me, just know that there's still the chance to wake up and positively alter the course of events.
Yes, the trends are very bad, but they can be changed. As I am fond of saying, we already have all the knowledge and technology we need to be agents of regeneration and abundance instead of extraction and degeneration. We simply lack the right narrative to mobilize our society productively.
Go outside and rejoice in what nature has still to offer. Really see the next bird or mammal or insect you encounter. Each one is pure magic. Take a good hard look at the individual before you, not a robin, but that robin. Not a squirrel, but that squirrel. That bumblebee. Each is an individual, same as you. Each has a role, a life, and is busy making decisions and contributing to the story exactly how it is supposed to.
This world we have is the only one we’ll ever have. It’s the one we evolved on and to which our DNA blueprints are exquisitely crafted. And it’s not dying, it’s being killed. We might as well be honest about that and use the active verb.
Killed actively and on purpose, but also by negligence. We’re neglecting to notice what’s true: that humans are a part of, not apart from nature. We are one with the larger world. It’s time to wake up and live into that story. It’s not a new one, but something we forgot in our hasty failing efforts to escape its limits -- limits that disappointed our fragile egos which wanted, needed, to be special and different.
Life ends, and life begins. There’s an evolutionary impulse underway that has given this brief moment of geological history both humans and elephants. We cannot know where evolution is going or why, but we can feel the potential of it all.
Elephants, as well as all of life, should be revered and cared for not because children’s books need real-life examples, or zoos need fresh breeding stock, or even because Kenya needs tourist dollars. But simply because they are here. With us. In this time.
A certain humility needs to be adopted along the lines of We simply don’t know what role the special and peculiar sentience of elephants is playing, so we’d better protect it. Because we don’t know. If we remove that species from the web of life, what cascade may we create?
A Call To Action
I could dredge up all the perilous ecological data I publish often on this site, noting the decline in virtually every species -- with many being lost every day and many more on the brink. But I won’t.
There’s no need. You already know in your gut that something is very badly wrong in this story. Something even worse than killing the life on the planet, including our own.
No, what’s worse is that we can do better but we’re not. We can have immense empathy, and bond with both humans and non-humans alike. We are capable of dimly grasping our own role on this planet and yet we’re collectively continuing to act as if….we’ll live forever. If there are problems with that approach, we're assuming we'll figure them out as they arise.
But as Stephen Jenkinson pointed out, when the stakes are too high that leads to a horrible moment. To get serious about saving other species after they are already gone is a wildly immature idea.
But it is still in our power to avoid that horrible moment. That’s where the idea of a 'movement' comes in. Look, I have little clue about how to actually start a self-sustaining global movement, but I do suspect that it has to involve (1) the right idea at (2) the right time and (3) involve the right people.
We have to do this. I know the time is right because so many people are already deeply unhappy with suicide rates up 30%, opioid addictions and death skyrocketing, and levels of depression (more accurately termed demoralization in most cases) at never before seen levels.
Those are all expressions of people who have lost their will to engage with life, or even to continue living. That means a loss of meaning and purpose, a devastating loss. Adam's recent report gives a hard-hitting breakdown of the mental health epidemic our disconnected and unfulfilling modern way of life has created. Be sure to read it if you haven't already.
To truly “save the planet” is to actually undertake the harder proposition of “saving ourselves.” The planet will be fine … but humans? Maybe not so much.
Changing any of this will begin with each of us as individuals. We have to become the change we wish to see. We have to shift the narrative away from the old bankrupt idea of infinite growth on a finite planet, or that humans are apart from (rather than a part of) Nature, and towards a better narrative that aligns better with the world as it actually is.
This is a tough sell, for sure. Ultimately, it requires us to find a way past our instinctual drive for comfort and more 'stuff'. Waking up to the realities involved is not easy nor pain-free. It’s emotionally devastating at first. And who wants to go through that?
“Inattention to the world's ecological state is well advised. Because attention to it mitigates against your happiness, contentment, and your sense of well-being.”
“Having a conscience now is a grief-soaked proposition”
― Stephen Jenkinson
I do, for one. Why? Because to do so is to pass through the tunnel that brings me back to living fully into the one life that I have. I’m here to live, to make a difference, and to help usher new ideas into the world. The alternative is to face a bitter end-of-life moment that was unavoidable in the first place.
What needs to happen is to somehow awaken the people of the world to the actual nature of the predicaments we face, recognize their inevitability, and go through the wrenching adjustments necessary to realign our collective narrative with the objective truths of our times.
But how?
In some ways I'm encouraged, because so many people seem to be waking up. I know this terrifies The Powers That Be, who so desperately want to cling to their authority at any and all costs, because I track their efforts towards shaping the narrative. There’s nothing subtle about the ways that Wikipedia constantly degrades and disparages the pages devoted to anti-war activists while grotesquely supporting the neocon and war party efforts and related sympathetic journalists.
Twitter and Facebook are constantly stifling various views while elevating those that fall under the umbrella of promoting business as usual and protecting the ideas of those already in power. In other words: more war, more unfairness, and maybe some barely-passable lip-service to the idea that maybe we should devote a percent or two of our resources towards rear-guard actions to protect the environment. None of which are actually effective, of course, or else they would be immediately marginalized as the work of terrorists or malcontents.
All of which is to say that any revolution of thought won’t be televised, as they once said., Perhaps in today's age we should amend this to: The revolution won’t be posted to FB and then successfully re-Tweeted.
In other words, please don’t wait for this to appear on your radar before you take it seriously. It will only ever appear long after it’s far too late.
The revolution underway is already being conducted in places like our own site Peak Prosperity, as well as Charles Eisenstein’s, Charles Hugh Smith’s, Zerohedge, Jim Kunstler, and Craig Murray’s as well as countless others not named here. Each of these sites is committed to telling narratives that run counter to what the guardians in the MSM would like you to hear.
Each of these alternative websites is saying, in its own way, Hey the old way doesn’t even make sense anymore, is shot through with logical inconsistencies, and in many cases lacks even basic morality. Collectively, they're offering an invitation to see things differently, and to begin acting differently.
Our challenge is to remain focused, to promote the new ideas, and to be the leaders that are needed in these changing and difficult times. Our adversaries are those peddling fantasies that serve only to pacify our growing inner discomfort as the world dies around us, as well as those who seek to diffuse, distort and decay the new messages either for corporate or political ends.
Our various social media platforms are a slithering mess of ever-changing algorithms (making it hard to know who you are or aren't reaching with any given post), paid trolls, and bots programmed to deceive, slide, and/or derail any given conversation.
Which means we’ll need to be alert to those tactics and find other ways of remaining in touch. You’ll need to trust your own instincts, and avoid the numerous and sophisticated ways that we are being made to feel powerless, isolated, and even a bit crazy for thinking the things we do.
My personal strategy is to (severely) limit my time on Facebook, use Twitter only for data and never opinions, and then comment at sites like Peak Prosperity where the moderation is heavy and bots and trolls are quickly booted.
This movement will consist of good people taking right action. People who are willing to lead because they know it falls to them and they are not afraid to stand out and be different for a while. People who can read the data and know that it is correct because they can feel it in their bones.
The time for infinite growth is over. It’s increasingly obvious that the benefits of pursuing growth have nosed over, and that the human rocket is now pointed towards the Earth.
We still have time to right this ship, but it’s going to take heroic efforts by a lot of people. We need to be willing to give much and possibly lose even more. However, it won’t be futile sacrifice, because this is just how things are sometimes. You were born here and now, into these times, and your gifts are desperately needed.
We need each other. And you know what? Along they way we may just discover unity, purpose, meaning and our true individual gifts to bring forth.
My personal invitation is to support the mission of Peak Prosperity (“Creating a World Worth Inheriting”) by becoming an active premium subscriber so that Adam and I can continue to bring these messages to the world, along with promising models for a sustainable future. If not that, then please use your time and money to support others working in these areas, not least of which would be the important works of the individuals writing the blogs listed above.
It's only by facing the true nature of our predicaments that we can avoid a truly horrible future moment of deep and profound regret.
Time still remains, but it is running short.
We are open to any and all ideas about how to build, join or support a movement of like-minded people who are ready and able to shuck the old conventions and start anew which begins by facing the data as we know it today.
None of the former splitting/sorting functions of old apply here. So please don’t offer up one political party over the other, or any one country or system as being better, or ways we might vote new and better scoundrels into office, or tweaks to the existing exponential debt-based fiat money system that might extend things a bit longer. None of those hold any merit.
We need a new narrative and even if it cannot lay claim to “the truth” it cannot be based on obvious falsehoods. How do we create that new narrative in a way that it can be shared broadly? What needs to be done? Who should be involved?
Perhaps nothing needs doing, and this will all unfold of its own accord when its ready, but for those with an active “do” gene, like us, there are things to be done and efforts to be made.
So let’s get going. Either we do this on our own terms now, or we all face the horror of profound regret later.
The really good news? If we do this right, we reclaim our lives, our sense of meaning, our connection to each other and the sacred, and we fulfill our potential as creative stewards of planet Earth.
....
Unfortunately the human actions that are creating/ have created our increasingly dire situation are a result of the architecture of our minds, which means BAU will continue. There won't be any meaningful change to save us. You see it in the past, present, and it will be so in our future.
Facing The (Horrible) Future
Our fate directly depends on our courage to change it
I’d like to tell you a short story based on a movie that has had a profound impact on me.
I'll get to the story in a moment, but first, a little background on the movie...
It's called Griefwalker (by Tim Wilson) and it focuses on the life and wisdom of Stephen Jenkinson, a theologian and philosopher who worked as an end-of-life specialist for many years. Because we all must face death in our lives, inevitably our own someday, I highly recommend this movie and Stephen’s work to everyone.
After sitting at the death beds of a thousand individuals, Stephen has accumulated a wisdom regarding the process of dying that is perhaps unmatched in our modern times. His views and insights are extraordinarily powerful and extremely well-delivered in the movie.
Stephen is a blunt yet thoughtful man, and my own interview with him (Living with Meaning) remains one of my all-time favorites.
At one point in Griefwalker, Stephen was lobbed what I’m sure the interviewer thought was a soft-ball question. From memory, and I last watched the movie a few years ago so I’m certain to have this inexactly recalled, it was along the lines of “So, Stephen, you’ve learned how to ease people through the process of dying. How is that done?” I guess the idea was that after being so steeped and skilled at shepherding people through the process of dying, Stephen had arrived at some tidy formula for making it as gentle as possible.
Without blinking Stephen said, “Oh no. Dying for most people these days is horrible.” After a few shocked fumbly moments by the interviewer, and I confess to having been shocked too, Stephen continued, explaining that the physical process of dying can certainly be managed easily and well with palliative care, but the emotional journey can be quite terrifying (at first).
The reason why is because most people spend their entire lives pretending as if death is somehow avoidable. So when they find themselves dying, they suddenly have to confront the fact that they may have forgotten to fully 'live' during their one and only shot at life.
To suddenly realize the most precious thing you had was barely treasured along the way, never to be recovered, can indeed be a horrible moment.
As far as we know, we’ve only got one life to live -- and facing our end puts that into sharp focus. As Stephen says in his book Money and the Soul’s Desires, “Not success. Not growth. Not happiness. The cradle of your love of life … is death.”
To look back on one’s time on Earth and realize how much of it was spent not really being alive, not loving, not noticing, not being present with what is, is to realize that your one glorious ride was largely spent without reflection, depth or meaning. It was squandered. And there’s no undoing that fact. Again, that moment of realization is a bad moment.
I'm not writing this to push you to ponder your own demise, though that may be a healthy pursuit for many of us. Rather, I want to direct your attention towards a moment of horror that I think is coming – for all of us.
Where We're Headed
Travel with me to the future. Imagine that the year is now 2040.
If we suddenly woke in that year, what would we see in the world? More importantly, what would we not see? Which species would be missing? Which ecosystems will have utterly collapsed?
By extrapolating trends already in place (many of which are accelerating) we can easily predict a future world where there are no large animals left. Perhaps the last giraffe was killed and eaten by a hungry mob back in 2033, joining the White Rhino which was lost back in 2018.
Lions and tigers can no longer be found in the wild; their genetic stock hopelessly compressed into a few zoos and frozen test-tubes, should humans ever rally to justify the expense of trying to resurrect those species.
There are no coral reefs anywhere in the oceans, and essentially no diversity of life left in the seas at all. Acidification has upset and mostly ruined the ocean ecology from the bottom up.
First, we noticed that the oysters no longer successfully made it out of the larval stage. But by the time the scientists delivered a loud enough warning for all of the missing copepods and other vital zooplankton, it was already too late. The jellyfish had taken over. Nobody has a clue how to get the ecology to return to one that can support tuna, rockfish, dolphins, whales, seals and seabirds. Those are all gone -- starved, fished or hunted to extinction.
Worse, the ubiquitous jellyfish are entirely too efficient. In addition to decimating the zooplankton, the jellyfish are eating the phytoplankton responsible for generating most of the world’s oxygen -- their levels too low to continue being a positive force for oxygen release into the atmosphere. “Don’t worry!” scream the Tweets, "Scientists have found a new and better way in the lab to harness the sun to split water. We can make our own oxygen!" However, after the past 1,000+ lab 'miracle breakthroughs' that proved to be duds when attempted at scale, few have hope that this time will prove any different.
The vast systems offered by Nature -- more accurately, that were offered by Nature -- once taken for granted, are now fully appreciated by the people left on Earth. But it’s too late.
The insects are mostly gone, at least in terms of diversity. The terrestrial ecosystem balance that people knew and loved back in “the twenty teens” is gone and has been replaced by something far simpler and painfully less interesting. The failure to block neonicotinoid pesticides in time, as well as their more morally repugnant (yet legal!) derivations that outpaced activist’s ability to fight them, meant that entire classes of pollinators were lost.
With those, entire species of plants disappeared because they were utterly dependent on highly-specific pollinator services. Mankind's few lame attempts at creating “drone pollinators” were so utterly unfit for the task that the term became a profoundly disparaging insult, most frequently applied to ineffective politicians. “Looks like another useless bill being put up by the drone pollinator from New York.”
A few hardy bugs and roaches, lots and lots of ants (where are they all coming from?), and very few flying insects remain. No more large moths in the temperate climates, with such splendid examples as the Luna and Hawk moths now only existing as dead specimens in a few museums, right next to the dodo and African elephant displays.
And it’s been over 15 years since "the dawn chorus of birds" was a phrase that had any meaning. Nearly all of the migratory birds are gone, along with all of the insect eating species. It’s eerily silent outside in the morning. The sight of a single bumblebee, or a flash of colorful plumage, is cause for a quickening of your pulse -- the same physical reaction people once had when as noticing a movie star at a café.
Life, where it now exists in pockets, is revered. In nearly every place it remains, human guardians quickly dispatch any poachers or defilers, burying the bodies without remorse. Non-human life has become more valuable than human life.
Fossil fuels began peaking in 2030 in terms of total BTUs from all sources: oil, gas and coal. And while not crashing, they've unable to provide more, which exposed the 'continuous growth' model as being a cruelly-attractive mirage. Its handmaiden, debt-based money, was also revealed to be an artifact of the surplus energy from fossil fuels. Both models have failed.
As has retirement, a several-generation luxury never to be repeated again in human history. Everyone left alive has to work, if they want to eat.
With the loss of those fantasies, everything is now a difficult trade-off. Not surprising, many people are unable to cope with the consequences. Suicides are a leading cause of death, especially among those born during earlier and more abundant times.
Worst of all, food is now increasingly scarce due to a horrid combination of ruined soils and ever more frequent and destructive climate disruptions. Rains fall where they shouldn't and fail increasingly to fall where they should. Or they fall too hard, and too fast. Summers with temperatures of over 50C baked crops compounding water shortages, with several years' harvests lost entirely because the overnight temperatures did not cool sufficiently to allow for the open-air pollination of corn. Who knew?
How did we ever get to 9 billion people on Earth without considering that this moment might have arrived?
How did we allow ourselves to pretend that it wouldn't?
Why did we let the fantasy of relocating to Mars capture such a broad swath of our imagination and focus? Sure, we put an outpost there for a few years in the 2020’s, but – guess what? – it turns out that Mars is a hostile planet to life. It's utterly lacking in resources, it's much farther from the sun than the Earth, and managing a high-tech existence there was a colossal struggle. Of course we should have realized that going in and not placed so much of our species' odds on that hope. We spent hundreds of billions getting to Mars at the same time we were spending trillions to destroy Earth. What a horrible idea that was. In retrospect, it’s all so terribly obvious.
Another forlorn diversion was vertical farming, which posited that we’d just grow salad greens in container boxes. Of course, with some simple math and logic, we should have been able to realize that plants are calorie conversion machines, turning light energy into food energy. The idea that we were going to meaningfully replace the sun’s free and intense full-spectrum light with our own manufactured lighting, at scale and in sufficient quantities to meaningfully address the caloric needs of 9 billion people was…not very well thought through. Actually, in retrospect, that’s being too kind. We were deluding ourselves.
And so, out here in 2040, looking back, we humans have suddenly come to our collective moment of horrible realization. Because we could not face the idea that our specie's pursuit of collective growth had a predictable end, we forgot to properly care for the one planet we have.
Now that life on Earth is dying, the regret comes pouring out. Oh, how much we’d give to once again be able to hear a cacophony of birds in the morning! Or to swim over a thriving coral reef! Or to boat over an ocean teeming with fishes, whales and sea birds. Instead, the waters are now blank, sterile and depressing.
Remorse and regret. How could we have been so utterly stupid? How could we not have rallied in response to the warning signs, the endless string of increasingly desperate red flashing warning lights any one of which could have -- and should have -- been sufficient to motivate us?
Oh, what we would give to get one more chance! To go back in time and do things differently, protecting and preserving the Earth’s treasures as if…as if we were deeply in love with all of them.
Our Last Chance
In Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Scrooge is given the chance to return to his present and get another shot at life. If the 2040 vision I’ve painted terrifies you on a fundamental level as it does me, just know that there's still the chance to wake up and positively alter the course of events.
Yes, the trends are very bad, but they can be changed. As I am fond of saying, we already have all the knowledge and technology we need to be agents of regeneration and abundance instead of extraction and degeneration. We simply lack the right narrative to mobilize our society productively.
Go outside and rejoice in what nature has still to offer. Really see the next bird or mammal or insect you encounter. Each one is pure magic. Take a good hard look at the individual before you, not a robin, but that robin. Not a squirrel, but that squirrel. That bumblebee. Each is an individual, same as you. Each has a role, a life, and is busy making decisions and contributing to the story exactly how it is supposed to.
This world we have is the only one we’ll ever have. It’s the one we evolved on and to which our DNA blueprints are exquisitely crafted. And it’s not dying, it’s being killed. We might as well be honest about that and use the active verb.
Killed actively and on purpose, but also by negligence. We’re neglecting to notice what’s true: that humans are a part of, not apart from nature. We are one with the larger world. It’s time to wake up and live into that story. It’s not a new one, but something we forgot in our hasty failing efforts to escape its limits -- limits that disappointed our fragile egos which wanted, needed, to be special and different.
Life ends, and life begins. There’s an evolutionary impulse underway that has given this brief moment of geological history both humans and elephants. We cannot know where evolution is going or why, but we can feel the potential of it all.
Elephants, as well as all of life, should be revered and cared for not because children’s books need real-life examples, or zoos need fresh breeding stock, or even because Kenya needs tourist dollars. But simply because they are here. With us. In this time.
A certain humility needs to be adopted along the lines of We simply don’t know what role the special and peculiar sentience of elephants is playing, so we’d better protect it. Because we don’t know. If we remove that species from the web of life, what cascade may we create?
A Call To Action
I could dredge up all the perilous ecological data I publish often on this site, noting the decline in virtually every species -- with many being lost every day and many more on the brink. But I won’t.
There’s no need. You already know in your gut that something is very badly wrong in this story. Something even worse than killing the life on the planet, including our own.
No, what’s worse is that we can do better but we’re not. We can have immense empathy, and bond with both humans and non-humans alike. We are capable of dimly grasping our own role on this planet and yet we’re collectively continuing to act as if….we’ll live forever. If there are problems with that approach, we're assuming we'll figure them out as they arise.
But as Stephen Jenkinson pointed out, when the stakes are too high that leads to a horrible moment. To get serious about saving other species after they are already gone is a wildly immature idea.
But it is still in our power to avoid that horrible moment. That’s where the idea of a 'movement' comes in. Look, I have little clue about how to actually start a self-sustaining global movement, but I do suspect that it has to involve (1) the right idea at (2) the right time and (3) involve the right people.
We have to do this. I know the time is right because so many people are already deeply unhappy with suicide rates up 30%, opioid addictions and death skyrocketing, and levels of depression (more accurately termed demoralization in most cases) at never before seen levels.
Those are all expressions of people who have lost their will to engage with life, or even to continue living. That means a loss of meaning and purpose, a devastating loss. Adam's recent report gives a hard-hitting breakdown of the mental health epidemic our disconnected and unfulfilling modern way of life has created. Be sure to read it if you haven't already.
To truly “save the planet” is to actually undertake the harder proposition of “saving ourselves.” The planet will be fine … but humans? Maybe not so much.
Changing any of this will begin with each of us as individuals. We have to become the change we wish to see. We have to shift the narrative away from the old bankrupt idea of infinite growth on a finite planet, or that humans are apart from (rather than a part of) Nature, and towards a better narrative that aligns better with the world as it actually is.
This is a tough sell, for sure. Ultimately, it requires us to find a way past our instinctual drive for comfort and more 'stuff'. Waking up to the realities involved is not easy nor pain-free. It’s emotionally devastating at first. And who wants to go through that?
“Inattention to the world's ecological state is well advised. Because attention to it mitigates against your happiness, contentment, and your sense of well-being.”
“Having a conscience now is a grief-soaked proposition”
― Stephen Jenkinson
I do, for one. Why? Because to do so is to pass through the tunnel that brings me back to living fully into the one life that I have. I’m here to live, to make a difference, and to help usher new ideas into the world. The alternative is to face a bitter end-of-life moment that was unavoidable in the first place.
What needs to happen is to somehow awaken the people of the world to the actual nature of the predicaments we face, recognize their inevitability, and go through the wrenching adjustments necessary to realign our collective narrative with the objective truths of our times.
But how?
In some ways I'm encouraged, because so many people seem to be waking up. I know this terrifies The Powers That Be, who so desperately want to cling to their authority at any and all costs, because I track their efforts towards shaping the narrative. There’s nothing subtle about the ways that Wikipedia constantly degrades and disparages the pages devoted to anti-war activists while grotesquely supporting the neocon and war party efforts and related sympathetic journalists.
Twitter and Facebook are constantly stifling various views while elevating those that fall under the umbrella of promoting business as usual and protecting the ideas of those already in power. In other words: more war, more unfairness, and maybe some barely-passable lip-service to the idea that maybe we should devote a percent or two of our resources towards rear-guard actions to protect the environment. None of which are actually effective, of course, or else they would be immediately marginalized as the work of terrorists or malcontents.
All of which is to say that any revolution of thought won’t be televised, as they once said., Perhaps in today's age we should amend this to: The revolution won’t be posted to FB and then successfully re-Tweeted.
In other words, please don’t wait for this to appear on your radar before you take it seriously. It will only ever appear long after it’s far too late.
The revolution underway is already being conducted in places like our own site Peak Prosperity, as well as Charles Eisenstein’s, Charles Hugh Smith’s, Zerohedge, Jim Kunstler, and Craig Murray’s as well as countless others not named here. Each of these sites is committed to telling narratives that run counter to what the guardians in the MSM would like you to hear.
Each of these alternative websites is saying, in its own way, Hey the old way doesn’t even make sense anymore, is shot through with logical inconsistencies, and in many cases lacks even basic morality. Collectively, they're offering an invitation to see things differently, and to begin acting differently.
Our challenge is to remain focused, to promote the new ideas, and to be the leaders that are needed in these changing and difficult times. Our adversaries are those peddling fantasies that serve only to pacify our growing inner discomfort as the world dies around us, as well as those who seek to diffuse, distort and decay the new messages either for corporate or political ends.
Our various social media platforms are a slithering mess of ever-changing algorithms (making it hard to know who you are or aren't reaching with any given post), paid trolls, and bots programmed to deceive, slide, and/or derail any given conversation.
Which means we’ll need to be alert to those tactics and find other ways of remaining in touch. You’ll need to trust your own instincts, and avoid the numerous and sophisticated ways that we are being made to feel powerless, isolated, and even a bit crazy for thinking the things we do.
My personal strategy is to (severely) limit my time on Facebook, use Twitter only for data and never opinions, and then comment at sites like Peak Prosperity where the moderation is heavy and bots and trolls are quickly booted.
This movement will consist of good people taking right action. People who are willing to lead because they know it falls to them and they are not afraid to stand out and be different for a while. People who can read the data and know that it is correct because they can feel it in their bones.
The time for infinite growth is over. It’s increasingly obvious that the benefits of pursuing growth have nosed over, and that the human rocket is now pointed towards the Earth.
We still have time to right this ship, but it’s going to take heroic efforts by a lot of people. We need to be willing to give much and possibly lose even more. However, it won’t be futile sacrifice, because this is just how things are sometimes. You were born here and now, into these times, and your gifts are desperately needed.
We need each other. And you know what? Along they way we may just discover unity, purpose, meaning and our true individual gifts to bring forth.
My personal invitation is to support the mission of Peak Prosperity (“Creating a World Worth Inheriting”) by becoming an active premium subscriber so that Adam and I can continue to bring these messages to the world, along with promising models for a sustainable future. If not that, then please use your time and money to support others working in these areas, not least of which would be the important works of the individuals writing the blogs listed above.
It's only by facing the true nature of our predicaments that we can avoid a truly horrible future moment of deep and profound regret.
Time still remains, but it is running short.
We are open to any and all ideas about how to build, join or support a movement of like-minded people who are ready and able to shuck the old conventions and start anew which begins by facing the data as we know it today.
None of the former splitting/sorting functions of old apply here. So please don’t offer up one political party over the other, or any one country or system as being better, or ways we might vote new and better scoundrels into office, or tweaks to the existing exponential debt-based fiat money system that might extend things a bit longer. None of those hold any merit.
We need a new narrative and even if it cannot lay claim to “the truth” it cannot be based on obvious falsehoods. How do we create that new narrative in a way that it can be shared broadly? What needs to be done? Who should be involved?
Perhaps nothing needs doing, and this will all unfold of its own accord when its ready, but for those with an active “do” gene, like us, there are things to be done and efforts to be made.
So let’s get going. Either we do this on our own terms now, or we all face the horror of profound regret later.
The really good news? If we do this right, we reclaim our lives, our sense of meaning, our connection to each other and the sacred, and we fulfill our potential as creative stewards of planet Earth.
....
Unfortunately the human actions that are creating/ have created our increasingly dire situation are a result of the architecture of our minds, which means BAU will continue. There won't be any meaningful change to save us. You see it in the past, present, and it will be so in our future.
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