September | 2012 | Doomstead Diner

Monthly Archives: September 2012

The Acid Factory Forest

Published September 30, 2012 | By Jason Heppenstall

Off the keyboard of Jason Heppenstall

Published on 22 Billion Energy Slaves on September 29th 2012

Some Acid Factory rosehips

Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasbord inside the Diner

If you ever happen to find yourself flying to Copenhagen Airport you will no doubt take a metro train to the city centre shortly after landing. After you have been on the eerily driverless train for roughly three minutes you will notice that to your left you are passing a built up area of characterless blocks of flats, car parks and hotels. That’s where I live. In the other direction you’ll notice that you are passing close to the sea, with Sweden clearly visible across the Øresund, if the weather is good. In the foreground, just before the shoreline, you’ll notice huge mounds of dirt and tangled pieces of metal surrounded by earth moving equipment. Underneath it, although you could never tell, is the Acid Factory Forest.

Let me explain. I live on a road called Syrefabriksvej, which in English means Acid Factory Way. The reason for this is that quite a long time ago it used to lead to – you guessed it – an acid factory. Back in Denmark’s industrial heyday, if there ever was such a thing, the shoreline was covered with salt works, fish processing plants and factories. Then, by the 1970s or so, the fish had gone and production of goods was shifting overseas, meaning the factories shut down and the area became what is commonly called an urban wasteland.

Having a miniature rust belt did nothing for the island’s reputation whatsoever. The island I live on, you see, has always been the target of snobbery. In medieval times the contents of Copenhagen’s chamber pots were brought here and spread on the land as fertilizer, and henceforth the island was known as lorteøen – or shit island. By most accounts, it was populated by a particularly coarse breed of pig farmers, and in 1521 King Christian II, who was a great fan of everything Dutch, gave the southern section of the island to some farmers from Holland. His reasoning was that they could supply the royal table with quality fruit and veg – something he believed Danish farmers to be incapable of. They didn’t have to pay taxes and perhaps because of it all of Denmark hated them.

Amager (pronounced ‘Ama’ – the ger bit is silent – Danish is like that) continued to be unpopular. On the opening page of Søren Kierkegaard’s manifesto of existentialism Either/Or he declares that he’d rather live on Amager talking to the filthy pigs than live among the uncivilized philistines of contemporary Copenhagen society. I’m not sure if that was meant as a complement or not.

Anyway, today the pig farms are gone and covered in apartment blocks, 7-11s and pet grooming parlours. The shore line, where the old acid factory was, has been given an extreme makeover in the last six years, with a huge offshore island being built and fancy flats springing up here there and everywhere. You’re more likely to see a fashion shoot or a skateboarding contest than a blue-overalled worker down there these days. But one bit that nobody ever seemed like getting around to doing anything to was where the old acid factory had been. It covered quite an area, and there were the remains of many other factories there too, although I don’t know what they produced. Urban legend had it that the land was poisoned, which may well have been true.

Amager beach in 1950, when the area was a bustling industrial zone

Amager beach in 2012, now given over to leisure

Poisoned or not, nature had been allowed to take its course over the last 40 years and, until quite recently, a forest had grown up there. I used to go there regularly to recharge my psychic batteries. Denmark, you see, is a remarkably manicured country with barely a blade of grass out of place. Maybe it’s because the land was so flat and easy to tame that a culture grew up that could accurately be described as the cult of ‘neatness’. You know that picture of the American family with the picket fence? They were no doubt settlers from Denmark.You see it everywhere. Sometimes I think that the ideal home in these parts is a square Lego-type house on an immaculate lawn with not a single other living organism on the premises other than maybe a supermarket bought orchid artfully placed on the dining room table. Something a bit like this:

An idealised Danish house … for some

But the Acid Factory Forest was different. Here, there was a profusion of life. Through the concrete factory floors and the tarmac carparks and roads an army of saplings had burst forth, soon burying what remained of decades of human endeavor beneath a blanket of leaves and twigs and earwigs. It was a place of tall silver birches, adolescent oak trees, apple trees (perhaps from people tossing apple cores out of passing car windows), elberberry bushes, hawthorns, rosehips and many more. The trees were alive with birds, and I saw birds there that I never saw anywhere else in Denmark. But mostly it was populated by a sizeable unkindness of ravens, who sat looking down philosophically from the posts that held the rusty razor wire fence to keep people out up. Every time I saw these ravens I made an effort to say hello to them. After a time they grew used to me and, although I never managed to get a response out of any of them, I’m pretty sure that they understood some rudimentary English phrases after a while.

I loved visiting my urban forest and seeing all the wildflowers there in Spring and the amazing bounty of fruits and berries in the Autumn. I didn’t dare eat any of them, of course, as the warnings about poisoned soils were all too clear in my mind. Once, after reading a book about wild food, I decided to harvest some snails. The snails there were unlike any others I have seen in Denmark – they were giants! And they were everywhere. I picked up about 20 and put them in a huge jar, feeding them lettuce and parsley (tutored by my Italian father in law who is an expert snail eater – he said it would remove any ‘toxins’), and had big plans to fry them up in butter and garlic and invite a couple of friends around for a wine and escargot evening. I watched them slithering around for a week or two, and they watched me back with their slimy eyes on stalks. They looked so trusting. I grew to like them, and even had names for some of the more recognizable ones. Inevitably I couldn’t bear to eat them.

After a period of desperate rationalization, I rode back down to the Acid Factory Forest and gently placed them back where I had found them, bidding them a fond farewell as I left. The community of the forest had been reunited again. (Would the snails tell others of their adventures? Would the others believe them? Was I going crazy?)

But then, one day last year, something dreadful happened. An invasive species penetrated the nature zone – a predator so ruthless that it could only spell doom for all of the ravens and foxes and squirrels and hares that called the place home. Yes, an ape-like creature wearing a hard plastic hat and a fluorescent yellow jacket was seen surveying the site with a sextant and talking into a mobile phone. After only a few days more came, as if lured by this initial colonist. They worked methodically, and smoked cigarettes as they drove long white stakes into the ground at 100m intervals, dividing the land up in preparation for it being brought back into the orbit of human control. The ravens remained perched on the fence and watched all of this with their beady eyes, occasionally squawking something to one another in their indecipherable tongue. It was a bad omen to be sure.

But then, just as quickly as they had come, the men went away. For the entire winter and spring, nothing happened, and the denizens of the wasteland carried on living their lives in relative peace. But then, this summer, I went away for a week, and when I came back I noticed something odd. All of a sudden my flat had a sea view. Where before there had been the green froth of leaves there was now the icy blue of the Baltic Sea. I got on my bike and went down to investigate. When I got there it was a scene of utter destruction. A large machine was parked there which seemed to have some kind of giant double chain saw pincer attached to the front. It had evidently been over the whole area because nothing now rose more than a foot from the ground. The ‘debris’ was still there, and so were the ravens, who were all sat on the fence surveying the wreckage. Somewhere in it were all their nests, presumably with their young still in them.

I felt shocked, as if a family member or friend had been violently murdered. How could they do this? And to rub salt into the wound, they then sprayed the entire area in some kind of herbicide to ensure than no living thing would be left alive. It seems to succeed and after a few days the whole area was wilted and dead as if it had been sprayed with agent orange – which maybe it had.

I was depressed. The Acid Factory Forest had given me succour and strength throughout the times I had been depressed in the past, and now it was gone. There was nothing I could do. I mentioned it to a few local people but they were all unsympathetic. ‘Oh it was just an eyesore – a wasteland,’ they said in so many words. It attracted crime, it was being used to dump trash, teenage joyriders burned cars in it, somebody had been attacked there … it seemed like the place could do no good at all. There was nothing for it but to rehabilitate it and bring it back to a state of purity.

I wondered what had happened to all the resident wildlife. There was literally nowhere for it to go as the Acid Factory Forest had been surrounded variously by a beach (intersected by a busy road), Copenhagen Airport, a yachting marina and sterile suburbia. Only the ravens, I imagined, could get away – and they did. After a couple of weeks of staring at the devastation and cawing to one another they just left, en masse. I wonder how they made the decisions. When to go. Where to go. There is so much we don’t understand on this planet.

Over the coming weeks work went on at the site. The tree stumps were ripped up by another fearsome machine and bulldozed into great tangled piles before being loaded onto trucks and driven away. Then the ground was levelled and some kind of yellow plastic gauze was spread over the, perhaps, 40 acre area. After this hundreds – perhaps thousands – of truckloads of building debris was brought in and spread on the ground. Maybe it was the tower blocks they have been enthusiastically dynamiting around Denmark recently. Then on top of the debris went about a metre of clay. Beneath that huge mass of concrete, plastic and clay was a substrate layer of dying matter that was once a 40 year old forest. And some snails that had once been on an adventure.

A sign was erected outside the new barbed wire fences, showing what was to be done there. The land, it said, was being turned into a nature reserve as part of the city’s commitment to sustainable development. A CAD generated image showed what it would look like. It showed mostly immaculate grass with a few neat trees here and there with ‘contemplation benches’ for the computer generated Danes who were strolling around with shopping mall type contentment on their computer generated faces.

It was all too much and it caused me to think about all of the human follies to which we are susceptible. The greatest mistake of our age, it seems to me, is our inability to recognise that a linear accomplishment is trumped by a cyclical one. Every time we take a natural system and unleash a cataclysm upon it we are turning it from a very complex system with hundreds of different types of organisms (probably thousands if you go down to the micro level, which microbiologists tell us where it’s really at) into a very simple one of a handful of selected species which would never coexist in the natural world. To maintain the new equilibrium – in this case neat grass, a few selected trees and some water features – means a constant battle against the forces of nature which ‘want’ to turn it back into a ‘wasteland’ i.e. a piece of land that is useful to many species, but not us.

The wasteland of the Acid Factory Forest lives on on Google Earth, incidentally, which is yet to be updated.

This battle costs energy and money. It will take a few personnel with a variety of power-hungry machines to prevent the new ‘nature reserve’ from turning into a, well, nature reserve. And we know where the energy will come from to power those machines, and we know that using energy on hedge trimmers, leaf blowers and chainsaws for ornamental gardens will not be high up on the list of priorities during an energy crunch.

I have come to regard the whole Acid Factory Forest fiasco in a philosophical way. 40 years is but a blink of an eye in natural time, and one day this place, and plenty more besides it, will again be rich in life. I’ll be long gone by then. Wastelands like this will become wilderness one day. And many of the cities and towns that we live in will be a part of it if we truly extend our temporal range of consciousness to the far future. Who knows, maybe in the rubble of this flat on ‘Shit Island’ where I am typing this will one day be snuffled over by packs of wild pigs, hunting for acorns from the oak trees I have been surreptitiously planting in municipal parks and on road verges around the area. Or, more likely, the rubble will be home to crabs and oysters and the bricks of the kitchen wall I now see before me will be covered with seaweed and barnacles – the island is, after all, only a couple of metres above sea level, with much of it actually below.

After the trees had been removed the site was covered in plastic gauze

An adjacent area was left standing

The end result, standing with my back to the sea looking towards my apartment block

Postscript: After I wrote this a couple of days ago it has emerged – according to my well-placed source – that the local council has found itself with no money for planting trees or further developing the site. Work, for now, has stopped. In the meantime, some interesting new pioneers are forcing themselves up through the lifeless clay and rubble … pictures to follow.

***

The world’s first Holistic Real Estate Agent

Sustainable Properties for Sale

This is a shout out for my friend David Edge. I first met David in Spain when I interviewed him and his wife Aspen at their farm high up in the Sierra Nevada mountains for my very first newspaper article. They had bought a run down farm on a degraded piece of no-good desertifying land and through sheer hard work and determination turned it into a veritable green oasis in a parched yellow wilderness. David and Aspen used permaculture techniques and were heavily influenced by Allan Savory and his concept of ‘Holistic Management’ – and it was truly inspiring to see what they had achieved in the face of conventional wisdom.

Sadly, Aspen was struck down with cancer and died a couple of years ago and David was left with Semilla Besada, their farming project. He passed the project onto some new guardians and returned to his roots in Devon and he has now started a website with the aim of putting people in touch with one another who are seeking to buy or sell land or property that is suitable for living in in a sustainable manner. You could say that he is the first holistic real estate agent.

Anyway, please have a look at his new site and see if you can spare a minute to help him spread the word. As readers of this site will be aware, finding a place to live in which you can be a useful part of the ecosystem is one of the most important challenges we face. He is not doing it for money, although he does accept donations if it all works out for the buyer or seller.

You can see his site Sustainable Properties for Sale by clicking here and his Facebook site can be followed here. The site is fairly new but it covers properties worldwide – so it doesn’t matter where you live.

Posted in Environment, Home | Tagged Denmark, Ecology

Coming of Age in the Age of Oil

Published September 29, 2012 | By RE

Off the keyboard of RE

Discuss this article at the Kitchen Sink inside the Diner

In what seems to me at times like another life entirely, I reflect back on my years growing up in the Age of Oil. I wrote some about this in Pump Up the Volume and more about a later period in my life as an Over the Road Trucker. Still to come at some future date the Pigman Years on Wall Street, the School Teaching Years and so forth, and I still have more Chapters to write on the Over the Road years.

For today though, I am going to review experiences I had travelling around Europe in the summer after my HS Graduation. I graduated HS at the age of 16, On the Edge of 17. Skipped a couple of years through the period, moving back from Brazil I was placed up a year enrolling in the NY Shity Public School system, then in Junior High I went into the 2 Year “Special Progress” program they had which allowed you to do the normal 3 Years of JHS in 2 years.

Besides being chronologically pretty young on HS graduation, I also was physiologically pretty young. I looked probably about age 13-14 when I was travelling around Europe with a Backpack on the Interrail system. I shaved about once a week at the time to give you a clue as to where my morphology was at the time.

Anyhow, in the 2 years prior to HS graduation I took on summer jobs to save money for my Journey and also for the Hewlett Packard HP-35 Scientific Calculator I coveted to replace my Trusty Slide Rule. Actually ended up with an HP-45, which came out JIT for my Freshman Year of College at Columbia. Cost about half my Summer Earnings, and really I would have done fine with just a Slide Rule, but just HAD to have that cool piece of technology.

In the Summer after my Sophomore Year I worked in a Shower Curtain Factory in the Garment District of NYC, before all this shit was moved over to China. I was actually an Illegal Child Laborer that summer, because I was not old enough for Working Papers until the end of the summer on my Birthday. Nice Irony that the Son of a Chase Manhattan Pigman Bankster would be a Sweatshop Worker, at least for one summer, eh? LOL.

Anyhow, this was a Mom & Pop “Factory” which really just took up one floor of an old Warehouse, employed about 4 Hispanic and Chinese ladies Sewing the Curtains and ME putting the Grommet Holes and Grommets into the top of the Shower curtain. I worked at an entirely mechanical station where I would depress a floor pedal with my foot to cut the holes, then put Grommets into them and use another mechanical machine to squish the grommet halves together, the final completion of the Shower Curtain before Shipment out.

Needless to say, this was EXCEEDINGLY boring work, and by the end of the second week I was about ready to blow my brains out, except at the time I did not own a Gun. LOL. HTF anyone works these sort of Factory Assembly Line Job for a LIFETIME is beyond me. Over in China today, Foxconn Workers commit Seppuku on a Daily Basis, and I am not surprised in the least by that one.

Fortunately I had a friend from HS who had not been able to land a Summer Job, and I handed this job off to him and became the Shipping Clerk. This was WAY more interesting, I got to not only Fold the Shower Curtains Neatly, but also Tape the Package Closed, Label and Address it and Stamp it with the appropriate postage for its weight. Numerous tasks of a High Level of RESPONSIBILITY! LOL. Joking of course, but compared to stomping your foot over and over again making holes in the top of a Shower Curtain, this was positively INTERESTING stuff. LOL. Plus I was earning like $3/hr Minimum Wage and tucking it away in my savings account for my Journey and the Cool Calculator I wanted.

Despite the excruciating BOREDOM of this Summer of Work (my first experience in the “working” world), I somehow made it through without committing Seppuku and at the end had a few hundred DOLLARS in my Bank Account. My OWN MONEY!

The next Summer, I got my first Job on Wall Street, age 15. Courtesy of Dad the Pigman and his friend who was CEO of Merrill Lynch at the time. I was dropped into the Accounts Receivable Department at a Desk with an Adding Machine, and each morning a Pile of Checks would be dropped on my desk, and my Job was to punch them all into the Adding Machine and run a Tape to tally them up. You had to do this at least Twice and come up with the same result both times; if the results were different you had to go back through the tape to find the error, even if it was just 1 Penny. Then you had to run a new tape and get it all RIGHT. If you made a mistake on this one, Rinse and Repeat. Before you could turn in your work you had to have 2 perfectly clean tapes with exactly the same result on them.

Well, this also is Mind-Numbingly BORING stuff, and at the time I wasn’t all that great on a 10-Key Pad. So first off I was SLOW compared all the pro clerks whose fingers just FLEW over the 10-Key. Second, I generally sucked at this and made mistakes, and the typical Clerk in that sea of desks (no Cubicles at that time) could run 10 Tapes in the time it took me to run 1. However, I was put there by the CEO, so nobody complained how bad I was, and they were paying me just slightly over the minimum wage by $1. This however was better than Shower Curtain salary, and I found it marginally COOL at this time to put on a Collar Shirt and Tie each morning for something other than Church or a Wedding.

So in two summers of real “Work”, I managed to save somewhere in the negihborhood of $1500-2000 or so, including Birthday Money and Christmas Money and so forth. $350 1970s dollars of this went to buy my HP-45 Calculator, the rest I earmarked for my Big Trip to Europe! A similar Calculator to that HP can now be purchased for around $50 2012 dollars at Walmart.

First deal was to get over there as CHEAP as possible, and at the time a Brit by the name of Freddie Laker started Laker Airlines, run on the same principles of Greyhound Bus Lines, no Reservations you bought your Ticket at the Door and hopped on the Plane. The price of this ticket I recall was around $150 at the time.

Second Big Expense was the Railpass. I could have bought a 2nd Class Eurail Pass similar to the Interrail Pass the Eurotrash had access to, but I was advised to buy the 1st Class one, because you generally got several seats empty and could stretch out to sleep lifting up the armrests. This was a good Investment and worth the extra $200 or so I paid for a 6-week Railpass. Total cost I recall was $350 or so.

So all in all, the travel cost to get there and the cost of the railpass knocked off about $500 from the Savings, leaving me slightly over $1000 for 8 weeks in Europe. My Plan was to spend the First and Last Weeks in Jolly Old England around London so I didn’t need the Railpass for that. So Weekly Budget was around $125, about $18/day. If I spent $10 on a Hostel bed for the night, that left $8 to Eat with. However, while the Railpass was Active, I took mainly Night Trains and slept aboard the trains, saving money on Hostels this way. Also, when in the South of France and in Spain, I slept on the Beaches periodically with other wandering Eurotrash Teens and some Amerikan ones also. So actual Budget was probably closer to $25/day on days I did not buy a Hostel bed.

By the standards of the Eurotrash Teens Interrailing, I was positively LOADED with money, many of them had NO MONEY with them and just played their Guitars on the Streets to get Daily Change to eat with. Many of the girls would sleep with you just for a meal and a few bottles of beer.

The first girl I got involved with I did NOT get to sleep with, she was an “Older Woman” Brit Girl around 25. I met her on a London Bus 2 days after I got to London and she invited me to stay at her “Flat”. She was kind of Motherly and was surprised to see what looked to her like a 13 year old boy travelling around with a Backpack. She heard my “Amerikan Accent” talking to the Fare Collector on the Bus and started a conversation with me. Anyhow, she saved me several days of Hostels even though she refused my overtures for Nookie. LOL.

From there at the end of the Week I Activated my Railpass and got on a Hovercraft over to France, also covered with the First Class Eurail Pass. It also covered Ferries to Greece and Ireland, it was an incredible Bargain.

Arriving in Paris I walked around for a while navigating with a Map I picked up at the train station and a little Book I had which listed all the Hostels, restaurants etc that Students could go to on the cheap. However, the first two Hostels I hit were DUMPS, plus the Desk people in both places were RUDE beyond belief, and that is coming from a New York Shity boy quite used to Rude People. LOL. I stayed one night in Paris and headed for the Train Station in the morning, Destination SCANDINAVIA!

Like most 16 year old boys, the Numero Uno thing on my mind was SEX! I wasn’t travelling around Europe to absorb the Culture or eat Foreign Cuisine, I wanted to GET LAID! LOL. A few years before I headed to Europe the film “I am Curious, Yellow” had been released in the FSoA, it was a Swedish Produced X-Rated Film, the first such film I ever saw. Produced in 1967, but I don’t think it made it to the FSoA until the early 70s. At least I didn’t see it until the 70s, I am sure I was at least 13 or 14 when I saw it. The film convinced me Swedish Girls would jump into the sack at the drop of a hat. LOL.

Anyhow, arriving in Stockholm with a Roll of Quarters in my Pants (LOL), I was disappointed to find out that there weren’t too many Swedish girls running around Naked and besides that Stockholm was ridiculously EXPENSIVE. Even the Hostel was expensive and the restaurants were ridiculous. So once again I spent one night in Stockholm, then headed back to take the train to…AMSTERDAM!

Amsterdam was (and still is I think) famous for its Red Light District, where State Sanctioned Prostitution is Legal. Also plenty of DRUGS floating around Amsterdam at that time, it was the Hashish Capital of Northern Europe I think. There was also VERY cheap Hostelling available in Amsterdam, I stayed on a Barge in a Canal that charged $5/night. It was so cheap and entertaining I stayed in Amsterdam a whole Week, going to Dance Clubs, Smoking Hash at night on the Barge with the Eurotrash and even wandering the Red Light District to Buy some SEX. I never did though because first off the $50 the Pros were charging was Outta Budget, and second they just did not seem very appealing to me sitting in their Windows in Garter Belts and so forth.

I DID finally get laid in Amsterdam though, but NOT by Eurotrash, Dutch Prostitutes or Swedish Girls, but by another Amerikan! Met her in a Club, invited her back to my dive on the Barge and did the horizontal bop after Bonging several bowls of Hash with her! However, she ditched me after 2 days for somebody else. She was in Europe to do the same thing I was, collect Notches on her Gunbelt, without having her “reputation” sullied at home.

I did learn in Amsterdam though that the best ACTION was down in the South in Spain, Italy and Greece and that’s where all the Hot Topless Girls were to be found on the beaches also! So after getting Ditched by the Yank Slut it was off for the long Train Ride down south, and I elected to go to Greece first since I was nearing Midway in the Adventure. This was the furthest to get to and required a Ferry Ride from Brindisi in Italy over to Igoumenitsa in Greece as I recall.

Greece was really cool from the traditional Tourista viewpoint, checking out the Acropolis and Parthenon and so forth, the Food was cheap and great also but I didn’t meet any GIRLS there. Also, apparently the best places to Vacation in Greece were on the Greek Islands, and to get to them you had to have a Yacht for the most part. I went down to one of the Yacht Clubs to see about hooking on as Crew since I know how to Sail, and a Kraut dude with a really NICE 50′ Beneteau Yacht was agreeable to my crewing for him. Just when he made a pass at me after a few drinks I got the picture on that one and elected not to go for that cruise. Turned out to be a good choice since had I taken that cruise I would have missed meeting Ingrid later in Nice.

So I did not see much of Greece on this trip, it wasn’t until a cupla years later when I leased a Yacht with some friends that I got to Cruise the Greek Islands, which really were marvelous in those days and might still even be. The Plumbing was Crude to non-existent and many of the Tavernas cooked over open flame BBQs, but all the fish, feta cheese, olives, lamb chops and produce were Local so in theory they could still be OK. 35 years later though much has changed, so probably not.

So, it was back to the Port at Igoumenitsa to catch the Ferry back to Brindisi, where I met a Finnish couple, a Guy & Girl travelling together, quite common also of course. I’ll change some names here to maintain Anon some, call them Jensen and Janna. I met Jensen first, I was playing Chess against myself waiting for the Ferry and he asked me if I would like to Play some with him. This before the days you had laptop computers or I-Pads to play against of course. I had a little Pocket Magnetic Set I played on with me, and it was a pretty good conversation starter on all the Plane Rides and Train Rides I took. Almost always found a Chess Player in Europe.

Jensen was pretty good too, and he was funny in a Dour sort of way as well. We were playing for about an hour when Janna showed up, and OMFG she was STUNNING. I was IN LOVE with her the minute I saw her. Jesse’s Girl though. I was DETERMINED though I would get into Janna’s Pants, and after three days travelling with them I did. Unfortunately by day 5 Jensen figured this out, we got in a Fistfight, Janna was crying and pleading with Jensen telling him she was SORRY and I felt like a complete ASSHOLE, which of course I WAS! So I split off from Janna and Jensen in Italy after about 5 days of the Adventure of trying to STEAL another guy’s Girlfriend.

In Italy the first city I hit to check out after the split was Rome, and I did the Tourist thing checking out the Vatican and Michaelangelo’s artwork and so forth. I wasn’t looking for Nookie for a couple of days there, the experience with Janna and Jensen had made me feel very GUILTY and STUPID. But of course, being On the Edge of Seventeen and all by day 3 I was once again HUNTING for BABES! That is how it GOES when you are a Male On the Edge of Seventeen. Everybody Knows.

Nothing real good turned up in Rome, so it was back on the Interrail to head for Nice in the South of France this time, where I had been told the Beaches were PACKED with Topless Girls, which in fact was TRUE! On one of those Beaches I AT LAST met my Swedish Girl, again for anonymity purposes I will change the name here to Ingrid. I invited her to come with me to Venice, where I promised a Swell Hotel Room and she AGREED to come! She was with her Sister Ilsa though who had promised Parents back in Sweden to watch out for her, so she hadda come also. I was playing the part of Filthy Rich Amerikan Boy and really had done pretty well conserving my money for the first few weeks in Europe, so I felt I could AFFORD to buy a Swell Hotel Room for a few days.

On the train to Venice is where we met Torsten, the Danish Dude I spoke about in Jason Happenstall’s thread about Denmark. I visited with Torsten a few years later on another trip and got to see the Immaculate City of Copenhagen. Torsten and Ilsa Hit it Off, so now we were nicely Coupled Up by the time we arrived in Venice.

Upon arrival in Venice, we went a-walking around to find a Hotel Room, and came upon a Bed & Breakfast down an Alley that was pretty non-descript from the front, with an Old Italian Lady who managed it. She gave us a big bright SMILE when we came in, and asked how long we would like to stay. I said a Week, and her Smile got even BIGGER. LOL. It was $50/night, but $300 for the Week. She took us upstairs to the second floor and showed us the room. It was all OLD furniture, I mean REALLY OLD. The Bed where all the Banging went on was a four poster that probably was 100 years old at least. Lord Only Knows how many people Banged on that Bed over the Decades/Centuries. LOL. Despite the Age, it was all IMMACULATE. It had one Window which was Floor to Ceiling, and openning it it was right over a Main Canal with a FABULOUS view of this part of Venice. Had a tiny Balcony as well, though not really big enough to do anything but stand on.

Anyhow, I sure wish I could have stayed in that Bed & Breakfast FOREVER with Ingrid, but sadly I did not have an endless Deep Pocket plus I also had to start working my way back to Jolly Old England because my Railpass only had 6 weeks on it, and I already had used up about 4-5 of them. So sadly with tears in my eyes, I bid adieu to my Swedish Amour and began my journey back to England, with my Stash of Cash now seriously Depleted. In fact, I had barely more than the cost of the $150 Ticket on Freddie Laker’s Air Bus necessary to make it back to the FSofA after this adventure. I spent FREELY buying us great dinners in Venice and plenty of nice bottles of Italian Wine as well, so there was just about nothing left for me to eat on for the trip back. Weeks of work in the Shower Curtain Factory and pounding the 10-Key at Merrill Lynch were spent in that one wonderful week. I bought Baguettes and Cheese at Grocery Stores, slept on the trains and in the train stations for the 3-4 days it took me to get back to London. I lived on the approximately $2/day the typical 3rd Worlder lives on now, except in 1970s Dollars which bought substantially more then. I also had the Pre-Paid Railpass as well of course.

I had hoped to be able to crash again with the Brit Mommy type who befriended me when I arrived in London, but she apparently was not in town or busy when I got back. I called her twice the first day and never got an answer, this in the days before Answering Machines and Voicemail. She probably was on Vacation or just not home.

The REASON I called her was this:

All the Students and other Cheap Travellers who had come over to Eurotrashland through the Summer all converged on London at the end of the summer in the last week before the Colleges reopenned for the Fall Semester here in the FSoA. Freddie was only running a few planes, and they could not handle so many passengers all at once. The rest of the Airline Tickets were double or triple his price. So THE BIG QUEUE formed along the Thames river, hundreds if not thousands of young Amerikans seeking to get BACK to the FSoA all at once on the cheap flights of Freddie Laker. It took DAYS of waiting in this Queue, which was very informal really, Freddy did not organize it, we did.

Along the Thames River, hundreds of Shanty shacks were set up by Students with No Tents with them. They were constructed from Plastic, Pallets, Scrap Wood, old newspapers and Boxes from Grocery stores. The average wait was 2-3 days in the queue. I have Googled to find Pictures of this time, but apparently either nobody ever put them up or else Google won’t find them. The Entrepreneurs walked the line Hawking T-shirts which read “Better Laker than Never” and “‘Sooner or Laker“. Not a lot different than an OWS encampment, just not as nice with commercially produced Tents and Tarps.

Unlike my less well prepped neighbors, I DID have a Tent, and an Air Matress too! This made me a VERY popular guy amongst the Ladies, even more Popular than the guys who had some Hash to smoke. So the 3 Days I spent on the Big Queue on the Thames River were actually a lot of FUN and I would have stayed longer except I was 100% OUT OF CASH even for Food so I hadda get home. Besides, Freshman Orientation at Columbia was starting in around 2 or 3 days.

Now, in a conversation a while back with Diner Karpatok, I mentioned that I was “Serially Monogamous” and did not Indiscriminately Bang a lot of Coeds in College. This story of course belies that claim, but the Eurail Adventure was an anomaly and only represents 8 weeks out of my whole life. In total during that 2 months I think I banged 5 different girls, which was more than in all my years of College. That was what all the Teens and 20s Interrailing were DOING! It was the whole reason for making these Journeys. It represented a form of Coming of Age in the Age of Oil over in Europe.

Is there anything else which makes this Article “Peak Oil” and “Collapse” related? Not on the surface of course, it’s just more Autobio off my keyboard so the readers get a better Picture of the guy who writes all the DOOM on the pages of the Doomstead Diner. But in subtext there is much related to these themes.

First off, the Cheap Airfare which got me over to Europe in the first place is among the first thing that is going to dissappear here, and horny HS Graduates here who want to go traipsing around Europe looking for I Am Curious Yellow Swedish Girls will not be doing this much longer. The Swedish Girls themselves won’t be travelling around doing this either in Spain and Greece, where they are likely to get caught up in a Riot. Many people all travelling around willy-nilly being “Tourists” is going the way of the Dinosaur here, and will not return anytime too soon.

The next relationship is the Eurail system itself, probably the most comprehensive Inter-City Mass Transit system anywhere in the entire world. Because of it, if any neighborhood can survive to maintain an Industrialized lifestyle for a while WITHOUT Carz, it is in Europe. Only though for as long as they can keep those Trains running, and the Rail system in Eurotrashland has ALWAYS been Goobermint Subsidized, never paid for itself in any way. It’s pretty hard to imagine how the Greek and Spanish Goobermints are going to be able to afford to subsidize their portions of the Network here pretty soon. Not to mention the Tres Gran Vitesse.

Beyond the Financial problem of running that rail system is the Energy problem. Even though they mostly do not use Oil or Gas like Carz do for their energy input, its going to become harder and harder for all these countries to get enough Coal and/or Nat Gas to provide enough Electricity to keep them running. Its unlikely anyone will build anymore Nukes there for Electricity Generation, and you can’t push Big Trains around with Windmills. So even though the Rail System might run a few more years than the Carz/Trucks system, its longer term sustainability likelihood is equally small. Besides, without Touristas zipping around on these Trains to Gawk at Old Buildings, eat in 5-Star Restaurants or Bang Swedish Girls, such Inter-City transport does not have a whole lot of Utility. The main thing the rail system might be used for as long as it can be maintained would be to move FOOD around Europe and keep the population somewhat fed.. Except probem there would be that each Country doesn’t really have much Surplus Food to ship to any other country, particularly not once the Tractors run Outta Gas.

The Europeans were the first to Industrialize with the Steam Engine used at first mainly to pump water out of Coal Mines so more Coal could be Mined to provide Energy for said Steam Engines, in a “Virtuous Economic Cycle” for so long as there was Plenty-o-Cheap Coal to mine anyhow. In Fitting Irony here, it also appears the Europeans are going to be the First of the major Industrialized societies to fall off this Energy and Economic Cliff, and we can continue here to watch them as the Canary in the Coal Mine for what will eventually Cross the Pond and come down here as well.

How LONG will it take for this to Cross the Pond? This remains an unanswered question, but it doesn’t seem to me like it will be all that long here. It seems to me that this Journey, the Journey to the End of the Age of Oil is…wait for it…

…Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You.

Posted in Feature, Home | Tagged Eurail, Europe, Greece, Interrail, Italy, Scandinavia, Spain, TGV

Land of the Rising Sun

Published September 28, 2012 | By Morris Berman

Off the keyboard of Morris Berman

Published on Dark Ages America on September 28th 2012

Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasbord inside the Diner

Dear Wafers, I fly to Japan early Monday morning, and will be there for six weeks. I don’t know what the Internet cafe situation is there, esp. since I’ll be spending two weeks in the wilds of Northeast Honshu; plus, I’ll need to concentrate on my research while I’m there. So as of Monday, things will be kind of iffy on this blog, touch and go. I’m telling you this so you know that messages might not get posted for a while. But never fear: I’ll be back, and hopefully everything sent in will get preserved. Meanwhile, I wanted to ramble a bit about how I got into this project, and what my thoughts are about it at this point in time. One of my early books (1981) was The Reenchantment of the World–the only best-seller I ever had. I guess it hit the market at just the right time, when there was a lot of interest in holistic healing and nonscientific systems of thought. The book generated a lot of interest because of its central, radical thesis: that in their own terms, these nonscientific thought systems were true; that they described a world that did, to a great degree, exist. And that if the scientific world view was also true, it was so in its terms, i.e. the parameters of the modern world. This didn’t mean that I believed (for example) that arrows fell to earth in a straight line (Aristotle) prior to the Scientific Revolution, and that they changed their trajectory to a parabola around 1600 (Galileo). (Man, wouldn’t that be a hoot.) Rather, that in the rush to modernity, the baby got thrown out with the bathwater: a whole world of learning, an alternate sensibility, got lost. This, I still believe, and I believe that we are much poorer for it, despite the very real benefits of the modern world. (A theme, I should add, that is echoed in Ursula Le Guin’s brilliant novel, The Telling.) (Much to my surprise, I still get letters from folks out there saying, “That book changed my life.” This not from folks who took too much acid back in the 60s, but from philsophers, therapists, and people who have their critical faculties very much intact.) I wouldn’t call it my best book, and if I were to rewrite it today, I certainly would change a lot of what I originally wrote. As Noam Chomsky once remarked, if you are a professor and are giving the same lectures 20 years on from the same yellowed notes, it might be time to start thinking about retirement. Any scholar worth his or her salt is not going to agree with everything s/he wrote 31 years ago. And yet, there are a few themes that remain more or less consistent within the body of my work, and one of these is the costs of modernity. Modernity certainly has its blessings, and these are continually celebrated both in academic works as well as in the popular press. The costs of modernity, on the other hand, the aspects of the premodern era that were really valuable (as well as true)–well, these are things that most writers are not terribly interested in; and in the US, of course, at least 99% of the population is not even aware that there is an issue here. My interest in Japan was born many years ago out of a fascination with its craft tradition, which is one of the most breathtaking the world has ever known. I remember my high school English teacher, Harold Sliker–this around 1960, when teachers were dedicated and students paid attention in class, and were still able to read–talked about the Japanese tradition of sword making, and how the artisan would fast and meditate for three days before beginning the work, and then would forge the hot steel by repeatedly folding it over, and tempering it, until the result was a brilliant blade. I was fascinated by this, but never followed it up. Well, not as a teenager, at any rate. Years later, however, when I was writing the Reenchantment book, I found the same sort of dedication in the Western alchemical tradition. Care, dedication, tradition, craft, community, infinite patience–this was the baby that got thrown out with the bathwater.

Of course, I realize that there is a socioeconomic and political context here that makes the whole subject tricky. It is perhaps not an accident that Heidegger joined the Nazi party, and that the Nazis got involved in a weird amalgam of tradition and modernity that the historian Jeffrey Herf aptly calls Reactionary Modernism. Or that the world of the medieval alchemist was one of feudal-organic hierarchy; or that the samurai tradition, including the mingei, or folk craft tradition, got cleverly channeled into the militarism of the 1930s, culminating in the attack on Pearl Harbor. And as far as contemporary Japan goes, young people are for the most part interested in landing a job with Mitsubishi, making a ton of yen, and sticking the latest iPhone up their noses. Things like the tea ceremony, in their eyes, are for squares and tourists. Which is not all that surprising, given the impact America has had on that nation. The first impact came in the form of Commodore Perry, who sailed into Edo Bay in 1853 and threatened to blow the place to kingdom come if the Japanese did not open themselves up to commercial trade with the US. This was the catalyst for major turmoil within Japan, culminating in the overthrow of the shogunate in 1868 and what is known as the Meiji Restoration. While England, e.g., had more than a century to adjust to capitalism, Japan had to turn itself on its head in the space of a single generation. The result is a society that is extremely neurotic, still torn apart by issues of tradition vs. modernity. I wrote this recently to a Japanese friend, an anthropologist of about 50 years of age, who wrote back: “I struggle with all of this on a daily basis.” The second impact came in the form of General MacArthur, and the Occupation of Japan during 1945-52. The Americanization was fairly relentless, and the Japanese got on the bandwagon in a hurry: Coca-Cola, jeans, American movies, the whole nine yards. “Irresistible Empire,” Victoria de Grazia called it for the case of Europe being steamrolled by the US, and one can say that it was even more irresistible in the case of Japan. (Check out Oe Kenzaburo’s Nobel acceptance speech, 1994.) In any case, the land of green tea and ukiyo-e (Japanese woodblock prints) is still reeling from the double whammy delivered by the United States. (By the way, this does not mean that I think Japan should have won the war; I don’t. I’m just vainly trying to head off that accusation, like the one that surfaced in the wake of Ch. 4 of Why America Failed, in which because I said that the antebellum South had certain nonhustling characteristics that were admirable, a whole bunch of readers took this to be a defense of the Confederacy and of slavery. Man…my mother told me I should be a plumber instead of a writer, but did I listen? I keep saying on this blog that Americans are not very bright, and I have no doubt that when my book on Japan appears, the same crowd will be jumping up and down and screaming that I want Japan to have been the victor in WW2. Too many people in this country with lobotomies, apparently.) Anyway, all this by way of saying that Japan and what it represents, historically and culturally speaking, is a very complex subject, and that whenever one asserts X about it, there is always a non-X or anti-X that needs to be taken into consideration. That being said, let me return to Harold Sliker, Japanese sword makers, and the significance of the craft tradition. On craft in general, Octavio Paz wrote in 1973: “Between the timeless time of the museum and the speeded-up time of technology, craftsmanship is the heartbeat of human time.” Or to quote Alan Watts (The Way of Zen), “people in a hurry cannot feel.” Here is Watts on Zen art: “The aimless life is the constant theme of Zen art of every kind, expressing the artist’s own inner state of going nowhere in a timeless moment. All men have these moments occasionally, and it is just then that they catch those vivid glimpses of the world which cast such a glow over the intervening wastes of memory—the smell of burning leaves on a morning of autumn haze, a flight of sunlit pigeons against a thundercloud, the sound of an unseen waterfall at dusk, or the single cry of some unidentified bird in the depths of a forest. In the art of Zen every landscape, every sketch of bamboo in the wind or of lonely rocks, is an echo of such moments.” (If you want to get an idea of what Watts is talking about on film, check out Enlightenment Guaranteed and Cherry Blossoms, both by the German filmmaker and Japanophile, Doris Doerrie.) Bernard Leach, England’s greatest potter (who lived in Japan for many years), says that shibui is an aesthetic ideal in Japanese craft, referring as it does to the austere, the subdued, and the restrained. This element, he remarks (A Potter’s Book), gave the work a religious and psychological basis–something quite different from the hi-tech products being turned out by Japan today. During its integrated periods, adds Donald Richie (A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics), Japan presented the spectacle of a people who made art a way of life. All of this got lost in the rush to modernize, to Americanize. Yet one wonders whether any society, be it ours or the Japanese, can sustain itself without this kind of religious or psychological foundation. In this regard, the Japanese reaction to the Tom Cruise film, The Last Samurai, when it was released in 2003, is rather instructive (I need a stronger word here). The film is not really historically accurate; it is a romanticization of the last samurai rebellion, led by Saigo Takamori in 1877 (a folk hero in Japan to this day)–a shorter equivalent of our own Civil War, and fought, perhaps, for similar reasons (see the infamous Ch. 4 of Why America Failed). On blogs, newspapers, radio programs and whatever, there was this huge outpouring of emotion in response to the film, to the effect of: “This is us; this is the real Japan.” Shades of Ursula Le Guin, once again: a corporate-commercial reality had been rammed down their throats, pasted over a deep, spiritual reality, and suddenly, the Japanese came out of the closet and declared: We’re not having it; modernization tried to destroy our soul, but ultimately that soul still exists, and it will have the final say. Well, I don’t know how real (i.e., lasting) that outpouring of emotion was; everybody eventually went back to Mitsubishi to put in 14-hour work days, I’m guessing. But it does seem to me that there is a kind of ‘magical’ substrate that simply won’t go away, and that we should be grateful for that. Can human beings really live without meaning? Japan tried to do it since the Meiji Restoration, and it hasn’t worked out very well. America tried to do it since the late 16th century, and it seems to me that that is why it failed. In the last analysis, meaning is not a luxury. Still, the US, as well as Japan, are too far gone to embrace the substrate voluntarily; this much seems certain. But the modern world will pass, as I’ve suggested in previous writings, and as we transition to a more austere world–by necessity, not by choice–certain things may come to the surface once again. I’m thinking of my earlier post on Ernest Callenbach, and his posthumous essay, in which he wrote the following (please pardon my duplication of part of that post): “All things ‘go’ somewhere: they evolve, with or without us, into new forms. So as the decades pass, we should try not always to futilely fight these transformations. As the Japanese know, there is much unnoticed beauty in wabi-sabi–the old, the worn, the tumble-down, those things beginning their transformation into something else. We can embrace this process of devolution: embellish it when strength avails, learn to love it. “There is beauty in weathered and unpainted wood, in orchards overgrown, even in abandoned cars being incorporated into the earth. Let us learn…to put unwise or unneeded roads ‘to bed,’ help a little in the healing of the natural contours, the re-vegetation by native plants. Let us embrace decay, for it is the source of all new life and growth.” Mono no aware, the Japanese call it: the somewhat melancholy awareness of the impermanence of things. There will be something of great value on the other side of the Great Watershed we are facing, I’m convinced of it. Perhaps, Japan offers a clue to what it might be.

Posted in Geopolitics, Home | Tagged Japan

High-Priced Fuel Syndrome

Published September 28, 2012 | By Gail Tverberg

Off the keyboard of Gail Tverberg

Published on Our Finite World on September 26, 2012

Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasboard inside the Diner

Governments and economists around the world have not figured out that what the world economy is suffering from, to varying degrees, is “high-priced fuel syndrome“.

High-priced fuel syndrome has a number of symptoms:

Slow economic growth, or contraction
People in discretionary industries laid off from work
High unemployment rates
Debt defaults (or huge government intervention to prevent debt defaults)
Governments in increasingly poor financial condition
Declining home and business property values
Rising food prices
Lower tolerance for immigrants
Huge difficulty in funding retirement programs, programs for disabled, and regular pension plans
Rising international tensions related to energy supply

The countries with the most problem with high-priced fuel syndrome are the industrialized countries that are big importers of oil. This is the case because oil has been a particularly high-priced fuel in the past few years. Importing high-priced oil adds challenges of its own, since funds used for imported oil flow out of the country.

Figure 1. Historical inflation adjusted oil price per barrel, (Brent equivalent in 2011$), based on amounts shown in BP’s 2012 Statistical Review of World Energy.

While oil is the biggest culprit in high-priced fuel syndrome, high-priced fuels of other sorts can play a role as well. Natural gas is recently high-priced in Europe and Japan, but not the USA. The higher natural gas price contributes to a higher average energy cost level for these countries. High-priced renewables, such as off-shore wind and solar photovoltaic, can be expected to act in a similar fashion, because they add to the price challenge customers face.

At this point, Europe is hardest-hit by high-priced fuel syndrome. In part this is because Europe is a big importer of both oil and gas, and both are high-priced. European countries have also encouraged the use of high-priced renewables, adding to their difficulties.

While many people have laughed at the issue of the world “running out of oil” (or natural gas, or some other substitute fuel), it seems to me that they have basically missed the point. There is always lots of fuel in the ground, or available through devices we create that produce “renewable” fuel. The major issue is that the fuel becomes too expensive for the economy to afford.

The United States, Europe, and Japan were industrialized back when fuels were cheap, in the pre-1972 era (Figure 1, above). The cost structure of government welfare programs (such as Social Security, Medicare, unemployment) also assume that the economy will continue as it did with low-priced fuels. Substituting ever more-expensive fuels can be expected to push a country toward economic contraction, reduction in programs that the economy can no longer afford, and the symptoms listed above.

Why We are Encountering Rising Fuel Prices

When companies begin extracting oil (or natural gas, or coal), they start with the easiest, cheapest-to-extract first. In Figure 2, oil (or natural gas or coal) extraction starts at the top of the triangle, and gradually works down the triangle.

Figure 2. Author’s illustration of impacts of declining resource quality.

As we require more and more fuel, we gradually seek out less-desirable sources of fuels. These fuels tend to be slower to extract, and are more expensive for what we get. They are often more polluting as well.

Oil is the fuel that we recently have had a problem with easy-to-extract supply running low. We had a somewhat similar problem in the mid 1970s and early 1980s. At that point there was still plenty of cheap oil left in areas where we had not yet drilled (Alaska, North Sea and Mexico, for example), so the problem was temporary, lasting only until we could drill more oil.

This time, the problem seems to be permanent. The chief executives of oil companies Total and Shell have been quoted as saying, “The days of so-called ‘easy oil’ are over, making it harder to meet demand without complicated and expensive projects.”(Voss, 2007). Examples of such expensive-to-extract oil include deep-water oil and tight oil that must be “fracked”. The fact that the cheap oil is mostly gone is the major reason why oil prices are higher than they were five or ten years ago. If oil prices had not risen, it is likely that the amount of oil extracted each year would be declining.

There are alternative fuels such as ethanol and biodiesel, but they also tend to be expensive.

Natural gas and coal aren’t immediate substitutes for oil. For example, they won’t act as fuels in most of today’s cars, trucks and airplanes. While there are long-term possibilities for substitution, the high-priced fuel syndrome is today’s problem, not a future problem.

Rising Fuel Costs Cause the Economy to Contract

There are a number of ways rising fuel costs can cause the economy to contract. The problem is that consumers’ incomes don’t rise, just because oil prices rise. If consumers are required to pay more for a necessity, they will cut back on discretionary goods and services. A few examples:

Food prices. If oil prices rise, the price of food tends to rise as well, because oil is used in many ways in producing food: cultivation of fields, planting fields, chemical sprays (herbicides, pesticides), transporting soil amendments, harvesting fields, and transporting food to market.

Figure 3. Comparison of Food and Oil Prices. Food Prices indices are as published by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, available at http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/wfs-home/foodpricesindex/en/
Oil prices are monthly average Brent Oil spot prices, as published by the US Energy Information Administration. http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=rbrte&f=m

Low-income customers tend to be disproportionately affected by rising food prices. They especially tend to cut back on discretionary spending, such as buying a car or going out to a restaurant, in order to be able to afford enough food. As a result, workers in discretionary industries are laid off.

Commuting cost. If oil cost rises, the price of auto travel rises. Some auto travel, particularly commuting, is a necessity. Consumers, particularly lower-income consumers, tend to cut back on discretionary spending, such as vacation trips, to afford essential trips.

Businesses. Businesses are affected in multiple ways by rising oil prices. First, businesses in discretionary industries find that their “unit-sales” are down, because customers are spending more on food and commuting, as a result, need to cut back elsewhere. Lower unit-sales are likely to lead to lay-offs.

In many instances, businesses also use oil directly in the products they sell. For example, airlines use jet fuel. If oil prices rise, they have they either face lower profits, or need to raise prices to recoup their higher costs. This type of price increase further stresses customers’ budgets.

Electricity. While the current US problem is oil prices, rising electricity prices would be expected to have a similar effect. Every business today uses electricity in various ways–electric lights, running computers, running elevators, operating tools of various sorts. If electricity costs rise because of higher natural gas prices or because of greater renewable surcharges, it will raise the cost of the product produced.

Businesses again have the choice of raising the price to consumers, or facing declining profits. If they raise prices, they will be less competitive with suppliers from other countries, who may not be facing rising electricity costs, if their source of electricity (perhaps coal or nuclear) is not rising in price as fast.

If electricity prices rise, consumers’ budgets will be stressed in a similar way to the way that they are stressed by rising oil prices. This, too, can be expected to lead to a cutback in discretionary expenditures.

Follow-on effects. Laid-off workers may move in with relatives and cut back on driving to save on costs. This helps reduce demand for both homes and automobiles. With less demand for homes, housing prices may decline, especially in parts of the country with significant layoffs and plentiful housing supply.

Laid-off workers may default on loans, creating financial distress for banks. Even people who still have jobs may find the hours they work reduced, so that their take-home pay is lower. They too may cut back on discretionary expenditures.

Impact on Governments

Governments suffering from high-priced energy syndrome can expect a number of negative impacts:

Laid-off workers expect to collect unemployment benefits. If there are other kinds of benefits that they might collect under some other program (disability, retirement, low-income assistance), they will want them as well.
If citizens are working fewer hours or laid off, the amount of taxes they pay is lower.
Banks and other industries are likely to need bailing out, as borrowers default on loans.
The government will be faced with direct increases in costs, because the government uses oil to fuel its autos and jets.
The government will face increasing costs on products it buys that use oil, such as asphalt for highway projects.
Local governments may face reduced tax revenue because of declining home and business property values.

Figure 4 below shows US Federal Government Income and Outlays, in recent years:

Figure 4. US Government Income and Outlay, based on historical tables from the White House Office of Management and Budget (Table 1.1). *2012 is estimated. http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals

It is clear from Figure 4 that income had dropped at the same time outlay has risen. Even though the crisis is supposedly past, there is still a huge gap between income and outlays. Outlays in recent years are higher than would be expected based on pre 2005 trends, while revenues are lower than would be expected. Revenue would need to be more than 50% higher, to match outgo, for 2009 through 2012 fiscal years.

The amounts shown in Figure 4 are consolidated, so include programs such as Social Security and Medicare, besides “on budget” spending. How many readers could afford to contribute 50% more than they currently pay for the sum of (Federal Income Taxes + Social Security + Medicare funding)? If the government were to actually raise taxes this much, there would be a huge new round of lay-offs, because consumers would find their after-tax income much reduced, leading to even more cuts in discretionary spending.

Needless to say, the US government will do everything in its power to cover up its problems. In a later section, we will discuss how this huge deficit is being hidden.

Note that the only years during which US Federal Government income exceeded outgo in Figure 4 are 1998 through 2001. These years approximately coincide with the time period when historical oil prices were at the lowest level in recent years (Figure 5, below).

Figure 5. Historical average annual oil prices, (“Brent” or equivalent) in 2011$, from BP’s 2012 Statistical Review of World Energy.

Impacts of the Oil Price Increase in 2006 – 2008 Period

While most people now don’t think of oil prices in 2006 as being high, according to Figure 5, oil prices already had more than doubled from 2002 levels by 2006. If we look back at the financial situation in 2006-2007, we see impacts very similar to what we would expect from rising oil prices.

Sub-prime borrowers began to default as early as 2006 (Bernanke, 2007). As mentioned earlier, it was people who were on the “edge” financially who were most at risk of defaults on home loans. Sub-prime borrowers would seem to be on the “edge” financially and thus were particularly as risk, because they lacked the financial qualifications to obtain “prime” interest rates.

Figure 6. S&P/ Case-Shiller 20 City Home Price Data, using seasonally adjusted data. June 2006 is the peak month. Data from http://www.standardandpoors.com/indices/sp-case-shiller-home-price-indices/en/us/?indexId=spusa-cashpidff–p-us—-

Home prices started to drop in 2006 as well (Figure 6, above), and they haven’t been able to recover yet. We don’t think of homes as being discretionary spending items, but people can’t move into more expensive homes unless their incomes are rising. First-time buyers will also tend to put off purchases, if their financial situation is tight. The construction industry was one of the industries to face large lay-offs.

Defaults on loans caused considerable problems in the financial industry. “Short sales” (in which the sales price of a home is insufficient to pay off the remaining mortgage because the price of a home has fallen) also caused losses to the financial industry. The financial system was not set up with the idea that there may be a systemic problem of this sort. As a result, many banks found themselves in financial difficulty and needed governmental bailouts.

Other industries, such as auto manufacturing and insurance, also required bailouts. These patterns are precisely what one might expect from rising oil prices.

I make arguments similar to these in Oil Supply Limits and the Continuing Financial Crisis. James Hamilton (2009) has shown that the rise in oil prices alone were sufficient to bring on recession in the 2007-2008 recession.

One other important factor also affecting the 2006 to 2008 period was target interest rates. The Federal Reserve Open Market Committee (FOMC) raised interest rates during the 2004 to 2006 period (Figure 7, below).

Figure 7. Intended Federal Funds Interest Rates, as set by the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee http://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/openmarket.htm

The basic idea in manipulating interest rates is that low interest rates are supposed to increase economic activity, because low interest rates make it less expensive to buy a car, using a loan, or to take out a home improvement loan. They also make it less expensive for businesses to finance expansion with a loan. Higher interest rates are supposed to decrease economic activity, because of the opposite impact.

Ludlum (2009) reviewed the minutes of the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee (FOMC). The FOMC noticed rising energy and food prices as early as December 9, 2003. It wasn’t until June 2004, though, that the FOMC first raised interest rates, in an attempt to “damp down” demand for oil. The committee’s view (not stated in the minutes, but implied by rising interest rates) was that the rapid expansion of the US economy was leading to rising oil and food prices. The expectation was that raising interest rates would damp down US demand for oil, and bring inflationary pressures affecting oil prices under control. The FOMC continued to raise interest rates by 0.25% at each of its meetings (the minutes repeatedly comment about rising energy and food prices), until the target interest rate reached 5.25% in June 2006). The FOMC did not start bringing interest rates down again until September 2007.

If the problem were really rising US demand for oil, this approach might have worked. In fact, the real issue was rising oil demand elsewhere, especially China, India and other Asian countries. China had joined the World Trade Organization in December 2001, and was ramping up its exports starting in 2002 and 2003. It also didn’t help that world oil supply was not rising very quickly, so rising demand led to rising oil prices.

Figure 8. Oil Consumption for Selected Areas, based on BP’s 2012 Statistical Review of World Energy

The combination of higher interest rates and rising oil prices provided a “double whammy” to the US economy, helping push the US economy into recession. Europe and Japan also experienced major recession. The parts of the world with rapidly growing oil consumption generally did not experience recession.

The Growing Economy Problem

At least part of the reason for the High-Priced Fuel Syndrome is the fact that with all of the world’s debt, there is a need for growth to continue indefinitely. In a growing economy, it is as if we can always “borrow from the future,” because the future is always bigger and better than the past. We start running into huge problems if this is not true.

Figure 9. Repaying loans is easy in a growing economy, but much more difficult in a shrinking economy.

Part of the problem is that repaying loans is difficult in a shrinking economy (Figure 9), because less funds are “left over” after loan repayment. If we think of the situation as a government whose revenues start declining, we can understand what the problem is with repaying debt, plus interest on that debt. (Arguably inflation could play a role for a while, but lenders soon would catch on, and require higher interest to compensate for inflation.)

As long as the economy grows each year (and government revenue is higher), it makes sense for the government (and many others) to keep borrowing. But if the economy starts shrinking, we have a serious issue, because the government not only needs to stop borrowing more, but it also has to face the prospect of repaying what it already owes.

The situation is not too different for individual borrowers and for businesses. For individual borrowers, the risk is of being laid off from work, and not being able to find new job. For businesses, it is the risk of fewer buyers for their products, and because of this, less revenue in the future. With less revenue, fixed costs become a larger and larger share of total revenue, making it harder to repay debt.

Thus, in a shrinking (or even a flat) economy, debt defaults become more and more of a problem. Banks find themselves in more and more financial difficulty. This is basically the issue referred to earlier, with respect to high oil prices causing loan defaults.

Paying for Social Security and Medicare benefits is another area where growth makes a big difference. If an economy is growing, there is always a growing population of young workers to pay for benefits to the elderly. If the number of workers shrinks relative to the retired population because of high unemployment or few children, funding becomes a problem. This is yet another area where we have been counting on growth to continue indefinitely, to keep the model functioning as planned.

Recent Government Cover Up of High-Priced Fuel Syndrome

We noted above that the Federal Reserve raised interest rates in the 2004 to 2006 period, in an apparent attempt to damp down oil demand. Starting in September 2007, the FOMC took the opposite tack. Instead of raising interest rates, they brought them down, bringing them as close to zero as they could by late 2008. See Figure 7, above. The intent of this move was to stimulate the economy, by making borrowing less expensive.

Then the Federal Reserve decided to go further, and take up what it called Quantitative Easing, which is what other people call “printing money”—buying the government’s own debt, and some related debt. Target interest rates affected only short-term debt. Through the use of Quantitative Easing, it hoped to lower longer-term interest rates, as well, and thus provide even more of the low-interest rate benefit to potential borrowers. The United Kingdom and the Eurozone are taking a somewhat similar approach.

A major reason for Quantitative Easing (besides the stated business reasons for decreasing interest rates) seems to be lowering the amount of interest payments that the government itself would need to pay. This would help reduce the big gap between governmental outgo and income (Figure 4, above).

A second reason for Quantitative Easing is that it was a way of enabling the huge amount of deficit spending taking place. Without Quantitative Easing, the government would have had to go, “hat in hand”, to the world market, asking for additional loans. There might be a possibility of not all of the loans being sold, or of higher interest rates being required. By buying back a large share of the US’s own debt, it was able to make certain that interest rates would stay low, and that there would be an adequate market for the debt.

Impacts of Government Cover-up

One problem with artificially low interest rates is that the interest rates, in effect, steal from one segment of society, and use it to subsidize a different segment of the economy. The segment of the economy that is “stolen from” consists of pension plans, and people who would otherwise be saving their money, perhaps for retirement, and would benefit from interest income. Part of the reason that pension plans are having so much difficulty with funding now is because of artificially low interest rates. Pensions plans will need to be bailed out, or contributions will need to be much higher, if the system continues with artificially low interest rates.

Another even more major problem is that without a return to growth, there is no nice way to end the low interest rate/Quantitative Easing policy. One possibility is that at some point, the dollar will drop relative to other currencies, and the price of imported oil will become even higher. This will make the situation worse.

Somehow the situation must be resolved. One possibility is that the government will greatly reduce benefits and raise taxes, so as to balance its budget. Alternatively, there could be a major governmental change, perhaps leading to a totally new governmental structure and different currencies. It is possible that there will be hyperinflation, or some type of break in international trade. Countries may trade more with trusted partners, or may require collateral for trade.

Impact of High-Priced Fuel Syndrome on Exporters

This post has mostly been about the impact of High-Price Fuel Syndrome on energy importers, such as the United States, Europe, and Japan. The situation isn’t quite as bad for energy exporters, but they are not completely spared.

Energy exporters are usually in a better position financially than importers, because they collect funds from the oil or other type of high priced energy they sell. These funds can be used to fund government programs. If the energy exporter is fortunate to still have some “cheap to extract” oil left, the energy exporter can perhaps subsidize oil prices for its own people. This approach works much better when population is relatively small, such as Saudi Arabia, than when population is large, such as Russia, because with subsidy, internal use tends to rise, and exports decline.

Even when a country is an energy exporter, high oil prices or other high energy prices can be a problem. One issue is that those who benefit from high oil prices (oil companies, oil workers, local economies, governments that tax oil production) are not the same as the economy in general. For example, if oil prices are high, the major producing areas, such as Alberta, Canada can benefit, even as the rest of Canada behaves much like an oil importer, with job losses.

Another issue is the one illustrated in Figure 3, that of food prices tending to rise as oil prices rise. The Middle East is an oil exporter, but a food importer. If food prices rise at the same time as oil prices, the government finds it necessary to cushion this cost increase for the poor. To do this, they must raise food subsidies, or increase the level of payments to those who are unemployed. Making these changes quickly is not necessarily easy. There is considerable evidence that the 2011 “Arab Spring” uprisings were related to high food prices (Lagi, 2011).

So even for oil exporters, high oil prices may lead to problems.

In Summary

In summary, we are running short of cheap energy, especially cheap oil. High priced oil (or high priced energy of any type) tends to slow down the economy, leading to economic contraction. Our financial system is not made for contraction. Ben Bernanke and others have used artificially low interest rates and Quantitative Easing to try to cover up our current problems, but this is not a long-term solution. At some point, the underlying problems will become evident, and some type of discontinuity will take place. The economic situation will change from one of growth to decline.

Our system of benefits and taxes to pay for those benefits is based on the cost structure that was possible with cheap energy, and the growth that was possible with cheap energy. Very major changes will be needed, if government outgo is to made to match income. Basic programs such as unemployment, Medicare, and Social Security will either have to be reduced, or taxes raised substantially. Maintenance of huge amounts of infrastructure (such as roads, water and sewer pipelines, electricity transmission lines, and schools) can be expected to be increasingly expensive as well.

It is not clear exactly how the current situation will play out, but a return to cheap energy and robust economic growth seems very unlikely. A more likely outcome is a serious discontinuity, with affected countries much poorer afterward.

References:

Bernanke, B. S., The Subprime Mortgage Market, Speech at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago’s 43rd Annual Conference on Bank Structure and Competition, May 17, 2007. Available at http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bernanke20070517a.htm

Hamilton JH. Causes and consequences of the oil shock of 2007-08. Brook-
ings Papers on Economic Activity:215e61. Accessible at http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/Programs/ES/BPEA/2009_spring_bpea_papers/2009a_bpea_hamilton.pdf; Spring 2009.

Lagi M., Bertrand, K., and Bar-Yam, Y. The Food Crises and Political Instability in North Africa and the Middle East, Complex Systems Institute, 2012 Available at http://arxiv.org/pdf/1108.2455v1.pdf

Ludlum, S. Further Evidence of the Influence of Energy on the US Economy – Part 2, The Oil Drum, April 23, 2009. Available at http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5326

Tverberg, G. Oil Supply Limits and the Continuing Financial Crisis, Energy, 2012, 37 (27-34).

Voss S. and Patel, T. Total, Shell Executives Say ‘Easy Oil’ Is Gone (Update 1), Bloomberg, April 5, 2007 Available at http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aH57.uZe.sAI

Posted in Economics, Energy, Home | Tagged Depression, Energy, Gas, Oil, Recession

The Waning of the Modern Ages

Published September 27, 2012 | By Morris Berman

Off the keyboard of Morris Berman

Published on Counterpunch on September 20, 2012

Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasbord inside the Diner

Time to Abolish the American Dream

La longue durée —the long run—was an expression made popular by the Annales School of French historians led by Fernand Braudel, who coined the phrase in 1958. The basic argument of this school is that the proper concern of historians should be the analysis of structures that lie at the base of contemporary events. Underneath short-term events such as individual cycles of economic boom and bust, said Braudel, we can discern the persistence of “old attitudes of thought and action, resistant frameworks dying hard, at times against all logic.” An important derivative of the Annales research is the work of the World Systems Analysis school, including Immanuel Wallerstein and Christopher Chase-Dunn, which similarly focuses on long-term structures: capitalism, in particular.

The “arc” of capitalism, according to this school, is about 600 years long, from 1500 to 2100. It is our particular (mis)fortune to be living through the beginning of the end, the disintegration of capitalism as a world system. It was mostly commercial capital in the sixteenth century, evolving into industrial capital in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and then moving on to financial capital—money created by money itself, and by speculation in currency—in the twentieth and twenty-first. In dialectical fashion, it will be the very success of the system that eventually does it in.

The last time a change of this magnitude occurred was during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, during which time the medieval world began to come apart and be replaced by the modern one. In his classic study of the period, The Waning of the Middle Ages, the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga depicted the time as one of depression and cultural exhaustion—like our own age, not much fun to live through. One reason for this is that the world is literally perched over an abyss. What lies ahead is largely unknown, and to have to hover over an abyss for a long time is, to put it colloquially, a bit of a drag. The same thing was true at the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire as well, on the ruins of which the feudal system slowly arose.

I was musing on these issues some time ago when I happened to run across a remarkable essay by Naomi Klein, the author of The Shock Doctrine. It was called “Capitalism vs. the Climate,” and was published last November in The Nation. In what appears to be something of a radical shift for her, she chastises the Left for not understanding what the Right does correctly perceive: that the whole climate change debate is a serious threat to capitalism. The Left, she says, wants to soft-pedal the implications; it wants to say that environmental protection is compatible with economic growth, that it is not a threat to capital or labor. It wants to get everyone to buy a hybrid car, for example (which I have personally compared to diet cheesecake), or use more efficient light bulbs, or recycle, as if these things were adequate to the crisis at hand. But the Right is not fooled: it sees Green as a Trojan horse for Red, the attempt “to abolish capitalism and replace it with some kind of eco-socialism.” It believes—correctly—that the politics of global warming is inevitably an attack on the American Dream, on the whole capitalist structure. Thus Larry Bell, in Climate of Corruption, argues that environmental politics is essentially about “transforming the American way of life in the interests of global wealth distribution”; and British writer James Delinpole notes that “Modern environmentalism successfully advances many of the causes dear to the left: redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, greater government intervention, [and] regulation.”

What Ms. Klein is saying to the Left, in effect, is: Why fight it? These nervous nellies on the Right are—right! Those of us on the Left can’t keep talking about compatibility of limits-to-growth and unrestrained greed, or claiming that climate change is “just one issue on a laundry list of worthy causes vying for progressive attention,” or urging everyone to buy a Prius. Commentators like Thomas Friedman or Al Gore, who “assure us that we can avert catastrophe by buying ‘green’ products and creating clever markets in pollution”—corporate green capitalism, in a word—are simply living in denial. “The real solutions to the climate crisis,” she writes, “are also our best hope of building a much more enlightened economic system—one that closes deep inequalities, strengthens and transforms the public sphere, generates plentiful, dignified work, and radically reins in corporate power.”

In one of the essays in my book A Question of Values (“conspiracy vs. Conspiracy in American History”), I lay out some of the “unconscious programs” buried in the American psyche from our earliest days, programs that account for most of America’s so-called conscious behavior. These include the notion of an endless frontier—a world without limits—and the ideal of extreme individualism—you do not need, and should not need, anyone’s help to “make it” in the world. Combined, the two of these provide a formula for enormous capitalist power and inevitable capitalist collapse (hence, the dialectical dimension of it all). Of this, Naomi Klein writes:

“The expansionist, extractive mindset, which has so long governed our relationship to nature, is what the climate crisis calls into question so fundamentally. The abundance of scientific research showing we have pushed nature beyond its limits does not just demand green products and market-based solutions; it demands a new civilizational paradigm, one grounded not in dominance over nature but in respect for natural cycles of renewal—and acutely sensitive to natural limits….These are profoundly challenging revelations for all of us raised on Enlightenment ideals of progress.”

(This is exactly what I argued 31 years ago in The Reenchantment of the World; it’s nice to see it all coming around again.) “Real climate solutions,” she continues, “are ones that steer [government] interventions to systematically disperse and devolve power and control to the community level, through community-controlled renewable energy, local organic agriculture or transit systems genuinely accountable to their users.” Hence, she concludes, the powers that be have reason to be afraid, and to deny the data on global warming, because what is really required at this point is the end of the free-market ideology. And, I would add, the end of the arc of capitalism referred to earlier. It’s going to be (is) a colossal fight, not only because the powers that be want to hang on to their power, but because the arc and all its ramifications have given their class Meaning with a capital M for 500+ years. This is what the Occupy Wall Street protesters—if there are any left at this point; I’m not sure—need to tell the 1%: Your lives are a mistake. This is what “a new civilizational paradigm” finally means. It also has to be said that almost everyone in the United States, not just the upper 1%, buys into this. John Steinbeck pointed this out many years ago when he wrote that in the U.S., the poor regard themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” The Occupy movement, as far as I could make out, wanted to restore the American Dream, when in fact the Dream needs to be abolished once and for all.

Naomi then provides us with a list of six changes that must occur for this new paradigm to come into being, including Reining in Corporations, Ending the Cult of Shopping, and Taxing the Rich. I found myself writing “good luck” in the margins of much of this discussion. These things are not going to happen, and what we probably need instead is a series of major conferences on why they won’t happen. But note that part of the answer is already embedded in her essay: vested interests, in both the economic and psychological sense, have every reason to maintain the status quo. And as I said, so does the man or woman in the street. What would our lives be without shopping, without the latest technological toy? Pretty empty, at least in the U.S. How awful, that capitalism has reduced human beings to this.

In terms of recommendations, then, Klein’s essay is rather weak. But it offers something very important by way of analysis, and also by implication: Everything is related to everything else. Psychology, the economy, the environmental crisis, our daily mode of living, the dumbing down of America, the pathetic fetish over cell phones and electronic gadgets, the crushing debt of student loans, the farce of electoral politics, Mr. Obama’s rather rapid conversion from liberal hero to war criminal and shredder of the Bill of Rights, the huge popularity of violent movies, the attempt of the rich to impose austerity measures on the poor, the well-documented epidemics of mental illness and obesity—these are ultimately not separate spheres of human activity. They are interconnected, and this means that things will not get fixed piecemeal. “New civilizational paradigm” means it’s all or nothing; there really is no in-between, no diet cheesecake to be had. As Ms. Klein says, it’s not about single “issues” anymore.

What then, can we expect, as the arc of capitalism comes to a close? This is where Naomi shifts from unlikely recommendations to hard-nosed reality. She writes:

“The corporate quest for scarce resources will become more rapacious, more violent. Arable land in Africa will continue to be grabbed to provide food and fuel to wealthier nations. Drought and famine will continue to be used as a pretext to push genetically modified seeds, driving farmers further into debt. We will attempt to transcend peak oil and gas by using increasingly risky technologies to extract the last drops, turning ever larger swaths of our globe into sacrifice zones. We will fortress our borders and intervene in foreign conflicts over resources, or start those conflicts ourselves. ‘Free-market climate solutions,’ as they are called, will be a magnet for speculation, fraud and crony capitalism, as we are already seeing with carbon trading and the use of forests as carbon offsets. And as climate change begins to affect not just the poor but the wealthy as well, we will increasingly look for techno-fixes to turn down the temperature, with massive and unknowable risks….As the world warms, the reigning ideology that tells us it’s everyone for themselves, that victims deserve their fate, and that we can master nature, will take us to a very cold place indeed.”

To put it bluntly, the scale of change required cannot happen without a massive implosion of the current system. This was true at the end of the Roman Empire, it was true at the end of the Middle Ages, and it is true today. In the case of the Roman Empire, as I discuss in The Twilight of American Culture, there was the emergence of monastic orders that began to preserve the treasures of Graeco-Roman civilization. My question in that book was: Can something similar happen today? Naomi writes:

“The only wild card is whether some countervailing popular movement will step up to provide a viable alternative to this grim future. That means not just an alternative set of policy proposals but an alternative worldview to rival the one at the heart of the ecological crisis—this time, embedded in interdependence rather than hyper-individualism, reciprocity rather than dominance, and cooperation rather than hierarchy.” She believes that the Occupy Wall Street movement—remember, it was quite vigorous last November—embodies this; that they have taken “aim at the underlying values of rampant greed and individualism that created the economic crisis, while embodying…radically different ways to treat one another and relate to the natural world.”

Is this true? Four things to consider at this point:

1. I personally never visited Zuccotti Park, but most of what I saw on the Web, including very favorable reportage of the Occupy movement, seemed to suggest that the goal was a more equitable American Dream, not the abolition of the American Dream, as I indicated above. In other words, the basic demand was that the pie be cut up more fairly. I never had the impression that the protesters were saying that the pie, in toto, was rotten. This reminds me of an anecdote about Martin Luther King, who apparently said to Harry Belafonte, just before he (i.e., King) was assassinated, that he thought he might have been making a big mistake; that he sometimes felt like he was herding people into a burning church. This is a very different insight, quite obviously, than the notion that black people should be getting a larger share of the pie. After all, who wants a larger share of a rotten pie, or to live in a church that is burning down?

2. The Annales historians, along with the World Systems Analysis thinkers, have been accused of projecting an image of “history without people.” In other words, these schools tend to see individuals as somewhat irrelevant to the historical process, which they analyze in terms of “historical forces.” There is some truth to this, but “historical forces” can become a bit mystical. Just as it is forces that motivate people, so it is people that enact or manifest those forces. I mean, someone has to do something for history to occur, and at least the Occupy crowd was trying to throw sand on the wheels of the machine, so to speak, as have their counterparts in Europe. But I confess that for a number of reasons, I was never very optimistic about the movement; at least, not as it existed in the United States. As many sociologists have pointed out, America has no real socialist tradition, and it is no surprise that the serious maldistribution of wealth that exists in the U.S. is no issue whatsoever in the forthcoming presidential election. In fact, a recent poll by the Pew Charitable Trust revealed that most Americans have no problem at all with the existence of a small wealthy class; they just want to be able to join it—which takes us back to the quote from John Steinbeck. My own prediction, several months ago, was that OWS would turn into a kind of permanent teach-in, where the disaffected could go to learn about a “new civilizational paradigm,” if that would indeed be taught. This is basically the “new monastic option” I wrote about in the Twilight book. On one level, it’s probably innocuous; it hardly threatens the power elite. But that may not be the whole story, especially in the long run—la longue durée. After all, as the system collapses, alternatives are going to become increasingly attractive; and you can be sure that 2008 is not the last crash we are going to live through. The two sides go hand in hand, and ultimately—I’m talking thirty to forty years, but maybe less—the weight of the arc of capitalism will be too onerous to sustain itself. In la longue durée, one is far smarter betting on the alternative worldview than on capitalism. Thus the biologist David Ehrenfeld writes: “Our first task is to create a shadow economic, social, and even technological structure that will be ready to take over as the existing system fails.”

3. What, then, is that alternative worldview, that “new civilizational paradigm”? In Why America Failed I lay out, unsurprisingly enough, the reasons for why America failed, and I say that it was primarily because throughout our history we marginalized or ignored the voices that argued against the dominant culture, which is based on hustling, aggrandizement, and economic and technological expansion. This alternative tradition can be traced from John Smith in 1616 to Jimmy Carter in 1979, and included folks such as Emerson, Thoreau, Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs, Vance Packard, and John Kenneth Galbraith, among many others. In England it is particularly associated with John Ruskin and William Morris, who argued for the need for organic communities with a spiritual purpose, for work that was meaningful rather than mind-numbing, and who did manage to acquire a large number of American disciples. In a forthcoming book by a colleague of mine, Joel Magnuson, entitled The Approaching Great Transformation, the author states that we need concrete models of a post-carbon economy, ones that break with the profit model of capitalism—and not in cosmetic or rhetorical ways. He gives a number of examples of experiments in this vein, ones that I would term elements of a steady-state or homeostatic economy: no-growth, in other words. After all, writes Magnuson, “permanent growth means permanent crisis.” Or as I have put it elsewhere, our job is to dismantle capitalism before it dismantles us. Again, this does not mean taking on Wall Street, which I don’t believe can succeed. But it does mean leaving the field: for example, seceding. (Movements for secession do exist at this point, Vermont being a prominent example.) And if that’s not quite viable right now, there is at least the possibility of living in a different way, as David Ehrenfeld suggests. My guess is that “dual process”—the disintegration of capitalism and the concomitant emergence of an alternative socioeconomic formation—is going to be the central story of the rest of this century. And I suspect that austerity will be part of this, because as capitalism collapses and we run out of resources—petroleum in particular—what choice will we have?

4. This does not, it seems to me, necessarily mean a return to some type of feudalism; although that could well happen, for all I know. But we are finally talking about the passing not only of capitalism, but of modernity in general—the waning of the modern ages, in effect. In her interesting biography of the Hegelian scholar, Alexandre Kojève, Shadia Drury writes: “Every political order, no matter how grand, is doomed to decay and degenerate.” As for modernity in particular, she goes on:

“[M]odernity’s inception and its decline are like those of any other set of political and cultural ideals. In its early inception, modernity contained something good and beguiling. It was a revolution against the authority of the Church, its taboos, repressions, inquisitions, and witch burning. It was a new dawn of the human spirit—celebrating life, knowledge, individuality, freedom, and human rights. It bequeathed to man a sunny disposition on the world, and on himself….The new spirit fueled scientific discovery, inventiveness, trade, commerce, and an artistic explosion of great splendor. But as with every new spirit, modernity has gone foul….Modernity lost the freshness and innocence of its early promise because its goals became inflated, impossible, and even pernicious. Instead of being the symbol of freedom, independence, justice, and human rights, it has become the sign of conquest, colonialism, exploitation, and the destruction of the earth.”

In a word, its number is up, and it is our fortune or misfortune, as I said before, to be living during a time of very large, and very difficult, transition. An old way of life dies, a new one eventually comes into being. Of this, the poet Mark Strand remarks: “No need to rush; the end of the world is only the end of the world as you know it.” For some odd reason, I find that thought rather comforting.

Posted in Home

Smedley, Ike and Me & Sins of the Empire

Published September 27, 2012 | By Phillip Farruggio

Off the keyboard of Phillip Farrugio

Discuss Phillip’s articles at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasbord inside the Diner

Smedley, Ike & Me

In 1935, an essay was published, War Is a Racket (Google it), by retired Marine General Smedley Butler. In it Butler embellished his belief that our nation’s foreign policy was controlled and manipulated by private corporate interests… all in the name of greed. Wars, invasions and occupations by our military, according to General Butler, were all predicated on the desire for profit by corporations. He himself called his past life as a Marine general as being a gangster for these private industrial interests. He used WW1 as an example of who made the profits for our military being sent ‘Over there’. Apparently, most of the American public at that time could not care less for what Smedley Butler was selling.

In January of 1961, retiring President Dwight Eisenhower gave his farewell address (Google it). In it, this cold warrior made a sort of indirect mea culpa as to the “vast military industrial complex…” as he labeled it. Ike knew just how diabolical this network of war making corporations could be. As president he allowed many dirty deeds in the name of ‘fighting communism’. A whole list of countries that the United States pushed our sabers into, whether overtly or most often covertly, defines how we will be recorded by truthful historians… however few and far between they may be. Our current position as the world’s superpower is the bastard child of this greedy and corrupting military industrial complex… simply known to many as an empire.

This writer stands with sign in hand each week to once again sound the alarm bells that General Butler and President Eisenhower rang. I join with many others who want to finally curtail and pullback this military industrial empire. Many of us are progressives and libertarians politically… it does not matter. The truth of it all is that if this obscene and financially disastrous military spending is not cut drastically, our great nation will crumble from within. No terrorist attack could do as much damage as that! There is a movement nationwide to get the Congress to cut this tragically high spending by a minimum of 25%. Since 2001, military spending has almost doubled! It now hovers at over $ 560 billion a year, or 56 cents of every tax dollar we each send to Uncle Sam. Even if only half of the 25% in savings was passed on to the cities, Daytona Beach, nearby to my town of Port Orange, would receive 35 million dollars a year. That amount would wipe out all of the cuts in services for that community, perhaps even allowing a lowering of property taxes.

It is time for the fine and dedicated Occupy members and the equally important labor union movement to get on board with but one focus: Pullback this military empire! All the other peripherals such as greedy Wall Street, terrible foreclosures, viable and real health care reform, layoffs etc are all connected to this overzealous military empire. It is time for we who ‘know better’ to be role models for the majority of Americans who still buy into the mainstream media’s hype and spin. There is no major difference, so far as this military industrial empire goes, between the two dominant political parties. Yes, the Republicans are more caustic, but the Democrats are more diabolical by their hypocrisy. When, on foreign policy, a libertarian conservative like Ron Paul agrees with a lifelong progressive like Ralph Nader…

Sins of the Empire… Does Anybody Really Care?

I love the public library system, always have. From my earliest remembrances as an eight or nine year old, the local library was sacred to me. Each Friday afternoon after grade school, I would walk to the library and immerse myself inside the aisles of dreams. All kinds of wonderful books were there for my enjoyment. That little card with my name, address and signature was a passport to adventure. Walking home with an armful of new books, I was on cloud nine.

The movers and shakers of our American empire could not care less for the public library system or, for that matter, the public education system. What they do not need at all are well versed and thinking citizens. No, the more dumbed down the populace is the more they can be propagandized and controlled. If only those who enter and exit the local library in my town would realize the ramifications of our government spending the obscene sum of $ 1.2 million per year to keep a soldier in Afghanistan. The poor soldier only sees about $ 30,000 or $ 40,000 for that year long service to the military industrial empire, in a country that our nation has no damn business occupying in the first place! That is for another column… Let’s focus on waste and mismanagement of our taxes, ok? Here is the kicker to that one soldier being sent to Afghanistan for one year: That amount of money ($ 1.2 million) is the budget for ONE MONTH of the entire library system in my Florida County (Volusia) – which covers THIRTEEN branches! Doing the math and you will find that it would take but the cost of sending TWELVE soldiers to Afghanistan to cover the budget for the county’s 13 branches for one year. Imagine that a whole entire system of staffing and book buying and community rooms and special events… the maintenance of each facility, all equaling what we spend on sending twelve GIs to Afghanistan. Outrageous!

Here is the real tragedy of this all: Since fiscal years 2005-2007 my county’s library budget has been cut down by 33%! What once was a whole wall dedicated to New Fiction Books and another equally massive wall for New Non Fiction Books has been combined into one wall… with less and less new books! Down the line there have been cuts in everything, so as to meet the budget ceilings. Someday soon, and mark these words, you will hear the trumpeting for privatizing library systems. So, once again, the suckers will pay for the sins of the empire! Isn’t it time for the good folks of our towns and cities of America to speak out and demand a pullback of this military industrial empire, before the bankruptcy is complete?

PA Farruggio

September 26, 2012

{Philip A Farruggio is son and grandson of Brooklyn, NYC longshoremen. He is a free lance columnist (found on the fine Information Clearing House, Activist Post, and Dandelion Salad, Dissident Voice and Smirking chimp sites), an environmental products sales rep and an activist. Since 2010, Philip is a spokesperson for the 25% Solution Movement to Save Our Cities by cutting military spending 25%. Philip can be reached at paf1222@bellsouth.net }

Posted in Home | Tagged Dwight Eisenhower, Librabries, smedley butler, zmilitary Industrial Complex

Wonderful, Wonderful Copenhagen

Published September 26, 2012 | By Jason Heppenstall

Off the keyboard of Jason Heppenstall

Published on 22 Billion Energy Slaves on September 22, 2012

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Today I joined a gym. Yes, I know. I haven’t set foot in one for 15 years but the time had come to do so again. I apologise to regular readers who might be expecting something along the lines of some subject matter that is at least tangential to peak oil, global hegemony or environmental meltdown – that will all have to wait until next week. I should probably say now that if you’re of a sensitive disposition you might not want to read certain parts of this post, because today’s post is about … (drumroll) … violence!

But first, let me explain a little something. When I say I haven’t set foot inside a gym for 15 years, that’s not because I am some kind of couch potato who can’t walk up a flight of stairs. In fact, I run around 20km a week, bike about 100km and I’m even training for a half-marathon. Don’t forget, part of preparing for a future of limited medical care and inaccessible or ineffective drugs is the ability to keep fit and try and heal your own body. And just like sex, poetry and friendship, exercise is one of those things that you shouldn’t have to pay for. In any case, I have to exercise because if I don’t then the chronic pain I live with gets worse.

I’m not sure how it happened or what it is, but I live with an endless pain in my chest. It could have been when I had a snowboarding accident, or maybe it was the time I was infested with a tropical parasite that gnawed away at my insides unchecked for two years, but it’s been with me for this past decade, and sometimes it is debilitating, but usually it is just a low level ache in the upper left side of my chest. I’ve been to doctors and hospitals aplenty and they’ve run numerous tests on me and the conclusion is always the same: there’s nothing detectably wrong with me. Except there is. At times the pain spreads right up through my neck into my head and leaves me finding it painful to breathe and sleep. It isn’t fun.

I don’t know how it started or how to fix it. People have suggested acupuncture, visiting a chiropractor or various homeopathic treatments. Alcohol and coffee make it worse, whereas rubbing a pressure point under my left eye makes it go away temporarily, as if by magic. Very intense exercise also makes it go away for a few hours, as do strong pain killers. It’s a pain, but apparently not a fatal one.

So that’s why I go running. The only thing is that it seems to be getting more and more dangerous to go running where I live. Some people might think that it doesn’t get much safer and cleaner than Copenhagen – that is how the city likes to present itself to an international audience. That’s probably what the unfortunate American tourist thought last week who met a grisly end after an automated street cleaning machine suddenly developed artificial intelligence and went amok, sucking him up and ramming his head against the wall of a bank, thus killing him in a most unexpectedly unpleasant way. But anyone who has ever lived here or watched the superb TV series Forbrydelsen (renamed ‘The Killing’ in English) won’t be entirely surprised by what I am about to say. This has been my experiences in the past ten days or so:

A man was murdered with a single shot to the head outside the office I work in. The attack was thought to be a revenge attack for a hit on some people walking out of a mosque a year ago (also next to my office) which I heard. At the time I had thought somebody was throwing heavy things into a skip – that’s what it sounded like.
A couple of days later I went running at night. On a particularly dark street near the beach a car pulled up next to me and a man yelled something obscene at me. I ignored him and he drove off. Ten minutes later the whole place was full of police cars and it was on the news later that a man on that street had been randomly cruising around and stabbing passers-by. One victim was stabbed in the chest but managed to walk to hospital.
I also went running the next night and surprised two men doing something suspicious at a deserted building site – they didn’t take it well and I had to put a sprint on.
Three nights later I encountered a gang of youths, one wielding a metal pole outside a grim local shopping precinct. They were dressed in the American ‘gangster’ style of pants hanging down and covered in bling. They were also smashing the place up and again I had to sprint to get away from them as they shouted after me.
Then last night – the final night I went out. Half the police force of Copenhagen descended on the island of Amager where I live after violence flared up between the two main Hells Angels gangs who are Denmark’s de facto mafia. One man was thrown out of a moving car, and another was found kneecapped in the back seat of another. Just another night in Copenhagen.

Sporadic random cases? Maybe. But I used to regularly attend crime scenes in my capacity as a reporter here a couple of years ago, so I know very well that there’s a very dark underbelly in this city. Here are a few of the scenes I attended during that time:

A cold blooded murder of a Somali man who was leaving his flat for work and was gunned down from a passing car in front of his children.
A local bar (very close to my flat) invaded at night by a machine gun wielding gang hunting for junior members of a Hells Angels club. After shooting up the bar they dragged one unfortunate punter outside, pulled his trousers down and put the gun up where the sun don’t shine. I photographed the blood spattered plants pots and gore covered latex gloves of the paramedics.
The assassination of a powerful Chinese businessman in a restaurant outside the office.
The aftermath of a drugs turf war related grenade attack on some people enjoying a quiet beer in the alternative commune of Christiania. The grenade landed on the table and blew a young man’s jaw off.
The attempted assassination of a biker leader as he sat in a Joe and the Juice café drinking a milkshake. The bullet went through the window into his back, where he was sitting, although he didn’t die.

Apart from those there have been dozens, perhaps hundreds of others. Just across the water from where I live, in the Swedish city of Malmø, they also had to contend with a serial killer who was shooting dark skinned people at random. Luckily he was caught, but the fact remains that these kinds of people just seem to pop up over here with unnerving regularity. How long before we get Denmark’s answer to Anders Breivik?

But now the police fear a new biker war. Forget Islamic terrorists, Scandinavia is plagued with home grown ones with blonde hair and blue eyes. It brings me back to the happy days on the mid-nineties, when I first visited Denmark. In those days the various biker gangs, who ride around on shiny $80,000 Harley Davidsons and control the lucrative drug trade in these parts, were taking part in some pretty spectacular public battles. Who could forget the machine gun battle at Copenhagen Airport, for instance, or the RPG attack in central Copenhagen which launched a victim through a plate glass window as shoppers stood by gawking?

I should probably say that the leader of the Hells Angels, convicted killer Jørn Jønker Nielsen, is particularly web-savvy and on occasion phoned the office I used to work in to politely point out factual errors in our stories. So, if you’re reading Jørn, er, hello.

This is all very puzzling. The statistics don’t bear out my observations – Denmark has, on average, 0.9 homicides for every 100,000 people, making it the 21st safest country in the world (the US rate is about five times higher). It could be that victims are treated well in state of the art hospitals and usually recover, combined with the observation that most attacks tend to leave people half-dead rather than fully. And, of course, most violent crime tends to occur in the capital city, and most of them are premeditated attempts on the lives of various gang members and religious minorities.

So I have no particular desire to get caught up in all that again – hence my decision to join a gym in an international hotel near where I live. It’s a peculiar place to be. Everyone is so focussed on themselves and whatever is playing on their headphones, and they hardly seem to notice one another. It’s a kind of anti-community, where the lycra clad denizens drink only from plastic water bottles and nobody says a word but instead focuses on the numerous flat screen TVs affixed to the walls spewing out their 24 hour news and MTV feeds. Paper towel dispensers are much in use as every drop of sweat is quickly dealt with, and occasionally one of the gym employees will come round and empty the bins which quickly fill up with these and the plastic bottles. Various tattooed meatheads lift the free weights and flex their muscles in the mirrors, and afterwards there is a pool to cool off in, or a sauna to heat up in if you prefer. I quite like it.

It’s all very artificial and contrived, but for the time being it’s where I’ll be spending several evenings a week. What exactly am I doing as I run my standard 10km like a rat on a treadmill, dripping sweat onto the iPhone docking station? I’m writing my new sci-fi novel in my head, if you must know. And not getting shot up the backside or stabbed or having my jaw blown off by a grenade.

Normal service will resume next week.

Posted in Home | Tagged Collapse, Copenhagen, Denmark, Euro, Scandinavia, Violence

Is This a Radical Idea, or What?

Published September 25, 2012 | By George Mobus

Off the keyboard of George Mobus

Published on Question Everything on August 28th, 2012

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How to Teach Math — Abolish Math Courses!

A Sunday (July 29) New York Times opinion piece started me thinking about something I have often wondered about. Why are so many college students turned off on mathematics? The article’s title was provocative: “Is Algebra Necessary?” The author, Andrew Hacker is an emeritus professor of political science at Queens College, City University of New York and author of the book, “How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids — and What We Can Do About It”. Well, that certainly got my attention.

Here is the gist. Our system of education forces all students (K-12) to take math courses and expects all students to complete some level of algebra. Algebra is considered the minimum level of math competency for college and we (society) have decided that essentially everyone is supposed to go to college. Even students in the humanities are expected to master some level of algebra. But here is the problem: Algebra turns most students off! Surprise, surprise.

Therein is the rub. Turn the students off because you are forcing them to learn something that purports to be a subject onto itself with the lame excuse that they will need it later (and, of course later never comes) or because it will help them think analytically/quantitatively (without explaining why that is important, or even what it is!) and you have lost them. I claim, unnecessarily.

Right now our country is in a panic. Fewer American students are choosing science and engineering as careers and they are doing more poorly on standardized math exams than kids from many other countries. We’re in a panic because we hold firm to the idea that we have to compete with other countries economically. It is important, supposedly, to be number one when it comes to technology and science. And god forbid we fall behind in producing Nobel laureates (even if most of our prior laureates were actually foreign born!) Calls from politicians, business leaders, and social commentators (like Tom Friedman) extol us to knuckle down and do a better job in teaching kids math and science. The problem is that once we have turned kids off on math, we’ve lost them in science and engineering too. We are caught in a vicious cycle where we force feed more math only to make kids dislike it more and then we can only think to push it harder.

Hacker’s article claims that kids don’t need algebra. Indeed, they don’t need most formal mathematics as taught in standalone courses. He argues, and I agree with him, that forcing kids to take such courses actually works to turn them off to school more generally and learning as a self-directed, internally motivated process. In short we are killing our education system by forcing kids to take really dry courses that are de-motivating and mentally numbing for the vast majority. There are certainly math-oriented individuals who like the topic as a topic and will go on to major in math as a subject onto itself. But these are rare persons. Most kids are not interested in memorizing the quadratic equation.

They are, however, intensely interested in relations! How does this relate to that? They are actually capable of thinking algebraically if given a chance to pursue that thinking in a motivating context.

What is Math Good For?

There have been a number of studies now that show that the vast majority of people, in their jobs, never actually use anything as sophisticated as algebra — explicitly. On the other hand almost everyone deals with relations and functions of variables to one degree or another. Anyone who has to convert proportions (e.g. in resizing a recipe) is faced with a simple form of algebraic relation.

Math is fundamental to measuring and transforming things. We all use it in one form or another, usually without realizing it. And all too often people face situations where they have to consider things like relative rates of change in processes that matter to them.In other words, math beyond arithmetic can be highly relevant. We just don’t teach it that way.

We teach rules and axioms. We expect students to memorize facts that they will never explicitly use again in their lives. And in that process we turn them away from the very thing we dearly want them to learn. Talk about shooting one’s self in the foot. It is true that math is foundational in the sense that our modern world operates on principles that can only be expressed meaningfully through mathematics. OK. So it is not unreasonable that children and young adults grasp the basics in order to function in this world and contribute to it. Even though calculators will do the arithmetic (I still think it is useful to teach arithmetic at an early age) the decisions about which operations to use, in what order, and on what variables, etc. is the kind of skill they need to develop. And it turns out many people do develop some rudimentary capabilities when their livelihoods depend on it.

Kids are born curious. They are born with the drive to find out why things are the way they are. They want to know how things relate to one another and what causes this and that to happen. They will naturally wonder “how much?” and “when?” and always “why?”. Our school system methodically beats that natural tendency out of them. By the time I see them in college they are programmed well to simply want to know what do they have to memorize to get a good grade in this course. Forget curiosity. Forget a drive to understand. The one thing they have been taught to understand is that in this system the GPA is the coin of the realm and their job is to maximize that quantity (see they are thinking mathematically even in spite of the system). I find myself agreeing with Hacker. We are killing the very thing we want to cultivate in the minds of our kids. We have to look at this whole thing with new eyes.

Many More Students Could be Scientists!

Many and perhaps most kids are natural born scientists. Anyone who has observed fourth graders on a field trip knows this is true. What happens then to kids as they grow older and get more schooling? The answer is that we are systematically squashing that natural curiosity and pounding any interest in understanding relations out of their minds with the way we go about schooling them.

There will always be students who by virtue of their superior intellects and indomitable curiosity will rise above the beating they get from schools. Such students will do well in math and science. They will go on to become engineers and scientists in spite of school, not because of it. But, unfortunately, there are so many more who are more fragile and are too easily intimidated by our overbearing force of subjects onto their minds. These kids are actually potentially capable of being scientist and engineers with something more nurturing than what our school system offers. They need to be allowed to mature at their own natural rate. And they need to see themselves as being able to consider problems from their own understanding rather than being told they need to memorize formulas. These are the vast majority. They do not need to be force fed mathematics to appreciate the natural world. They can learn mathematics in the context of their understanding that natural world.

And that is why I say abolish math courses! They do not really advance our objectives in having children and young adults understand the world. They intimidate kids. They stultify curiosity. Math is not a subject unto itself (unless you wish to become a theoretical mathematician!). It is a language for thinking about and expressing how the world works. It is really no different from spoken languages except that it is generally more precise. Once appreciated, the rules of relations in nature can become as natural to thinking as syntax is to natural languages.

The solution is to teach science better. By that I mean expose kids at an early age to the natural world with emphasis on how things relate to one another. Start exposing them to systems thinking early and reinforce it in every subject they take, even art and language classes. Start providing them with developmental stage-appropriate challenges, especially problems that can be studied and answered by a small group of peers. Let them discover the barriers to coming up with solutions that only some kind of math will get over. Let them puzzle on it for a while and then provide guidance with some examples of similar problems. If they are motivated because they really want to meet the challenge they will readily learn the math as a consequence of wanting to solve the bigger problem ^[1].

I became convinced of this approach while watching some seventh and eighth graders working with Lego robots to perform certain challenging tasks. These robots are an excellent exploratory environment for kids to try out ideas (hypothesize and experiment) and discovering how a little algebra can get the job done. The challenges involve multiple sensor inputs, light (with color values), touch, sonar readings, etc. The mobile robots have to perform some task such as following a black line on a white field while avoiding objects. This requires that their programs get varying values from the sensors and determine the significance of the values, especially relative to one another (for this age the programming environment is very friendly, a visual drag-and-drop construction tool kit). In other words they have to construct functions that produce motor output results in the proper fashion. Kids who wouldn’t know an algebraic formula from their behinds are able to work out the relations and even come up with multiplicative factors that put variables in the proper scales. They naturally need some guidance to get started but they are soon working with these formulas and even trying variations and new formulas if they think they can improve a behavior.

The sciences, and I do mean all of the sciences not just the natural kind^[2], are full of mathematical challenges that could provide the framework for learning math. Put the math where it belongs and let the kids have fun exploring the world they want desperately to know about. Stop teaching mathematics as a required subject in grade, middle, and high school. Embed math in the subjects they will take as the language they need to understand in order to communicate within that subject.

It is possible that by high school there will be some students who show a natural ability and interest in math as a subject. So there should be options in courses that resemble those now taught for these students to go further with formal mathematics. Quite possibly these are future math majors at the universities. There will always be a few who find pleasure in math just for its own sake and they should be given the opportunity to pursue that as well. They will be our future mathematicians and we need a few of them to work on pure math.

But the vast majority of students will only find interest in math if it is seen to serve a useful purpose for them. They need to experience math as part of a general problem solving process directed at challenges that truly interest them. This can extend to college as well. Students who take introductory sciences (e.g. Biology 101) should be exposed to more advanced algebra and even some calculus. They can be explicitly exposed to statistics when they do experiments, collect data, and then have to answer questions about the phenomenon they just witnessed. Ask a biology class to determine how much energy flows through a given ecosystem, first yearly, then monthly, then daily, then in minutes, etc. By doing this, exposing them to the notion of sample rates at smaller and smaller scales you’ve just started them down the road to understanding limits and infinitesimals. College level science courses (and many other subjects as well) could be designed to have a math learning skeleton upon which the flesh of the subject is hung. In other words the course designs would start with an outline of the mathematics that the community of educators agreed should be learned in the context of the subject. The professor’s job becomes one of fashioning the subject content into challenges that are guaranteed to expose the need for those maths and then be ready to aid the students as they work through what techniques they need and how to use them. It is possible that an introductory science course might end up taking a whole year (2 semesters or 3 quarters) to complete because math is being taught within the context of the subject. So what? Students will learn both the math and the science much better as a result of learning them together in the context of solving complex challenging problems. It will take a different kind of professor than you typically see today (which is why this will never be adopted I suppose). The professor’s job is to design problem-based curricula and act as a guide and mentor rather than a lecturing fount of all knowledge. I personally know a few professors who would be hard pressed to play that role. After all it is actually pretty easy to simply prepare lectures and grade assignments.

In our current paradigm we expect students to take the necessary math courses as prerequisites to taking the science courses. We expect them to have retained the math and be able to apply it as appropriate to the kinds of domain-specific problems the professor assigns. In other words, learn the math first, then take the science. We believe that is more efficient. Unfortunately you will hear many professors complain that the students are simply not prepared for the subject because they don’t know the relevant math. It is easy to blame the high schools for failing to teach them what they need to know to be successful in the science courses. What no one seems able to see or understand is that the failure comes from the way we go about teaching math as a standalone subject. Even when a math text attempts to motivate a word problem with an example from “real life” it fails because as far as the student is concerned it isn’t real. It is not the students. It is not the difficulty of the subject per se. It is the way we teach it that is the problem.

If we want to have more kids solidly learn math and science (and engineering) then we had better get our act together and stop beating them up with the subjects the way we are now. Of course it isn’t just the math and sciences education that has to be radically reformed. The whole K-12 education system is based on efficiently moving kids through a system designed to produce worker bees. Then we all complain that kids can’t think when they get out. For years reformers have been beating around the edges of true reform. They have been trying to fix things by tweaking the existing school system, curriculum, and pedagogy but never really taking a systems approach to designing a system that will truly educate. The proposal to abandon math courses and embed math within other subjects is a little more than a tweak. And as such it will buck the established system and thus be untenable. Moreover there is the problem of finding good science teachers who could actually pull this off. This is especially true at the K-12 level but, as I alluded to above, is also problematic at the college level. The kind of teaching that is called for is hard, highly skilled work. Perhaps if society recognized this they would agree to pay teachers more and thus attract those qualified people. Oh wait. I forgot, society is comprised of people who were schooled in the current paradigm! They are not likely to see the value in their children really learning because for the most part they never experienced it themselves. Another vicious cycle.

Footnotes

[1] It is true that learning math within a specific context has some problems with respect to transference to other situations where the same math would be applicable. We humans do have a tendency to not be able to naturally abstract or decontextualize instances of an exemplar. Kids could learn how to use a second-order polynomial function in one situation and completely fail to recognize how it might apply in a different setting. For example the exponential growth function is found applicable in so many different settings. If kids were to learn it in, say, a population biology setting, they might not recognize it use in an economics setting. But this is why I insist that systems science and thinking be taught everywhere. Once someone becomes more proficient in systems thinking it becomes much easier to use math abstractions in a variety of settings.

[2] And this extends to not just subjects that have science in their names, e.g. computer science, but to professional school subjects like business, social work, etc.

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The Weekly Steven Lendman 9/24/2012

Published September 24, 2012 | By Steve Lendman

Off the keyboard of Steven Lendman

Published on Stephen Lendman’s Blog

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Friday, September 21, 2012

Score One for Hedges v. Obama

by Stephen Lendman

On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong called his Apollo 11 landing “one step for man, a giant leap for mankind.”

Hedges v. Obama perhaps reflects a baby step, if temporary, for justice.

On September 12, Southern District of New York federal Judge Katherine B. Forrest blocked Obama’s indefinite detention law.

In her 112-page ruling, she called it “facially unconstitutional: it impermissibly impinges on guaranteed First Amendment rights and lacks sufficient definitional structure and protections to meet the requirements of due process.”

She added that:

“If, following issuance of this permanent injunctive relief, the government detains individuals under theories of ‘substantially or directly supporting’ associated forces, as set forth in” the National Defense Authorization Act, “and a contempt action is brought before this court, the government will bear a heavy burden indeed.”

At issue is section 1021 of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). It states in part:

“Congress affirms that the authority of the president to use all necessary and appropriate force pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) includes the authority for the Armed Forces of the United States to detain covered persons (as defined in subsection (b)) pending disposition under the law of war.”

“Covered persons” are defined as:

Anyone “who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.”

Plaintiffs argued that broad, ambiguous language like “substantially supported,” “associated forces” and “directly supported” leaves them and others vulnerable to lawless indefinite detention.

For example, meeting someone rightly or wrongly designated a terrorist, staying in their homes, inviting them to speak at conferences or in panel discussions, perhaps interviewing them, or socializing with them can be called dealing with the enemy.

So can writing anti-imperial articles, exposing and/or discussing US crimes of war and against humanity, and participating in anti-war protests.

Hedges and others also said concerns arose from NDAA’s passage. It grants unconstitutional presidential authority. It exceeds the September 2001 congressional approval for Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) for “the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States.”

On January 16, 2012, Hedges wrote “Why I’m Suing Barack Obama,” saying:

He and others challenged AUMF’s legality “as embedded in the (2012 NDAA) signed by (Obama) on Dec. 31.” He picked New Year’s eve. Perhaps he thought no one would notice.

It created a firestorm but not in the media. They reported virtually nothing on enacted tyranny.

Hedges said NDAA “authorizes the military in Title X, Subtitle D, entitled ‘Counter-Terrorism,’ for the first time in more than 200 years, to carry out domestic policing.”

“With this bill, which will take effect March 3, the military can indefinitely detain without trial any U.S. citizen deemed to be a terrorist or an accessory to terrorism.”

“And suspects can be shipped by the military to our offshore penal colony in Guantanamo Bay and kept there until ‘the end of hostilities.’ It is a catastrophic blow to civil liberties.”

As a journalist, he spent many years abroad. He “met regularly with leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza.”

He also met Arafat and other PLO leaders when they were called terrorists. He “spent time with the Revolutionary Guard in Iran and was in northern Iraq and southeastern Turkey with fighters from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party.”

They were all called terrorists. So are others journalists meet with regularly and will again. It’s their job.

Hedges said he “suspect(s) the real purpose of this bill is to thwart internal, domestic movements that threaten the corporate state. The definition of a terrorist is already so amorphous under the Patriot Act that there are probably a few million Americans who qualify to be investigated if not locked up.”

Washington’s war on terror is ill-defined and vague. It reflects totalitarian state harshness. It equates dissent with treason. It fosters “mounting state paranoia. It expands our permanent war to every spot on the globe.” It destroys fundamental constitutional rights.

Obama lets CIA torturers, Wall Street crooks, other corporate criminals, lawless war profiteers, and other venal high-level civilian or government officials off scot-free.

In contrast, he usurped unconstitutional diktat authority. At issue is freely targeting US citizens anywhere in the world, indefinitely detaining them, and killing them if he wishes on his say so alone.

Freedom in America is fast disappearing. On December 14, the House passed the FY 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). On December 15, the Senate followed suit. Ironically it was Bill of Rights Day.

Obama signed it into law. The measure ends constitutional protections for everyone, including US citizens. Specifically it targets due process and law enforcement powers.

With or without evidence, on issues of alleged terrorist connections posing national security threats, the Pentagon now supplants civilian authorities. It’s well beyond its mandate.

Militaries exist to protect nations from foreign threats. America’s Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) applies solely to its own personnel as authorized under the Constitution’s Article I, Section 8. It states:

“The Congress shall have Power….To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval forces.”

In America, state and local police, the Justice Department, and FBI are responsible for criminal investigations and prosecutions. No longer on matters relating to alleged national security concerns.

Enactment means America’s military may arrest anyone anywhere, including US citizens. They can be indefinitely held without charge or trial, based solely on suspicions, baseless allegations, or none at all.

No reasonable proof is required, just suspicions that those detained pose threats. Henceforth, indefinite detentions can follow mere membership (past or present) or support for suspect organizations or individuals.

Constitutional, statute and international laws don’t apply. Presidential diktats replaced them. No one anywhere is safe.

Presidents have unchecked power. They can unjustifiably accuse anyone of posing a threat. They may order arrests and imprisonment for life without charge or trial. Abuse of power replaced rule of law protections. It’s happening in real time.

Ahead of their holiday break, leaders from both Houses met secretly to resolve final language differences before sending NDAA to Obama to sign.

Senate bill sponsor Carl Levin said administration officials, in fact, lobbied against language excluding US citizens from indefinite military detentions without trials or due process. According to Levin:

“The language which precluded the application of Section 1031 to American citizens was in the bill that we originally approved….and the administration asked us to remove (it) which says that US citizens and lawful residents would not be subject to this section.”

“It was the administration that asked us to remove the very language which we had in the bill which passed the committee. (W)e removed it at the request of the administration….It was the administration which asked us to remove the very language, the absence of which is now objected to.”

In other words, Obama wants US citizens indefinitely detained in military prisons whether or not charged. He fully supports police state repression. Only his disingenuous rhetoric says otherwise.

His earlier Executive Order authorized indefinite detentions of anyone designated national security threats. Specifically intended for Guantanamo detainees, it’s now for everyone, including US citizens at home or abroad.

Moreover, CIA operatives and Special Forces death squads got presidential authorization to kill targeted US citizens abroad. As a result, they can be hunted down and murdered in cold blood for any reason or none at all.

Inviolable rights are dead. Protesting imperial lawlessness, social injustice, corporate crime, government corruption, or political Washington run of, by and for rich elites can be criminalized.

So can free speech, assembly, religion, or anything challenging America’s right to kill, destroy and pillage with impunity. Tyranny arrived in America. The nation’s unsafe to live in. There’s no place to hide. Anyone challenging injustice can be arrested, charged with supporting terrorism, and indefinitely imprisoned forever.

In response to Judge Forrest’s ruling, administration officials appealed. They claimed she exceeded enjoining NDAA’s section 1021. In a 38-page filing, they said her ruling:

“threatens irreparable harm to national security and the public interest by injecting added burdens and dangerous confusion into the conduct of military operations abroad during an active armed conflict.”

Forrest questioned how AUMF is interpreted. The 2001 authorization and NDAA’s section 1021 aren’t the same, she said. “They are not co-extensive. Military detention based on allegations of ‘substantially supporting’ or ‘directly supporting” the Taliban, Al Qaeda, or associated forces, is not encompassed within the AUMF and is enjoined by this order regarding” NDAA.

Washington uses AUMF and other twisted legal interpretations to wage war on humanity. At issue also is giving Obama diktat authority to indefinitely detain or kill anyone he wishes with or without charges or trials.

Habeas and due process rights are null and void. So are all other constitutional rights. Obama effectively granted himself dictatorial powers.

His minions overstepped by saying Forrest took “it upon (herself) to disagree with an interpretation of the military’s detention authority that had previously been endorsed by all three branches of government.”

“What is more, (she) expressly invites actions for contempt sanctions if the military exercises detention authority in a manner inconsistent with the court’s deeply flawed understanding of that authority.”

In June, she issued a preliminary injunction against enforcing the statute she questions. While appealing her ruling, Obama officials didn’t block it.

After making her injection permanent, they asked for an emergency stay. They claimed she made an “unprecedented” ruling affecting wartime matters.

On September 17, Second Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Raymond Lohier issued a one-page order. It stayed Forrest’s decision until a three-judge panel rules. On September 28, it’ll hear pro and con arguments.

If it upholds her injunction, expect the Supreme Court to decide.

Bruce Afran is one of several attorneys representing plaintiffs. He called the government’s concern unfounded. Forest’s injunction doesn’t touch its separate AUMF powers. “The general thrust of (its) argument seems to be that the president and Congress are immune from judicial review.”

No matter which way the Second Circuit or perhaps Supreme Court rules, this issue is far from resolved. At the behest of Obama or Romney if he’s elected, Congress can pass new overriding legislation. It happened several times during the Bush administration.

If so, we’re back to square one. Repression will continue unchecked. With or without NDAA, it’s largely that way now. America isn’t fit to live in. A new dark age dawned no matter which party wins in November.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book is titled “How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion and Class War”

http://www.claritypress.com/Lendman.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour

posted by Steve Lendman @ 11:53 PM

Long Knives Target Iran

by Stephen Lendman

Some background:

February 11, 2012 marked the 33rd anniversary of Iran’s 1979 revolution. It ended a generation of repressive rule under Washington’s installed Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.

In 1953, CIA operative Kermit Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson and Franklin’s cousin, engineered the Agency’s first coup. Democratically elected Mohammad Mossadeq was ousted. The New York Times called him Iran’s “most popular politician.”

As late as 1977, Jimmy Carter declared Iran an “oasis of stability.” He ignored years of brutal Shah repression. In January 1979, he fled the country. Ayatollah Khomeini returned. He proclaimed the Islamic Republic with overwhelming public support.

US officials thought they could control him. They thought wrong. Iran was free from Western dominance and didn’t look back. Tensions escalated. Washington planned regime change. It remains US policy.

In 1975, Iran and Iraq negotiated the Algiers Agreement. It settled border disputes between the two countries. In March 1980, Saddam Hussein unilaterally abrogated it. Carter officials encouraged him.

Journalist/historian Dilip Hiro noted:

“According to the Iranian president, Bani-Sadr, in early August 1980 his government had purchased secret documents containing a detailed account of the conversations in France between several deposed Iranian generals and politicians, Iraqi representatives, and American and Israeli military experts.”

“If so, the administration of President James Carter had an inkling of Iraqi plans. By supplying secret information, which exaggerated Iran’s military weakness, to Saudi Arabia for onward transmission to Baghdad, Washington encouraged Iraq to attack Iran.”

Saddam was supported by CIA-sponsored Iranian military officers given refuge in Iraq. Soviet Russia feared revolutionary Islam spreading to central Asia.

Saddam saw his chance to wage war and win. He hoped to defeat a regional rival, annex parts of Iran, and strengthen his regional position.

Washington wanted its own regional influence enhanced. The Carter Doctrine pledged Middle East military intervention if US interests were threatened.

According to columnist Jack Anderson, he considered invading Iran, seizing its oil fields, and boosting his electoral prospects, he hoped. Soviet Russia threatened intervention if he followed through.

Carter abandoned his plans. At the same time, his administration remained hostile to Ayatollah Khomeini’s government.

Reagan escalated Carter policies short of committing US forces in combat. Saddam got US backing. America pretended neutrality. It proves repeatedly it can’t be trusted.

Support for the Shah was a key element of US regional policy. Iran’s 1979 revolution changed things. Saddam became Washington’s weapon to defeat a government it opposed.

On September 22, 1980, Iraq invaded Iran. Border clashes preceded all-out conflict. Nearly eight years of war followed. Over a million died, including civilians. America and other Western countries call it the Iran/Iraq war.

Saddam hoped it would be a “whirlwind war.” He renamed it Qadisiyyad Saddam. It was an emotive reference to Arabs defeating Persians in 636. Tehran calls it the “Sacred Defense” or “imposed war.”

On September 21, Press TV headlined “Iran marks (32nd) anniversary of Iraq imposed war with military parades,” saying:

Ceremonies opened “Sacred Defense Week.” They began symbolically at Ayatollah Khomeini’s Tehran mausoleum. Planned events include parades, commemorative concerts, and photo exhibits.

Commemorating the occasion, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad delivered a nationally televised address, saying:

“Our sacred defense was not defending a territory, a nation or a school of thought alone. It was well beyond that. It was defending human dignity, the rights of all nations and those of the oppressed people of the world.”

Iran will “stand and defend its rights,” he asserted. He called the blasphemous anti-Muslim film inciting violence an Israeli plot “to divide (Muslims) and spark sectarian conflict.”

He and Ayatollah Khamenei days earlier noted Western hypocrisy. Condemn Washington, other NATO allies, or Israeli crimes and be denounced. At the same time, insulting Islam is called free expression.

He criticized nations backing Saddam’s invasion. They revealed their imperial regional aims. They’re also fake human rights advocates. They say one thing and do another. Scoundrels operate that way.

Iranian officials turned out in force. High-ranking military ones were present. Iran’s latest military hardware was showcased. On display was its new domestically made air defense system.

Called Raad, or Thunder, it’s more advanced than its Russian predecessor. It’s designed to confront jet aircraft, cruise missiles, smart bombs, helicopters, and drones.

Its capability ranges up to 30 miles. It can strike targets high as 75,000 feet. It’s a formidable defense against attack.

“Sacred Defense Week” commemorates Iran’s commitment to deter aggressors and remain free.

Western and Israeli long knives remain threatening. Tensions are especially high. Netanyahu’s bluster aside, longstanding Washington plans call for regime change.

Iran’s peaceful nuclear program is red herring cover used as pretext. If not that, something else would substitute. Excuses are easy to fabricate. Western media scoundrels regurgitate them ad nauseam.

Fear is generated. Other false charges follow. America is hell bent for war. It has a willing partner in Israel provided Washington plays the lead role.

Potentially catastrophic consequences are ignored. Apparently, so is opposition expressed by current and past high-ranking military and government officials in both countries. Updated war plans are ready to be implemented unless cooler heads go all out to prevent it.

Iran is falsely called an existential threat. Netanyahu and Israeli hardliners claim it constantly. Washington does it on and off. It’s wearing thin but take it seriously. One day crying wolf won’t be bluster or bluffing.

On September 20, Haaretz reported the latest outburst. It headlined “US warns Iran: Time is running out on diplomacy over nuclear program.”

This time UN envoy Susan Rice issued the warning. She gives diplomacy a bad name. She’s one of America’s worst ever ambassadors. Her style is belligerent, arrogant, and offensive.

Addressing the Security Council, she said:

“We believe there is still time and space for diplomacy,” but not much.

“(T)he onus is on Iran to respond constructively.” She added that Washington seeks a “clear, united resolution” regarding Tehran’s nuclear enrichment program.

Her comments were a clear warning. At the same time, she and other US officials know Iran’s nuclear program is peaceful. So do others in Israel, European nations and elsewhere.

Nonetheless, warnings persist. This one comes as Washington, Britain, France, Saudi Arabia, and other US allies stage large-scale Gulf naval drills. Doing so is provocative. It heightens tensions. Make no mistake. Provocation is Washington policy.

This one is codenamed IMCMEX-12. It involves minesweeping and other measures to keep the Strait of Hormuz open if Iran blocks it defensively. It warned about doing it if attacked.

In September, Tehran plans its own drills. It knows the risks and stands ready to confront them.

So do Israelis wanting no part of war. A mid-August Haaretz article headlined “We’ll all pay on doomsday,” saying:

Attacking Iran is madness. It means sharply higher oil prices, deeper global recession, and Israel becoming “even less popular in Europe and the United States than we already are.”

The Bank of Israel and Finance Ministry predict attacking Iran will cause “serious economic damage.” They’re concerned about bankruptcies, mass layoffs, potential panic, and other protracted effects.

World condemnation will follow. Countries, companies, labor organizations, and consumer groups already boycott Israel for good reason. Attacking Iran will intensify their ire.

When “rockets fall on Tel Aviv,” expect investors to flee. Financial assets will suffer. Tax revenues will drop. Deficits will rise.

Iran’s response will be far more robust than anything Israel previously experienced. “You can’t live a normal life under a daily threat like that.”

Israelis will be fearful. They’ll hunker down. Normal activities will be curtailed. Business will suffer. Tourists won’t come. International airlines will cancel flights. Ports will be “paralyzed.”

The shekel will drop sharply. Inflation will rise. Goods will become scarce. The only good news is that unaffordable housing prices will fall. Who’ll buy property vulnerable to destruction?

Haaretz omitted what’s most important. How many millions of Iranian and Israeli lives will be lost? Bombing nuclear facilities in both countries assures widespread irradiation.

Immediate casualties will be huge in both countries. Longer-term ones will be catastrophically high. War on Iran assures all sides lose. Regional countries will be affected. So will most others from economic fallout.

Haaretz is right saying “We’ll all pay on doomsday.” Assuring it doesn’t happen is the only sensible policy. It’s not rocket science. It’s common sense.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book is titled “How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion and Class War”

http://www.claritypress.com/Lendman.html

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour

posted by Steve Lendman @ 11:49 PM

Thursday, September 20, 2012

US Media War on Islam

by Stephen Lendman

America never treated Muslims respectfully. US media and Hollywood play lead roles. Jack Shaheen’s book “Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People” documented how American filmmakers slander them.

For decades, they’ve been fair game. From silent to more recent films, prejudicial attitudes were fostered. They still are regularly. They disparage Islam in contrast to manufactured notions of Western values, high-mindedness, and moral superiority.

Islamic tenets are ignored. The Koran teaches love, not hate; peace, not violence; charity, not selfishness; and tolerance, not terrorism.

Its five pillars include profession of faith, prayer five times daily, fasting during Ramadan, charity, and performing the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in a lifetime for those able to afford it.

Nonetheless, Muslims are stereotypically portrayed as dangerous gun-toting terrorists. Hate messages repeat regularly. Fear is stoked. Imperial wars of aggression are called justifiable ones.

At home, Muslims are vilified and persecuted for their faith, ethnicity, and at times prominence, activism and charity.

They’re lawlessly targeted. They’re hunted down, rounded up, held in detention, kept in isolation, denied bail, restricted in their right to counsel, tried on secret evidence, convicted on bogus charges, and given long sentences.

For extra harsh treatment, they incarcerated as political prisoners. They’re segregated in Communication Management Units (CMUs).

Doing so violates US Prison Bureau regulations. They strictly prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, religion, national origin, sex, disability, or political beliefs.

In February 2005, the Supreme Court’s Johnson v. California decision affirmed 14th Amendment protection against racial discrimination. It “rejected the notion that separate can ever be equal or neutral.”

Bush administration officials violated rule of law provisions regularly. So do Obama’s. Innocent victims suffer grievously. It happens abroad and at home.

Guantanamo and other torture prisons exist globally. Muslims fill them. Post-9/11, they became public enemy number one.

Many in America are consigned to CMU prison hell. Treatment is ruthless and demeaning. Extra punishment may be ordered for any reason or none at all.

They get fewer rights than other prisoners. Their dietary requirements are compromised or denied. So is proper medical care when needed. Emergency treatment takes days to get. It’s not delivered properly when gotten.

Rotten, inedible food quality is commonplace. Tap water is inferior. Privacy is denied. The entire CMU is monitored round the clock with cameras and listening devices. Policy assures mistreatment and disrespect. Prisoner complaints go unanswered.

Virtually every imprisoned Muslim is innocent. They’re war on terror victims. They’re locked up for praying to the wrong God. They’re alive, but for those getting inordinately long sentences, they’re among the living dead.

Their families suffer with them. It’s the wrong time to be Muslim in America and in nations abroad Washington targets.

Major media scoundrels back the worst of US crimes. When Bush administration officials declared war on Islam, they marched in lockstep. They still do. They’re reliable imperial cheerleaders.

They headline inflammatory accounts of innocent Muslims charged domestically. They play the same blame game. Targeted victims are considered guilty by accusation. Before indictment and prosecution, they’re convicted in the court of public opinion.

Their coverage of anti-Muslim hate film violence is appalling. They ignore what’s really going on. On the one hand, it reflects rage over imperial wars on Islamic countries. People don’t burn buildings or harm others over blasphemous materials alone.

The film sparked what followed. It ignited violence. Promoting it on social media spread it. Something else could have done it as easily. People take abuse only so long before reacting. Once begun, it replicates elsewhere.

In the 1960s, racial segregation, related police violence, other denied civil rights, and economic depravation ignited violence across America. Neighborhoods in northern US cities were set ablaze. It can happen again and likely will. Provocative incidents spark it. It can happen anywhere.

Other factors also lie behind the anti-Muslim film. Dark forces produced it. Killing a US ambassador reinforced it. Israeli fingerprints are all over it. Jewish donors funded it. They got what they wanted.

Justifiable rage across the Middle East, North Africa, Central and South Asia, as well as elsewhere lets them portray Muslims as violent terrorist threats. US and other Western headlines reflect it. More on that below.

Also at issue is America’s November election. Netanyahu and Obama dislike each other. It’s no secret that the Israeli leader favors Romney. He thinks he’ll be quicker to attack Iran.

He’s angry about Obama’s reluctance to show rock solid support. He wants him Carterized. He picked a very public fight to get his way.

Perhaps he’s directly responsible for the blasphemous film. If not, very likely extremists around him. It has all the earmarks of a Mossad false flag. At issue is weakening him politically and fomenting war.

San Francisco anti-Muslim bus ads stoke it. They’re planned for New York and perhaps elsewhere. They read:

“In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man.” Concluding words say “Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.”

Pam Geller’s running them. She’s a notorious hatemonger. US media scoundrels publish her writing. She’s interviewed on television. CBS’ 60 Minutes ran a full feature profile.

She and Robert Spencer co-founded the Freedom Defense Initiative and Stop Islamization of America. It’s legal to be bigoted in America. It’s appalling that media scoundrels support what they should condemn.

The French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo fanned its own flames. It ran blasphemous caricatures of the Prophet Muhammed. Some showed him naked in pornographic poses.

Editor in chief Gerard Biard claimed he did it to satirize the anti-Muslim video. He called its violent reaction absurd. Editorial director Stephane Charbonnier said “We have the right to express ourselves.”

Biard added the Charlie Hebdo is “a newspaper against religions as soon as they enter into the political and public realm.” He claims Muslim religious leaders manipulate French followers for political reasons. “You’re not meant to identify yourself through a religion, in any case not in a secular state,” he claims.

Christians and Jews do it freely in France, America, and other Western countries without incident. Only Muslims are targeted for their faith unfairly.

Who speaks for their rights? No one in high places or with media influence able to reach large audiences in America and across Europe daily.

White House spokesman Jay Carney stopped short of denouncing Charlie Hebdo editors, saying:

“We don’t question the right of something like this to be published. We just question the judgment behind the decision to publish it.”

Call it a back door endorsement. French officials also backed their hate speech rights.

Try denouncing the holocaust in France and see what happens. Try wearing a hijab, other head covering, or head to toe burqah and find out.

Try denouncing Israeli crimes on US television or in mainstream publications, and see how long you keep your job. Try supporting right over wrong and fair no better.

Major media in America and other Western countries suppress truth and full disclosure. Imperial wars are cheerled. Friendly dictators are supported. Independent governments are called terrorist ones. News, information, and analysis get turned on their head.

On September 19, a New York Times editorial was typical. It headlined “The United States and the Muslim world.”

It invoked “Arab Spring” terminology. It’s a Western, not Middle East, term. Since regional protests erupted in winter 2011, nothing changed. In countries like Egypt, things are worse.

The Times inverts reality. It calls regional states run by despots “liberated” ones. They’ve “become battlegrounds for Islamic extremists, moderates and secularists, all contending for power and influence over the direction of democratic change.”

Except for confessional-style Lebanese democracy, no Arab state tolerates it. Neither does Israel, America and hardcore NATO allies.

The Times blames regional violence on extremist elements beyond US control. They’re “eager to exploit unrest for their own purposes.”

Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah is a powerful force against Western and Israeli imperialism. The Times calls him a “particularly destructive force.” It denounced his ability to get tens of thousands of anti-US/Israeli protesters onto Beirut streets and elsewhere across Lebanon.

It pilloried his support for Assad. It condemned Anti-American regional protesters. It claimed they “reinforced the worst fears of those who see Muslims” as violent extremists.

“In 2009, (Obama) wisely sought rapprochement with Muslims.” His Cairo speech “endorsed an approach of mutual respect and promised, that….America never would be at war with Islam.”

From day one, Obama waged multiple direct and proxy wars against Muslim countries. Iraq remains occupied. Tens of thousands of US combat troops never left. Daily violence harms innocent civilians.

Afghan war rages. It’s America’s longest conflict. No end in sight looks near. Obama destroyed Libya. He killed tens of thousands of civilians. Violence continues daily across the country. No one’s sure who’ll live or die.

He supports the worst of Bahraini despotism, its war on people wanting democratic freedoms, and its persecution of activists supporting it.

He’s waging proxy wars against Somalia, Yemen, and indirectly against Palestine with billions of dollars of Israeli aid and strong support for occupation harshness.

He bears direct responsibility for ravaging Syria. He plans eventual war on Iran. Since January 1991, America killed millions of Middle East, North African, and Central Asians Muslims. Most were non-combatant civilians. Many were children.

How many more millions will die before The New York Times and other media scoundrels acknowledge decades of US mass murder?

Instead, The Times praised Obama’s commitment to Middle East democracy. It urged America “to stay engaged in whatever ways it can.”

Millions across the region feel otherwise. They want Washington out for good reason. It’s a scourge. It menaces people wanting peace and freedom, not war, occupation, genocide and destruction. Don’t expect The Times or other media scoundrels to explain.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book is titled “How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion and Class War”

http://www.claritypress.com/Lendman.html

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour

posted by Steve Lendman @ 11:43 PM

Bailout Fraud and Unaccountability

by Stephen Lendman

On December 8, 2008, the Senate confirmed Neil Barofsky’s nomination as Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) watchdog. He assumed the post of SIGTARP (Special Inspector General for TARP).

On July 20, 2009, he estimated the $700 billion bailout fund could balloon to $23.7 trillion. Obama administration secrecy conceals what’s essential to reveal. Over $9 trillion is known. Some analysts think true figures may be three times that amount. Only crooked bankers and corrupt bureaucrats know for sure.

In February 2009, Barofsky submitted an initial report to Congress. In the past two months, he said, Washington handed out hundreds of billions of dollars (like confetti) to troubled financial institutions.

Where did the money go, he asked? What assurances exist that it’s not stolen or wasted?

TARP didn’t require recipients to report or internally track funds used. Accountability wasn’t mandated. Banks took full advantage. Instead of loans to stimulate recovery, they hoarded cash, acquired other financial institutions, paid off debt, speculated, and knew then and now there’s plenty more help for the asking.

Fraud prevention standards weren’t imposed. Barofsky doubts the program’s longterm success.

On March 29, 2011, he headlined a New York Times op-ed “Where the Bailout Went Wrong,” saying:

Two and a half years after legislation passed, Obama officials declared mission accomplished. “On my last day as the special inspector general….I regret to say that I strongly disagree.”

TARP and what followed struck out. It “failed to meet some of its most important goals.” Main Street was sacrificed for Wall Street.

Congress was told TARP funds would buy up to $700 billion of mortgages. Authorizing legislation (the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act – EESA) emphasized preserving homeownership.

Treasury officials promised help. EESA mandated it. Struggling homeowners got none. Legislative provisions were violated. Treasury changed the rules. Money went to banks with no accountability or mandate to extend credit.

“There were no strings attached: no requirement or even incentive to increase lending to home buyers, and against our strong recommendation, not even a request that banks report how they used TARP funds.”

Instead of increased lending, it declined. As inspector general, Barofsky had no enforcement power. He could only recommend. Suggested policies fell on deaf ears. Treasury and Wall Street conspired to commit grand theft. Ordinary people were hung out to dry and scammed.

Helping homeowners was shelved. The Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) was introduced. Obama promised four million families help. The program was “a colossal failure.”

It was designed to fail. Its provisions included no accountability. Guidelines only were provided. Banks and other mortgage services ignored them. Foreclosures mounted. Millions of homeowners were defrauded. Nothing changed to this day.

One of HAMP’s most pernicious abuses was letting servicers “direct borrowers who were current on their mortgages to start skipping payments, telling them that that would allow them to qualify for a HAMP modification,” said Barofsky.

“Homeowners who might have been able to ride out the crisis instead ended up in long trial modifications, after which servicers would deny them a permanent modification and send them an enormous ‘deficiency’ bill.”

“Borrowers who might otherwise never have missed a payment found themselves hit with whopping bills that they couldn’t pay and now faced foreclosure. It was a disaster.”

Geithner bears full responsibility. Understating problems, he admitted solutions “won’t come close” to expectations. He refused to address glaring shortfalls. He abandoned Main Street for Wall Street. He’s complicit in grand theft. He and banker cronies belong in prison.

Banks know they can steal with impunity. They’re larger and more powerful now than when crisis conditions erupted. They can speculate recklessly. They’ll be bailed whenever they get in trouble.

Treasury “ignore(d) rather than support(ed) real” reforms. Its “broken promises” turned TARP and other programs into a giant Wall Street “giveaway.”

Its “mismanagement” and criminal complicity “damaged the credibility of the government….” Conditions are so out of control that future policy makers may be unable “to save the system the next time a crisis arises.”

Perhaps that’s TARP’s “most lasting, and unfortunate, legacy.”

Barofsky’s new book “Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street” explains.

Writer/Roosevelt Institute fellow Matthew Stoller calls it “a very important” account of the financial crisis aftermath. In April 2010, Barofsky met a key adversary.

Herbert Allison formerly headed Merrill Lynch, TIAA-CREF and Fannie Mae. He came out of retirement to oversee TARP. He became Assistant Treasury Secretary for Financial Stability.

“Have you thought at all about what you’ll be doing next,” he asked. “Out there in the market, there are consequences for some of the things you’re saying and the way you’re saying them.”

Barofsky knew he was being threatened “with lifelong unemployment.” Going along instead of bucking the system assures revolving door plum positions. “It was gold or the lead,” he explained.

Cooperate and get rich. Don’t and lose out. At first, he “had no idea that the US government had been captured by” bankers. He was “shocked (at) how much control” they have over policy on their own terms. Treasury goes along deferentially. Republicans or Democrats agree on core issues.

He was hijacked and hamstrung. Too big to fail constitutes near omnipotence. Whatever Wall Street wants it gets. Contesting its power is futile.

Stoller calls “Bailout” an account of “the importance of Congressional oversight in reigning in corruption, and the problems of our imperial Presidency.”

Barofsky hoped for press and congressional attention. “Our message was simple,” he said. “Treasury’s desperate attempt to bail out Wall Street was setting the country up for potentially catastrophic losses.”

Throughout his tenure, he was obstructed. He faced road blocks, ambushes, trench warfare, and threats in trying to do his job.

On arrival at Treasury, he saw ornate large offices given top officials. He got a small, foul-smelling basement one with barred windows. He spent most of the next three years there. He wasn’t welcome unless he played ball. It’s not his style and he refused.

He explained what he saw graphically. Homeowners were abandoned and scammed. A tsunami of evictions, foreclosures, fraud, mortgage document robo-signings, blighted neighborhoods, and homelessness continues without relief.

Taxpayers got the bill. Bankers got benefits. So did lobbyists and go-along politicians. The combination of Treasury criminality, White House complicity, congressional laxity, and regulatory failure keeps the dirty game going.

Since crisis conditions erupted five years ago, ordinary people were sold out and lied to. Obama exceeded the worst Bush administration policies. Political corruption is rampant.

Barofsky’s best efforts failed. Attempts to achieve accountability, transparency, controls, and consumer protections proved no match for entrenched bureaucratic power, privilege and complicity with Wall Street.

He issued numerous reports. Geithner and other Obama officials buried them. Media scoundrels largely ignored them.

Barofsky believes Geithner, complicit officials, and Wall Street crooks should be fired and prosecuted. Don’t expect it as long as criminals run America.

Five years after crisis conditions erupted, no top Wall Street or government official faced charges. Unaccountability is institutionalized. An eventual greater crisis looms. Unresolved problems assure it. When is anyone’s guess.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book is titled “How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion and Class War”

http://www.claritypress.com/Lendman.html

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour

posted by Steve Lendman @ 11:42 PM

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Hypocrisy not Democracy in America

Hypocrisy Not Democracy in America

by Stephen Lendman

US elections are farcical. Obama and Romney represent two sides of the same coin. Neither offers choice. Democracy never existed and doesn’t now. Rhetoric substitutes for reality.

Republicans and Democrats offer the worst of all possible worlds. Ordinary people are entirely shut out. Growing numbers reject both parties for good reason. Money power owns them.

“Are you better off” than four years ago, asked The New York Times? “There is really no reason for any hesitancy. The country is unquestionably better off than it was in 2008.”

Fact check

True to form, The Times offered a litany of lies. Bankers, other corporate favorites, and war profiteers fared handsomely. They still do. America’s 99% got stiff-armed. Most US households were thrown under the bus.

Virtually no jobs were created. Full-time/good pay and benefit ones are disappearing. Real unemployment approaches 23%. In the Great Depression, it reached 25%. Serious efforts were made then to reduce it. Virtually nothing is done now.

US Census figures confirm half or more of US households living in poverty or bordering on it. Record numbers need food stamps to survive. Congress plans cuts when they’re more than ever needed.

Feeding America says over 50 million Americans face hunger. One in six people are affected, including over one in five children. Political Washington ignores food insecurity. Serving corporate interests and imperial warmongers alone matter.

Duplicitous political convention rhetoric was enough to make a brash brigand blush. Banality took center stage. Demagogic deception hid reactionary extremism.

Convention delegates and ordinary people inhabit worlds apart. Pre-scripted yammering was predictable. Republicans showed contempt for human needs. Phony populism hid a similar Democrat agenda.

Privilege alone matters. Ordinary folks increasingly are on their own sink or swim. Obama’s first term reflected it. Betrayal and failure defined it. Another four years assures more of the same and then some.

The man promising hope and change broke every major pledge made. Four demagogic years did Lincoln one better. He fooled most people enough to matter. He’s beholden to big money. He never cared about ordinary people and doesn’t now.

“Yes we can” conceals his dark side. No pun intended. He’s a consummate con man. It’s easy to know when he’s lying, just watch his lips move.

Throughout his political career, he’s been pro-corporate, pro-war, pro-Israel, anti-populist, anti-civil and human rights, and anti all values real democrats support.

He put Wall Street crooks in charge of looting the nation’s wealth. He furthered the greatest wealth transfer in history. Rules, regulations, legal restraints with teeth, and taxes were slashed to help them. Plans are on track to make America resemble Guatemala.

Full-time/high pay/good benefit jobs are disappearing. So are social services. They’re on the chopping block for elimination. The nation’s middle class is targeted for destruction. A huge underclass is replacing it. America’s more than ever militarized to control it.

Police state laws threaten freedom. Big Brother spying is policy. Privacy is a figure of speech. First Amendment rights and dissent are endangered. Tyranny, torture, corporate empowerment, and permanent wars define Obama’s agenda.

He exceeded the worst of George Bush’s harshness, lawlessness, and belligerency. Imagine what he plans if reelected. He waged war on Islam, Latino immigrants, animal and environmental rights activists, whistleblowers, people of color, the poor, anyone challenging state power, and civil rights lawyers who defend them too vigorously.

In Obama’s America, only the privileged matter. Growing numbers of others are on their own hungry, homeless, and jobless.

He looted the nation’s wealth, wrecked the economy, ravaged one nation after another, and continues waging war on humanity.

He executed two Latin American coups. Honduras’ democratically elected president was ousted. So was Paraguay’s. He militarized Haiti, opened the country for business, occupied it for plunder, rigged its election, installed a pro-Western stooge, and increased the growing burden of impoverished Haitians who deserve better.

He supports the world’s worst despots. He sucks up shamelessly to Israel. He spurns long denied Palestinian rights. He plans war on Syria and Iran. Neither nation threatens anyone. America and Israel menace humanity.

He presides over a bogus democracy under a repressive police state apparatus. Habeas rights, due process, judicial fairness, and other civil liberty protections are quaint artifacts increasingly discarded.

Torture is official policy. So is Murder, Inc. Death squads operate in over 120 countries. Special forces and CIA operatives are licensed to kill. US citizens may be targeted at home or abroad. No one anywhere is safe.

Summary judgment means no arrests. No Miranda rights. No due process. No trial. Just a bullet, bomb or slit throat. It’s official Obama policy. Diktat authority affords justice to no one ordered killed.

It also lets Obama order US citizens arrested and indefinitely held without charge or trial. No proof is needed, just suspicions that those detained pose threats. Constitutional protections no longer apply.

US military personnel may arrest and indefinitely detain anyone globally. No one anywhere is safe. Tyranny is policy. Obama seized virtual dictatorial powers. Anyone designated a potential enemy of the state, true or false, is targeted.

Political prisoners fill America’s gulag. It’s the world’s largest by far and one of the worst. Muslims and people of color are most at risk. America’s super-rich and corporate crooks are free to do what they please. Bad as things are now, expect worse.

War rages against labor. Budget-strapped states get little help. Welfare is being cut. So are Medicare for seniors, Medicaid for the needy, and other New Deal/Great Society programs.

Public education is being commodified. Plans call for making it another business profit center and ending government’s responsibility. Health care is being rationed. Only those who can afford it will get help when they need it.

Food and drug safety don’t matter. Nor do clean clean air or water. Small farms and businesses are being destroyed. Large ones are bigger and more dominant than ever.

Wall Street ones are up to one-fourth larger today than four years ago. They’re double their size a decade ago relative to the economy. Ordinary Americans are much poorer and more deprived.

Financial reform was fraudulent. Institutionalized grand theft is policy. Business as usual lets Wall Street run the country. Consumer protections don’t exist.

The worst of bad practices continue. Rules either don’t exist or are made to be broken. Bankers get what they want. Ordinary people get scammed.

Obama promised “change you can believe in.” He delivered betrayal instead. He’s anti-progressive, hard-right, reactionary, belligerent, pro-corporate, and anti-populist. He’s heartless, merciless, morally corrupt, and soulless.

Austerity is policy when help is needed. Draconian cuts were enacted. Many more are planned. Eliminating trillions of dollars in social service spending is policy. Democrats are in lock step with Republicans.

Corporate handouts, tax cuts for the rich, and Pentagon spending remain virtually untouched. Bad as things are now, imagine America in four years under either party.

Obama plans more of the same and then some. Romney is a religious extremist/corporate crook/socially destructive/imperial rogue.

He and Ryan plan exceeding the worst of Obama. Both are unapologetic. They’re indifferent to human need and welfare. They represent everything wrong with a broken system. It’s too corrupted, dysfunctional, and rotten to fix.

They’re frontmen for financialized America, super-rich privilege, and imperial lawlessness. They guarantee worse wide awake nightmares than Obama.

America’s choice in November is none. Bad as things are now expect worse. Bipartisan complicity assures it.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book is titled “How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion and Class War”

http://www.claritypress.com/Lendman.html

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour

posted by Steve Lendman @ 11:54 PM

Unconditional Surrender in Chicago

by Stephen Lendman

September 18, 2012 will be remembered in Chicago as a day of infamy. Corrupt city officials and union bosses won. Teachers, parents, and kids lost.

On September 10, teachers walked out. Core issues were at stake. Most important is saving public education. An American tradition is disappearing.

It’s being commodified. Corporate predators are gaining control. Contract terms agreed on do nothing to stop them.

On Tuesday, Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) House of Delegates voted to suspend strike action and resume classes. By 9:00AM Wednesday morning, they reopened across the city.

Primary and secondary education in Chicago and across America is a shadow of its former self. An article written two years ago next month compared earlier America with today. Rewritten parts are below, saying:

A personal note. I grew up in Boston from the mid-1930s – mid-1950s through college. Post-graduate work followed military service.

Times were different, good and bad. Eisenhower was still president. Unemployment was low. Anyone wanting work found it. Financialization hadn’t taken hold. Industrial America was strong. Most jobs were high pay/good benefit/full-time ones.

Most years the economy grew during a post-WW II expansion. Inflation was low. The average new car cost $1,500. A typical home was under $10,000. College was affordable.

Harvard’s 1952 full year tuition was $600. Four years later it was $1,000 – for a full, two-semester year. Anyone could attend evenings for $5 a course and get a Harvard degree for about $175.

My mother did it that way. On June 14, 1956, we graduated together in the same class. We were Harvard’s first ever mother and son to do it. Perhaps no parent and child did it since.

America was unchallenged economically. Its manufacturing base was solid. It offered high paying/good benefits jobs. No longer.

Union representation was high. Today it’s a shadow of its former self. Southern and northern US cities were segregated. They still are.

All 1960s civil rights gains plus most good jobs and benefits are gone. Alaska and Hawaii additions grew America to 50 states. The Korean War left an unsettled armistice. Six decades later, things haven’t changed.

Cold War politics settled in. Mutually assured destruction (MAD) prevented WW III. Censure ruined Joe McCarthy. By May 1957, he was dead at age 48. He’s not missed or mourned.

The CIA’s first coup deposed Iran’s democratically elected Mohammad Mosaddegh. A generation of terror followed. A year later, America toppled Guatemala’s Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. Decades of genocide followed. Indigenous Guatemalans suffered horrifically. They still do.

Throughout the decade, few followed Vietnam events, France’s defeat, and America’s growing involvement. Palestine wasn’t occupied. Israel was mostly out of sight and mind.

Times indeed changed, and not for the better, including in education.

June 14, 1956 reflected a different time. Thousands filled Harvard’s yard that day. Dignitaries showed up. Jack Kennedy delivered the commencement address. Senator JFK. It was 1956.

He was thoughtful and scholarly. Politicians don’t talk that way today. He said political parties and politicians only think of winning. Truth and honor are sacrificed for political advantage.

His entire address was full of scholarly references. He quoted Lowell, Milton, Bismark, Goethe, Macauley, and others. He had intellect and showed it.

He reminded listeners that long ago books were politicians’ tools, not their enemies. Locke, Milton, Sydney, Montesquieu, Coke, Bollingbroke and others were widely read and quoted in political pamphlets.

“Our political leaders traded in the free commerce of ideas with lasting results” long ago. He named Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Franklin, Adams, his son John Quincy Adams, and Daniel Webster among others.

He said when freedom is endangered, politicians and intellectuals “should be natural allies, working more closely together for the common cause against the common enemy.”

He ended saying “if more politicians knew poetry and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place in which to live on this commencement day of 1956.”

He also said one of his contemporaries spoke of Jefferson as a man for all seasons. He called him “A gentleman of 32, who could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, dance a minuet, and play the violin.”

He was also a statesman, third US president, and supporter of public and university education. He said “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

“….whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that, whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them right.”

He called education fundamental for democracy. He believed ignorance and sound government can’t co-exist. He said government must provide education.

Only popular government can safeguard democracy. “Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories. And to render them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree….”

“Democracy cannot long exist without enlightenment….it cannot function without wise and honest officials.”

In free societies, everyone “should be educated regardless of wealth, birth or other accidental conditions….Children of the poor must be educated at common expense.”

On December 2, 1806, in his State of the Union Address, he urged Congress pass a constitutional amendment mandating federal support for education. He said:

“An amendment to our constitution must here come in aid of the public education. The influence over government must be shared among all people.”

He never got what he wanted. It’s our loss today. He believed primary and secondary education were vital. He wanted them kept public. He had six objectives. He hoped they’d create a more productive, informed electorate. They included:

(1) “To give every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business;

(2) To enable him to calculate for himself, and to express and preserve his ideas, his contracts, and accounts, in writing;

(3) To improve, by reading, his morals and faculties;

(4) To understand his duties to his neighbors and country, and to discharge with competence the functions confided to him by either;

(5) To know his rights; to exercise with order and justice those he retains; to choose with discretion the fiduciary of those he delegates; and to notice their conduct with diligence, with candor, and judgment;

(6) And, in general, to observe with intelligence and faithfulness all the social relations under which he shall be placed.”

Hopefully he meant “she” as well as “he.”

He devoted his later years to education. He wanted to create an “academic village.” In 1819, he founded the University of Virginia. He envisioned a new kind of university. He wanted emphasis placed on practical affairs and public service.

It was America’s first nonsectarian institution of higher learning. It was the first to adopt an elective course system. He called founding the university one of his greatest achievements.

He did it late in life. He planned its curriculum, recruited its first faculty, and designed its “academic village.” In 1825, classes began with eight teachers and 68 students.

Kennedy also believed in the importance of education. He said “Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource.”

“Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our nation.”

“A child miseducated is a child lost.”

He supported keeping primary and secondary education public. He proposed aiding them with federal grants. He stressed investing in our youth from grade school through post-graduate studies. Imagine what he, Jefferson, and like-minded leaders would say today.

On September 19, the Chicago Tribune headlined “Teachers, students return to Chicago public schools,” saying:

On Tuesday, Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) House of Delegates members voted to end strike action and return to classes.

Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) president Karen Lewis pressured them to accede. She should be hung in effigy, fired and replaced. Instead she practically gloated saying:

“We feel very positive about moving forward. We feel grateful that we have a united union, and that when a union moves together, amazing things happen.”

Sugar-coating sellout doesn’t wash.

Mayor Emanuel was no better. He called the deal “an honest compromise.”

It was sellout. Money and power won. Teachers, parents and kids lost. At issue is how long will it take before they know? Then, what’ll they do about it?

Short-term, it’s too late. Across America, ordinary people are losing out consistently. Human, civil and worker rights are being lost. A previous article said Occupy Wall Street is right. The only solution is world revolution. Nothing less will work.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Posted in Geopolitics, Home

Disintegration

Published September 23, 2012 | By Steve from Virginia

Off the keyboard of Steve from Virginia

Posted on Economic Undertow on September 22,2012

Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasbord inside the Diner

The economic crisis in Europe and elsewhere deepens, political systems are unable to respond, conditions are rapidly spiraling out of control.

In English, this remark from the Chinese social networking site, Weibo:

beijingwanbao: We can adapt as times change. If the foreign devils haven’t said the U.S. army won’t get involved, what are we doing tying up our own hands and feet? If we don’t even have this measure of resolve, we’ll just be blackmailed. //@tracelesstraveler: China affirms it would not use nuclear weapons first. //@beijingwanbao: “Starting a Sino-Japanese War: Comparing Weaponry in Pictures” http://t.cn/zWsiGrC (via @milnews) Why waste energy? Skip to the main course and drop an atomic bomb. Simple.Reposts: 2082 Comments: 974

Beijing Wanbao is a Chinese capital city news broadcaster. The frenzy is about the purchase of the Senkaku Islands, a couple of uninhabitable islands by the Japanese government from their private owners last week. These islands are located near Formosa.

Around 1900, Japanese entrepreneur Koga Tatsushirō constructed a bonito processing plant on the islands with 200 workers. The business failed in 1940 and the islands have remained deserted ever since.

Back then, nobody cared …

The islands came under US government occupation in 1945 after the surrender of Japan ended World War II. In 1969, the United Nations Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East (ECAFE) identified potential oil and gas reserves in the vicinity of the Senkaku Islands.

The xenophobic, paranoid hyper-nationalism of the Chinese is never far from the surface, the smallest scratch brings it to the surface:

More Weibo: the sign says, “Even if China becomes nothing but tombstones, we must exterminate the Japanese; even if we have to destroy our own country, we must take back the Diaoyu Islands.”

Kill humans so that there might be cars!

It’s not just about the oil, it’s about the denial about the oil: the banner is posted in front of an Audi automobile dealership by employees. Without the presumed gusher of fuel from Diaoyu-Senkaku Islands, cars are a hard-sell. The Chinese fanatics defend both their pocketbook interests and their new-found adoration of the sports sedan. The Chinese are late to the party and they know it: the furious desperation with which they grasp their last, best chance is indicative. They will have their wasteful moment in the sun and they will blow up anything and everything that stands in their way.

Like Americans, the Chinese have bet the rent money on endless supremacy of the automobile over all other things into the far distant future. Cognitive dissonance: what the banner holders don’t grasp is their cars devour the fuel supply that they themselves are willing to kill and die for. Each Chinese dies twice, once to gain oil concessions then again when their pet cars burn up the fuel supply. At the end of the day, the Chinese have nothing to show for their human sacrifices other than some used cars … and massive debts that cannot be repaid.

All of this and violent anti-Japanese riots on top of threats by the Chinese establishment to bankrupt Japan by dumping its collection of Japanese IOU’s on the market at once.

Clearly the American Way loses something in the translation to Chinese. Cars cease being ‘fun’ when they become instrumental to mass destruction.

China’s fury is misdirected: the Japanese are flat broke, depending upon the Bank of Japan to keep the debt collectors at bay for one more day (Ambrose Evans-Pritchard):

The Bank of Japan is to buy a further 10 trillion yen (US$130bn) of bonds, bringing the total accumulated so far in its battle against deflation to 80 trillion yen, or 20pc of Japanese GDP.Jun Azumi, Japan’s finance minister, praised the bank’s “bold” efforts to hold down the yen, lending credence to suspicions that the real motive is to counter “beggar-thy-neighbour” currency devaluations by other powers and prevent the strong yen choking Japan’s export industry.Yunosuke Ikeda, from Nomura, said the Bank of Japan had yielded to “immense political pressure” after months of criticism.

Japan seeks to protect its own precious automobile industry, the central bank jumps on the quantitative easing bandwagon in an attempt to keep the status quo intact. The fact of mass, coordinated QE speaks for itself. Meanwhile, the crisis in Europe takes a political turn (Ambrose Evans-Pritchard):

Spain risks break-up as Mariano Rajoy stirs Catalan fury.

The ruling parties of Catalonia have sought guidance from Brussels on the legality of secession from Spain, requesting a “route map” for membership of the European Union and the euro as an independent state.

Jose-Manuel Garcia-Margallo, the (Spanish) foreign minister, threw down the gauntlet, calling Catalan secession “illegal and lethal”. He warned that Spain would use its veto to stop the region of Catalonia becoming an EU member “indefinitely”.

Catalan leader Artur Mas held high-stakes talks with Mr Rajoy in Madrid on Thursday, armed with a mandate from the Catalan parliament and with charged emotions left from an unprecedented protest by 1.5m people in Barcelona 10 days ago.

He demanded an independent treasury for the rich Catalan region, with control over its own tax base akin to the model already enjoyed by Basques. The 9m Catalans have an economy the size of Austria’s.

[ ... ]

A serving army officer, Colonel Francisco Alaman, has fueled the flames by comparing the crisis with 1936 – when Gen Francisco Franco seized power – and by vowing to crush Catalan nationalists, described as “vultures”.

“Independence for Catalunya? Over my dead body. Spain is not Yugoslavia or Belgium. Even if the lion is sleeping, don’t provoke the lion, because he will show the ferocity proven over centuries,” he said.

Retired Lt-Gen Pedro Pitarch, a former army chief, said the words reflect “deeply-rooted thinking in large parts of the armed forces”. He also accused Madrid of bungling the Catalan drama disastrously.

“Are we looking at a failed state?” he asked. Investors holding Spanish debt are listening carefully.

There are disputes, violence and disturbances relating to oil and other resources in the Arctic, in northern, eastern, southern and western Africa, out and out war in the Middle East, in the Eastern Mediterranean littoral, the Persian Gulf in both Iran and Bahrain, in South Asia, as well as political gridlock in Europe, Japan and the United States. Every day the world steps closer to the precipice. As the economic tools prove to be useless to stem decline what remains are military tools, the means to simply steal from others. The imperial West has resorted to these tools already, to kill all of us so that (presumably) all of us might drive.

All of the above is more Peak Oil denial, like the ‘Central Bank Printing Money’ meme. The gist of the militarist argument is that stealing resources is a permanent solution to resource constraints, that the resources are available to steal, that they will be better employed by the thief.

China, Japan, Spain and the rest are bankrupted by their unaffordable automobiles. None of these countries can pay for their past consumption of non-renewable resources. They have borrowed in the past and seek to borrow now, to pay for the resources and to retire older debts.

Meanwhile, the same countries have nothing worthwhile to offer as payment for the resources they need tomorrow … or for the generations to come. They consume the means with which to pay. They offer up comic-book drek … of a careless future the outlines of which are becoming more clear. In the place of a fanciful futurama of robot kitchens and flying cars, there is a continual unraveling accompanied by denial of the same unraveling, a collective inability to respond appropriately leading to system breakdown: more cognitive dissonance.

Reality about energy supplies begins to emerge and it’s as ugly for ‘Autoworld’ as Thanksgiving is for turkeys. Peak Oil has blitzed the Greek economy into the dumpster with stunning dispatch, so much so it seems beyond the ability of sensible Greeks to understand what happened to them. Greece isn’t a hedge fund or an over-leveraged investment bank peddling fubar MBS out of a back room but a modern, middle-class nation with a (semi)functioning government and a four-thousand year history: all that except for the history is gone … in a heartbeat. Fall asleep in Greece, wake up in Angola.

— from ‘God, Peak Oil and Turkeys’ (March, 2012)

Nobody will admit that Greece was undone by peak oil, nobody will even discuss it or entertain the possibility! This isn’t economists in 2004 missing a prediction about what might happen in 2008. This is an entire army of exceptionally well-paid, over-educated analysts, policy makers, business leaders, economists, educators, pundits, energy bloggers, fiction writers, poets and bass fishermen not seeing what is taking place right under their noses!

Now it is Spain’s turn to be swept off the table by its automobile waste. The only issue is how long will the process take. Using Greece as a model, once the establishment is admittedly insolvent, the spasm of national ruin and follow-on decline is almost instantaneous.

Like Greeks, the Spanish bet the rent on the American Way waste-based consumer economy, not realizing it was a scam. Now that they ‘know’ (or are dimly aware) there is nothing they can do about it, there is nothing the Spanish want to do about it. Like the Greeks the Spanish want the euro, they want the cars they want the modernity and will continue to do so even when the Spanish economy completely collapses. The Spanish have spent centuries living off the soil in small villages and they have no desire to return.

Same with the Chinese and Japanese.
“There’s a lot of momentum embedded in the passion of Chinese here to adopt higher-standard of living … they want their apartment, they want their cars, they want their air conditioning.

— Bloomberg
These countries’ chances to turn aside from faddish consumerism came and went decades ago. They caught themselves in the self-reinforcing web of fashion … that requires chic Spaniards/Greeks/Japanese/Chinese to have a shiny new cars, luxury jobs, designer ‘accessories’, new houses in the suburbs and ‘resorts’. Add the predatory lenders and ruthless manufacturers, shills and gamblers and the moderns were doomed. They had no idea what it was they were signing their futures away for, they believed the salesmen rather than following common sense.

All of this overhead structure is precariously balanced upon slender resources. The amounts of oil near the Senkaku Islands look to be very small. Information from the International Energy Agency (IEA, 2008)

Field	Estimated Oil Reserves (Mbbl)
Canxue	5
Baoyunting	4.5
Chunxiao	3.8<
Cuanqaio	2.2
Wuyunting	1.9
Tianwaitin	.5
Total:	17.9

Twenty million barrels is an insignificant amount of oil to go to war over. Presumably there is more than the 20 million … that can be retrieved by improved drilling. Yet, even 2 billion- or 20 billion barrels of proven reserves would do little to address the 10 million barrel per day consumption habits of the Japanese and Chinese. A decade and more of extraction enterprise is required to bring any oil to the markets. In the meantime, the world’s other oil wells relentlessly decline. Bloated demand outruns all possible sources of new supply. The only question is how long will it be until this demand is bankrupted?

Next goes Europe, itself. The Greek default closes the book on Europe in its current form, which is a lost cause. It is the end of the beginning: there is not going to be any ‘recovery’ or way back from the abyss that is now engulfing the continent. Some fragments here and there might save themselves for a little while, then like sparks from a bonfire be swept away by the wind. The crisis must now burn itself out: Europeans, look to yourselves and may your turkey-God have mercy on your souls.

Not much longer, children ….

Posted in Economics, Energy | Tagged Austerity, Cars, China, Euro, Oil, Spain

Lately…

Published September 22, 2012 | By William Hunter Duncan

Off the keyboard of WHD

First published @ Off the Grid in Minneapolis

Discuss this at the Epicurian Delights Smorgasbord inside the Diner

How much can happen in a week?

About a week ago*, I awoke to a story on NPR about organic food. Stanford University had released a study suggesting organic foods aren’t any healthier than industrial foods. I was only half shocked, as I was only partially awake.

When I walked into big bank later that morning, into the break room, BBC teevee news was reporting on a Stanford study, suggesting organic foods are no better for you than industrial foods (though I think NPR and the BBC used the word “commercial.”) That was when I felt a watershed feeling, as of the last gasping breathe of a dying paradigm. Stanford, NPR, and the BBC. The commercialism of life is officially systemic, such that no authority of any kind remains, that is not suspect of bastardizing reality.

Then an Egyptian American coptic Christian con artist, pretending to be an Israeli Jew, released a film. An American Ambassador was killed in Libya, in an attempted kidnapping (why else would the “rioters” have rushed him to a hospital while he was still alive?), and anti-America sentiment with all the vigor and all-the-more ferocity of the Arab Spring, was released, all over the world. Meanwhile, much of China is alight with anti-Japanese fire breathing, many a Japanese automobile smashed to pieces in the street, Japanese restaurants and stores trashed, Japanese compared to dogs and demons. While one of the (debatable) Americans running for President, has been making increasingly aggressive statements against Russia, Iran, Syria and China, and at least 47% of his fellow Americans. Oh yeah, Apple released the iPhone 5. QE3?

First of all, hospitals have no incentive to lower Health Care costs. In fact, they have a financial incentive to fill the hospital, just as the prisons do. Hence, there is motive built into the system to keep people fat, unhealthy, and preferably stupid. Hence, a Federal and State policy in defense of industrial food. Second, we Americans don’t get to presume we have the right to 35%+ of the world’s resources, and then get uppity about the blowback, or to blame the languishing economy on poor people. Third, that attempted kidnapping that went awry can’t be explained away with stories about radical Islam, as wretched as Fundamentalist Islam is, when the very private brain behind American foreign policy, the Council on Foreign Relations, is praising al Qaida for their support of the rebels in Syria; as in, don’t put it past the CIA to kidnap an American Ambassador, or pay al Qaida to do it, with weapons to be used in Syria, to incite Americans to war in the Middle East, to forget about the economy – when NPR, the BBC and Stanford can’t be trusted not to eviscerate the truth with mass media absurdities. Fourth, I can’t tell the difference between Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. How many Christian pastors stood up this week and defended Ro-money’s de-humanization of half the country, with the poor put to the proverbial boot? On the whole as Religions with a capital R, Christianity, Islam and Judaism strike me as hostile to women, to the weak and to life, and bent toward world domination. The old beliefs speak of a triple Goddess arising in this world as the archetype of the maiden, the mother, and the crone. Today they are all subdued by dominant visions of the One Male God (OMG), or the One Male Omniscient God (OMOG), as a triplicate tyranny in God the Father, Yahweh and Allah.

An email came through to our department Wednesday, in big bank, that there would be a managerial walk-through at 1:30, and besides not having any personal items at our computer stations, we were required to have our keyboards on our computer trays, NOT on the desk. I didn’t see the email, and no one confronted me, though I can’t be sure it won’t be counted against me that I had my backpack under the desk and my keyboard on the desk. It’s hard to imagine any of my immediate managers insisting.

This is big bank, thinking not of my comfort or health, but of orderly appearances. This is especially obtuse, this kind of oversight, as I’ve waded through two hundred and fifty different big bank proffered mortgage loans in default, the last two days. Talk about government incompetence? Say, institutional. Indeed, Government facilitated these loans I’m expected to do this one thing for, highlighting HUD settlement statements, 150 loans every day the next several days, but the banks profited, big time. Nevertheless, because I have a job to do, I cleared 100 yesterday, 150 loans today, through this stage of the process.

The largest loan of the 250 was $929,000. There were three above $700,000, about 75 today from Maryland and Virginia, above $400,000. I don’t generally feel too bad about my part until I see a loan under $200,000, the closer the loan gets to $100,000. The especially saddening ones are under $100,000, in rural areas, though the documents aren’t necessarily indicative of refinancing for a quick cash infusion, whatever the state of the debtors. On the whole, these loans do speak of a people trying to step up in class, who overshot, who got suckered into a classic bubble, according to a commercial version of the American dream. The vaunted $25 billion dollar mortgage settlement between the big banks and the State Attorney’s General, is vinyl siding and window treatments to a rotten house, a Cherrio sponge in a bucket full of sour milk. Something I may attempt to benefit from, and report on faithfully if I do, btw, as I am $50,000 under water.

For those readers who remember about my job search, an email arrived from HR, of the DREAM JOB – not just the DREAM JOB, the Job I Was Made To Do. I wasn’t deemed worthy of an interview.

I’m not surprised, nor am I wrecked about it either. Big Bank is not my first choice, but big bank is a kind of blessing in disguise, lipstick on a pig maybe, but a blessing for me now, for sure. A paycheck every week! Though my sister made more in one night serving drinks last week, than I made in my 40 hrs of service to Big Bank. That was sobering. Turns out people don’t drink less when the economy is shitty. Tough work though, hard on the body, slinging drinks. Tough I can’t imagine staring at mortgage documents years on end (though defaults are sure to continue in abundance into the forseeable future, notwithstanding the wish making of the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg et al.) The benefits have abounded, for me; my house is cleaner than it has been in awhile, I’ve brought a lunch every day since I started, most of it from my garden, and I’m encouraged to think about orderly progress on the house and garden. There is much to do, including turning the garage into a greenhouse, tearing up more of the driveway, a paver patio by the pond, insulating boards for the windows, besides putting the garden to bed for the winter, and the full harvest of course. I get up every weekday at 5am with the alarm. I’ve economised somehow and my best dreams seem to come around 2am.

I wish I could show you pictures of my garden, though no image or series of images or words would suffice to capture the beauty of my garden, after a rain, in the twilight, in the fall. My garden is a lush, abundant, enchanted food and medicinal forest, compared to my neighbor’s consensual, bleak, burned out yards of sod. There is a spontaneous landscape artist on the corner right now (with an easel,) painting the sunflowers in the front, which stand ten feet tall, next to the equally tall broom grass, and the heavenly blue morning glory’s on the fifteen-foot, dead, spiraled lilac trunk I propped up right at the corner. Surrounded by cosmos, hyssop, New-England aster, tomatoes, cabbages, melons and sapling fruit trees.

I finished reading a book this week, called The Alphabet Versus the Goddess. Leonard Shlain’s basic premise is, five thousand years ago, everywhere in many cultures the Great Mother was supplanted by a Violent Male God, wherever there is evidence of the emergence of the written word. The word, he claims, is linear, abstract, and analytical, which is the purview of the left hemisphere of the brain, which is associated with the right side of the body. The right brain is about emotion, connection, image and sound, intuition, art and dancing. The written word literally rewired our brains to be left brain dominant, hence the imbalance in the world, the right angles, the general aggressiveness, incongruous attitudes about life, economy, the earth and universal processes. The world is in process toward re-balance, a return to wholeness and equanimity between the opposites of our being, as evidenced by the re-emergence of the image, Shlain contends. Teevee isn’t so bad, in this sense, insofar as the near universality of the image has primed the human brain toward a greater openness to right brained activity, a greater expansion in the feminine. Shlain believes we are on the verge of a golden age, in which the masculine and the feminine are in greater balance. He wrote his book in the Nineties, before 9/ll, though I don’t think he would be surprised necessarily by the resurgenge everywhere of mysogyny, whether that be fundamentalist Islam or the white male American Republican obsession with controlling the womb. Like I said, the watershed, the final thrust, of a dying paradigm.

I gave the painter a watermelon. I’ve made juice from three kinds of grapes that grow here. I’ve made salsa, and I’ve canned tomatoes and peppers. And while I have the urge to store, preeminent, or at least evident, is a desire to share. I measure the true abundance of this garden by what I will keep and what I will give away. Trusting, when I remember, that what I give will come back.

Shlain though contends, it is not to do away with the word, with Logos, with the analytical and science, but to embrace the spontaneous, life as Art and the joy of being alive, emotion, connection and the relation in every aspect to all things. Because therein arises the essence of the next stage of our evolution, the dis-illusion of duality and the unification of opposites. Arising above all out of the body, as it is a fount of universal energies, to the degree we open up to it.

*er, two. LOL

Posted in Environment, Home | Tagged American Dream, Banking, Debt, Mortgages

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Published September 21, 2012 | By RE

Off the keyboard of RE

Discuss this article at the Geopolitics Table inside the Diner

The Anniversary date of Occupy Wall Street has passed, barely a Blip on the Radar in the pantheon of major Newz Events unfolding around the world these days. Die hard OWSers showed up on Wall Street, vastly outnumbered by the Massed Force of the World’s 7th Largest Army, the NYPD of Billionaire Mayor Micheal Bloombug.

With the exception of a few Striking Teachers in Chicago who Capitulated after a mere 6 Days of Striking, Amerika mostly proceeds onward here in gradual deterioration of Opportunity for most people, while a few at the top have access to the now ENDLESS supply of ZIRP Funny Money being produced by Da Fed.

Over in Asia, disgruntled Chinese are taking their Anger out on the Japanese, who didn’t manage to succeed in dominating China though WWII, but as the Chief Agent for Anglo-Illuminati Bizness Interests have done a pretty good job dominating China in the post-War years, accessing their Cheap Labor and sieving profit out of that land mass for their Illuminati Masters.

Now the Nipponese are in their own World of Shit as Fuk-u-shima inexorably poisons their water supply, agricultural produce and fisherie, and so they covet some disputed Islands that they say they “own”, while the Chinese say they “own” them. Mixed into that Ballgame, NATO is working on setting up more Oz Military fortresses and the Chinese are Talking a Bond War on the Nips, while their Hackers mess around with a few dozen websites to show they are SERIOUS.

Over in MENA, Syria remains a sewer, the Israelis keep Trash Talking the Iranians and Putin occasionally flexes Ruskie Muscle. So the Flashpoints for International War between major Global Nation States are all in place here in many places, A False flag or even a REAL Flag might at some point get any of these rolling onward here. But is INTERNATIONAL WAR, aka Global WWIII the most likely outcome here? It may happen, but IMHO is subsidiary to the CIVIL WARS which are going to Sprout like Mushrooms as time goes by here.

Ambrose Evans Pritchard of the UK Telegraph had this to say about the recent shenanigans going on over in Spain:

Tens of thousands marched in Madrid at the weekend to protest against drastic cuts, including a 7pc cut in public wages. A man set fire to himself in Portugal, where clashes turned violent.

The protests followed a traumatic week in Catalonia, where 1.5m took to the streets amid a wave of secessionist demands. Catalan leader Artur Mas has been swept by events into open confrontation with Madrid. Mr de Guindos pleaded for time, insisting that the reforms would lay the foundations for recovery. “These sacrifices are absolutely unavoidable.”

His claims were badly undercut by Nobel economist Joe Stiglitz, who told a Spanish forum that German austerity medicine is “utterly misguided” and will push Spain deeper into a downward spiral. It would be “suicidal” for Spain to accept a rescue if it involved more fiscal tightening, he said.

You know what the word secession means of course. Same thing it meant here in the FSoA in the 1860s. Southerners will often refer to the Civil War as the War of Secession or the War of Northern Aggression.

In another of the remakes of 1930s Cinema, Spain is on the brink of Civil War.

Like the Civil War here, the Spanish Civil War was really about the transition from the Agricultural Economy to the Industrial one.

From Wiki:

At the end of the 19th century, the owners of large estates, called latifundia, held most of the power in a land-based oligarchy. The landowners’ power was unsuccessfully challenged by the industrial and merchant sectors.^[9] In 1868 popular uprisings led to the overthrow of Queen Isabella II of the House of Bourbon. In 1873 Isabella’s replacement, King Amadeo I of the House of Savoy, abdicated due to increasing political pressure, and the short-lived First Spanish Republic was proclaimed.^[10]^[11] After the restoration of the Bourbons in December 1874,^[12] Carlists and anarchists emerged in opposition to the monarchy.^[13]^[14] Alejandro Lerroux helped bring republicanism to the fore in Catalonia, where poverty was particularly acute.^[15] Growing resentment of conscription and of the military culminated in the Tragic Week in Barcelona in 1909.^[16] After the First World War, the working class, the industrial class, and the military united in hopes of removing the corrupt central government, but were unsuccessful.^[17] Fears of communism grew.^[18] A military coup brought Miguel Primo de Rivera to power in 1923, and he ran Spain as a military dictatorship.^[19] Support for his regime gradually faded, and he resigned in January 1930.^[20] There was little support for the monarchy in the major cities, and King Alfonso XIII abdicated;^[21] the Second Spanish Republic was formed, whose power would remain until the culmination of the Spanish Civil War.^[22]

In Spain between WWI and WWII, it was finally the Industrialists time to take control over this country, which they had not been successful with in the 19th Centruy as they had with Britain, Germany and the FSoA. A Military Coup d’Etat was organized up with Generallisimo Francisco Franco as the Strongman, backed by the other Fascist States of Europe at the time, the Italians led by Il Duce Benito Mussolini and the Krauts led by Der Fuehrer Adolf Hitler. The Ruskies were funding the Loyalists, which ironically represented the traditional Landowners of the Feudal system but had a large Grassroots component which represented the Peasant class of Spain at the time.

The Spanish Civil War was particularly violent (though all such conflicts really are pretty nasty), and is best known to Amerikans through the writings of Ernest Hemingway in his Novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls“, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and made also into a film starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman. At the end of the story, Hemingway’s Protagonist Robert Jordan is wounded and makes his Last Stand to take out as many Fascists as he can while his Guerilla Fighter friends and True Love Maria make their escape.

The theme of Self-Sacrifice in Civil War and the conflicts to come in this Go Round are ones often explored around the Tables inside the Diner, as each person attempts to work out for themselves how they will react when confronted with such situations.

For those of us currently living inside the FSofA, these choices still seem Far Off, far enough off that most folks do not even want to consider them. More often the discussions are about how you might try to AVOID becoming Cannon Fodder in such a war and how to achieve basic survival with enough Food and Fresh Water and Shelter once the current systems holding our society together begin to break down.

It is however unlikely that most of us will be able to avoid the consequences of the breakdown of Industrial Society, already well in progress across much of the world as we speak. The ongoing Wars both Civil and International all throughout MENA now are the direct consequence of diminishing Available Energy from Fossil Fuels, and the diminishing ability to bring the “benefits” of Industrial Civilization to more societies, or even to maintain them in the societies that took them on in the aftermath of WWI and WWII.

This diminishing capacity to maintain the Industrial Society is already most apparent in the Western societies in Greece and now Spain as well. Greece is a relatively small economy though, and in order to keep the banking system from suffering a Cascade Failure numerous Kludges have been undertaken to prevent an outright Officially recognized Default from occurring there. The Greeks themselves are not doing any better with the perpetual Bailouts of their banking system, but their political organization is in complete dissarray and Greece is well on its way to becoming a Failed State on the model of Somalia or Zimbabwe. Critical difference there in terms of general perceptions is that this is in EUROPE, not in AFRICA.

While the problem inside Greece can be masked somewhat, it is not so easy to mask the SAME problems occurring on a larger scale in Spain. The much larger scale of the problem along with long standing animosity between the Castillians and Catalonians have now created a clear division in Spain, not dissimilar in many respects to the division in the Muslim world between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Like that situation where all are Muslims, in Spain they are all Roman Catholics. The division here is more along traditional Tribal Lines rather than all that much disagreement on Religious principles.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard contributed a bit more to this yesterday in another article about the possibilities for Secession by the Catalonians:

It is the latest move in a fast-escalating clash between Catalan nationalists and Spanish nationalists, the latter backed by King Juan Carlos and the Spanish military.

Jose-Manuel Garcia-Margallo, the foreign minister, threw down the gauntlet, calling Catalan secession “illegal and lethal”. He warned that Spain would use its veto to stop the region of Catalonia becoming an EU member “indefinitely”.

The constitutional crisis has eclipsed the parallel drama of a Spanish bail-out request from the European Stability Mechanism. It is no longer clear whether premier Mariano Rajoy can deliver on any austerity deal with Brussels.

Catalan leader Artur Mas held high-stakes talks with Mr Rajoy in Madrid on Thursday, armed with a mandate from the Catalan parliament and with charged emotions left from an unprecedented protest by 1.5m people in Barcelona 10 days ago.

He demanded an independent treasury for the rich Catalan region, with control over its own tax base akin to the model already enjoyed by Basques. The 9m Catalans have an economy the size of Austria’s.

“It did not go well,” he said. The Rajoy government said Spain’s constitution allows no margin for compromise. Mr Mas refused to meet the press in the prime minister’s offices, retreating to the Catalan delegation, where he spoke before the Catalan and EU flags. “Constitutions may or may not be modified, but they do not subjugate the will of the people,” he said.

Catalonia’s parliament will meet next week to “think deeply” about its next fateful step. “Catalonia will follow its path. We have no enemies but we will build our own project as a country,” said Mr Mas.

The newspaper Confidencial reported that his Convergència i Unió (CiU) party and coalition partners have asked the European Commission whether Spain can prevent Catalans exercising democratic self-determination, and whether a sovereign Catalonia could remain part of the EU’s single market and the euro.

The speed of events has caught almost everybody by surprise, including Mr Mas himself. His CiU has, until now, pursued a policy of calculated ambiguity over secession. Mr Mas has pivoted quickly, embracing what he calls the “popular outcry” as his own.

The antagonisms date back to the Franco era and, above all, to 1714 when Philip V abolished all Catalan institutions, and imposed Castilian laws and absolutism by right of conquest.

Diplomats say Mr Rajoy’s Partido Popular has provoked the latest eruption of fury by exploiting the economic crisis to break the power of the regions. This came to a head over the summer when Catalonia was forced to request a €5bn rescue from Madrid, though it is a net contributor to the Spanish state.

Spain’s economic slump has frayed nerves across the country, much as it did before the Civil War in the 1930s. Unemployment has risen to 25.1pc and may go higher as the delayed effects of austerity bite deeper.

Citigroup expects the economy to contract by 3.2pc next year and 0.8pc in 2014, pushing public debt to 100pc of GDP.

Chief economist Willem Buiter said the mix of austerity and reform will not restore Spain to “fiscal sustainability”, even if EU loans keep Spain going for another couple of years. He expects “debt restructuring” in the end. The warm glow of the European Central Bank’s bond plan helped Spain sell 10-year debt at 5.66pc on Thursday, the lowest since February.

Mr Rajoy appears to determined to play for time, hoping that he can muddle through without a rescue.

Traders say such gamesmanship is unlikely to succeed for long. Mr Rajoy also hopes to siphon off part of the €100bn in EU rescue package for Spanish banks, but this is certain to infuriate Germany’s Bundestag.

Spanish politics are now intruding, in any case. An EU bail-out memorandum would have to include fiscal restraint for the regions, further inflaming Catalonia.

The risks of a misjudgement are growing. The king caused irritation in Catalonia this week by warning against the seduction of “chimeras” – his first such crisis intervention since 1981.

A serving army officer, Colonel Francisco Alaman, has fuelled the flames by comparing the crisis with 1936 – when Gen Francisco Franco seized power – and by vowing to crush Catalan nationalists, described as “vultures”.

“Independence for Catalunya? Over my dead body. Spain is not Yugoslavia or Belgium. Even if the lion is sleeping, don’t provoke the lion, because he will show the ferocity proven over centuries,” he said.

Retired Lt-Gen Pedro Pitarch, a former army chief, said the words reflect “deeply-rooted thinking in large parts of the armed forces”. He also accused Madrid of bungling the Catalan drama disastrously.

“Are we looking at a failed state?” he asked. Investors holding Spanish debt are listening carefully.

Catalonians unhappy with the general distribution of Wealth and Taxation throughout Spain now wish to form their OWN seperate Country recognized by the European Union in general. Though why anyone would care or want to be recognized by that bunch of scumbags I have no clue whatsoever.

What this represents is much the same as the breakup of the Soviet Union after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which is One-to-the-Many dissolution; as opposed to Many-to-the-One Consolidation which has been underway since the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution 10 Millenia ago or so. This Many-to-One consolidation accelerated tremendously of course in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, as the War machine of the Military-Industrial Complex moved around the world basically beginning with the War of Northern Aggression and the forcible openning of Japan by Matthew Perry’s Gunboats. WWI and WWII were the final steps in Consolidation of Power by the Industrialist Illuminati, and Bretton-Woods brought the entire World under the domination of the BIS, utilizing the Dollar as World Reserve Currency.

The Dissolution of the Soviet Union along with the progressive dissolution of many smaller Nation States into their separate components is the Beginning of the End for Globalization. The opposite side to the Secessionists in Catlaonia are of course the Krauts and their Client states in Northern Europe who all wish to perpetuate the European Union under THEIR control, forcing all the PIIGS nations to accept a loss of Soveregnty and Fiscal Watchdogs from the IMF dictating to them how they spend their money, which of course is not their money at all but money created out of thin air by the Bankster Cabal of the Illuminati.

To me, the obvious loss of control here throughout the system with evermore Nation-States devolving into this type of internal bickering spells the Death Knell for Globalism, and with that the withering of the Power of the Illuminati. Not that they will go Quietly into this Good Night of course, but without the Cheap Oil to power the War Machine and maintain the vast connections of the Electric Grids and the World Wide Web, this kind of Global Power simply cannot continue to function.

As it decays, certainly you see the International Wars being fought here for Oil in MENA, but really the more important and critical wars are the Civil ones already underway, and those still to come. Anyone who believes that the FSoA will hold together as a Unit once the spin down works its way inward from the Peripheral Economies into the Central Ringfenced ones is positively nuts. CBs can print Money in perpetuity, but they CANNOT Print Oil or Print Food. You CANNOT MAKE SOMETHING FROM NOTHING!

It is just a matter of time before the Spanish problems migrate to Italy also, from there to France and then finally work their way inward past the Ruhr Valley into Krautland. In fact it may not even take that long, since it remains unclear that the Krauts can split themselves off from the collapsing economies of the PIIGS either. Europe is bound to fracture, and then after that the FSofA and China and Russia and Japan will all fracture also. Countless and endless Civil Wars everywhere is the outcome of that, not really International Wars fought by integrated Nation States.

In such a time, with so much strife coming to your neighborhood in due time, for anyone to believe they will be able to manage a Peaceful Doomstead is mostly a pretty unreasonable hope. Similarly unreasonable are hopes that having a large stash of Possessible Gold and Junk Silver Coins will help you all that much either.

Like the Spaniards in Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls”, you have to come to grips with the fact inside your own country, nay inside your own COMMUNITY there will be Competing Interests at work, those with a stake in the Game of Globalism who wish it to continue onward, and the vast majority of the disenfranchised with little stake in this other than their dependence on the Systems it uses for control. In every community in one way or the other you will be forced to line up on one side or the other as the society fractures along the lines of Haves and Have Nots.

When it does, it behooves all to remember the words of John Donne

from
Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions
MEDITATION XVII.
NUNC LENTO SONITU DICUNT, MORIERIS.
Now this bell tolling softly for another, says to me, Thou must die.

PERCHANCE he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill as that he knows not it tolls for him. And perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that. The church is catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does, belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that head which is my head too, and ingraffed into that body, whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me; all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another; as therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come; so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness.

There was a contention as far as a suit (in which, piety and dignity, religion and estimation, were mingled) which of the religious orders should ring to prayers first in the morning; and it was determined, that they should ring first that rose earliest. If we understand aright the dignity of this bell, that tolls for our evening prayer, we would be glad to make it ours, by rising early, in that application, that it might be ours as well as his, whose indeed it is. The bell doth toll for him, that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute, that that occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God. Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? But who takes off his eye from a comet, when that breaks out? who bends not his ear to any bell, which upon any occasion rings? But who can remove it from that bell, which is passing a piece of himself out of this world?

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Neither can we call this a begging of misery, or a borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves, but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of our neighbors. Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did; for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath afflicion enough, that is not matured and ripened by it, and made fit for God by that affliction. If a man carry treasure in bullion or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into current moneys, his treasure will not defray him as he travels. Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it, but it is not current money in the use of it, except we get nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it. Another may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell that tells me of his affliction, digs out, and applies that gold to me: if by this consideration of another’s danger, I take mine own into contemplation, and so secure myself, by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security.

Remember the Words of John Donne when the Big Show Comes to a Theatre Near You, for it most surely is coming now to about ALL Homo Sapiens who Walk the Earth at the End of the Age of Oil. Go With God my Friends, and…

SAVE AS MANY AS YOU CAN

Posted in Geopolitics, Home, Top 10 Econ | Tagged Civil War, Communism, Fascism, Feudalism, Hemingway, Industrilization, Spain, WWI, WWII

The Close Tie Between Energy Consumption, Employment, and Recession

Published September 20, 2012 | By Gail Tverberg

Off the keyboard of Gail Tverberg

Published on Our Finite World on September 17th, 2011

Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasbord inside the Diner

The number of jobs available to job-seekers has been a problem for quite a long tine now—since 2000 in the United States, and longer than that in Europe. If we look at the percentage of the US population who are employed, it is now back to 1984 or 1985 levels.

Figure 1. Total number of individuals employed in non-farm labor, and reported by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, divided by US resident population, as reported by the US Census Bureau.

I have run into a number of clues about what is happening. In this post, I’d like to discuss what I am seeing. Part of the problem is that high oil costs squeeze the economy, reducing employment. Part of the problem is growing trade with Asia. It is even possible that the Kyoto protocol (which the US did not sign) has something to do with what we are seeing. Let me start by explaining a fairly strange relationship.

A Strange Relationship – A Close Tie Between the Amount of Energy Consumed and the Number of People Employed

Since 1982, the number of people employed in the United States has tended to move in a similar pattern to the amount of energy consumed. When one increases (or decreases), the other tends to increase (or decrease). In numerical terms, R² = .98.

Figure 2. Employment is the total number employed at non-farm labor as reported by the US Census Bureau. Energy consumption is the total amount of energy of all types consumed (oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind, etc.), in British Thermal Units (Btus), as reported by the US Energy Information Administration.

I have written recently about the close long-term relationship between energy consumption and economic growth. We know that economic growth is tied to job creation, so it stands to reason that energy consumption would be tied to job growth¹. But I will have to admit that I was surprised by the closeness of the relationship for the period shown.

This close relationship is concerning, because if it holds in the future, it suggests that it will be very difficult to reduce energy consumption without a lot of unemployment. It also would seem to suggest that a shortage of energy supplies (as reflected by high prices) can lead to unemployment.

Why Rising Energy Cost (Particularly Oil) Leads to Lower Employment and Less Energy Consumption

Suppose oil prices rise². The critical issue is that consumers’ incomes do not rise at the same time. Consumers’ budgets get squeezed, and they cut back on discretionary spending. For example, they may go out to restaurants less, make fewer long-distance vacation trips, put off buying a new car, or contribute less to their favorite charities. Workers in discretionary sectors of the economy tend to get laid off, as a result. We have come to know this as part of recession.

(The impact of an oil price rise will be worse if other fuel prices, such as natural gas, rise as well. It will be mitigated, if natural gas prices are low, as they are in 2012 in the United States. Europe has much higher natural gas prices than the United States. This is big part of the reason why recessionary impacts are now worse in Europe than the United States.)

In the case of high oil prices and lay-offs, less energy of all types–not just oil–is used. Laid-off workers may move in with relatives, and thus reduce their living expenses. Each laid-off worker would have used oil to get to their job, and this will no longer be required. The jobs experiencing layoffs themselves may have required fuel use of various types, such as heat for buildings, fuel for airplanes, or electricity used in making new cars, and this is reduced as well.

There is also likely to be a link to housing prices. Moving up to a more expensive home is a discretionary expenditure. If people’s incomes are squeezed by high oil prices, and some are being laid off, there will be less demand for homes as well. This lower demand can be expected to reduce housing prices, especially in areas where commuting distances are longest (and thus, oil use for commuting greatest). There are also likely to be layoffs in the construction industry, as there is less demand for new homes and new buildings of all sorts.

As I have mentioned previously, James Hamilton (2011) has shown that 10 out of 11 recessions in the United States since World War II were associated with oil price spikes.

High Energy Costs in One Area Tend to Lead to Substitution to Places Where Energy Costs Are Lower

If there is a possibility of international trade, manufacturing and some types of services will tend to move to areas where costs are lowest. Part of these costs are energy costs. A manufacturer with cheap electricity costs will have an advantage over one with higher electricity costs. As energy costs rise (as they have in recent years), they get to be more important in determining where manufacturing will be done.

Besides direct energy costs, wages are another part of the difference in costs from one part of the world to another. Wages tend to be lower in the warmer areas of the world. In part, this is because energy from the sun provides much of the needed energy for heating homes, so there is less need for supplemental energy. This means that wages do not need to be as high for a comparable standard of living.

If we look at recent world energy consumption, we see rapid growth in energy consumption. This pattern is quite different from the US pattern we saw in Figure 2, which was much flatter.

Figure 3. World Energy Consumption based on BP’s 2012 Statistical Review of World Energy

Figure 4 below shows that there has been a striking difference in how energy consumption has grown in various parts of the world.

Figure 4. Energy Consumption divided among three parts of the world: (1) The combination of the European Union-27, USA, and Japan, (2) The Former Soviet Union, and (3) The Rest of the World, based on data from BP’s 2012 Statistical Review of World Energy.

Energy consumption has been quite flat in the grouping of industrialized countries I show first (European Union-27, USA, and Japan). The Former Soviet Union (FSU) collapsed in 1991, and the consumption for those countries has never recovered. Energy consumption for the “Rest of the World” has been increasing amazingly rapidly since 2002. The rest of the world includes China, India, Bangladesh, and many small countries, plus oil exporters, such as Saudi Arabia and Mexico. Although I don’t break it out separately on Figure 4, the increase in energy consumption since 2002 has been especially marked in Asia.

The “bend” in the line for “Rest of the World” energy consumption took place immediately after China joined the World Trade Organization in December 2001. If we look at China’s fuel consumption by itself, we see that its huge rise in energy consumption (Figure 5, below) came mostly from increased coal consumption starting at that time. Oil consumption also increased. Nuclear and renewables are too small to be visible on the chart.

Figure 5. China’s energy consumption by source, based on BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy data.

Other countries, especially Asian countries like India, also ramped up their energy consumption at a similar time. India also uses coal as its primary fuel, with 53% of its energy consumption in 2011 coming from coal (based on BP 2012 data).

While I don’t have employment data for Figure 4 groupings, I do have economic growth data (Real GDP is Gross Domestic Product, adjusted to remove effects of inflation), shown in Figure 6, below.

Figure 6. Three-year average real GDP growth for (1) EU-27, USA, and Japan, (2) Former Soviet Union, and (3) Rest of the World, based on data by Angus Maddison through 2008, and USDA since then.

Figure 6 indicates that the economy of the “Rest of World” has been growing much faster than the EU, USA, and Japan grouping since 2001. In fact the Rest of the World’s growth has been much faster for nearly the entire period shown on the graph. Based on the steeper rise in energy consumption of the “Rest of World,” in Figure 4 compared to the old industrialized countries grouping, this might be the predicted result.

One point that many people miss is that the Great Recession of 2007-2009 was to a significant extent a phenomenon of the older industrialized countries. EU, USA, and Japan all were hit very hard, while the “Rest of the World” almost sailed along. This can be seen in the energy consumption data on Figure 4, and the economic growth data on Figure 6. The Rest of the World slowed down a bit, but even during that period, its growth rate exceeded the best growth rate of the EU, USA, and Japan grouping during the 1984-2011 period (based on Figure 6).

Is it Possible to Change the Relationship between Energy Consumption and Number Employed?

The answer is pretty clearly, yes, but lower wages may be part of the mix.

Let’s look at how the United States changed its energy consumption, per number of people employed, over time. If we go back to the 1949 to 1972 time period, we also see a close relationship ( R₂ = 99%) between US energy consumption and employment, but it is a different close relationship than since 1982, (shown in Figure 2, near the top of this post).

Figure 7. Graph of amounts similar to Figure 2, but for the period 1949 to 1972.

During the 1949 to 1972 period, energy consumption was consistently rising faster than the number of people employed. Oil was cheap, as were other energy sources, so not too much thought was given to how efficiently it was used. Also, as we will see in Figure 9, wages for workers were rising much more quickly (in inflation-adjusted terms) than they have been in more recent times.

About 1972, we discovered we had a big problem:

Figure 8. US crude oil production based on data of the US Energy Information Administration.

Oil had been our largest source of energy, and our own domestic production was dropping quite rapidly. By 1973, the Arabs had discovered our vulnerability, and the 1973 Oil Embargo began, leading to a sharp rise in gasoline prices. The US Federal Government regulated oil prices from 1973 to 1981. At the same time, a major effort was made to switch oil use to another fuel whenever possible. Electricity generation was switched to include more coal and nuclear (based on EIA data), and to remove production using oil. There was great demand for more fuel-efficient cars, leading to the import of cars from Japan (a country that had been making smaller cars for years), and the down-sizing of US cars.

Figure 9. Employment and Energy Consumption using data similar to that used in Figure 2 and 7, but for the 1972-1982 time period.

As a result, the period 1972-1982 was a time when energy consumption was relatively flat, but employment rose. A big part of this rise reflected the addition of women who had not previously worked outside of the home to the work force. With the higher price of oil, salaries did not go as far, so having another family member working was helpful. According to Toosi, the percentage of women who were part of the workforce rose from 43.3% in 1970 to 51.1% 1980. Wages of women were lower than those of men (Figure 10, below), helping to hold down the average wage.

Figure 10. US Median Wages, separately for males and females, in 2010$. Based on Census Historical Income Tables: People, Table P5 – Regions by Median Income and Sex.

Also, the wages of lower-paid men stopped rising in real (inflation-adjusted) terms. (The wages shown are Figure 5 are median wages–50% of wage-earners earn more than that amount and 50% year earn less.) Wages of high-paid workers, such as business executives and physicians (not shown on the chart), were still rising.

It is hard to tell what the relative impacts were of the many changes that took place in the 1972 to 1982 time period. Clearly, lower average wages (with more women in the work force) and flatter wages were a big part of the change. But there were other changes as well, including more imported manufactured goods, changes to fuels other than oil, and more efficient use of oil, all contributing to the differences we see between Figure 2 and Figure 7. The US became a net importer during this period as well, and thus began running up external debt (based on US Bureau of Economic Analysis data).

Comparing energy-employment patterns in Figure 2 and Figure 7 may be confusing for some. I show the change in the relationship in another way in Figure 11. Here I show (energy consumption/number of people employed). It shows that energy consumption per employed person was rising prior to 1972, came down for a variety of reasons in the 1972-1982 period, and is now pretty close to flat (decreasing slightly).

Figure 11. Total US energy consumption divided by number employed. Energy consumption from US EIA, number of non-farm workers from US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

On a positive note, one factor that has helped keep quality of life up is increased efficiency in using energy. Homes are better insulated now. Home heating and cooling units are more efficient. Businesses have worked hard to keep energy use down, because energy is a major factor in their cost structure. For example, we read about airlines retiring their less fuel-efficient jets. Thus, even though energy consumption divided by number of workers is flat or trending slightly downward, our standard of living has risen considerably since 1970 or 1980.

Another thing that has helped improve living standards is the amount of manufactured goods we are now importing from China and other countries around the world, especially Asian countries. The amount of debt we need to keep amassing to buy all of the goods we buy abroad is a problem, however, because we are not earning enough to pay the full amount of these goods. If we could count on economic growth forever, perhaps we could simply “grow” out of this debt, but this seems increasingly unlikely, for reasons I will discuss in later posts.

The United States Hit Peak Percentage Employed in 2000

If we look at the percentage of the US population who have jobs outside the home (or self-employed farm workers), the trend is quite alarming (Figure 12):

Figure 12. US Number Employed / Population, where US Number Employed is Total Non_Farm Workers from Current Employment Statistics of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Population is US Resident Population from the US Census. (This includes children and others not usually in the labor force.) 2012 is a partial year estimate.

While the percentage of people with jobs was rising between 1960 and 2000, in recent years it has dropped. The recent drop seems to be at least in part related to the shift in energy consumption growth (and jobs) to the “Rest of the World,” which includes China, India, and many other developing countries and oil exporting countries. Jobs that the United States would have had, seem to have been shifted elsewhere.

The percentage of US population employed outside the home or farm has grown for a very long time. The increase started in the 1800s, as the use of coal allowed a reduction to the number of workers needed in farming, because it allowed more use of metals, enabled the use of electricity, and helped make farmers more efficient. See my post The Long-Term Tie Between Energy Supply, Population, and the Economy. See also Smil, (1994) and Lebergott (1966). Later, women increasingly joined the work force, especially after World War II.

The combination of rising energy costs (especially oil) and increased international trade gave China and other Far Eastern countries an opportunity to ramp up their manufacturing and service industries (call centers in India, for example). Jobs migrated to China and to other countries with low energy costs (thanks to lots of coal in the mix) and low costs of living, thanks in part to better solar heating.

There had always been some foreign trade, but the amount of trade increased in the late 1970s, when we started importing smaller cars from Japan, as well as more oil. It increased again later, especially after China entered the World Trade Organization in late 2001. US imports of goods and services increased from $54 billion in 1970, to $291 billion in 1980, to $616 billion in 1990, to $1.4 trillion in 2000, and to $2.7 trillion in 2011 (US Bureau of Economic Analysis).

Other Observations

Role of World Trade. Figure 4 suggests that world trade makes a huge difference in the amount of energy consumed. If we truly wanted to reduce our energy consumption (which I doubt world leaders are really interested in), we could reduce world trade through taxes on imports, or some other mechanism. The number of people employed would likely drop as well, although perhaps part of the difference could be made up by greater efficiency and by lower wages for individual workers.

The important role of world trade also brings up another issue. If world trade were, for some reason, interrupted or seriously scaled back, this would likely significantly reduce energy consumption (and employment) around the world.

Energy Consumption vs Number of Jobs Patterns by Country will Vary. I have shown US data. Patterns in other countries are likely to vary, in part because of the different specializations (amount of services compared to manufacturing, for example) of different countries, and different wage levels in different countries.

Good Intentions Aren’t Always Helpful. The Kyoto Protocol with respect to Climate Change was adopted in 1997. Figure 4 and Figure 5 suggest that adding China to the World Trade Organization had far more impact, and in the opposite direction. In fact, additional carbon taxes on goods that require high energy input may have encouraged competition in countries without such controls. Furthermore, reduced oil consumption through, say, higher taxes on gasoline, left more oil on the world market, to be used by developing countries. (This is related to “inelastic supply” of oil. Reducing demand in one area leaves more supply for other areas.)

Figure 13. Actual world carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels, as shown in BP’s 2012 Statistical Review of World Energy. Fitted line is expected trend in emissions, based on actual trend in emissions from 1987-1997, equal to about 1.0% per year.

Figure 13 shows that while Kyoto Protocol may have helped reduce emissions in some countries, world carbon dioxide emissions have grown more than what would have been expected, based on the 1987-1997 trend in emissions. If the Kyoto Protocol influenced China’s and the rest of Asia’s decision to ramp up exports, this decision would have indirectly affected job availability in the United States, even if the US was not a signer of the Protocol.

The “Smaller Batch” Issue. If there is not enough energy to go around at prices people can afford to pay, recession seems to be nature’s way of fixing the situation. I compare the situation to a chemical formula, or to a cake recipe. If one necessary ingredient is in short supply, the economy behaves as if it is making a “smaller batch”. It contracts in a way that leaves out those who were most marginal to begin with–such as employees of discretionary industries, and borrowers who could only barely make payments on loans (subprime borrowers), and countries with the highest energy costs. Employment is reduced, and unemployed people tend to move in with friends or their family, to cut expenses. This reduces energy consumption.

Increased Wage Dispersion May Reflect Another of Nature’s Coping Mechanisms. In the animal kingdom, any “K-selected species,” such as a dog or cats or primates, (probably including humans), has an inborn instinct toward hierarchical behavior. The manifestation of this instinct tends to be greater as there is greater crowding, and greater competition for resources (Dilworth, 2009). The intent in the animal kingdom is survival of the fittest, with those at the bottom of the hierarchy being starved out, if there is not enough to go around.

It is striking to me that since the mid-1970s, we have seen what could perhaps be interpreted as increased hierarchical behavior in humans and corporations. Wage dispersion has tended to become greater since the mid-1970s, when we started encountering energy supply problems. We have also seen the growth of international businesses. These large businesses have been increasingly favorably taxed, because they can choose tax havens around the world to incorporate. All of these changes tend to concentrate wealth at the top, in large companies and in the wealth of high paid workers. Perhaps all of this is a coincidence, but the timing is striking.

Increased use of part-time and contract jobs might be considered a trend in this direction as well. Job sharing has been proposed as a way of dealing with having an inadequate number of jobs in the older industrialized countries, but this tends to act in the same way (pushes the wages of lower-paid workers down, while leaving the top wages untouched).

Economic Models. Economic models seem not to take into account the very substantial shift in percentage of the population employed. Part of economic growth on the “way up” was growth in the percentage of people employed. If economists miss this change, as well as the fact that the percentage now seems to be headed down, their models will be wrong. Expected economic growth may disappear.

The World War II baby boom generation is now reaching retirement age. This change will tend to push the percentage of population employed down further, all other things being equal.

Impact on Governments. If fewer people are employed, this is a problem for governments around the world. Governments in Europe are particularly affected now, partly because of the generous benefits they offer. The US budget deficit is very much related to this issue as well. I will write more about debt and government funding in another post.

Notes:

[1] The idea of looking at employment in relationship to the economy after reading Mario Giampietro and Kozo Mayumi’s book, The Biofuel Delusion: The Fallacy of Large-Scale Agro-Biofuel Production, Earthscan, 2009.

[2] While total energy costs are important, individual energy costs, such as gasoline cost, are important as well, because there is little short-term substitutability across sectors. For example, coal is not an option for running today’s gasoline-powered cars, and public transport is not an option in most of the US. If there is a long enough lead-time and citizens can afford the transition, substitutions might be made, but it is not something we can count very much in the short term.

Other References

Hamilton, J. D. Historical oil shocks. NBER working paper No. 16790. Feb 2011. Available from http://www.nber.org/papers/w16790.pdf

Toosi, M. A Century of Change; the US Labor Force 1950 to 2050, in Monthly Labor Review, Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2002. Available from http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2002/05/art2full.pdf

Smil, Vaclav, Energy in World History, Westview Press, 1994.

Lebergott, S. Labor Force and Employment 1800 to 1960, in Brady, D. S., Editor, Output, Employment and Productivity in the United States after 1800, National Bureau of Economic Research. (1966) Available at http://www.nber.org/chapters/c1567.pdf

Dilworth, C. Too Smart for Our Own Good, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Posted in Economics, Energy, Home | Tagged Consumption, Depression, Energy, GDP, Recession, Unemployment

Collapse Fatigue Syndrome

Published September 19, 2012 | By RE

Off the Diner Keyboards

Discuss this article around the Kitchen Sink of the Diner

Occasionally a thread inside the Diner strikes a chord with many Diners, as is the case with the recent thread, Futile or Not, Here I Come begun by Diner Buzzard.For many of us who have been examining the Collapse for a long time, a sense of Frustration and Fatigue has set in as we wait for and expect a Collapse to occur which is more definable than just the slow deterioration of the “Long Emergency” described by Jim Kunstler. For some, their participation in discussions about Peak Oil and its ramifications goes back to 2004-2005, when the PeakOil.com and LATOC Forums began. For others, their expectations of a Collapse have been with them as far back as the 1960s and 1970s. For myself, I mostly woke up to oncoming collapse with the failure of Bear Stearns in 2007, although the Katrina disaster in NOLA was probably my real wake up call.While we appear closer than ever now to true collapse of the Monetary System and Industrial Civilization, the fact it has not yet occurred systemically through all societies brings with it a sense of Futility in perpetually rehashing the same topics. Early Forums like Peak Oil and LATOC are either very quiet now or out of publication entirely in the case of LATOC.Is there still value in discussing this collapse, when there really is not much thatcan be done to stop it? How many times can you predict the Sky Will Fall with other Chicken Littles but never see the Sky Fall, just lower the Cloud Ceiling some?A few Diners weighed in with their thoughts on these issues, and I present a selection of them here for both Veteran Kollapsniks and Rookies alike to consider. To read all the thoughts of the Diners, visit the Futile or Not, Here I Come thread ongoing around the Kitchen Sink of the Doomstead Diner.RE

Buzzard wrote:

I’m a reader here. In fact I’m basically a reader everywhere. I am neither brilliant nor inspired. Any comments which I could make would be amateur at best. However, I do read a lot- and I get impressions. While reading back and forth in the barbeque section (I’m obviously running low on good literature) I got the sense of fatigue in those who were posting. Perhaps this is only a mirror of myself because I have been admittedly tired of the whole mess recently. [You know, the whole collapse mess?]

Although my participation has been mostly lacking, I have followed several forums for some years- in fact since the yahoo lists. So most of the posters I run into are familiar to me from ROE, Dieoff, Peakoil, LATOC etc. What I am sensing is a sort of ‘collapse fatigue’ which shows in subtle ways. Interestingly also I have watched the development of online personalities and opinions over the years. Much of it, I believe can be attributed to a maturity and wisdom grown from years of experience in the individual’s search for knowledge and truth. I know that the journey has taken me to places which I never could have predicted.

Frankly, I’m tired. Part of it could be a growing impatience, like sitting in the theater as a kid with your tub of popcorn waiting for the movie to begin. And let’s face it. I’m not getting any younger. Seventy doesn’t look that far away any more. (I can’t believe that I even wrote that). Nothing earth shaking here. I’m just curious as to what others are feeling when you strip away all of the intellectual issues and probing questions of the day. I know that I find myself backing out of ‘acceptance’ into depression again. That’s depressing. I get up and do it again- amen. Most of you are veterans of the truth wars. Is it any easier than it was ten years ago? How is the cynicism quotient?

Golden Oxen wrote:

“Frankly, I’m tired. Part of it could be a growing impatience, like sitting in the theater as a kid with your tub of popcorn waiting for the movie to begin. And let’s face it. I’m not getting any younger. Seventy doesn’t look that far away any more. (I can’t believe that I even wrote that). Nothing earth shaking here. I’m just curious as to what others are feeling when you strip away all of the intellectual issues and probing questions of the day. I know that I find myself backing out of ‘acceptance’ into depression again. That’s depressing. I get up and do it again- amen. Most of you are veterans of the truth wars. Is it any easier than it was ten years ago? How is the cynicism quotient?”

Hi Buzzard, Tired and depressed from the whole ball of wax myself. Starting to understand why Peter, my favorite poster at DD has walked away. The more I learn here, which I tell myself is a good thing, how can learning be considered a bad thing, the more depressed I get. We are in real friggin mess, with no way out it seems, and all this seems to accomplishing very little except pointing out how bad it really is. The petty fights and bullshit don’t help either.

OWS was the only thing I have seen lately which energized me and filled me with some hope, but that has ended on a very sour and depressing note as well. Guess that’s why we hang out at the Diner. Nice to hear from you. GO

RE wrote:

Collapse Fatigue is pandemic across the Collapse Blogosphere these days. It probably should get its own listing in the DSM-IV right next to PTSD.

The two Biggest Collapse boards in the first generation were PeakOil and LATOC. LATOC is gone completely as Matt Savinar took it offline. PeakOil has withered away and gets less daily action than we get here in the Diner.

The early and most original Bloggers like Dmitri Orlov and Jimmy Kunstler more or less have made Collapse their Bizness, and both websites are mainly venues to promote their Books and Speaking Engagements. Both are still very creative writers, but they also both recycle the same themes over and over again. Neither participates much in discussion even over on their own Blog Commentariats.

For me, Collapse remains an intriguing and ever changing sea of information to digest, and really MOST of the world still is not even AWARE of it. The Collapse Fatigue phenomenon mostly exists among people who have been aware of peak oil since at least 2007, some since as far back as 2000.

Like many Kollapsniks who have been waiting for the Sky to Fall, part of me wishes that it would just FALL already so we can get on with the next stage, whatever that might be, bad as it is likely to be. However, for anyone who has NOT yet fallen off the Economic Cliff, its a GOOD thing that Extend & Pretend has worked as long as it has. Here on the Diner, we have several people who hope for 6mo-2years more time to get their Plans/Doomsteads ready.

I guess the best way to explain how I feel about Collapse and how I avoid Collapse Fatigue is to follow Ty Webb’s advice in Caddyshack, in this case rather than “Be the Ball”, it’s “Be the Collapse”. It remains the most IMPORTANT topic of our time, and regardless how Old you might be there is still much to be learned here.

So I keep thinking about it and writing about it and discussing it with others here on the Diner. Even recycling old material is important because Newbies are always Waking Up here, more all the time. Us Old Timers should be around to fill in the Newbies and…

Save as Many as You Can

Water Weasel wrote:

Buzzard,

and RE, it is very hard reading the news anymore when you start to see what’s going on. It’s tough to say, but, if you’re not at least a little bit depressed, you’re not paying attention. I don’t know how you can get to “acceptance” when all the time things are getting worse. I won’t say the “f” word. (*cough*futile*cough*)

Quote
I’m just curious as to what others are feeling when you strip away all of the intellectual issues and probing questions of the day
I’m feeling like I need to stock up on beer and pretzels, ’cause this is going to be the biggest train-wreck you ever did see.

I have no idea how it’s going to go down. I can only hope that I have enough of an edge to make it through the first wave. Probably not, but in that case, I take solace in living a middle-class 21st century American life, at least for a while, which is better than most humans who ever lived. I’ll continue to be a good person, and I’ll continue to try to make things better, and I hope that’s still worth something.

RE,

Quote
For me, Collapse remains an intriguing and ever changing sea of information to digest, and really MOST of the world still is not even AWARE of it.
This is really mind-boggling isn’t it? There’s some meat here that hasn’t been explored. Futilitist is interested in sociology. Maybe he could lead this thread.

But, yeah, when you see the assault on the biosphere, that we depend on for our economy as well as our very life, it’s hard not to wish for it to stop, now, no matter how hard it might be. And it looks to me like it will stop, eventually. It’s like pulling off a Band-Aid, slow, or in one go? I prefer in one go. Let’s get it over with!

But, I do love my currently comfy lifestyle, with a job and food and all. It’s a tough call.

Surly wrote:

Ah, Caddyshack.

The story of the making of this movie is well worth watching.

My face: “Heavy hitter, the Dalai Lama…”

“… he said, on my deathbed I would receive total consciousness.
So I got that goin’ for me.”

Buzzard wrote:

Quote from: WaterWeasel on Today at 01:52:42 AM

RE,

Quote
For me, Collapse remains an intriguing and ever changing sea of information to digest, and really MOST of the world still is not even AWARE of it.
This is really mind-boggling isn’t it? There’s some meat here that hasn’t been explored. Futilitist is interested in sociology. Maybe he could lead this thread.

In fact it was Futilitist’s comments which prompted this thread. I didn’t address him personally because my question was more general, a smokey malaise which had settled over me.

I am fond of telling people that I have it easy because I am old enough that I will be dead before the shit really hits the fan. I have lived an interesting and eventful life. I won’t check out thinking that I have been particularly robbed of anything. I tell people that I pity those younger who stand to live through the full monty. What will their lives be like? What I tell people sounds good. It sounds right… And it is a lie. In fact, I am jealous of the young. I am so intrigued and curious about the future that I am beginning to think that I will miss it.

I guess that is why Greer gets under my skin. I don’t want to hear ‘Catabolic Collapse’. Doesn’t he realize that we need to get on with it so that I can see what happens? It is also why “Tipping Point” resonated with me instantly. If what he says is true then it could all come down tomorrow. Now we’re talking. And… aside from my selfish desire to see how it all turns out, I also subscribe to the ‘remove the band-aide’ quickly school of collapse. It just makes sense. As Jensen says. The sooner it comes down the less the planet suffers damage from human’s hubris and greed.

I suspect the reason most of us are here is because wandering through this mansion of darkness we have noticed a room where the lights are still on. Even though it seems to me at this point that the same arguments and information gets recycled over and over, at least the truth will set you free (or piss you off, whatever the case will be).

RE wrote:

Quote from: buzzard on Today at 04:26:04 AM
I am fond of telling people that I have it easy because I am old enough that I will be dead before the shit really hits the fan. I have lived an interesting and eventful life. I won’t check out thinking that I have been particularly robbed of anything. I tell people that I pity those younger who stand to live through the full monty. What will their lives be like? What I tell people sounds good. It sounds right… And it is a lie. In fact, I am jealous of the young. I am so intrigued and curious about the future that I am beginning to think that I will miss it.

With this paragraph BY ITSELF you undermined your own initial argument that you are not a thinker who has something to say. You clearly do. I think you just have spent more time reading than most and have not felt it necessary to express your own opinions, Now you do. All to the good there.

I feel much the same in the sense that I had it good, if it all goes to hell in a handbasket tomorrow I lived a pretty good life in the Age of Oil. I certainly already lived longer than the average H-G lives, if you make it to 50 in that type of life you are OLD.

I am NOT nearly so old as some here though, I am pretty sure some of our Gold Bugs are well into their 70s actually. LOL. These folks have little to worry about, they don’t have all that much time left under the best of circumstances.

The folks who really got stuff to deal with are those in their 30s and 40s, particularly if they have dependent children. However, few of that demographic are here on the Diner as of yet. Mostly Old Dudes and some younger unmarrieds, though there are a few here with kids also.

In one sese, it would be EXCITING to be young again and preparing for the world as it is to be. I also am in a sense JEALOUS of younger folks, I WISH I was 30-something again with all my physical strength and speed to go out into the Bush and make my go of it there. What an ADVENTURE!

In reality though, I HAD my Adventure already, it was the adventure of a life lived in the culminating years of the Age of Oil. It was a FUN adventure. I lived a pretty good life, and I learned a lot. What else are you here for anyhow, besides eating and breathing? You learn stuff. Then you pass on what you learned to the Young ‘uns. That is the course of life, eh?

Now we have a bit of time left here to chat up on the internet how to negotiate the most amazing spin down of Human Civilization in all of recorded History. Us Old Folks won’t be around too much longer, but we still can pass on some knowledge and observe the end, until at last we each buy our Final Ticket to the Great Beyond.

…Read the rest with the Diners around the Kitchen Sink of the Doomstead Diner

Posted in Economics, Feature, Home | Tagged Blogosphere, Collapse, Kunstler, LATOC, Orlov, Peak Oill

Articles of the ESM: Draghi reinvents the Divine Right of Kings

Published September 18, 2012 | By Slogger

Off the keyboard of John Ward

Originally posted on The Slog on September 9th, 2012

Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasbord inside the Diner

You don’t get me I’m part of the Union

Draghi reinvents the Divine Right of Kings

Hitler’s 1933 Post-Reichstag Fire Emergency Decree had nothing on the newly drafted ESM Charter. You can read it here in full at the EU website: the mad folks are getting more brazen by the day, but they’re still leaving the nasties until the contemporary MSM journalists get bored: so the really startling stuff doesn’t appear until Article 32. These are the extracts that matter, quoted verbatim except for the usual deliberately baffling legalese:

Article 32, para 3: The ESM, its property, funding and assets, wherever located and by whomsoever held, shall enjoy immunity from every form of judicial process. (There is one exception – entirely in the ESM’s favour)

para 4: The property, funding and assets of the ESM shall, wherever located and by whomsoever held, be immune from search, requisition, confiscation, expropriation or any other form of seizure, taking or foreclosure by executive, judicial, administrative or legislative action

para 8: To the extent necessary to carry out the activities provided for in this Treaty, all property, funding and assets of the ESM shall be free from restrictions, regulations, controls and moratoria of any nature

Article 35, para 1: In the interest of the ESM, the Chairperson of the Board of Governors, Governors, alternate Governors, Directors, alternate Directors, as well as the Managing Director and other staff members shall be immune from legal proceedings with respect to acts performed by them in their official capacity and shall enjoy inviolability in respect of their official papers and documents.

There are other worms in this charity tin, but trust me, these two articles are the ones that ensure it really isn’t the standard contract. The Sun headline is this: the ESM can steal your granny’s favourite sherry decanter, and there’s nothing you can do about it; any media hacks investigating grand larceny, murder and mass rape can whistle Dixie; no matter who they subordinate, cheat, or screw over, they’re allowed to, so there; and if I Mario Draghi deems it in the public good to stuff 46,000 gold bars in a Gnome’s private bank, it’s none of your business.

But there is one astonishing phrase in there which I feel duty bound to lift and separate from even this stuff above:

‘The archives of the ESM and all documents belonging to the ESM or held by it, shall be inviolable. The premises of the ESM shall be inviolable.’

The International Law Society definition of ‘inviolable’ is ‘unassailable and impregnable’. Or in one word, untouchable. Or an yet another word, supreme.

Or in a final word, Sovereign.

You have been warned.

Posted in Economics, Geopolitics, Home | Tagged ECB, ESM, Mario Draghi, Sovereignty

A Year of Occupy

Published September 17, 2012 | By Surly

Off the Surly keyboard

Discuss this article at the Geopolitics Table inside the Diner

A Year of Occupy

The following article is a look back at a Year of Occupy from someone who has been an active participant. While noting the history of the movement in a rough way, it draws primarily upon the writer’s firsthand experience with the local manifestations of Occupy. The local movement started in a series of meetings last September in Norfolk, VA, and burst into full bloom on October 6 of last year. What remains of the local group is planning an anniversary event for October 6 of this year. Any omissions, mischaracterizations, mis-statement of facts, bowdlerizations, calumnies, disinformation or misdemeanors are the responsibility of the author alone, who is striving mightily herein to NOT live up to his nom-de-plume.

“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness, and our ability to tell our own stories…” – ~Arundhati Roy

Arab Spring, American Fall

OWS Poster

It will be a year ago this weekend that a group called Occupy Wall Street made an encampment at Zuccotti Park and captured the imagination of the world. The largest collective national protest in 40 years inspired other Occupy camps to spring up like mushrooms after a summer rain across the FSA in imitation and tribute. Many were inspired by visitors to Zuccotti, who came like pilgrims to look, march, participate, and understand. In the space of just a few weeks the repressed and frustrated found their voice, and expressed it in “mad as hell” Howard Beale moments across the country.

OWS was originally inspired by Kalle Lasn and Micah White of Adbusters, a Canadian anti-consumerist publication, who conceived of a September 17 occupation in lower Manhattan. A peaceful occupation of Wall Street was promoted with an image featuring a dancer atop Wall Street’s iconic Charging Bull statue.

Also inspired in part by Egyptian mass protests in Tahrir Square, Occupy protesters put forward the main issues of social and economic inequality, corporate greed, corruption and the undue influence of corporations on government—particularly from the financial services sector. The OWS slogan, “We are the 99%,” addresses the growing income inequality and wealth distribution in the U.S. between the wealthiest 1% and the rest of the population. Lack of justice on the part of Justice Departments was also an issue, as the Feds failed to prosecute those who had brought about a global crisis of monetary insolvency. (Far better, it would seem, for the attorney general to focus on free speech demonstrators and whistleblowers.)

Protesters were forced out of Zuccotti Park on November 15, 2011, with a coordinated raid on other Occupy camps following on shortly thereafter. While there have been unsuccessful attempts to re-occupy the original location, protesters have turned their focus on occupying banks, corporate headquarters, board meetings, college and university campuses, along with Wall Street itself.

So what has Occupy achieved?

Banks Got Bailed Out, We Got Sold Out

It’s fair to say that occupy has changed the conversation. Within the space of a year, we tend to forget how in a country deeply resistant to notions of class, where everyone is” middle class”, the development of any sort of class consciousness is quite remarkable. Most Americans find it difficult to stomach the sight of the 1% being bailed out and then earning obscene profits while they, or their family, friends, and neighbors, are looking for work without success.

The escalating income inequality evident from the 30 year class war begun under the Reagan Administration against the working people of the US reached its apex at the presence of Occupy. Phrases like “The 99%,” “the 1%,” changed the national conversation and the prevailing narrative forever. Occupy’s mission was to expose how the 1% are controlling our fates through the financialization of all aspects of economic and political life. The evidence is abundant: the middle class is drowning in loans, student debt, fraudulent mortgages, and a democracy being sold to the highest bidder, all while our environment is turned into yet another toxic asset, and those assets which we hold in common are sold off to the highest bidder as well.

November saw a coordinated attack on camps all across the country. Oakland Mayor Jean Quan was one who admitted to being on the phone with the Department of Homeland Security. It seems clear that Homeland Security orchestrated a coordinated set of attacks led locally by increasingly militarized local police departments. Armed with budgets swollen by several years of homeland security grants coupled with outright gifts of military and paramilitary gear, local police decided to move on Occupy encampments such as the one in Norfolk, clad in full riot gear and tearing down tents with paramilitary zeal. What had been cordial relations between occupiers and the police quickly became hostile in an astonishing fashion.

Occupiers were arrested; trumped up charges brought, later dismissed in court.. As with the attack on Zuccotti, the assaults on the camps were often staged at hours where they would attract the least attention. And where the local press ran a story, the thrust of the story was predictably on the side of “take a bath and get a job.”

Anita in back of squad car at Occupy Norfolk arrest

Carmen arrested at the Occupy Norfolk camp in Commercial Park. (Abhi Photo)

What is interesting is the timing of these attacks on the camps. During the month of October, as camps were beginning across the country, much of the effort concentrated on a quotation mark move your money” effort, asking people to move their accounts from the large banks to smaller, community banks or credit unions. The move your money day was November 6. By some estimates Bank of America lost $4 billion of deposits in the month of October as a result of this effort. More people moved gtheir bank accounts in the month of October than had moved in all of 2010. Shortly afterwards that the coordinated assault on the camps began.

These attacks created new memes. New York Mayor Bloomberg got to claim that he controlled his” own private army”, the 7th largest in the world.

And in another show of disproportionate force on the West coast, Lieut. John Pike became famous as “pepper spray man” as he was photographed employing blinding pepper spray on sitting, peaceful protesters at the University of California Davis. (In one small scrap of justice, it should be noted that Lieut. Pike and UC Davis have parted company as of this past summer.)

Apolitical

Much as been made about Occupy being non-political. The easy peg on which to hang Occupy is as the lefty counterpart to the Tea Party. Yet Occupy has never been embraced by the Democrats, and with good reason. Most Occupiers distrust Democrats as fully as they do Republicans.

Given the Democratic party’s reliance on campaign contributions from the very sources the Occupy movement opposed, along with its support of bailouts for the financial sector, the Dems were never going to give their full backing to the Occupy movement unless the movement became a viable force politically. Any astute political observer knew the Democratic establishment would not work to achieve the goals of the Occupy movement, particularly at the national level. Hillary Rodham Clinton raised nearly $20 million from Wall Street when she was a senator. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has received more than $5 million from the same sources since 2007, and Barack Obama received more than $15 million from the investment industry during the 2008 election cycle. This year, the Democratic National Committee has raised more than $10 million from the securities and investment community, the same people against which Occupy takes to the streets.

Some wanted the Occupy movement needed to put forth its own slate of candidates in primaries and local races — as the tea party began doing in 2008 when it became disillusioned with Republicans — to either replace the Democrats who wouldn’t support their positions or to force incumbent Democrats to adopt the views of the movement. Of course the teahadis were subsidized by the Koch Brothers and other reactionaries as useful minions able to advance their far-right agenda.

Of course, the Occupy movement could not offer its own candidates or alternatives because it never offered a clear, coherent vision or plan of action. Those who wished to turn Occupy into a co-optable political movement asserted that abstract ideas and clever slogans had to give way to concrete proposals and electoral agendas.

Like the people at the heart of the Egyptian revolution, those spearheading the Occupy movement were the youth, the intellectuals and academics, people with lofty ideals but with little practical experience in governing. Without a mechanism to turn ideals into policy, many would say Occupy is simply spinning its wheels.

A Winter of Discontent

The violent crackdown on peaceful dissent, and the relative brutality of police tactics, especially when confronted with peaceful protesters, became an issue of concern for Occupiers as much as it was ignored in the mainstream media. The mainstream media had hung Occupy on the news peg of the “black bloc anarchists,” whose presence among occupiers is almost always synonymous with infiltrators, either of the Homeland Security or the local police variety. (It became an article of faith among our local Occupy groups that anybody exhorting other people to violence head de facto identified himself as an infiltrator, pink hair or not. And, although I can’t prove this, I believe to this day that our local Occupies were rotten with them.)

The escalating criminalization of dissent has gone hand-in-hand with an increasingly ubiquitous surveillance society. In the wake of the PATRIOT act, we have become complacent, and have watched silently as cameras become ubiquitous at the same time that our rights to privacy are diminished. Even the recent case in which a New York judge has ruled that Twitter must give the court three months worth of tweets from a user in a pending case involving an Occupy Wall Street protester is yet another chilling trend. The freedom for corporations to act as persons increases, while the freedom for private individuals to act likewise diminishes. And the power of government to abet the aims of corporations, while inhibiting the aims of individuals continues unchecked.

As Aaron Cynic has said,

Plenty of people might dismiss connecting these requests and other instances that highlight targeted suppression of dissent as mere paranoia. Such tactics have a chilling effect on legitimate dissent, and the efforts by multiple law enforcement agencies to question, detain and arrest activists of varying stripes points to a much more dangerous world. More than a decade ago, former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said that when it came to dissent in troubled times, Americans should “watch what they say and what they do.” Rhetoric like Fleischer’s and quick quips today from politicians like “if you’re not doing anything illegal, you shouldn’t be worried” shows an increasing acceptance of the criminalization of dissent, and points towards a disturbing future.

Such rhetoric is now become the norm.

It in spite of the increased emphasis on security Occupy groups remained active in supporting a variety of demonstrations and movements. Throughout the winter and early spring, our local groups supported actions protesting NDAA, the prospect of war with Iran, staged a very successful Mayday action in coordination with many other Occupy groups throughout the country, and had a very successful statewide General Assembly in Roanoke. A dedicated and committed core of volunteers kept the flame alive over months.

Circular firing squad

Occupy polity is messy. Decisions in this leaderless organization are made by the Gen. assembly which consists of all those people who identify with the local occupy organization, who gather together to share announcements, to deliberate on proposals initiated by workgroups, and to otherwise mount the virtual soapbox and share what is on their hearts. A general assembly is not a Rotary breakfast. The advantages of the leaderless group are obvious: it is far less easy to co-opt or decapitate. On the other hand, it is extremely difficult to get things done. One or a few individuals with agendas can derail the work of the group.

Day 14 Occupy Wall Street

There is also a great deal of concern about co-optation. During this past summer we saw the schism between OWS and the 99% Declaration, which was another group that sprung up from OWS but split with them along fault lines of concern. The Adbusters people, for example, attacked the 99% Declaration as the product of “the same cabal of old world thinkers who blunted the possibility of revolution for decades.” Not surprisingly, the 99% Declaration was led by a former lawyer for Goldman Sachs. It’s ironic that having given birth to the notion of “the 99%,” Occupy finds subsequent movements eager to use the 99% moniker and elbow the originators out of the way, often to achieve political objectives. The truth is that many occupiers are disgusted with both political parties, including this writer. I hold with Gore Vidal who, in 1970, observed that “the Democrats and Republicans are the left and right wings of the Property Party.”

What has happened locally, especially in Norfolk, is that many of the original founders of the local Occupy movement, many of whom were Ron Paul libertarians, fell away from the movement, either from disaffection with what seemed to them to be a progressive left agenda, or for Occupy’s refusal to endorse any party or candidate. In any event, those people are gone and their energy is missed.

Without camps around which to coalesce, the survival of local Occupies becomes challenging. It is made even more so by the impact of marginal personalities, group dysfunction, selfishness, jealousies, and gossip, and all of the other many human frailties to which most of us are all too prone. Locally, one person who is a garden-variety bully, has disrupted the proceedings of two Occupy groups (and is now working on a third) with lurid tales of intrigue, lost love, and defamation of character. Moreover, in an organization that resists being an organization, and which behaves far more like an affinity group, affinities get strained by gossip, whispering campaigns, he-said-she-said, and the sort of thing one might have thought best left behind in high school.

On a personal note, I can be depended upon to utter one phrase in most situations: “Be who you say you are; do what you say you’re going to do.” It is both galling and frustrating to have the work of a group be hijacked by somebody’s failure to execute. But what do we do, dock their pay?

Sign from March on Wall Street South (D. Digati photo)

March on Wall Street South (D. Digati photo)

What next?

The future of Occupy depends solely upon the ability of local groups to generate and maintain enthusiasm for the cause. As noted above, it is very difficult to sustain enthusiasm in the absence of a campsite. Many municipalities have gone out of their way to make it difficult for occupied groups to camp by passing ordinances restricting camping within city limits, etc.

Our colleagues in Occupy Roanoke have a different and productive example. They enjoy good relations with the local police and are in good odor with the local press. They are well funded, fully fuctional, and smart.

One of the ongoing conundrums of Occupy is that in order to realize “a better world is possible,” we have to behave in different ways, and we are ill trained to do so. Few have the vision and discipline necessary to set aside personal agenda and ego. Raised in a culture of craven materialism, where every transaction and relationship is financialized, in a culture that elevates the Cult of the Individual, “competition” is normal. We are marinated in the values we wish to change. It is cooperation, and self-sacrifice, and putting the other first, that is essential. Some might call it servant leadership. A communitarian spirit is a concept so alien and foreign to most of us that it might as well be Martian.

As Thom Hartmann has said in The Last Days of Ancient Sunlight, and in a different context, “We need new stories.”

It may be that the Occupy moment has come and gone. The changes in the prevailing economic narrative remain. What we do about them is anybody’s guess, but in an era where the PATRIOT act has been amplified by the National Defense Authorization Act, enhanced crackdowns on whistleblowers and troublemakers, greatly enhanced surveillance, the use of drones, a militarized police, and at this writing, a Middle East in flames, it remains to be seen what happens next.

For my part, I can say that as a result of Occupy, I have met some of the finest and most remarkable people who it has ever been my pleasure to meet. I have built associations with other activists working on causes which for which we share a commitment. And in a quite unforeseen development, I even met the woman with whom I now share a home and a life, which came as an unbidden blessing.

So much good has come from Occupy, and whatever good that may yet come will be a result of the collective effort of all of us. Herein lies the challenge:

“The obvious point is that most social activists look constantly to the state for solutions to social problems. This point bears labouring, because the orientation of most social action groups tends to reinforce state power. This applies to most antiwar action too. Many of the goals and methods of peace movements have been oriented around action by the state, such as appealing to state elites and advocating neutralism and unilateralism. Indeed, peace movements spend a lot of effort debating which demand to make on the state: nuclear freeze, unilateral or multilateral disarmament, nuclear-free zones, or removal of military bases. By appealing to the state, activists indirectly strengthen the roots of many social problems, the problem of war in particular…” ~ Brian Martin, ‘Uprooting War’

References:

http://bluemassgroup.com/2011/10/if-victory-is-dramatically-changing-the-conversation-then-occupy-has-already-won/

http://occupywallst.org/article/occupy-changed-conversation-now-we-change-world/

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/09/13-2

http://www.theroot.com/buzz/whither-occupy-wall-street-movement

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/02/whither-the-occupation/252441/

http://www.mercurynews.com/top-stories/ci_21072133/guest-commentary-whither-occupy-movement-these-days

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/01/lt-john-pike-uc-davis-pepper-spray-campus-police_n_1727933.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_606w/WashingtonPost/Content/Blogs/arts-post/Images/APTOPIX_Occupy_Seattle_0aa4c.jpg?uuid=JeAx_BBqEeGEZV6eLLi4GA

http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/203/669/gixXe.jpg?1321899388

http://www.disappearednews.com/2012/05/white-house-homeland-security-involved.html

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/03/23/evidence-homeland-security-coordinated-occupy-crackdown/

http://www.inthesetimes.com/uprising/entry/12303/mayors_dhs_coordinated_occupy_attacks/

http://www.salon.com/2012/04/30/borrowing_the_occupy_brand/

http://politicker.com/2011/11/mayor-bloomberg-i-have-my-own-army-11-30-11/

http://www.diatribemedia.com/2012/07/09/the-increased-criminalization-of-dissent/

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/nov2011/pers-n15.shtml2011

http://fromthetrenchesworldreport.com/us-instigating-violent-crackdown-on-whistleblowers-dissent/19709/

http://www.thefastertimes.com/politicalmedia/2011/10/10/occupy-wall-street-brings-class-consciousness-to-america/

Posted in Feature, Geopolitics, Home, OWS, Surly | Tagged occupy, occupy hampton roads, occupy norfolk

The Uncoolness of DOOM

Published September 16, 2012 | By Old Horseman

Off the keyboard of the Old Horseman

Published on Old Horseman on January 3,2011

Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasbord inside the Diner

It seems that a general sense of impending doom is going mainstream in recent years. It’s getting harder and harder for many people to fully ignore the the signs and pretend that a return to conventional prosperity is just around the next bend… In fact, a growing fraction of the population is becoming well-aware of the fact that there will be no real “recovery”, and that Business As Usual is gone for good.

Perhaps as a coping mechanism, the bulk of these doomers envision a “cool” kind of doom. Usually imagining one extreme or the other in future scenarios.

The light side of Cool Doom is a vision of some kind of Great Depression v2.0. Sure, gas and food will get expensive. The economy will continue to collapse. But those who think ahead, plant backyard Victory Gardens and invest in high MPG automobiles will be okay. Especially if they “re-localize”, support farmers markets, and think in terms of “building community”.

The dark side of Cool Doom is the hardcore, post-apocalyptic vision of the future. Hiding in bunkers from radioactive fallout. Fighting off mutant zombies and jackbooted stormtroopers. Just like in a Sci-Fi fantasy or video game.
The handy thing about both versions of Cool Doom is that they relieve the doomer of the need to make any REAL changes in his or her lifestyle.

The light side Cool Doom means you take up gardening as a hobby and get a hybrid instead of a big SUV. Maybe you actually talk to some of your suburban neighbors or “near-by” family about emergency plans, and stock some dry goods and bottled water. No big deal, really.

Cool Hippie Doom

The dark side of Cool Doom means that you take up shooting and gun collecting as a hobby. Maybe stock a Bug-Out Bag, or even remake your basement into a bunker. The kind of stuff that’ll let you make a kick-ass last stand long enough to see those who laughed at your doomerism get munched by zombies before you go out in a blaze of glory yourself!

It's all fun and games until somebody's brain gets nommed

Almost nobody likes to think about the more likely scenario: Uncool Doom… No hippie-dippy kumbaya neosuburbia… No mushroom clouds or Mad Max… Just an irregular, but increasingly steep decline. Fuel getting more and more expensive, then less and less available until driving at all becomes problematic. At the same time employment opportunities dry-up, meaning you’ll need to drive even farther to find decent work. With so much competition for ever-fewer jobs, pay will be miserably low, while goods and services, which will be in shrinking supply, cost more and more inflation-devalued dollars. Knowing they can’t afford high bills, people will cut-back on their household power usage, only to have the utility companies compensate for below-expected demand/income by raising rates and cutting staff and upkeep on the already decrepit power grid.

The problem with this relatively boring, Uncool Doom is that you actually have to make real, sweeping changes in your life to prepare for it.

The private automobile is most obviously doomed. You need to plan for a future without one, which probably means moving to a city where public transportation is available, a reasonably self-contained small town where everything you need in within walking or bicycling distance, or out to a self-sufficient farmstead from which you won’t need to venture often and which can produce fuel for transportation when it is necessary. The auto-dependent suburbs will continue to fail, and faux-doomsteads (auto-dependent suburban households out in the sticks) will fail even faster.

The fiat “dollar” economy is disintegrating, and paper wealth of all kinds is going with it. The whole system of people being employed in make-work occupations to be paid in dollars which they can then trade for everything they need is hopelessly inefficient and cannot long endure. Already jobs are being phased-out in favor of people relying more directly on Government for a growing number of the things they need. This means that you either need to reconcile yourself to being a ward of the state (giving the Government ever-increasing control over your life), or you have to become independent of the Government and its currency system.

Widespread GovCo infrastructure and goods distribution is a reflection of the now-deceased growth economy. It won’t take an EMP from a nuclear attack to kill much of the power grid. It’ll only take the cost of supporting so many miles of power cables to supply a decreasing and increasingly moneyless population of customers. It won’t take zombie attacks to shut-down the rural supermarkets. It’ll just take increasing operation costs and spiraling prices nobody can afford. The time will come when, even if you have a mattress full of Federal Reserve Notes, there won’t be anything available to buy with them outside of the major cities.

The probable form of doom is uncool because you CAN prepare for it. But this preparation means doing uncool things like moving out of suburbia and away from “normal” life. Largely disconnecting from the people and groups you know are doomed, even if they are family. And planning for a vision of the future most people absolutely refuse to see.

This is how most people will perceive you. Cool Doom can really be a cop-out. Light-side Cool Doomers imagine that not that much needs to be done, and can blame future failure on the lack of social enlightenment in society. Dark-side Cool Doomers can imagine that nothing they could do would be effective against the living Hell of the future anyway, so why bother?
But let’s face it. History tends to be uncool in real-time.

Posted in Home | Tagged Doom, Preparation, Zombies

Central Bank Failure…

Published September 15, 2012 | By Steve from Virginia

Off the Keyboard of Steve from Virginia

Published originally on Economic Undertow on September 14, 2012

Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasbord inside the Diner

Ongoing rush of monetization world-wide took a predictable step yesterday as the Fed Chairman announced open-ended lending to mortgage industry. This is on top of ongoing lending to the government (LSAP/Operation Twist) and the promise of ‘unlimited’ lending to banks (by way of governments) in the European Union. On the way is more central bank lending in Japan, UK as well as more stimulus in Chinaand elsewhere.

As was pointed out in the Economic Undertow short-version:

Modernity cannibalizes its capital, as such our crisis is irreversible. Conventional marketplace remedies such as debt jubilees/write-offs, re-distribution, bailouts, stimulus, austerity policies, monetary easing, etc. have no effect on outcome other than to worsen conditions. These are efforts to reclaim capital that no longer exists. Consequently, remedies accelerate unraveling process by increasing gross debt (claims against capital) while exposing remaining capital to consumption at higher rates.Economists insist that capital is symbolic (money) rather than material. Capital = resources (Daly), all industrial money is debt. Abstract money is infinitely reproducible, material inputs are not.

The central bankers endeavor to reproduce as much of the abstract ‘money’ as possible, hoping that consumption can grow to ‘normal’ levels. The central banks lend, this is all they can do. Despite talk about ‘tools’, they only have one: making- or not making loans. The banks’ only form of medicine is more of what put the world in the hospital in the first place!

The economies are like a car that cannot start. First one person then another puts the key into the ignition and cranks the engine. New people arrive and say, “I can start the car,” and take their turn with the key. They declare the problem is with the battery or the starter or the engine or the electrical system. Each believes the other simply does not know how to start a car. The gas tank is empty the car will not start regardless of who turns the key. Eventually, the battery fails.

Battery Failure = Great Depression

Most of the people in the world do not want a second Great Depression. There are also very few on this planet that do not acknowledge the possibility/likelihood of another depression. The people will do whatever it takes to forestall it. If this requires believing the establishment’s lies … they will become believers. They will repeat whatever lies they must to themselves, to their children, they will live the lies until they are submerged by them.

When the central bankers promise the children that they will save them, the children act accordingly … even though the fact of the central banks having to make such promises speaks for itself. When the Fed and the rest are the last line of defense, there really is no last line of defense.

What people don’t understand is the nature of our crisis, it is an energy crisis in drag. High real input prices due to scarcity are stranding trillion$ of infrastructure used to waste resources, (sunk capital investment). There is no coming back from this. When capital resources are gone they are gone forever, wasting infrastructure is worthless junk. The process has arrived at the point when the various actors are beginning to come to understand what ‘forever’ actually represents and that they are confronting it.

The monstrousness of our predicament is almost beyond the ability of the human mind to grasp its scale. We burn up our resources today, there will be no more resources to burn for millions of years. We’re it. Apres moi le deluge!

Central bankers cannot issue value-on-demand. They cannot offer anything other than symbols for value, items that have worth only under circumstances that do not currently exist and cannot again! They cannot print crude oil, topsoil, surface water, they cannot increase waste-carrying capacity, they can add to the assault on these things by way of their lies and the willing credulity of others. They can only make matters worse, the central banks are at odds with themselves.

As far as it goes, the entire world is in the grip of resource deflation, from which there is no escape. Our voracious machines dig the graves of our grandchildren faster and deeper, capital is destroyed more utterly, what remains becomes unaffordably expensive, at some point the costs are bankrupting … see ‘Greece’.

Greece is all of our futures, our children’s futures, our grandchildren if they are very, very lucky and can dodge the consequences of our stupidity and blindness. They will live in small villages, they will till what fertile soil they can find, they will make things by hand they will wish all of us had died before we were born.

Loans without end … just not for you!

Tens of millions are unemployed worldwide! The solution is to offer loans at near-zero cost to bankers! That will solve the problem … right? Let the Fed Chairman’s friends take they money and run … to Peru!

Figure 1: This graph of Fed total assets and liabilities from Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank (click on for big). This amount is set to grow by another US$480 billion per year into the foreseeable future. Keep in mind, the central bank balance sheet expands because the private sector balance sheet contracts. Fed credit supplants private credit, it is not added to it. If there is no private sector deficiency there is no need for easing! The end of the day has no net increase in available funds for the public, only balance sheet problems pushed further into the future.

The breakdown of Federal Reserve balance sheet can be seen on the Fed statistical release page. Regardless of what the report says, all assets held outright by the Fed are loans made by them: the purchases of Treasury- or agency bonds are loans to these agencies.

The flow of credit is from the central bank into reserve accounts at the Fed (not circulating currency). Reserves do not appear in the greater world unless there is demand for them in the form of redemptions/depositor withdrawals that exceed the requirements of ordinary, day-to-day business. A good example of this excess depositor demand would be a bank run.

What the central bank has done is guarantee all bank deposits by offering what amounts to unlimited reserves.

It’s not clear guaranteeing deposits is what the Fed Chairman intends to do. Bank runs are underway in Europe, China, Argentina and elsewhere. The reason is there are no effective lenders of last resort, the consequence of central bank over-promising/making unsecured loans. When central banks leverage themselves they become no different from ordinary, commercial banks/shadow lenders who are insolvent because of their unsecured lending. The central bankers promise ‘unlimited’ supplies of liquidity, they cannot possibly deliver it. The central banks are collateral-constrained. There is less good collateral available: collateral is capital, there is a shortage of it: our crisis is the consumption of capital. Adding claims against what little remains is pointless particularly when the form of the claim is accelerated consumption.

The Chairman guarantees bank deposits with the left hand while making the guarantee necessary with the right.

More left hand-right hand: or perhaps left foot-right foot: the central banks place the petroleum industry’s boot on the throat of the world’s economies (click on for big):

Figure 2: Brent crude continuous front-month contract, chart by TFC Charts: the financing needs of the petroleum extractors is at odds with those of the extractors’ own customers (Guardian):

Further quantitative easing in doubt as petrol prices near record high.

Phillip Inman

The Bank of England could be prevented from boosting the economy with another round of QE if inflation rises

Petrol pump prices jumped to 139.7p a litre this weekend, within 3p of the 142.5p record set in the spring, according to figures from the AA.

The cost of diesel also rose as Europe’s major refiners blamed hurricanes in the US and a string of refinery shutdowns for a spike in the cost of crude oil.

A rising oil price will spook the Bank of England, which has relied in its inflation forecasts on a fall in oil prices linked to falling demand across the world. The central bank’s monetary policy committee, which sets interest rates, could be prevented from adding to its £375bn programme of quantitative easing to boost lending in the economy if inflation takes hold, analysts said.

Higher pump prices will also add to concerns that the UK will join continental Europe in a stagflation trap as inflation rises while growth remains flat.

Fears that the economy will remain in recession for the rest of the year were heightened by a report on Monday that found optimism among UK businesses has hit a 20-year low.

There is an upper bound to the price of petroleum, where the costs of consumption become unaffordable and demand is constrained. In the US, the price is a little over $4 per gallon of motor gasoline: at this level the entire fuel wasting enterprise becomes unaffordable, including the precious tract house- and office developments, sectors of the economy the central banks are desperate to revive.

Figure 3: Got gold? (TFC Chartz, click on for big) How about silver? It is hard to see a green light given to Wall Street asset speculators that won’t push up the price of all commodities. Unlike crude oil, which cannot rise in price without self-limiting demand destruction, gold is not strategically important. An ounce of gold can be bid up to a cool million dollars per ounce without effecting the so-called ‘productive’ economy. Gold is a fetish, like a Tiger tank or a Warhol Car Crash: a very high price might reflect uncertainty about the worth of other goods (including currency) but the implied shortage of gold would not materially effect output of necessary goods.

The central banks think only of creating asset price ‘bubbles’, in our ruin of a world there is nothing left.

Posted in Economics, Home | Tagged Capital, Central Banking, Collateral, Deflation, Dollar, ECB, Energy, Euro, Fed, Inflation, QE3

QE3 Ship Sails

Published September 14, 2012 | By RE

Off the keyboard of RE

Discuss this article inside the Diner

Its all over the Blogosphere and the MSM, Helicopter Ben has once again loaded up the Chinook Choppers and is going to drop anywhere from $40B to $125B worth of Funny Money on the TBTF Banksters EVERY MONTH from now to Kingdom Come.

Graham Summers of Phoenix Capital on Zero Hedge is busy eating CROW after months of predicting that the Bernank would NOT run another QE Gambit. After 2 Epic Fails with QE1 & QE2 & “Operation Twist”, yet ANOTHER one of these Helicopter Drops you would think a Normally Smart Academic like Helicopter Ben would not undertake. There are however extenuating circumstances here you have to consider in the situation as it stands.

The primary consideration you have to grasp is what is going on over in Eurotrashland. The Krauts and the Bundesbank basically Caved to Super Mario Dragon and have agreed to fund the ESM and look the other way while the ECB does back door buying of Sovereign Debt of Spain and Italy. IOW, Super Mario is going to Print to Fund these economies, at least for a while. This will require a LOT of Ink and Paper to print those colorful Euros.

What happens if Super Mario is Printing non-stop to fund those economies and Helicopter Ben does NOT print in tandem? Answer: the Exchange Rate goes to hell in a handbasket in short order. The Euro would drop in value rapidly, the Dollar would rise in value and all the trade based on the current relative valuations being held stable would fall apart. In order to Validate the Value of the Euro, Helicopter Ben HAS to print just as fast as Super Mario does.

As Steve on Economic Undertow often points out though, CBs like Da Fed and the ECB don’t really Print Naked, they Print to match “Collateral” that is thrown at them and Buy this Collateral with the New Money. The issue here is that just about anything these days serves as Collateral on completely Fictitious Marking of Value.

Not quite Baseball Cards here as Collateral, but Close. For the ECB, they are “buying” Sovereign Debt that is Irredeemable Debt, it cannot and never will be repaid. In the case of Da Fed, they are Buying MBS that basically amounts to non-performing loans. Stop and THINK about that. Even if it is JUST $40B a month, are people REALLY taking $40B/month out in Mortgages anywhere now?

The $40B DaFed CAN buy each month is the Trash on the books of Fannie and Freddie and the TBTF Banks. In return for the worthless securities, they hand over new worthless Toilet Paper money. This is LIMITED though, because really the TBTF banks and Fannie and Freddie have only a limited number of these securities to SELL to Da Fed. At this point ALREADY after 2 rounds of QE, I suspect these Banks hold few MBS, Da Fed ALREADY “owns” most of the Trash. For the Banks to get MORE Cash for Trash, they would have to issue out more Mortgages. To WHOM will they issue such mortgages?

THAT is the problem here. You see, Da Fed can Buy infinite Debt, but only if infinite Debt is issued out and somebody SIGNS for that debt. Dead BROKE J6P is not signing for new Debt, nor are TBTF Banks OFFERING him debt to sign for either. You have this HUGE ZIRP Credit Line, but unless you can get somebody at the bottom end you define as a “Good Credit Risk” to sign, you cannot distribute out the money this way. THAT IS THE PROBLEM.

Helicopter Ben can make the money cheap to free with ZIRP to the TBTF Banks, but if those Banks do not push that money out into new loans, it just exists as Digibits on a ledger in a Super Computer. It is NOT real MONEY!

Now, with the few MBS that some of the TBTF still have, they can Sell it to Da Fed and get back more funny Money to “Invest” elsewhere. Which of course generally amounts to Pumping and Dumping the Stock Market and Bidding up Commodities these days.

Far as the Stock market is concerned, this produces the “Wealth Effect: where Stock Holders THINK they are getting Richer because the Stock Market goes inexorably upward. Similarly, the Commodities markets get driven upwards as those who now have GOBS of new Free Money can bet it in those markets also! So UP go the Oil futures contracts, UP go the Soybean Futures also.

Problem here of course is that at the OTHER end of the line, Konsumers have no access to Money Drops from Helicopter Ben’s Chinook Chopper. The Money problem here is a DISTRIBUTION PROBLEM, not a CREATION problem. HB can create INFINITE Money, what he CANNOT do is move that money outward any further than the TBTF Banks responsible for pitching it out in more LOANS.

In prior incarnations of this cycle, as long as CBs pushed out more money at low interest rates,those with access to that money used it to “invest” in industries that might employ some people, so the money got distributed out that way. NOW these Banksters are NOT pushing the money out that way, what they are doing instead is blowing bigger bubbles in the Stock and Commodity Markets, and MANY economistas see this as a precursor to Hyperinflation. Which it could be, but ONLY once complete FAITH is lost in the system as whole, and we are not there yet.

QE3 will NOT get a Huge number of people taking on new Mortgages, because they are not Credit Worthy people! Even if you HAVE a Minimum Wage Job Flipping Burgers somewhere, this does NOT provide enough income to service a mortgage at anywhere NEAR typical McMansion Valuations. So there will NOT be massive creation of new MBS for Da Fed to Buy here. All they really can buy are all the old non-performing loans already handed out.

Similarly, the ECB can buy more Sovereign Debt, but they are not getting paid back EITHER. All these CBs are becoming “Bad Banks”, the final Bag Holder for a LOT of irredeemable debt. However, as long as they keep printing in UNISON and the holders of energy reserves ACCEPT this toilet Paper for the energy, the system can exist for another hour, another day.

A point here will come though at which the Money is not accepted and the available fuel to distribute out is not enough. We appear to be very close to this point if we are not already there.

Hyperinflation in the Dollar remains unlikely in the near term, and in fact as long as the Major CBs print in Concert, Hyperinflation of any of these currencies also remains unlikely. Commodity Price Inflation is likely but this is Range Limited by the Distribution problem. What will occur is that Speculators will drive the wholesale prices up on on the markets while the consumption decreases through Demand Destruction, forcing more bankruptcies. IOW, QE3 will have precisely the same effect as QE1&2, which is to do absolutely NOTHING to stop the deflationary spiral.

It is a MISTAKE to focus on the Prices here, it takes your eye off the ball of the economic dynamic in effect, which is credit contraction. Even if Da Fed or the ECB mkes EZ credit available to the TBTF, that does not mean they move the money further out into the retail economy. The “Wealth Effect” of an increasing Stock Market price is very limited overall and does not jump start the Main Street economy a priori.

What it WILL do likely here for enough time is to get the Elections done with. Long as they keep pitching out Funny Money, long as this money serves to buy Oil from somewhere, you can perpetuate a Long Emergency/Slow Collapse. The problems created though are more Political than they are Economic, and you just never know when a Fruit Vendor Self Immolating will get enough people motivated to set fire to a few Embassies. That is the War economy we are working our way into now.

Posted in Home | Tagged Commodities, Deflation, Hyoerinfation, Money, QE3, Speculation

Spiritual Musings on Collapse

Published September 13, 2012 | By Ashvin Pandurangi

Off the keyboard of Ashvin Pandurangi

Introduction from RE: In keeping with the Diner policy of providing a wide spectrum of ideas, perspectives and philosphies on these pages, I welcome long time debate adversary Ashvin Pandurangi as a Cross Posting author on the Diner Blog. Ashvin is an active Diner inside the Forum, and recently began his own Blog, Picturing Christ. Many people also know Ashvin from his work on The Automatic Earth, where he has been Blogging the Collapse with Stoneleigh and Ilargi for a couple of years now.Ashvin’s focus has changed over the last year as he has become immersed in the Spiritual aspects of the collapse from the POV of an Evangelical Christian. His current focus does not fit well on the pages of The Automatic Earth, so to express himself fully on these questions he began his own Blog. It will be no surprise to Diners, but unless you followed the many debates Ashvin and I have engaged in over the last 6 months, you are likely not aware that Ashvin and I do not agree on numerous Philosophical and Spiritual concepts. We DO agree on many of the Economic and Geopolitical problems which face us all, though even there we generally find some way to disagree with each other. LOL. For those interested in searching these arguments down, you can find them distributed through the pages of the Doomstead Diner and The Automatic Earth.

I myself am not an Evangelical Christian, I am not even a Christian of any flavor. The best general rubric for my Spiritual and Religious philosophy is referred to as Panentheism. Here on the Diner, there are some others with similar ideas (notably Diner Author William Hunter Duncan), and there are as well other Christians besides Ashvin (notably Diner Author Surly), and likely quite a few other Religious philosophies as well. Diner Tao Jonesing often weighs in with his Taoist viewpoint on the Diner pages. There are numerous Atheist Diners as well.I have not written too many Blog Articles specifically addressing the Spiritual aspect of Collapse, the main ones are On the Existence of God, Infinite Regression Analysis of God, and Christian Apologetics. I do however periodically drop in on debates inside the Diner which have Spiritual and Religious underpinnings, where Ashvin is often a prolific contributor.

I look forward to reading more from Ashvin, and challenging him where I find inconsistencies in his analysis. It’s always entertaining to engage Ashvin, he’s a very bright fellow and good writer, and our Holmes-Watson Debates can be very entertaining reading. We may end up having a few more of them now across the pages of the Doomstead Diner and Picturing Christ. Time will tell on that one.

Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasbord inside the Diner

As many of you Diners already know, I traditionally wrote about economic, financial and industrial/environmental collapse for The Automatic Earth. For all human beings who are still fortunate or unfortunate enough to exist on this Earth, these are issues of prime and imminent importance. We are now at least four years running into the start of the sub-prime mortgage meltdown, which then morphed into generalized private and public debt crises around the world. Many have predicted that either this year or the next carries the most probability for the next BIG leg down the ladder of financial collapse, including me.

Yet, I was also moved this year to start reflecting on what most people consider to be the more “personal” questions of life, and how the answers to those questions are relevant to the dynamics of collapse. Perhaps it is partly because I started to feel the “collapse blues” that I’m sure most of the people here have experienced at some time or another – a period of time when you feel like everyone and everything is Doomed, and there’s really nothing you can do about it. We can write and talk and discuss until the cows come home, but only a few people will end up protecting themselves from the inevitable downfall at the end of the day.

So that was a part of the reason for my shift in focus, but by no means the whole thing. The more important part was that I felt there was a big piece of the collapse puzzle that was missing for me, and it had to do with the question of WHY – why were the sociopathic bankers so reckless and greedy? why were the shiesty politicians so corrupt? why where the neo-con war hawks so thirsty for blood and oil? Most importantly, though, why could I see hints of all of that sociopathic behavior, all of that corruption, all of that blood-lust and all of that never-ending materialism in everyone around me? My family and my friends were really no different at the end of the day.

Obviously, they weren’t perpetrating evil at Hitler-like scales, but they had generally accepted and supported a paradigm in which Hitler-like people are much more likely to exist than not. That’s what got me thinking that all of these systemic crises we face now ultimately boil down to existential questions – who are we, where do we come from and why do we think and act in the ways that we do? And such questions obviously lead you to the realms of history, philosophy and spirituality. To make a somewhat short story even shorter, I took a leap of faith into those realms of knowledge and I came out with what I believe to be very good answers.

Those answers came in the form of Judeo-Christian theology for me. It wasn’t enough to just have the answers, though… I needed to share them with others – and that is how I came to classify myself as an evangelical Christian. And while I managed to inject some Christian themes into my articles on TAE, and I also managed to get into some fiery debates/discussions here on the DD forum, it simply wasn’t enough. What I needed online was a space of my own to devote entirely to my Christian perspective on all manner of modern day concerns. That is why I created my new blog, PICTURING CHRIST.

Head Chef here at the Diner, RE, has been gracious enough to post this promo piece on DD for me, and I appreciate everyone who has taken the time to read and consider it. PC will be all about the interplay between metaphysical philosophy, Christian theology, religious history and the systemic crises of materialism that we face today. It will be about exposing naturalism and materialism for the destructive ideologies that they really are, and giving people an arena to consider and discuss spiritual alternatives. Yes, I am an evangelical Christian, and my posts will be centered around the truth I find in the holy scriptures, but I also welcome challenges and alternatives to my views. Faith is nothing if it isn’t tested…

I have only been a Christian for about a year now, so I hope to learn a lot about my own faith from this experience, while hopefully motivating others to learn more about theirs as well. I truly believe that we are living in perhaps the most unique time in all of history, and that the storms looming overhead will leave behind an epic amount of wreckage in their wakes. However, I also believe that it is ultimately our souls which need to be saved on this Earth, not our physical bodies. So if anyone here feels similarly or is simply interested in being convinced (or trying their best to convince me why I’m wrong), I encourage you to visit PC and check out the content.

In addition to the regular posts that will go up, I have added sections for videos and audio files that will deal with all manner of spiritual subjects – such as the NT, the OT, difficult Christian doctrines, numerous fields of apologetics, the New Age, Eastern religions, and much more. I will continue adding pages and content to the site as time progresses, and I am welcome to any suggestions or input from readers as to what they would like to see or hear. There are already three posts up on the site so far, and I obviously recommend you start with the Intro – An Introduction to Picturing Christ

However, if you want to know a little more about why I think Christianity provides the ultimate answer to our current problems of Doom and Gloom, you can give this one a read - How Doom & Gloom Disappeared with the Protoevangelium

And finally, if you’d like to know what I truly mean by “Picturing Christ”, and how that process of picturing can help us navigate the treacherous waters we find ourselves in today, you can check out this latest post - The True Power of Pictures

PS – I am also continuing to work on improving the functionality of the site, including ease of navigation and the posting of customized comments (fonts, colors, embeds, etc.). There are a lot of plugins available on the hosted WordPress platform I am running, so none of that should be a problem.

Thank you all very much for your time and consideration, and I hope to continue interacting with everyone here at the Diner, at TAE and hopefully at PC as well!

-Ashvin

Posted in Home | Tagged Christianity, Collapse, Panentheism, Spirituality

Monthly Archives: September 2012

…Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You.

How to Teach Math — Abolish Math Courses!

What is Math Good For?

Many More Students Could be Scientists!

Footnotes

Spain risks break-up as Mariano Rajoy stirs Catalan fury.

SAVE AS MANY AS YOU CAN

…Read the rest with the Diners around the Kitchen Sink of the Doomstead Diner

Draghi reinvents the Divine Right of Kings

Further quantitative easing in doubt as petrol prices near record high.

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