…Or May the Heavens Fall
Off the keyboard of Phillip Farrugio
Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasboard inside the Diner
From the bible: “Let justice prevail or may the heavens fall” Goodness me the heavens did fall yesterday over the entire northeastern part of our great nation. The damage to life and property, the power outages and the crippling of commerce was devastating. So many nine to five Americans were hurt… along with the super wealthy. Even the temple of corporate profit had to close down for two whole days! One television stock market pundit went so far as to say that there was no need to close Wall Street because of the hurricane. He did not even dare mention the tremendous losses or threats of no shelter, food, electricity, heating or transportation. No, this guy only cared about the loss of two trading days. Imagine if he was an Iraqi investment pundit in March of 2003, when the real Shock and Awe occurred? There must be this thing called karma after all.
New York City, in addition to having so many good and decent Americans from all walks of life and nationality, also is the most negative place in the entire country of ours. The packs of corporate sharks who earn their corporate profits from the pain and suffering of the poor and the working stiffs operate in NYC and surroundings. The Occupy movement did not initiate in Chicago or LA or Dallas. No, it engaged itself in protesting the very core of the nest of greed and corruption, which happens to be in NYC. Where do most of these predatory skunks reside or have their summer homes and estates? Well, the rich are as equally enamored by the ocean as the rest of us. Sadly, as the universe rolled those 11 foot sea walls onto the land and destroyed many palatial properties, the homes of John and Joan Q Public got wasted away as well. Karma can be a bitch.
Governor Christie of New Jersey had to call out the National Guard to help with the hurricane. How many of them were around to help? How many of our Guard are still in the desert hornet’s nest? The governor spoke to the media about the amount of infrastructure that was destroyed or rendered useless. What he failed to connect is the fact that for every soldier we keep (and kept) in Iraq and Afghanistan for one year, that costs our treasury over one million dollars! How much New Jersey infrastructure could those one million dollars have helped improve and strengthen? Do the math, governor, and see what your support for phony wars and occupations has been doing. That goes for the Democratic governors who support their Democratic president and his foolish foreign endeavors. The only ones laughing are the corporate and Pentagon wolves who make their livings from more and more phony wars and threats of wars.
A storm held our greatest city and surrounding region hostage. Similar to what Wall Street and its Military Industrial Empire’s controllers have been doing to us serfs for Lord knows how long. When will the day come and the mass of our fine and decent citizens get off their duffs and stand in unison for a cause far greater than most: Save our nation by pulling back this empire before it totally pulls us under! ?
PA Farruggio
October 30th, 2012
{Philip A Farruggio is son and grandson of Brooklyn, NYC longshoremen. He is a free lance columnist (found on Information Clearing house, Doomstead Diner, Op Ed News, Dandelion Salad, Activist Post, Dissident Voice and many other sites worldwide). Philip works as an environmental products sales rep and has been an activist leader since 2000. In 2010 he became a local spokesperson for the 25% Solution Movement to Save Our Cities by cutting military spending 25%. Philip can be reached at paf1222@bellsouth.net
OIL KILLING: Are we about to witness an era of gang warfare in energy?
Off the keyboard of John Ward
Published on The Slog on October 27, 2012
Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasboard inside the Diner
News blackout on Belgian shooting can’t disguise signs of assassination
Hazy….the facts surrounding mob-style killing of Nick Mockford (left)
I wonder how many people reading the rapidly petering-out Belgian oil ‘hit’ story realise that the incident took place fifteen days ago. Although Belgian police insist that this is normal, it isn’t. That is, news blackouts about eurodisaster may be normal, but a ban on news about this serious a hit is about as abnormal as they come.
Death scene…the Da Marcello restaurant in suburban Brussels
Thus far, a near-Stepford Wife headline has appeared almost everywhere along the lines of ‘A British oil executive gunned down in Brussels could have been the victim of a targeted assassination’.
Sorry to be obvious here, but WTF else does anyone think it might have been….a deranged waiter who thought Mockford’s derisory tip was the last straw in a life going bad?
“It could’ve been a random mugging and car-jacking attempt,” Belgian police told a prominent UK news agency yesterday. As the two assassins ran away like the clappers in bike gear carrying crash helmets – having poured four shots into the bloke – I’m scoring this minus 53 on a probability scale of ten. Yesterday, Nick’s employer Exxon came out with this belter attempting to beat that with a score of minus 97:
“We were shocked by the tragic death of Nick Mockford, one of our employees a fortnight ago in Brussels. Mr Mockford was a department manager at our office close to Brussels, but we have no indication that the incident was work-related.”
Well hell, that’s the way it is in Brussels – it’s the Wild West out there guys, Abilene has nothing on your eurocrat suburb. Here are some equally relevant clues:
This is Nick Mockford, Aussie-rules star from Melbourne Australia. Nick is half the Belgian victim’s age, not entirely caucasian, 18,000 miles from the slaying, and still alive. Belgian police have ruled him out of their enquiries at this stage.
Should we all try and get real here? A senior Exxon executive goes out for dinner with his wife in a town where the most dangerous thing about the place is that it smells of chips. On leaving – and let’s be clear about this – he was shot to death by two blokes who had clearly taken the trouble to work out what he was doing there, and waited for him to exit the eaterie. They ran off. A news blackout was then declared for fully 240 hours. Are any of us (even people like me who dismiss 90+% of all known conspiracy theories) expected to believe that, on closer examination, this appears to have been an attempt to steal the guy’s company car? I sincerely hope not, as otherwise all hope for the human species has left the theatre.
Nichlas Mockford wasn’t just some two-bit ‘departmental manager’. He was the Head of Marketing for interim technologies for Exxon. For interim technologies read ‘Green=alternatives to oil=end of Texas, Middle East, East Med undersea’…..and indeed any region whose current or future wealth might be based on black gold. For example, Russia.
Or, for interim technologies read ‘Green=eco-warriors seeing him as an ‘earth-traitor’=possibly persons of Kiwi/Hard Left/libertarian persuasion’.
The escaping motor-cyclists so clearly hell-bent on nicking Mr Mockford’s car were described by witnesses as “looking East European”.
So there we have it. I’m hoping that tomorrow’s (Sunday) papers have some intriguing leads re this one, otherwise I’d be inclined to write off MSM journalism for good.
Frankenstorm Snor’eastercane Sandy
Off the Keyboard of RE
Discuss this article at the Geological & Cosmological Events Table inside the Diner
In the long standing Diner tradition of covering major Weather events, along with the Pro Meteorologists the Diners are looking at Sandy as a BIG ONE. Mostly we discuss these events inside the Diner, but this one appears to me to be sufficiently impressive in scope that I am going to Blog it also.
To begin, a few of my initial comments inside the Frankenstorm Snor’eastercane Sandy thread inside the Diner:
DUD or Weather Doom? Place your Bets here in the thread before Sandy makes landfall!QuoteMany forecasters are warning that Sandy could be more destructive than last year’s Hurricane Irene, which caused billions of dollars in damage across the U.S. Northeast.
According to all the Top Mets like Jeff Masters of Weather Underground, Sandy is set up to be even BIGGER than Irene, which just last year caused $Billions$ in damages up through the East Coast corridor, one of the most densely populated techno-societies anywhere, with endless miles of Electrical and Communications wire and fiber optics strung around the neighborhood.
Up in Vermont after Irene, numerous towns were CUT OFF, as many Historic Covered Bridges went washing down the Raging Rivers. We don’t know to this day how many miles of roadway were repaired, regraded and repaved, but we DO KNOW that in the aftermath of that Hurricane FEMA was essentially TAPPED OUT of funds, and one wonders where they are getting their next infusion of Funding to repair AGAIN many of the SAME roads and SAME miles of Electrical cable strung up around that neighborhood?
How about all those folks living in various towns in NJ that suffered record flooding from Irene, but who resolutely hang out in them (because where do they have to GO afterall?), and who now seem quite likely to get a Repeat Performance this year? How many times can we Rinse & Repeat this scenario before people just get TIRED of it and start streaming out of these neighborhoods looking for somewhere to go?
Where “Safe” to go INDEED is the question. With these massive precipitation events, Mountains are not real safe due to Flash Flooding and Landslides. Head Inland to the Great Plains, where Drought is killing the Corn and Soybean crops? Head to the West Coast and the Hotel California, where you can Check Out but you can Never Leave?
I have little doubt that Da Goobermint will conjure up another few $Billion$ here to clean up after Sandy finishes dumping the water vapor sucked up from the Heating Atlantic ocean. The Wires will be restrung again. Happy days I suspect for Construction Workers and Linemen for the County called back in to work for a few months in the Cleanup.
Of course, when they can’t get Diesel to run the Heavy Equipment, the Cleanup is going to be a whole lot more difficult. When the Lights stay OFF for more than a Week, REALITY is going to start setting in here, and we will move into the next stage of Industrial Civilization Collapse.It won’t be pretty, that is for sure.
Looks like the Big Apple is set to take a Direct Hit again, this time at Full Moon High Tides.
Zero Hour looks to be Tuesday Morning, a week before the POTUS Election. Its a slow moving storm too, so if there are mass power outtages they may still be persisting to Election Day. Reschedule the Election? Can you IMAGINE the “irregularities” that will occur? This will be worse than Bush-Gore.
This is going to be a GREAT WEEK for Doomering!
NY Shity is going to shut down the Subways AGAIN.
Wind field size on Sandy is HUGE, and a very BIG fetch on the inbound track it is taking.
Water temps are at all time highs for this time of year (big surprise there), So Sandy will likely crank up a bit tomorrow.
Let’s first look here at Sandy’s projected Track:
As you can see, Sandy stays well offshore until the Dogleg to the Northwest for final approach. Quite different than Irene, which hugged the coast and actually made a landfall in the Outer Banks before making a second landfall in NY Shity and so had a lot of power sapped out of it. Circulation around the central low pressure zone of Sandy has nothing to disturb it until it crashes into NY Shity Harbor, assuming it follows this track and just about all the Models agree on this one.
Also, this track takes Sandy over just about the same stretch of NJ and PA that got so badly flooded from Irene. Impossible to predict Rainfall totals here, currently the Pro Mets are talking 5-8″, but this is highly dependent on how fast Sandy moves and how much water vapor she collected up on the fetch inward.
What REALLY makes Sandy different from Irene though is the “Perfect Storm” confluence of meeting up with another Weather System that is approaching from the West carrying a lot of cold air. In higher elevations and in the more northern sectors once Sandy rolls over NY, VT and NH, this could be a MAJOR snowfall event measured in FEET. In Buffalo where they often get dumped on by HUGE snowfalls in normal circumstances because of Lake Effect snow, it could be truly Record Breaking. Buffalo ALSO is the first place Edison wired up for Electricity, fittingly enough since a huge Blackout situation is pretty much a GUARANTEE here.
On a Political Level, Sandy’s arrival RIGHT before the POTUS election means the Political Significance of this storm is extraordinary. The East Coast is the most populous are of the FSofA, and how Obama-sama handles the Disaster can easily sway this election. If a significant portion of the East Coast is still without Power by Election Day, there is about no way the O-man can win. Then of course is the question of whether they will hold the election at all or delay it, as I mentioned in one of my posts.
Alaska HAARP ARRAY
Finally, for the Conspiracy Theory crowd, there is an awful lot of RARE COINKIDINK here. Hurricanes hitting the East Coast at this time of year are pretty rare occurrences, rarer still are “Perfect Storm” scenarios of 2 major weather systems meeting up like this. Then for all that to occur on PRECISELY the week the POTUS election is scheduled…well the statistical chances of this being a Random Event seem mighty small to me. Much has been written about HAARP and the possibility that weather systems can be created at will now by the Military-Industrial Complex. I have my doubts this is possible, but such a remarkable COINKIDINK makes me VERY SUSPICIOUS.
RE
Update: Will the Subways Flood?
Jeff Master’s article on his Wunderground Blog highlights the biggest single economic danger from Sandy, the possibility that the Storm Surge will overtop the seawalls in southern Manhattan and flood the vast network of underground tunnels and electrical conduits beneath the city streets.
Anyone who has ever been to NY Shity knows there are no High Voltage Power lines on poles above ground bringing electric power to the NYSE and Goldman Sacks-the-taxpayer, all of these lines are below ground in lower Manhattan, well protected from Wind Damage but extremely vulnerable to flooding. In this case with seawater, a fabulous electrical conductor and also extremely corrosive.
If the seawall is overtopped, the many Tunnels out of lower Manhattan that connect it to the Mainland and to Long Island could fill with water. Estimates are it would take a month to pump them out and get them operational again. Without these tunnels operational, it would be just about impossible to commute into and out of Wall Street.
Besides that, although many of their computer centers are now remotely located, it would be about impossible to run many of the Bloomberg Terminals on Emergency Generator Power for more than a few days. Getting the fuel to run said generators into lower Manhattan itself would be a nightmare.
Just the repairs alone would cost $Billions$, and the inability to “do bizness as usual” for a full month would cost many billions more in lost ttax revenue and so forth.
Sandy’s projected track puts the maximum Storm Surge straight into NY Shity Harbor. Jeff Masters gives it a 30% chance of overtopping the Seawalls. I think he is being generous there, not to seem too Doomerish but at the same time covering himself if it does flood.
This is one question which will be answered fairly rapidly, since it will/will not occur inside a few hours when Sandy makes Landfall. If it does overtop, you’ll get the same kind of dramatic footage that occurred when the levees were Breached during Katrina.
NY Shity is highly dependent on the subways and light rail lines for moving around so many people in that machine. Many do not even OWN carz.
If the Subways FLOOD, this is a Black Swan of immense proportions. Wall Street will have to move their operations to data centers on the mainland, and that will be very hard to do since those DCs are not set up for people to commute to.
The Clock is Ticking on a Time Bomb here. Wall Street is a CENTRAL NODE for all International Trade, and disruption of those operations at this level for a month is a domino that will cascade through the entire Global Financial system.
Not $Billions$ in losses there.
$TRILLIONS$
RE
Sandy 1997 Westchester County “Simulation”
For you HAARP Conspiracy theorists out there, this is Grist for the Mill.
Next: The Local Drill Up: WESTCHESTER COUNTYNY ARES/RACES Previous: The Rye Plan
The Hurricane Simulation
Westchester County Communications Officer Sandy Fried, an Amateur Radio operator and ODES staff member, had recently attended a training seminar at the National Hurricane Center in Miami. Part of the training was a simulation using data from the Hurricane of 1938 that caused major losses on Long Island and in Westchester. The texts of the simulated bulletins, forecasts, discussions and strike probabilities along with the hurricane’s track were sent home with the seminar attendees. We named the simulated hurricane after Sandy, who incidentally was nine years old during the real Hurricane of 1938.
These texts were used as the drill stimulus. They were time-shifted to simulate land-fall around 6pm on Saturday, October 4th. Working backward from this time, we used these texts to generate and automatically update a World Wide Web status page (http://www.weca.org/SET) and send email to the Westchester ARES/RACES email reflector and fax to the County Emergency Operations center at the times that the National Weather Service would normally have sent them.
Figure 4:Web Page at 5 a.m. October 3, 1997
Figure 5:Simulated Hurricane Sandy Track at 2 p.m. October 4, 1997
Figure 6: Simulated Hurricane Sandy Bulletin at 5 a.m. October 4, 1997
RE
Wipeout!
Frankenstorm SNor’Eastercane Sandy: WIPEOUT!
The latest animation from NHC of the satellite imagery shows that Sandy is getting better organized and has developed a well defined eyewall now.
The NYSE now will NOT open up after all, as the Illuminati who make these decisions now think it will be too difficult to run the show from remote locations. Closed through Tuesday at least.
The biggest aspect of this Frankenstorm hasn’t even really begun here yet, it’s the merger with the 2 other Winter Storms coming in from the North and West that make this scenario much different than the “typical” Northeast Hurricane track.
Normally shortly after making landfall the Hurricane would lose most of its wind speeds, then the remenants of the storm would sweep up and out over new England to the Atlantic again. Not so with Sandy.
Because of the merger with the other systems, Sandy is expected to undergo “Baroclinic Enhancement” and the powerful winds will persist well inland and for several days. In fact they are prediciting 26′ waves around CHICAGO off Lake Michigan. That is Waiamea Bay surfing on a LAKE. New Nature indeed, eh?
The “good newz” here is that the ground is not as saturated as it was when Irene hit, so they currently don’t expect as much inland flooding. However, I think this really depends on just how many days of torrential rains they actually get and how it all actually collects up in the watershed.
Besides rain also in this situation is the fact it is going to come down as snow in the higher altitudes and inland north. Estimates are they might get 3 FEET of snow in the Smokies and Blue Ridge Mountains. With lots of trees still in Leaf, this means a lot more power lines down, and also harder to get the Cherry Picker trucks moving around.
The main question in my mind is whether the power outtages will all be local or whether the whole grid will get compromised with loss of the big transformers in Upstate NY. That could bring on an India style Blackout of 100M people taking out the whole Eastern Seaboard.
All in all, Frankestorm Sandy is shaping up to be the Storm of the Century.
RE
Tall Tales of Paul Bunyan
Off the keyboard of RE
Discuss this article at the Geopolitics Table inside the Diner
Living inside the FSofA, or in fact inside any of the other major Industrialized Nations, you get a really skewed view of the World as it is, and what might be possible moving forward into the Future. In my last Feature article Doomer Science Fiction Late Night Double Feature Picture Show, I discussed a few of the common Futurist categories you run into as you surf around the Doom-o-Sphere.
Although Pundits with more Doomy Outlooks are becoming ever more common all the time, in general MOST people who don’t follow the progress of Industrial Civilization Collapse don’t know it is collapsing at all. Most people who live in 1st World countries fully expect Industrialized lifestyles to continue onward, and all we really are suffering through here is an Economic Glitch which could be resolved with Better Politicians and Better Economic Policies. Different viewpoints exist on what those Better Politicians would do and which Economic Policies are actually BETTER, but few people who do not follow the Doom-o-Sphere consider the problems we have to be systemic and insoluble.
Similarly and perhaps to an even greater extent, 3rd Worlders don’t grasp yet that the life of Happy Motoring that existed for the 1st Worlders is not going to come to their locale anymore, and they still aspire to and covet the “Progress” achieved in the Industrialized nations.
This cognitive dissonance really hit home to me reading an article on India Newzhound Joe posted up on Joe’s Newz Channel inside the Diner. As most of you are aware I think, India recently had the largest Mass Blackouts of an Electrical Grid anywhere on the Planet since Industrialization began, with well over 300M people affected by the Blackouts. The Indian Grid is slip shod to begin with here, and even what they currently have is none too reliable, but still it is coveted out in the hinterlands as something people NEED to improve their lives and have better Opportunities in the world.
Fact is, at least 1/3rd of all Indian households still have ZERO electricity, and another 1/3rd that have some probably get it “illegally” by Pirating it off feeder power lines in varous Slums and Shanty towns surrounding the Big Shities of India. If you walk on foot just a few miles outside of Dharmsala up into the Mountains, you leave the Tarmac and the Power Grid behind, and “travel back in time” to the Pre-Industrial world where many Indians still live:
Early last summer I went trekking in the Himalayas high above Dharamsala. I had just finished a book and wanted to get away from the heat of the plains and clear my head in the clean air and crystal silence of the mountains.
Within a day, I had walked beyond the last metalled road. Along with the tarmac, I left both the telephones and the electricity grid far behind me. Soon I was heading into an apparently premodern world: up in the hill villages, the harvest was being cut by hand with sickles and bound in sheaves, stacked one by one into stooks. Oxen ploughed the narrow terraces with wooden ploughs. In the villages, stone houses with wooden fretwork balconies like those in Mughal miniatures tumbled down steep mountainsides, slate roofs alternating with roof terraces where the women were drying apricots and stacking kindling for the winter. You could almost taste the woody resin-scent of the deodars and the warm peach-brandy aroma of the drying fruit. One of the goatherds who wandered past our camp the second evening said he was on his way to consult the local oracle, a shaman who channelled a Pahari deity and was celebrated for the accuracy of his prophecies. It was trekking as time travel: I seemed to have walked up into a Jack-and-the-Beanstalk world about as far as I could imagine from the noise and pollution of New Delhi.It was therefore something of a surprise the following morning to be woken by the sound of passing schoolchildren. Looking out of the tent, I saw a party of 20 immaculately dressed children with beautifully laundered uniforms – white trousers and white shirts for the boys and white salvars for the girls – heading down the hill on their way to the new private school that had, they said, just opened up in the valley below. Not one of their parents had had any education and the older generation in the village was entirely illiterate, but this school would teach them until fifth grade. After their 13th birthdays, they said, they hoped to continue their schooling up to the age of 18 in the senior schools of Dharamsala.
Here these people are, living a pre-Industrial lifestyle many Doomers would consider Idyllic with Local Food Production, Oxen ploughs farming the land and all, but these people who live that way now ASPIRE to the “better life” for their children and dress them up in well Laundered School Uniforms to get the Education they never got so they can, in theory of course, become a Succesful Participant in the Industrial Paradigm as an Engineer or Scientist, whatever.
These people are likely COMPLETELY unaware that most well educated Indian Doctors seek to GTFO of India where they make about what a Mickey D’s Burger Flipper makes in the Land of Good & Plenty here, many Ph.D. scientists have LESS chance of getting a Job in their field of expertiese as Ruskie Ph.D.s do, which is lower still than Chinees Ph.D.s and lower still than FSofA Ph.D.s.
The really sad thing about this article though is that the Writer, Wiliam Dalrymple does not grasp the problem either. From his POV, the Indian State has Failed to Provide the BASIC SERVICES these poor folks NEED .
None of the basic services that the villagers needed – roads, sanitation, education, health, electricity or telephones – had been provided by the state, yet the villagers had found a way around most of their problems. Despite the government inaction, they were determined to educate their kids and inch forward. They were not going to allow themselves to be left behind.
Note all the assumptions made in this paragraph. First that these Villagers NEED these Basic Services, and beyond that they are even “Basic” at all! Paved Roads are “Basic”? Only Carz need Paved Roads, and these folks can’t afford Carz anyhow. Even more pathetic though is the idea that getting any of this allows them to “Inch Forward”. The only way they Inch forward into this is by taking on DEBT, and eventually they would find themselves in exactly the same place the Greeks are in right now, unable to pay the debt with a lot of Industrial Infrastructure they can no longer support. Once the Ubermeisters cut off your access to Debt Money to keep on building out the system, it collapses on itself. They only issue the debt for so long as they can use it to suck you dry of everything you actually DO own, the resources of your particular patch of land. Once you hand over the Deed to the Property to them, you perpetually pay Rent to live on your OWN land!
Like just about everyone, your typical pre-Industrial agrarian pushing a plow or wading through Rice Paddies aspires to a “better” life than that. If you haven’t been immersed inside the corrupt and nasty world Industrialization has created, from the OUTSIDE LOOKING IN, it seems just GREAT!
Russell 1913 Tractor
Picture yourself a dirt poor farmer out there on the Great Plains in say 1913 or so when the Federal Reserve Bank Act was pushed through CONgress on Christmas Eve, yourself pushing a plow behind your Oxen when the first Russell Tractor shows up on display in town. To be followed directly thereafter by a Demonstration of its abilities by the Russell Salesman. He Challenges you to a Plowing Race on your fields, and CRUSHES your best team of Oxen in no time. Or picture yourself a Lumberjack with an Axe and a Big Blue Ox named Babe, up against the Chainsaw of Black & Decker or WTF was making them back in Paul Bunyan’s time. Big and strong as Paul was, big as his Blue Ox Babe was, they just could not COMPETE with the scrawny Bankster with the CHAINSAW and the RAILROAD. You GOTTA HAVE that equipment! You will be LEFT BEHIND if you don’t get it! SIGN OFF your Farm as Collateral on the Dotted Line now for your LOAN to buy this marvelous technology!
This fact of life as Industrialization revved itself up into High Gear in the early 20th Century is the main reason I have argued so vehemently against Steve from Virginia of Economic Undertow’s “Fashion” hypothesis for why the culture and civilization went down the Industrialization Highway. These weren’t Fashion Choices being made, they were competitive survival choices which became necessary to continue operating successfully as a Farmer or Lumberack or Textile maker or anything else that was mechanized and powered by the thermodynamic energy of fossil fuels.
The Tall Tale of Paul Bunyan and his Blue Ox Babe clearly was written as a parable to SELL the Industrial Paradigm to the youngest minds in this Disney Animation of the story, and even though all the Lumberjacks are out there Rooting for Paul to Win the Contest with the Chainsaw and Railroad, in the end Paul & Babe go the way of the Dinosaur and head up to the Last Great Frontier of Alaska. In the end also, the Railroad and the Chainsaw came to Alaska too. I know this to be true, since I LIVE in Alaska.
On the Great Plains of the Midwest as WWI came to a close, all those Factories built to construct the first Tanks and Armored Vehicles were turned to building Tractors, and the Credit flowed out fast and furious to Farmers to buy these magnificent machines. If you didn’t buy one, you couldn’t compete with all the food produced by your neighbor, and as prices dropped on the food being produced you no longer could make a living without one. So you signed the Note with the Bankster selling the Tractor putting your Farm up as Collateral.
Sadly of course, as time went by through the Roaring Twenties and every Farmer got a Tractor, the price you could get for your produce continued to drop, until you no longer could afford to pay the loan on your Tractor. In comes the Repo Man from the Bank to Foreclose on your Farm, and now you are a dispossessed Okie on the road to to the Grapes of Wrath in California.
The folks who loaned you the money to buy the Tractor never had the money at all, it was conjured into existence the minute you signed for the loan. As a poor Okie with just your Farm as collateral, you could not get endless loans to rollover your debt, but the Banksters could and so they consolidated all these Farms into the the large scale Industrial Farms we have today, complete with Goobermint Subsidies to run them and push everyone else outta biz.
This scenario repeated itself over and over again in every Industry known to man, beginning first with the Mining industry itself which quickly turned Mining into one of the worst and lowest paid jobs a person could do; then to Weaving and Clothing manufacture which the Luddites tried to fight; then to Farming and so forth and so on down the line.
As long as the Cheap Oil came a-bubblin out of the ground and the SAME people who controlled the creation of Credit/Money also “owned” or really STOLE the rights to this Oil, they were completely in control and in the Catbird Seat as far as choosing the Direction of the Civilization is concerned. Regardless of “Democracy”, J6P never had any choice in this, really no Candidate EVER from any party even the Communists for the most part came out AGAINST PROGRESS and AGAINST GROWTH, at least not here in the Land of 
Good & Plenty anyhow. Eventually you got your Mao’s and Pol Pot Ag Commie Anti-Industrialists over in Asia, but such a movement never gained any traction inside the FSofA. All groups such as the Amish and your Back to the Land Hippies of the Whole Earth Catalogue era were thoroughly marginalized here, and the stories you got also of Mass Genocide by people like Mao and Pol Pot served to reinforce the idea that moving against the tide of Industrialization was a BAD IDEA and would lead to the Death of Millions.
The historical narrative of Pol Pot as Genocidal Dictator Extraordinaire is a very powerful meme held here in the FSofA as Truth, but recently Israel Shamir revisted the Short “Reign of Terror” of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, and returned a quite different perspective on this period in Cambodia under his rule:
Now, in the monsoon season, Cambodia is verdant, cool and relaxed. The rice paddies on the low hill slopes are flooded, forests that hide old temples are almost impassable, rough seas deter swimmers. It’s a pleasant time to re-visit this modest country: Cambodia is not crowded, and Cambodians are not greedy, but rather peaceful and relaxed. They fish for shrimp, calamari and sea brim. They grow rice, unspoiled by herbicides, manually planted, cultivated and gathered. They produce enough for themselves and for export, too — definitely no paradise, but the country soldiers on.
Socialism is being dismantled fast: Chinese-owned factories keep churning tee-shirts for the European and American market employing tens of thousands of young Cambodian girls earning $80 per month. They are being sacked at the first sign of unionising. Nouveau-riches live in palaces; there are plenty of Lexus cars, and an occasional Rolls-Royce. Huge black and red, hard and precious tree trunks are constantly ferried to the harbour for timber export, destroying forests but enriching traders. There are many new French restaurateurs in the capital; NGO reps earn in one minute the equivalent of a worker’s monthly salary.
Not much remains from the turbulent period when the Cambodians tried to radically change the order of things in the course of their unique traditionalist conservative peasant revolution under communist banner. That was the glorious time of Jean Luc Godard and his La Chinoise, of the Cultural Revolution in China sending party bonzes for re-education to remote farms, of Khmer Rouge marching on the corrupt capital. Socialist movement reached a bifurcation point: whether to advance to more socialism Mao-style, or retreat to less socialism the Moscow way. The Khmer Rouge experiment lasted only three years, from 1975 to 1978.
Surprisingly, Cambodians have no bad memories of that period. This is quite an amazing discovery for an infrequent visitor. I did not come to reconstruct “the truth”, whatever it is, but rather to find out what is the collective memory of the Cambodians, how do they perceive the events of the late 20th century, what narrative has been filtered down by time gone by. The omnipotent narrative-making machinery of the West has embedded in our conscience the image of bloody Khmer Rouge commies cannibalising their own people over the Killing Fields and ruled over by a nightmarish Pol Pot, anybody’s notion of ruthless despot.
A much quoted American professor, RJ Rummel, wrote that “out of a 1970 population of probably near 7,100,000 …almost 3,300,000 men, women, and children were murdered …most of these… were murdered by the communist Khmer Rouge”. Every second person was killed, according to his estimate.
However, Cambodia’s population was not halved but more than doubled since 1970, despite alleged multiple genocides. Apparently, the genocidaires were inept, or their achievements have been greatly exaggerated.
The Pol Pot the Cambodians remember was not a tyrant, but a great patriot and nationalist, a lover of native culture and native way of life. He was brought up in royal palace circles; his aunt was a concubine of the previous king. He studied in Paris, but instead of making money and a career, he returned home, and spent a few years dwelling with forest tribes to learn from the peasants. He felt compassion for the ordinary village people who were ripped off on a daily basis by the city folk, the comprador parasites. He built an army to defend the countryside from these power-wielding robbers. Pol Pot, a monkish man of simple needs, did not seek wealth, fame or power for himself. He had one great ambition: to terminate the failing colonial capitalism in Cambodia, return to village tradition, and from there, to build a new country from scratch.
His vision was very different from the Soviet one. The Soviets built their industry by bleeding the peasantry; Pol Pot wanted to rebuild the village first, and only afterwards build industry to meet the villagers’ needs. He held city dwellers in contempt; they did nothing useful, in his view. Many of them were connected with loan sharks, a distinct feature of post-colonial Cambodia; others assisted the foreign companies in robbing people off their wealth. Being a strong nationalist, Pol Pot was suspicious of the Vietnamese and Chinese minorities. But what he hated most was acquisitiveness, greed, the desire to own things. St Francis and Leo Tolstoy would have understood him.
The Cambodians I spoke to pooh-poohed the dreadful stories of Communist Holocaust as a western invention. They reminded me of what went on: their brief history of troubles began in 1970, when the Americans chased away their legitimate ruler, Prince Sihanouk, and replaced him with their proxy military dictator Lon Nol. Lon Nol’s middle name was Corruption, and his followers stole everything they could, transferred their ill-gotten gains abroad then moved to the US. On top of this came US bombing raids. The peasants ran to the forest guerrillas of Khmer Rouge, which was led by a few Sorbonne graduates, and eventually succeeded in kicking out Lon Nol and his American supporters.
In 1975, Pol Pot took over the country, devastated by a US bombing campaign of Dresden ferocity, and saved it, they say. Indeed, the US planes (do you remember Ride of the Valkyries in the Apocalypse is Now?) dropped more bombs on this poor country than they had on the Nazi Germany, and spread their mines all over the rest of it. If the Cambodians are pressed to name their great destroyer (and they are not keen about burrowing back into the past), it is Professor Henry Kissinger they name, not Comrade Pol Pot.
Pol Pot and his friends inherited a devastated country. The villages had been depopulated; millions of refugees gathered in the capital to escape American bombs and American mines. Destitute and hungry, they had to be fed. But because of the bombing campaign, nobody planted rice in 1974. Pol Pot commanded everybody away from the city and to the rice paddies, to plant rice. This was a harsh, but a necessary step, and in a year Cambodia had plenty of rice, enough to feed all and even to sell some surplus to buy necessary commodities.
New Cambodia (or Kampuchea, as it was called) under Pol Pot and his comrades was a nightmare for the privileged, for the wealthy and for their retainers; but poor people had enough food and were taught to read and write. As for the mass killings, these are just horror stories, averred my Cambodian interlocutors. Surely the victorious peasants shot marauders and spies, but many more died of American-planted mines and during the subsequent Vietnamese takeover, they said.
In order to listen to the other side, I travelled to the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, the memorial where the alleged victims were killed and buried. This is a place some 30 km away from Phnom Penh, a neat green park with a small museum, much visited by tourists, the Cambodian Yad va-Shem. A plaque says that the Khmer Rouge guards would bring some 20 to thirty detainees twice or thrice a month, and kill many of them. For three years, it would amount less than two thousand dead, but another plaque said indeed that they dug up about eight thousand bodies. However, another plaque said there was over a million killed. Noam Chomsky assessed that the death toll in Cambodia may have been inflated “by a factor of a thousand.”
There are no photos of the killings; instead, the humble museum holds a couple of naïve paintings showing a big, strong man killing a small, weak one, in a rather traditional style. Other plaques read: “Here the murderous tools were kept, but nothing remains now” and similar inscriptions. To me, this recalled other CIA-sponsored stories of Red atrocities, be it Stalin’s Terror or the Ukrainian Holodomor. The people now in charge of the US, Europe and Russia want to present every alternative to their rule as inept or bloody or both. They especially hate incorruptible leaders, be it Robespierre or Lenin, Stalin or Mao – and Pol Pot. They prefer leaders keen on graft, and eventually install them. The Americans have an additional good reason: Pol Pot killings serve to hide their own atrocities, the millions of Indochinese they napalmed and strafed.
Cambodians do say that many more people were killed by the invading Vietnamese in 1978; while the Vietnamese prefer to shift the guilt to the Khmer Rouge. But the present government does not encourage this or any other digging into the past, and for good reason: practically all important officials above a certain age were members of the Khmer Rouge, and often leading members. Beside, almost all of them collaborated with the Vietnamese. The present PM, Hun Sen, was a Khmer Rouge commander, and later supported the Vietnamese occupation. When the Vietnamese went home, he remained in power.
Prince Sihanouk, who was exiled by the Americans, also supported the Khmer Rouge. He returned home to his neat royal palace and to its adjacent silver temple with Emerald Buddha after departure of the Vietnamese. Unbelievably, he is still alive, though he transferred the crown to his son, a monk who had to leave monastery and assume the throne. So the royal family is not keen on digging up the past, either. Nobody wants to discuss it openly; the official story of Khmer Rouge alleged atrocities is entrenched in Western conscience, though attempts to try the perpetrators bore scant results.
Looking back, it appears that the Khmer Rouge of Pol Pot failed in their foreign policy rather than in their internal one. It is fine that they canceled money, dynamited banks and sent bankers to plant rice. It is fine that they dried up the great blood-sucking leech, the big-city compradors and money-lenders. Their failure was that they did not calculate their position vis-à-vis Vietnam, and tried to push beyond their own weight. Vietnam was very powerful – it had just defeated the US – and would brook no nonsense from their junior brothers in Phnom Penh. The Vietnamese planned to create an Indochinese Federation including Laos and Cambodia under their own leadership. They invaded and overthrew the stubborn Khmer Rouge who were too keen on their independence. They also supported the black legend of genocide to justify their own bloody intervention.
We talk too much about evils committed under futurist regimes, and too little about the evils of the greedy rulers. It is not often we remember Bengal famine, Hiroshima holocaust, Vietnam tragedy, or even Sabra and Shatila. Introduction of capitalism in Russia killed more people than introduction of socialism, but who knows that?
Now we may cautiously reassess the brave attempts to reach for socialism in various countries. They were done under harsh, adverse conditions, under threat of intervention, facing hostile propaganda. But let us remember: if socialism failed, so did capitalism. If communism was accompanied by loss of life, so was and is capitalism. But with capitalism, we have no future worth living, while socialism still offers hope to us and our children.
It is at this point about impossible to separate the Truth from Fiction and Propaganda with respect to Mao and Pol Pot. No doubt many died under their Diktats, but how many it really was and exactly how all this death was meted out is pretty hard to determine now. You also of course get no real Numbers on exactly how many Deaths Industrialization has been responsible for either. However, when you look at what is going on in MENA right NOW, and make a few fairly secure projections about the future, you can be pretty sure that Industrialization is going to lead to the Deaths of ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more people than Mao and Pol Pot put together. I mean really, Fuk-U-Shima BY ITSELF is likely to kill more people than both of those guys, given its location right next to Tokyo. The responsible Genocidal Maniacs are nice Family Men Apparatchiks of the Industrial Corporate State, Faceless and Nameless Salarymen for the most part, but in their Greed and Stupidity they condemn more people to DEATH than Mao or Pol Pot ever did.
To return to where I began in this article with the pre-Industrial Indian peasants looking to “better” the lives of their children by sending them to schools and getting hold of Cell Phones since nobody is wiring them for land line phones in their Huts and Hovels, in one of the GREAT IRONIES of this Civilization Collapse you have this group of people running one way; while over here inside Industrialization Central you have a whole OTHER group of people running in precisely the REVERSE direction. Labelled in my Doomer Science Fiction article under the Amish Fusion Utopians and Transition Townies groups, these are Industrial Lifestyle people now seeking to emulate the kind of Lifestyle impoverished Indians in the Foothills of the Himalayas currently live, but seek to EXIT.
There is a certain tendency if you are aware of what is occurring here to want to run over to India and WAKE UP these farmers and tell them they don’t NEED electricity and Tractors to replace their Oxen, they should be glad they actually still HAVE the Oxen, which will continue to work just fine the next time the Grid collapses in India, which probably won’t be in the very far distant future. Sadly, you are even LESS likely to be able to convince them of this fact of life than you can convince MOST J6Ps here in the FSofA that Happy Motoring is going the way of the Dinosaur.
The end result of this insanity is neither group is going to be happy with the outcome of Civilization Collapse, and both groups are likely to be set against each other at various levels of Warfare, both Civil and International. What most folks who I label as Brave New Worlders don’t seem to grasp or just do not accept as valid is that once the per caita energy falls below Critical Mass and its organizing Monetary System collapses, the kind of One World Order Techno-Fascist State we have now also will collapse, making the Projected Future of Chip Implanted Techno Slaves a highly unlikely outcome overall. Inside the 1st World countries though UNTIL this collapse works its way past the Ringfencing, most certainly you will see ever more loss of Freedom and Gestapo Tactics undetaken to retain control. How long this period lasts is anybody’s guess, but it is hard for me to imagine it can last more than another 20 years or so based on the current depletion rates of high EROEI Oil, even assuming high levels of Demand Destruction. This also igonores the fairly substantial likelihood of full on Global Resource Wars, which may incorporate Thermonuclear Weapons.
Overall as I have projected in many posts and articles since I began Blogging the Collapse in 2007, in aggregate at about all Fractal Levels of our Civilization, what we are immersed in here is a One-to-the-Many breakup which inevitably will result in many smaller Political Units forming up, and how they form up and work to one extent or another is still very much an Open Question just about everywhere. You can be pretty certain SOME kind of structure will step in to replace failing Global Systems in your neighborhood, you just cannot be too sure what it will be or how well it will work. However, the very fact these Units will be smaller and more Local means that as an Individual within a Community, once this fracturing really gets Rolling in your neighborhood, you may have more ability to be an Agent for Change then you do now under the Global Oligarchy.
More likely than a descent into complete Mad Max in all places or Chip-Implanted Brave New World Techno-Slavery is fracturing into smaller Political Units run under varying forms of neo-Feudalism and Warlordism, along with some Tribal and Communal organizations. Rather than a single large scale Ruthless Dictator like an Uncle Joe Stalin or a Pol Pot are many smaller ones. Such personalities are selected for in such a time, because either Actively or Passively, many very difficult choices which end with many deaths end up having to be made. On the positive side though, because the political units are smaller there is a better chance that the Individual can have some effect first on who ends up promoted to such a position of Power, and second on how that Power might be wielded.
In this respect, it is important NOT to “Give Up“, and begin to make the Contacts and at least think about alternative Structures that you might play a significant part in creating inside your comunity. Diner Admin William Hunter Duncan provides a good EXAMPLE to others in his Off the Grid in Minneapolis Blog with the Gardens he grows food for himself. Rather than trying to HIDE that he is doing this to protect himself from Starving Zombies seeking food, he is Cutting the Path and Leading the Way f or others. Hopefully, MORE people will show up at WHDs door and ask him to TEACH them how to do what he does, rather than STEAL from him what he has. As the Chinese Proverb says:
Beyond the Food Production, developing Mutual Protection Schemes for your Community are important. Most people aren’t yet aware of the level of Full Doom we are heading into, but on the other hand I think most people DO know their local communities are becoming less “safe” all the time and require protection schemes the Local Gestapo are not providing, and in fact often working directly against. At this point I think it is becoming more likely you can bring together neighbors for Neighborhood Watch Groups to increase your security.
Finally, if you ARE aware of the level to which this spin down can go, it is still possible to prepare yourself for a Final Bugout. This may not up your survival chances by much or for a very long time, but again, who wants to be the FIRST to go here? If you Value Life, you hang on best as you can, long as you can. If you know what is coming down the pipe here, if you are physically and psychologically PREPARED, you have a far better chance of making it through the Zero Point than those who remain to this day quite CLUELESS about it.
For this reason, I maintain the Doomstead Diner Blog & Forum, and will continue to write on these issues until the Internet Goes Dark. Together, the Diners are stronger than they are Individually and although many of the ideas we discuss have been beaten to death on the 1st generation of Doom Blogs like Peak Oil and LATOC, the message still has not been delivered to many. You can’t Save Everybody, but you CAN…wait for it…
Save As Many As You Can
RE
Economics & Moral Philosophy
Off the keyboard of Brian Davey
Published on FEASTA on September 10,2012
Discuss this article at the Economics Table inside the Diner
Cafe Economique Talk
Presented in Nottingham, UK on 30th August 2012 The talk is presented below with its accompanying slides. Click on each slide to see a larger version. Please note that the notes that go with the power point were written up after the talk had been given and thus differ slightly from the audio version. The arguments in the written version are slightly more detailed and the written version includes references and sources whereas this is not fully the case in the audio presentation.
Audio file of talk (free registration required) Powerpoint slides
| In the late 1960s and early 1970s major university economics departments in the USA and major economics journals decided to take the history of economic thought out of the economic syllabus and stop accepting articles on the subject.Thus it is that many economists are pretty ignorant about the history of their own subject. They probably think that Adam Smith, in the 18th century, was the first economist. |  |
| In fact writing, thinking and study about economics goes back to the ancient Greeks. It was taught in universities in Europe from 1250. This early scholastic economic was a part of the moral philosophy. Its leading thinkers, St Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, drew upon the writings of Aristotle and sought to unify his ideas with that of Christian theology. |  |
| But why was it a part of moral philosophy? The answer is that economics was considered to be all about the use of means to attain ends. Nowadays economics is a topic that I would describe as studying the use of intermediate means to provide for intermediate ends. However, it typically neglects the integration of the economy in the physical and natural world on the one hand while at the same time ignoring the study of what structures and determines our intermediate ends , namely the study of our ultimate ends. What are these ultimate ends? |  |
To Aristotle you could not even consider this question without having a view of what is particular to human beings. For him the end of all human activity is sometimes translated as “happiness” but this can be misleading to a modern understanding of that word – because what Aristotle meant by happiness was a very specific idea of living a virtuous life in accordance with reason. The virtues included personal characteristics like integrity, honour, loyalty, courage and forthrightness. Ideally life meant developing oneself and flourished in and through ones dealings and particularly through participation in the community.
This did involve some need for provisions, and if fortune was on your side your women and your slaves could take of your needs in this respect, but Aristotle did not think that happiness involved accumulating lots of possessions.
To Aristotle the amount of property needed for a good life was limited. Taking this standpoint he saw there being two kinds of exchange and trade: exchange in order to satisfy a genuine need; and exchange in order to make money and accumulate possessions. The latter Aristotle thought of as unnatural, as he did usury, because it involved money growing without limits which violated the laws of nature – since everything in nature has limits.
Well, fast forward to Augustine and Aquinas. No doubt they too turned a blind eye to the power structures of the feudal society in which they lived but, as monks who had taken vows of poverty, they thought the reason for living was firstly, as it says in the Ten Commandments, to love God and also to love your neighbour. Life involved transcending yourself. Well, of course, this is very different from calculating your individual interest as assumed by modern economists. Instead it was assumed that you gave to and provided for the people that you loved and that you exchanged with strangers – in order, at the next stage, to have the things needed for the people that you love and for oneself.
To Augustine every person has a choice – to provide his or her goods for himself or to provide them for other people. This depends on the love people feel for themselves compared to the love they feel for other people. Thus distribution at the local and personal level, as economists describe it, involves a moral choice. With Aristotle there was also an idea that you shared wealth with a wider community, which in his case was the polis, the political community (of men and non-slaves).
Even when we exchange with people we do not love we had ethical obligations. For Aquinas exchange involved a just price – the price that emerged through haggling that cleared the market – but, and this is crucial, a just price is not imposed or experienced by some parties under conditions of duress. To charge someone high prices because there was a famine was most definitely not charging the just price.
So the context prevailing in the market is an issue too – indeed we can extend this idea to include monopoly control of the market and other conditions. Later in this talk I’ll argue that if you take away from people their means of support, like access to the commons, this is also putting them under duress.
The early medieval period was characterised by power structures somewhat akin to protection rackets where militarised hierarchical gangs effectively imposed themselves on the people and extracted labour and products, claiming that they had their authority and rights from God, but in effect having their power from their ability and preparedness to act as ruthless gangsters operating out of heavily fortified castles.
The church was no doubt complicit in all of this but it also acted as a form of social welfare agency in difficult times when the aged, sick and poor could turn to the monasteries. In addition, in England, the ordinary people had certain rights to use the forests, the wastes and commons lands for their own maintenance that were protected in the Charter of the Forests (the companion statement of rights adopted at the same time as the Magna Charter).
The rise of the merchant class and of commercial society in towns, and along trade routes outside the power of the military elite, changed all of this over a number of centuries. With the Reformation in England Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and sold them to his courtiers dismantling welfare provision for ordinary people.
Economic theory changed with the times. According to Aquinas merchants did fulfil a useful function of bringing goods from where they were abundant to where they were scarce. However, that’s not all that they did. For example they helped create economic conditions where it paid the elite to take the commons land from the commoners to enrich themselves (with sheep for the wool trade). And trade could be in slaves or the goods from slave plantations – or from products extracted by taxes in colonies. In other words under conditions of duress.
Increasingly economics reflected the technical issues of the time, rather than being a theorisation of the morality of the market.
| Over several centuries the commons land was enclosed and the people using it lost their rights to sustenance. These processes meant they had to work for the emerging capitalist class as wage labourers or pay rent to the landowners on onerous terms. The price of labour and the price of land was the result of an institutionalised form of duress in that the ordinary people had no other options but to work on terms set by employers and landowners. |  |
Elite theorisation of economics turned a blind eye to these processes, including in the ideas of Adam Smith in the 18the century. Smith was a professor of moral philosophy and was no doubt aware of scholastic economics. However for several centuries economic thinking had been changing from the ethical reflections of monks into more hard bitten ideas about how merchants and the aristocracy made money and accumulated wealth.
Thus Smith did not mention the Atlantic slave trade and plantations which created the wealth that flowed into places like Glasgow. Nor did he consider pillaging of India by the East India company. This international trade involved economic arrangements nothing like his cosy picture which he wrote about, although he must have been aware of it as the source of the riches of people in his own world.
Smith’s inquiry into the Wealth of Nations was not concerned with ethical issues about distribution and looking after the poor. He regarded himself as living in a different kind of age, an age of improvement – the commercial society had changed the game as far as economics was concerned. So Smith wrote about how more primitive societies might be more equalitarian – but, in his own society the labouring classes had their needs met and the more important thing was that the division of labour, specialisation, was making possible a continuous improvement in production . Thus everyone was much better off, even if unequally so.
Not for the first time or the last Smith was another economist who ignored less uplifting aspects of reality and chose to describe the further development of specialisation and of the market as the future for commercial society.
| Note that in this respect the monkish idea of progress as moral progress had slipped into an idea of improvement as technical progress which produced more wealth. Scarcity was the chief problem facing humanity and overcoming scarcity was the chief task. This meant resources were to be used as efficiently as possible and technological progress would allow for more to be produced. |  |
| If you like scarcity became the original sin of the new economic religion and efficiency and technological progress became the new means of salvation – with economists functioning rather like a new priesthood, a role that they still enjoy. Indeed, for the contemporaries of Smith in this period the production and use of this greater wealth, would bring about better people directly and indirectly – because the commercial society had its own virtues and rewarded hard work, discipline, thrift, delayed gratification etc. |  |
Of course, people still realised that human and social relationships were not always just, and that the ends that people pursued were less than perfect. However, it was increasingly assumed that these problems too required economic and technological progress. It would be when people were all much better off that they would be able to get to grips with these problems.
The slide on the right quotes philosopher David Hume, a contemporary of Smith. This idea is still with us today and has been shared by many subsequent thinkers. Karl Marx thought that the highest phases of communism would be prepared by the ability of capitalism to create an economy of abundance. In this context all sorts of problems between people would “wither away”. Without believing in the need for revolution Keynes also believed that in the distant future humanity would overcome its scarcity problem and thus its psychology of self interestedness. (See his essay, “The Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” published in Essays in Persuasion). The problems for humanity were no longer problems between people and God (or between people and Nature) nor between people – they were problems of inadequately developed technology.
Even more important was Smith’s abandonment of the ideas of Augustine and Aquinas, about an obligation in economic activity, towards loving your neighbour. For him a properly working market delivered socially beneficial results even though people were pursuing their self interests – or perhaps I should say, because people were pursuing their own self interests.
The famous quote from Adam Smith on the slide illustrates this idea.
Having abandoned considerations of distribution which were rooted in ethical considerations of love for one’s neighbour and ones obligations to a wider community, the new economics asserted that by pursuing one’s private advantages – and self love – the market would in any case organise a social outcome in the interests of everyone.
In this theory people got what they wanted through the “invisible hand” of the market because if they decided they wanted more beer and less bread they would seek to buy more beer and less bread, the price of bread would fall and that of beer would rise. Some bakers would switch to brewing and some farmers would switch from wheat for flour to hops and barley for brewing…Prices would act as signals that resources needed to be re-directed. As long as there were no restraints to resources flowing from one use to another there was no need for the state to intervene.
This was not a revolutionary new idea in his day – these kind of ideas that the market activities motivated by self interest, delivered what people wanted, can be found over a hundred years before Adam Smith. Moreover we should try to understand it as contemporaries would have understood it. Humanity had fallen – we’re sinners. And yet God had a providential plan for the world and he realised his plan through the self love of people operating through the “laws of the market”, that Smith described. At the time of Smith it was big thing that Newton had showed that things did not happen because of continual interventions by God. So instead people now thought that God set up the basic design of the universe and then it ran itself. In a similar way, the market and the “social physics” of economics worked through the predictable self interested behaviour of people giving rise to economic laws. As the poet Pope put it: “Thus God and Nature formed the general frame, And bad self-love and social be the same”.
| Later economists assumed that the famous invisible hand of the market meant the operation of the price system and competition so that, without any central plan, the market self-organised the allocation of resources. If there were too much bread and not enough beer the bread would remain unsold and its price would fall whereas the price of beer would be bid up. So then resources would switch from bread production to beer production quite spontaneously, as long as markets were competitive and the beer producers could not prevent others from brewing to keep beer prices up. |  |
It’s a nice parable but what economists are well aware of is that prices and the allocation of resources depends on the prior allocation of rights to the different factors of production. What was being ignored and relegated to the small print was what Aquinas had been aware of – the issue of duress. Smith was an apostle of the market and commercial society at a time when labour and land were being forced into becoming market commodities by land enclosure and when the state, by attacking the poor law for the support of destitute people, was ensuring that the poor worked on terms that can be dictated by their employers.
Neither land nor labour are originally “produced” with the explicit purpose of becoming commodities. Land is part of the living natural system and labour is people who have been forced to work on terms dictated by the owners of the means of production.
In this context the market does indeed produce according to the wishes of those with purchasing power – but how purchasing power is distributed, reflecting the economic and property system, was the deeper question.
| As is usual the new economic priesthood avoided these questions and, as the 19th century progressed, devoted themselves instead to a deeper study of how people, motivated by self love and self interest, behaved. What determined their choices? This they did by using another framework from philosophical ethics, namely the utilitarian philosophy developed by Jeremy Bentham and then by John Stuart Mill. (The picture is of the corpse of Jeremy Bentham, with his head at his feet in a glass box at the London School of Economics). |  |
| Let me briefly compare Bentham and Mill’s moral philosophy to other schools of moral philosophy. Whereas Aristotle had an ethics based on developing ones virtues as a person, and the church an ethics based on explicit and written codes and principles and duties, the utilitarians had an ethics based on consequences. This consequentialist view was grounded in the idea that what mattered was whether actions gave rise to subjective states of pleasure or pain (utility or disutility). |  |
| The idea of utility was to be found in scholastic and early economics but to this school the utility of an object meant its fitness for its intended purpose. Now utility was given a different meaning – it was the ability of an object or service to give rise to a sense of subjective happiness, satisfaction or dissatisfaction. The criteria for an optimal decision then became the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. But how did you measure this subjective state? |  |
Economists came up with a solution – there were no absolute measures of utility but this did not matter because in choosing between options people demonstrated in practice what their comparative utilities were between different goods. They demonstrate their relative preferences by what they are prepared to pay as they allocate their limited purchasing power between different purchasing options for goods and services. What people are prepared to pay is a proxy measure of their utility for the last unit of a good that they purchase.
This idea of willingness to pay (or willingness to accept in payment) is then used by economists as a proxy measure for how much people value things that do not normally appear on markets. It is thought to be a convenient idea too because the same situation can involve losers as well as winners, and here is an idea here that this can be solved by cash compensation payments. If an action involves increased welfare for one person and decreased welfare for someone else then it still might involve a greater happiness overall and one can tell that is so if the gainer can compensate the loser and still be better off. (This is the so called Kaldor Hicks principle. Note that winner does not actually have to compensate the loser, they merely have to be able to in theory).
What people are prepared to pay thus measures how much things matter to them – their ethical values were reflected in their monetary values. Economists are enthused with this idea as it appears to them to give a common measuring rod that can be used for all sorts of situations, including policy decisions about issues that do not normally appear in an ordinary market at all – for example, environmental decision making.
Thus the importance of protecting a species threatened with extinction is measured by what people are prepared to pay to protect it – or prepared to accept in compensation if it goes extinct.
This is actually nonsense because it assumes informed preferences and most people do not have preferences about such natural things as they live separated from the species anyway. What’s more it leads to a beauty contest where pandas and popular animals would score highly but the creepy crawlies or snakes that are crucial parts of eco-systems get no offers to pay at all. If people are then informed about the species and the ecological issues the obvious point to make is that value is created by being informed about the things, highlighting a need for education, not by spontaneous preferences.
| So this point of view is highly challengeable and it has been claimed that economists are involved in corruption – see right. |  |
This leads me on to what it is economists actually do – and why these things matter. And the answer is that economists are actually there as advocates for a particular kind of value system. They are not unlike priests whose job it is to argue for their belief system.
This is a quote from economist Robert Nelson who describes what it was like to work as an economist in the US Department of the Interior which was and is responsible for the upkeep of national parks and landscapes in the USA:
“If economists had any influence—which they sometimes did, if rarely decisive—it was seldom as literal ‘problem solvers.’ Rather, the greatest influence of economists came through their defence of a set of values. Much of my own and other efforts of Interior (Ministry) economists were really to persuade others in the department to act in accordance with the economic value system, as compared with other competing priorities and sets of values also represented within the ranks of the department.” Robert Nelson Economics as Religion Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001 p xiv
| So how do economists actually do this?In fact economists mostly create models from assumptions that are assumed to be self evidently true…or claimed to be true enough for practical purposes.. and then analyse the logical consequences with mathematic symbols and diagrams. With enough simplified assumptions it then seems possible to show that competitive markets deliver efficient outcomes defined in the way economists want. |  |
| Of course, if you assume away the real world in your models then, surprise surprise, these models deliver ideal allocation outcomes – or they do on the blackboard and in the lecture theatre in the groves of academe, if not in real life. But what has happened is that conclusions are manufactured based on premises initially assumed. This may happen in very sophisticated mathematics so that mere muggles don’t understand it but that’s what the wizards are doing. (Today’s leading economic textbook writer, Greg Mankiw, has described non-economists as ‘muggles’, the ordinary people without magical powers, described in the Harry Potter novels. His implication is that economists are like wizards.) |  |
| As I have said the key to all of this is based on an idea of what people are like. There is an implicit modelling of human beings here. Certain types of behaviour (the type that allows economists to model people and markets predictably) is called “rational”. |  |
You may think that this description of how people are and how they behave is meant by economists to be applicable only to economic and market activities. But if people are calculating their individual self interest in their economic dealings why should one assume that they do not do the same thing in their political, their social and their interpersonal dealings? Should we not also assume that government officials are calculating their interests too? At the very least, why should contact between business and government not lead to a cosy relationship, particularly if people can leave government posts and get lucrative jobs with industry? What about bribes and kick-backs from business for special favours?
When I studied economics at the end of the 1960s the textbooks, for example by Paul A Samuelson, pictured a world where the state was essentially benevolent and independent from business. A democratic process determined the policies the state would adopt and economists were just technical advisers about the options. They could regulate markets without being contaminated by the self interest motivations of markets. The idea that the state could be captured by business interests and the majority of the people were effectively excluded from real influence was not there.
This began to be replaced by another view of the relationship between business and the state spearheaded by the Chicago School.
| The idea that the state could be captured by interest groups led to a kind of market fundamentalism by the Chicago school. The ideal was to go all the way and for the state to be driven out of market activity altogether if at all possible.To the Chicago economists the rational calculating individual was a description that could be applied to the understanding of all human behaviour, not just that in the market place. |  |
| So, what framework do you use to explain racial discrimination? To Gary Becker at Chicago, racism is a preference choice of who you want to live near and employ. Note, he does not endorse or condemn Becker merely sees himself explaining and drawing out the consequences. |  |
| The model of rational economic behaviour is then used by Becker and another theorist, Richard Posner, to explain “love” , marriage and prostitution in a utilitarian framework. Marriage is a relationship involving reciprocal service provision which saves on transaction costs like pricing each service that a couple provide for each other, or keeping accounts for these services. In this framework prostitution is a “spot” sexual transaction where it is “more efficient” to pay for the service in money. |   |
| It is used to explain crime too. Most people don’t steal because it would not be profitable but in the life circumstances of criminals the rational maximisation of costs and benefits of crime does make it pay according to Becker. This is another form of the redistribution of income in the same broad category as government welfare programmes. |  |
The trouble with this view is that it is at best tautologically true in a sense that is banal – people do things because they want and thus they must get satisfaction or utility from doing and deciding what they do. However this banality makes little sense of the many actions and people who do things where they are conflicted – where they act in ways that involve self sacrifice for moral reasons, where there is genuine anguish about their difficult decisions, where they do things because they think they ought to, not because it gives them any satisfaction at all.
At the same time this way of analysing things has important aspects of being a toxic self fulfilling prophecy and contributes to the ethical degradation of society.
In fact psychologists have looked at what motivates people all around the world in different cultures and have come up with a picture of the varieties of motivations. This picture includes the ideas of the economists in values in the bottom left hand quadrant but makes no sense of the many other motivations that people have demonstrated in this diagram by Common Cause. http://valuesandframes.org/handbook/
Many of these are not simply different self interested “preferences” in a utilitarian sense. For example many of the spiritual and community and environmental motivations involve serving a higher purpose which involves transcending or going beyond the self. These are intrinsic motivations which can involve a different “life game” in the sense meant by the critic of psychiatry, Thomas Tzsas; purposes to give meaning and direction in life. http://www.bgmi.us/web/bdavey/Life.htm
If the assumptions of what “rational economic man” are like do not accurately describe many people, they probably do accurate describe many economists and those trained by them. There is a saying in the Talmud, “We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are” and this probably does describe how many economists actually think and decide.
There are important respects in which the economic viewpoint functions as a belief system which is now shaping how things are in the form of a self reinforcing or self fulfilling prophecy. The point is that the economist’s view of the world actually serves to create the very mindset that it describes.
For example, a study of economic and non economics students in 1993 by Frank, Gilovich and Regan found that most people learn to be more co-operative as they get older – but that learning economics slows this process of social maturity. While students in other disciplines learn to be cooperative over college years, students majoring in economics learn the same fact much more slowly.” It seems that micro-economics teaching over as little as 4 months can have a noticeable effect:
“They picked three classes at Cornell University. Two of these were introduction to microeconomics. The third was introduction to astronomy. In the first microeconomics class (class A), the professor was a game theorist with interests in mainstream economics, and he focused on prisoner’s dilemma and how cooperation might hinder survival. In the second microeconomics class (class B), the professor’s interests were in development economics and he was a specialist in Maoist China.
To the students in all these introductory classes, the authors posed simple ethical dilemmas, including questions such as “If you found an envelope with $100 with the owner’s address written on it, would you return it?” The questions were asked twice, first in September, in the beginning of the fall semester and once again during the final week of classes in December, not even a full four months apart.
Comparing results against the astronomy control group, students in economics class A became much more cynical and gave less ethical responses at the end of the semester. Students in class B grew to be more unethical, yet not by so much compared to students in class A. The results clearly show that no matter what their initial ethical tendencies were, students who were exposed to a mere four-months of “rational” reasoning became less cooperative.” http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-decision-lab/201104/why-does-studying-economics-hurt-ethical-inclinations
In important respects there is evidence that departments of economics have become departments for the promotion of anti-social behaviour.
An early Chicago economist called Frank Knight made the observation that one requirement for markets to work efficiently is that people are honest. If they are not honest then things get more complicated – the transaction costs start to rise. You need to spend time checking out your suppliers or customers, you need to work longer on creating water tight contracts. You need to take court action more often with huge costs involved. In the small town world of Adam Smith if the butcher, the baker and the brewer ripped each other off the dishonesty would soon get noticed and eventually they would be likely to lose out from their dishonesty. Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan and the de-regulators of the 1990s and the early 21st century clearly did not see the world they lived in like that.
Yes, Adam Smith’s market self organised the supply of the goods that people want. But markets can self organise criminal activity and anti social behaviour too.
| And this can be on a massive scale. When the American banks created financial instruments out of loans to people with no income and no assets, got them judged to be AAA quality they then sold these toxic fraudulent instruments victims all over the world. The financial victims that purchased them had no easy way of checking if they were safe investments and assumed that if rating agencies said that they were AAA then they were. All told there were probably up to a half a million criminal felonies that took place in this period. |  |
| So economics has come a long way. The ideas of the scholastics were compatible with what could be found in the Bible in the First Epistle to Timothy in the New Testament, that “The love of money is the root of all evil”. In the 17th and 18th century the idea was that God worked through individual self interest to create a society delivering in the interests of everyone. This has now morphed into economics becoming a virtual religion in its own right with theology for rich people who love money. |  |
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222
Off the keyboard of William Hunter Duncan
Published on Off the Grid in Minneapolis on October 24, 2012
Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasbord inside the Diner
This is my 222nd post. Adding the numbers of my name numerologically, they add up to 222.
What to say?
First, I guess I needed a month off. Shortly after the jubilation of my last post, there was a personnel shift at big bank, and I was moved to the coldest, draftiest, most awkward corner in the building. I had been surrounded by seven women; I now have grey cubical walls within arms reach on three sides. A reminder, I guess, not to stand out too much, not to enjoy myself while I work, maybe. That, and all the romantic ideas I sort-of hinted at in my last post, have collapsed in the reality of the generally weird idiosyncratic chaos of my life, including that furnace friend couldn’t fix the furnace, so I’m heading into my third winter in a cold house. (Who do you ask on a date anyway, when you don’t own a vehicle?) It’s also harvest time, and there are many projects in the garden. The garden is very beautiful still, so I’m outside as much as I can be. There was also a stairs I built for a maiden, mother and crone. Anyway, I’m back.
What was going on a month ago? I suppose that was about the time of the first VICE-prez debate. How about this election! What’s weirder than half of American voters, about to elect a vulture capitalist President? That about half of that half two years from now are going to be poorer for it? Though based on Ro-Money they might be angling for jobs driving Latinos out of the country. Or maybe working at a Walmart distribution center, living in tents and half-way houses and on the street. Though what do I know, I may have to work at big bank Monday, Christmas Eve Day, and the Friday after Thanksgiving, foreclosing on people’s houses.
Weirder I think is Ro-Money’s China talk, as if America is not afloat because China is buying Treasury bonds by the trillion, so we Americans can buy mountains of consumer crap we throw into the nearest designated incinerator or hole in the ground – so 28 members of Walton ilk are worth a billion, five or so worth $25bl+. Or maybe it’s that my radical Fundamentalist Constitutionalist Sovereign Christian mother LOVES Wal-Mart? If I do make it home for the holidays, the food will consist mostly of Wal-Mart food product, even veges grown in China.*
But then, ladies, don’t you know, if you get preggers by force, that’s the will of OMOG. Something like my work at big bank is the work of God.
Or maybe it’s that O doesn’t really want the job? If he loses, it won’t just be because America is about done with him. There have been moments in every debate, when I thought he wasn’t sure. What about you? Would you want the job? Oh great, he can continue another four years killing people every week with drone strikes, presiding over the growing domestic security State, the collapse of global financial markets, food shortages famine and die-off(?), global biological eco-illogical destruction in the name of commerce, war in Iran (apparently). Alas, he chose to fulfil a fate, though he might have given it up chosen his own and told America the truth. Existing in such a wicked web of lies and agendas and confabulation, it is impossible to imagine any truth coming out of him, that isn’t about treating Americans as if they are stupid children.
Wait a minute. The weirdest thing was hearing Ro-Money, paraphrased, “you didn’t say that? You didn’t?! You didn’t?! What did you say then!” talking as a child, as to a child, to the President of the United States of America. Or maybe it was both, their inarticulate, fumbling, empty, inauthentic language. Or maybe the media reinforcement of the stupid message.
MY work at big bank is rote enough, and I am good enough at it, that I’ve spent the past week listening to youtube streams of Terence Mckenna. That has been a blessing. Terence talked a lot about the world being made of language. The world as we know it certainly is, the debates being a pre-eminent example. To the degree that most people talk about the world they inhabit, they recite what they hear in the media. The message of the media and the candidates for Prez being tight, no ideological wiggle room there at all, really. You won’t get anything like the truth there, only the Truth as it is prescribed for you, stupid Americans.
ANyWay, here’s some truth from me,
Storable Edibles. Contrary to zombie propaganda, I’m making sure everyone knows I’m growing food.
Another place for a hoop house experimental.
Pics
A stairs for a maiden, mother and crone (crone not present on delivery) living in a condominium. The mother of whom gave me this first generational digital camera.
As if by magic, a delivery, future valkyrie or norn, or the like, I hope.
Asters, on my woodland city walk
Got rid of my cell phone yesterday. I’ll have a house phone and better internet, for $50 less a month than I’ve been paying for cell and city wireless. The Vee ry ZON people called it an upgrade.
*Both links in this piece came courtesy of JoeP.
The Golden Blind Spot
Off the keyboard of Monsta666
Discuss this article at the Economics Table inside the Diner
It is often said by people who support gold backed currencies that the chief weakness of fiat currencies is it encourages governments and central banks to issue excess amounts of money/credit. While this fact is true it would be a mistake to think this is the main reason why currency devaluation occurs. This is because the issues of overleveraging are primarily problems that stem from the private sector as most money generated in the economy comes from COMMERICAL banking and NOT central banking. In fact depending on sources or the countries in question the amount of money/loans generated as a result of fractional reserve system can be 97% or perhaps even higher if one includes other complex financial instruments such as derivatives in the total money supply.
This excessive money creation can lead to catastrophic results to the national currency if no measures are taken to limit this over expenditure. This over expenditure is present in all monetary systems both fiat and gold based currencies because each system operates with a fractional reserve system. The fiat currency maybe marginally worse because the central banks can encourage even more overleveraging as none of the new money issued by the central bank is bound by gold reserve requirements. This component of money creation only constitutes a small part of total money creation however despite assertions you may hear from Ben Bernanke.
Still, despite this relative small amount of money generated through QE or simple naked money printing this form of money creation can lead to some significant results. As this new money is issued it will enter the commercial banks and due to the process of fractional reserve banking this money can be multiplied creating further inflation in either the real economy or various asset classes such as houses or stocks. In fact this process is called the money multiplier effect in Monetary economics and this is one reason why this practice is promoted by Keynesian economists who wish the governments to issue some money as this printed money will be multiplied by banks by loaning this money out to its customers. Problem is, in this current recession many banks instead of lending have hoarded this money since there are no real returns on investments that can be made from these loans. Instead most of that money is gambled in the biggest casino in the world which is the stock/bond market and since there is quite a lot of excess money floating around this excess cash has the tendency of generating bubbles with overvaluations in stocks such as Facepalm.
But let us go back to the topic at hand which is the issue of currency devaluation. This process has occurred many times in the past even during the eras when countries followed the gold standard which we should note: is a point often forgotten by many people advocating a return to the gold standard. It should be remembered that the US suffered numerous financial crises in the 19th century when it did follow the gold standard, the most notable being the 1873-1879 Long Depression. Indeed this depression was known as the Great Depression until this event was supplanted by the Great Depression of the 1930s. All of which occurred during an era when all the major currencies of the world followed the gold standard.
The causes of this Long Depression are – like the great depression of the 1930s – are still debated among economists but the general problems would appear to share striking similarities. Like the 1930s depression the Long Depression came at a time shortly after a major war, increasing globalisation and most important of all excessive credit creation by the commercial banks. In the case of the Long Depression this was the American Civil War while the Great Depression had World War 1. Such wars meant that the central governments issued an excessive amount of credit to fund the war effort and this excessive spending came despite the fact the gold standard places heavy penalties on countries that do not practice fiscal restraint. This scenario of excessive credit creation coming through war would then spur further credit creation once the main commercial banks got hold off this money. In fact the money created by those banks would be a multiple of the amount of money the government printed. In any case, these wars times should be noted for the fact it is one of the few instances where governments are prepared to risk mortally damaging their currency by money creation. We need to remember they are creating money on two levels: one by direct money printing or QE and then the subsequent process of this money being multiplied by the commercial banks. This behaviour of excessive spending under this circumstance can apply to whatever monetary system is applied be it gold or fiat based currency system. This excess spending and subsequent credit expansion by commercial banks also result in the formation of various bubbles.
To say the Long Depression was caused by excessive war spending would not tell the whole story however. To not mention the next point would be to neglect raising another commonality between the two eras. That is, the immediate period after the civil war was a boom period for the US economy (which again is repeated in the roaring 1920s). This boom in both cases occurred because of an expansion in the money supply. In the case of the 1860s this money expansion came about due to the government and major private companies investing heavily in railroads. Much of those railroads were financed by loans, bonds and subsidies which in many cases were backed by the US government. These cheap loans created overinvestment in the industry and eventually lead to a bubble forming (or overcapacity). As it became clear many of these rail companies could never pay back their loans this caused many banks to fail which eventually culminated with the failure of the major banks of Jay Cooke and Henry Clews which brought the financial sector to its knees. The resulting recession would last six years and growth was below normal until after the 1890s.
Again this period of recession and sluggish growth shares a similar similarity to the Great Depression. So why bring up the point of the Long Depression and Great Depression? I think the point to take from all these events is that despite being on the gold standard (in the case of the 1870s the gold and silver standard) banks and corporations found ways of overleveraging the monetary system and the main method was by employing the system of fractional reserve banking. When those loans could not be paid back it resulted in large scale defaults which almost caused the destruction of the financial system. Now it can be argued that since a fiat currency encourages more spending (as currency is no longer bound by reserves of gold) then the magnitude of the problem will be that much greater so the level of defaults required to bring the system into balance would be greater but then the argument becomes one of a matter of degree.
The main issue I see with the gold standard – despite assertions to the contrary – is it is not immune to reckless spending. Reckless spending can come through poor lending practices and these practices have a particular tendency of loosening during WAR TIMES and BOOM TIMES. In the case of war the risk of financial collapse is acceptable to fight the war while in the case of boom times the perception of risk becomes distorted so market participants take out excessive loans thinking the risk of failure is lower than reality. This human behaviour must be accounted for when suggestions of moving to a gold standard system are ushered.
If one wants to assure there is no risk of financial mismanagement then one needs to get at the root of the problem and that is one of leverage. Every major currency in existence today follows a debt based fiat currency system with many of the commercial banks operating with a fractional reserve system. This system of fractional reserve banking is not well understood by most members of the public but most of the loans/money generated through the system comes about through here. This point is important as it is the leveraging that ultimately causes the instability in the monetary system NOT whether the currency is backed by gold or promises (as is the case in fiat).
To gain a good idea how a fractional reserve works it is best to find out how the system started in the first place. That way we can learn it simply and not be baffled and confused with all the mumbo jumbo that some smarty pants will put in front of us to confuse us. All these terms and convoluted descriptions are just smoke and mirrors to make the public feel intimidated and not ask further questions about the fraud being committed right in front of their eyes. Notice how no one actually teaches how monetary systems actually operate in school? Anyways, I digress and let us focus on the topic at hand.
The fractional reserve system originally came about when early bankers would help store pieces of gold bullion for various customers. To make transfers more convenient the early banks would issue notes which allowed the customer to redeem their gold. This meant people did not have to travel back and forth with gold bars which was a major drag (literally) not to mention quite dangerous. After sometime however the banks realised that customers would only trade these notes instead of exchanging gold directly. In fact those notes became a form of ad-hoc currency and it became apparent that the more notes that were issued the more money would be generated which meant more profit to the banks. So the banks began the path to the dark side by issuing more notes than they held in gold reserves. Thus it was the beginning of the fractional reserve banking and as the name implies, the banks only hold a fraction of the total deposits in reserves.
Once the banks had found that most people did not take out money or gold from their deposits creating excessive notes posed no real risk of them being found out or going bankrupt. However this practice did lead to the issuing of more money which while fraudulent benefited the upper class massively as it allowed them greater means to spend, invest – and most important – lend money to various major public projects. It should be remembered that most major public projects cannot pay for themselves and such projects can only be financed through debt. To see more information on this matter please refer to the three part Large Public Work series.
These extra loans also had the effect of extracting more wealth from its subjects via interest payments from the extra loans generated from this operation. As a result even though this form of fraud became known to the government it was not outlawed. Instead laws were made to limit the amount of risk such practices posed to the overall financial system. From this point onward the financial system developed extra complexity but on a fundamental level they all operate on the same premise. To many this is really a legalised system of fraud and one wonders how the general population would behave if it learnt the truth of the matter and how money really works. It is this fact why all banks are vulnerable to a bank runs because if people run to the banks in mass to collect their deposits the bank would soon become bankrupt due to lack of reserves.
In light of these facts if one wishes for stability then one needs to confront the fractional reserve system. If a person does wishes for total stability then the reserves must equal 100% of the currency available. Any leverage will create some instability and the more leveraged it becomes the greater the resulting instability. It should be noted however that the fractional reserve system – despite its obvious flaws and shortcomings – has one big advantage. This method of generating excess cash has a great effect in delivering growth for the general economy which was a great BOON to an ever expanding industrial economy. In fact if one looks at the term capitalism the main objective of this system is to acquire capital. This can be through actual assets or cash and since fractional reserve banking delivers on this objective one can see why it is so prevalent in modern economic systems. However as noted by many others this growth cannot go on indefinitely and in a contracting economy excessive credit creation can quickly become a bane to society. In fact one can easily say a fractional reserve system would not be fit for purpose for an economy that is continually contracting. In fact it would be catastrophic.
Still, one should not forget that this system must be removed if one wishes for future stability. What needs to be understood however is if one does wish for complete stability with full fractional reserve banking then one must confront several problems most of which are considerable; by moving from a fractional based reserve system to a fully backed reserved system it would mean a large percentage of the total money supply be removed or large amounts of new capital must be acquired. To take the former option of money/credit destruction would mean a massive almost total deflationary event. In other words, all current assets would lose nearly all their value. In addition since all existing loans will still remain the same in nominal terms then a massive deflationary event will mean the value of those outstanding loans would rise massively in real terms leading to large scale defaults which would create further havoc on an already overstrained system. These defaults, which are likely to be considerable, if not total, would reduce the money supply further still. In short this solution could not provide an acceptable method of returning to a fully backed reserve system.
The other option highlighted in the paragraph above is to increase the amount of capital or reserves in the system. The easiest way of achieving this feat would be through some means of issuing non-debt based money which would basically amount to a form of debt jubilee. This process of money generation would however, if left unrestrained, lead to massive inflation as a large amount of money would be spent on non-essential purchases. Even if laws were put in place to force consumers to pay back all existing debts before the money could be used for other activities it would result in a large scale deflation event as a lot of the existing debt based money is wiped from the system. This solution however would not result in larger scale defaults mentioned earlier as those debts would be expunged from the system. It should be noted that such a move would directly harm the banks as they would lose nearly all their assets and as such they could be forced into bankruptcy. Furthermore the other biggest losers would be the financial elite who hold most of the world assets. Since these people and organisations have the most influence in this current system it seems fanciful they would implement a plan that damages their interests the most. This solution has numerous proponents most notably economist Steve Keen (see 19:00 of the video).
For this solution to have a lasting effect however it would need to put a full reserve banking system in place after the debt jubilee is issued otherwise the system will fall into the same problems of excessive debt.
If such a system of full reserve banking were developed it would then lead to another problem which is a lack of growth of debt that is required for modern banking to operate. Without debt accumulation it is hard to see how banks could generate sufficient profits to remain viable. If banks do not possess the ability to create money through loans then the only income they could derive would be from service charges from holding deposits. The other possibility would be to use those existing deposits for lending to businesses and corporations who would then pay the banks with interest through means of expansion. However such a system could not operate unless there is an expansion of the money supply by a central bank or by the banking sectors growing at the expense of other industries. In any case such a system would sacrifice much growth and could still face some potential dangers in currency devaluation.
It would seem that while a transition to a more sound system is favourable it cannot realistically occur until there is a large-scale reduction in the existing money supply, loss of capital by some other means or large scale debt jubilees of which the outcome is unlikely to come and even if implemented will lead to large scale bankruptcies and possible supply-chain contagion as result of this.
One also needs to consider the possibility of a society that can be happy with a non-growth economy which would be basically be enforced by applying a full reserve banking system. This question needs to be considered under the light of growing populations and the three desires of greed, power and competitive nature of man. What are the chances some expansionary monetary system will be devised to cater to such basic desires and realities facing man in the future?
Last of the Mohicans: Requiem for Russell Means
Off the keyboards of RE & Steve Lendman
Discuss this article in RIP: Russel Means inside the Diner
Requiem for Russell Means
Russell Means, the Ogalala Sioux who portrayed Chingachicook in Last of the Mohicans died yesterday at the age of 72 of inoperable Throat Cancer. He chose not to try the modern medical routes of Chemotherapy and Radiotherapy but rather try Holistic Remedies, which in the end did not work.
Although he is probably best known and remembered by most people for his role in Last of the Mohicans, Russell really became Famous for his IRL role as a leader of the American Indian Movement, AIM. In particular, his greatest notoriety came in the standoff at Wounded Knee in 1973 with the FBI, which lasted around 70 days as I recall. There were several Gun Battles in this confrontation, and in later years Russell was tried and acquitted in the murder of another Native American Annie May Aquash, who AIM leaders had pegged as an FBI Informant. His activism in fighting for Native American Rights and Justice is the stuff of Legend:
AIM was founded in the late 1960s to protest the U.S. government’s treatment of Native Americans and demand that the government honor its treaties with Indian tribes. Means first gained national attention when he led a group of Indian protesters in seizing the Mayflower II ship replica in Plymouth, Mass., on Thanksgiving Day 1970.
Other protests included a prayer vigil atop Mount Rushmore to focus attention on Lakota claims to the Black Hills and an occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., to highlight broken treaties.
His leadership of the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee, S.D., cemented his place in the national spotlight. The protesters demanded strict federal adherence to old Indian treaties and an end to what they called corrupt tribal governments.
He found himself dogged for decades by questions about the group’s alleged involvement in the slaying of a tribe member, Annie Mae Aquash, and the several gunbattles with federal officers during the 71-day occupation of Wounded Knee, but he denied that the group ever promoted violence.
Wounded Knee where Russell and AIM made their Last Stand against the FBI was also the site of another battle, the last one fought in the Indian Wars in 1890.
The Wounded Knee Massacre occurred on December 29, 1890,[4] near Wounded Knee Creek (Lakota: Čhaŋkpé Ópi Wakpála) on the LakotaPine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, USA. It was the last battle of the American Indian war. On the day before, a detachment of the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment commanded by Major Samuel M. Whitside intercepted Spotted Elk’s band of Miniconjou Lakota and 38 Hunkpapa Lakota near Porcupine Butte and escorted them five miles westward (8 km) to Wounded Knee Creek where they made camp.
The remainder of the 7th Cavalry Regiment arrived led by Colonel James Forsyth and surrounded the encampment supported by four Hotchkiss guns.[5]
On the morning of December 29, the troops went into the camp to disarm the Lakota. One version of events claims that during the process of disarming the Lakota, a deaf tribesman named Black Coyote was reluctant to give up his rifle, claiming he had paid a lot for it.[6] A scuffle over Black Coyote’s rifle escalated and a shot was fired which resulted in the 7th Cavalry’s opening fire indiscriminately from all sides, killing men, women, and children, as well as some of their own fellow troopers. Those few Lakota warriors who still had weapons began shooting back at the attacking troopers, who quickly suppressed the Lakota fire. The surviving Lakota fled, but U.S. cavalrymen pursued and killed many who were unarmed.
By the time it was over, at least 150 men, women, and children of the Lakota Sioux had been killed and 51 wounded (4 men, 47 women and children, some of whom died later); some estimates placed the number of dead at 300. Twenty-five troopers also died, and 39 were wounded (6 of the wounded would later die).[7] It is believed that many were the victims of friendly fire, as the shooting took place at close range in chaotic conditions. At least twenty troopers were awarded the coveted Medal of Honor[8]
I was a Junior in HS in 1973, and a Pirate Radio Talk Show host and DJ on the WQLB Pirate Radio station my friend Randi ran out of his basement in Flushing, NY. The standoff at Wounded Knee between AIM and the FBI was a regular subject of discussion on my Weekly Talk Show in the wee hours of Saturday Night-Sunday Morning for weeks. That confrontation was my first awakening to the Native American genocide undertaken to capture the Americas for the Europeans in how it was REALLY done, as opposed to the way it had been portrayed in Hollywood films and on TV in my youth.
When in 1992 Russell appeared in the credits as the actor who played Chingachicook, I did a double take. Was this the SAME Russell Means that ran the Last Stand at Wounded Knee? How many Native Americans are named Russell Means? Of course it WAS the same guy, and really no better Casting has ever been done for any Hollywood film EVER. Russell played that part so well because really Russell WAS Chingachicook, at least in his Spirit.
The Film remains perhaps my all time favorite of all films, which is pretty tough to call with many very good ones up there, but it is so emotionally wrenching and powerful in its themes that no matter how many times I watch it, I always tear up and mourn for what was lost here.
So now, in the words written by James Fenimore Cooper which Russell Means spoke so eloquently in that film, he finally does go to join the rest of his Tribe at the Great Council Fire of his People. He will find Peace there, and he will be Honored for all Eternity.
Great Spirit, Maker of All Life. A warrior goes to you swift and straight as an arrow shot into the sun. Welcome him and let him take his place at the council fire of my people. He is Uncas, my son. Tell them to be patient and ask death for speed; for they are all there but one – I, Chingachgook – Last of the Mohicans.
I will end this post with the penultimate 9 minute sequence at the end of Last of the Mohicans, the most emotionally wrenching 9 miutes ever filmed, IMHO. Self-Sacrifice, Good vs. Evil, Vengeance and Retribution, it’s all in there in 9 miutes of powerful filmaking backed by an equally powerful soundtrack. A fitting homage to Russell Means, the LAST OF THE MOHICANS.
RE
From Steven Lendman
Remembering Russell Means
A Cargo (Bike) Cult
Off the keyboard of Jason Heppenstall
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| In days of yore cargo bike racing was a big thing in Copenhagen, something that is being resurrected by Harry vs Larry, whom I pinched this image from |
Published on 22 Billion Energy Slaves on October 20, 2012
Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasbord inside the Diner
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| A Christiania Bike at work. Image courtesy of Copenhagenize |
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| The Sorte Jernhest. Image courtesy of this blog |
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| The Nihola Bike. Image from this blog |
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| The Bullitt Bike – image from here |
- It’s a tried and tested technology. If you can still see 40 year old Christiania Bikes rumbling around the streets you know that this is a bike that is built to last.
- It can carry a load of up to 100kg (probably more) with no problems. I will need to be able to move this amount of weight up to 20 miles every day, and it would seem ideal for it. Plus, with a single big handlebar, getting off and pushing is always an option.
- I want the option of being able to fit an assisting electric motor on it in the future, and the large exposed back wheel provides plenty of space to do so. The bike is fine in flat areas like Copenhagen, but it would be seriously hard to ride it up a steep hill, fully laden, without some kind of power assist.
- I like its black no-nonsense design and the fact that you could easily sell things out of the front box area as it is a deep box with sides that slope forwards, making presentation of the goods easy.
- I love Christiania. It’s a truly inspiring place to be that shows what people can achieve against all the odds (expect a long post about Christiania soon) and I want to help support its survival.
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| Selling like hot cakes at the Christiania Bike workshop in Copenhagen. That’s my bike, ready to go, in the foreground. |
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| Here’s my bike on its first ever job, earlier today – a 20km round trip to pick up a 19th century chair for my wife to restore. It was an easy job but I can’t count on such light loads in the future. |
Doomer Science Fiction Late Night Double Feature Picture Show
Off the keyboard of RE
Discuss this article at the Geopolitics Table inside the Diner
Discussions in the Panarchy & One-t0-the-Many thread inside the Diner brought up an old topic, Categories of Doom which paint various different pictures for the Future of Homo Sapiens on Earth, if the species has one at all that lasts past Mid-Century or so. Just about every Doomer out there has carved out for themselves the Projected Future they either think will occur or would like to occur. In essence, this is Science Fiction, because none of us really KNOW how it is going to play itself out, you just extrapolate on trends and ideas you have to try to imagine the Future.
Going back to my writings on The Burning Platform blogging with Jim Quinn, in my Frosbite Falls Daily Rant I developed a basic breakdown between the two most prevalent Doomer Types writing in the Collapse Blogosphere, Full Doomers and Doom Liters. To get an idea of the differing attitudes these two groups have on the crucial questions of collapse, I created a comparative table.
Topic |
Doom Lite |
Full Doom |
| Dollar & Monetary System | We can fix the monetary system and rehabilitate the Dollar if we STOP PRINTING, feed Helicopter Ben to the Lions, Slash Spending, allow TBTF Banks to FAIL, Incarcerate the Criminal Banksters and use Precious Metals to underpin the currency. | The monetary system cannot be rehabilitated by any means, there will be a complete collapse of ALL Fiat money and financial instruments and commerce will for quite some time be mainly Barter. PMs will only retain value in areas where there is a surplus of basic commodities. |
| Inflation, Hyper-Inflation, Deflation, Stagflation, DICK UP YOUR ASSFLATION | WTF CARES ANYMORE? WE ARE TOAST NO MATTER HOW IT COLLAPSES.AGREEMENT | WTF CARES ANYMORE? WE ARE TOAST NO MATTER HOW IT COLLAPSES.AGREEMENT |
| Energy | To resolve our Energy problems, we must IMMEDIATELY begin building more Nukes, Drill Baby Drill for more Local Oil and build more Hydro Plants and Wind Farms, and eventually pick up the slack from lost energy from Imported Oil sources. | Lost Energy from depleted Oil is Irreplaceable and it is far too late to stop an extensive Power Down throughout society which will halt most of our Transportation methods and bring down the Electrical Grid. Our only choice is to prepare for a Low Energy footprint in the future. |
| Goobermint | We can fix Da Goobermint if we Vote Out all the scumbag CONgress Critters and replace them with Honest Politicians who cannot be Bought who all demonstrate the Wisdom of the Founding Fathers and abide by the Constitution. Said new Goobermint will be made much smaller with fewer Regulations and less Taxation, allowing Commerce to revive as the Free Market takes over. | Da Goobermint is inherently unfixable and corrupt and cannot be rehabilitated via the Ballot Box. Only a Revolution can remove the current power structure, and the results of a Revolution will likely bring a new Goobermint as bad or WORSE than the current one. The failure of the monetary sytem and energy systems will eventually render all large scale Goobermints unable to function, with the power vacuum filled by local Warlords and Dictators in most places. |
| Jobs | We must stop the offshoring of Productive Jobs and rebuild our Manufacturing Base in order to build an export based Mercantilist economy with a Trade Surplus. | The Industrial Model is FINISHED, even if we could rebuild Factories here in the FSofA, we wouldn’t have the Oil to run them anyhow, and there won’t be anyone here or abroad who could afford the products we build with them anyhow, because of the upward spiraling cost of energy measured in EROEI. |
| Immigration | We must Seal the Borders and deport all Illegal Aliens and get FSofA Citizens to work at all the scut jobs at below Minimum Wage they currently fill to reduce Unemployment and reduce the liabilities of Aliens who are soaking up free Medical Care in the Emergency Rooms of our Hospitals. | We can TRY to seal the borders and deport the Illegal Aliens, but they will just be replaced by more home grown Citizens who are falling off the economic cliff and will be just as big a drain on the Medical System. Besides that, at least on the Border with Mejico, it will likely create an ever growing Shooting War with a Tsunami of Wetbacks seeking to escape an even worse situation in Mejico. |
| Imperialism & Foreign Wars | We must STOP trying to be the World’s Policeman, bring all our Boys & Girls HOME and reduce the outrageous COST of maintaining the Big Ass Military. | As soon as we STOP running all our Imperialist adventures, we will basically be CUT OFF from the Foreign Oil still making its way across the Sea Lanes to our Refineries. We also will crash just about the only type of “productive” thing we build here anymore, which are the Weapons of War and we will bring back a whole new crew of people to put on the Unemployment line. |
| Free Shit Army & 30 Blocks of Squalor | We must end all transfer payments, all Welfare, Social Security and Medicaire which are all unfunded Liabilities we cannot afford. Former Welfare recipients will be FORCED to go back to work and become Productive Citizens rather than Useless Eaters. Old Folks will rely on their Savings and their Extended Families to take care of them in their dotage. | The minute we knock down all these social support mechanisms is the minute we turn into Egypt or Libya or all the rest of the 3rd World countries where the people with Nothing Left to Lose go BERSERK. We don’t HAVE jobs these people could do, even if they were qualified to do any job, which they are not for the most part. Most Old Folks have no savings, and the Extended Family died back in the 1950s for the most part. The Medical Industry as a whole would COLLAPSE without Goobermint input, putting the Doctors, Nurses and Medical Records folks on the UE lines also. |
China |
China will succeed long term because they are net creditors, have most of the Industrial infrastructure and have more Science and Math geniuses studying at Elite Universities. | China is TOAST because of outrageous Population Overshoot, a depleted Water Supply, insufficient arable land and insufficient local supplies of remaining Fossil Fuel energy. |
FINALSOLUTIONS |
Boomers should be EXTERMINATED | Pigmen should be EXTERMINATED |
While this table provides a good basic understanding of the differing perspectives you see in the Doom-o-Sphere, it doesn’t break down a couple of other important categories you see all the time on the net now, the Cornucopians who have confidence our Civilization will be salvaged and perpetuated at least, if not go on to Star Trekking the Universe through Technological Innovation and new Renewable Sources of Energy. Nor does it cover the Uber-Doomers, who believe we are on the road to an Extinction Level Event rivaling the Permian Extinction which occurred 282 Million Years Ago.
Even those additional Categories though do not express the great range of ideas for the Projected Future of Homo Sapiens if this turns out NOT to be an ELE. There are many more of these Sub-Categories, and in this post I am going to identify a few of them, along with their attributes and some of their main proponents here on the web in a few cases.
I will start with the main category of Cornucopians, those who have the most positive outlook on the Future for Homo Sapiens. They fall into 2 main Sub-Categories, Techno-Utopians and Amish-Fusion Utopians.
Techno-Utopians or Jetsons
The TU Sub-Group includes those who believe forms of Conventional Nuclear Energy such as Thorium Fission Reactors can be applied to resolve the energy problem, along with those who believe various forms of Renewable Energy might be applied to do the same thing. There are other more speculative TUs who consider the possibilities of Fusion Power or Zero-Point Energy as arriving in time to salvage Industrial Civilization. This group is also nicknamed Jetsons.
Amish-Fusion Utopians
The AFU Sub-Group genrally covers the Greenies in the Transition Towns movement. You can see this represented well on the pages of Transition Voice, edited by Erik & Lindsay Curren. The AFU Model incorporates many “Green” forms of Renewable Energy collection such as Wind and Hydro together with small towns that overall use a localized form of Agriculture more or less on the 18th Century model. Industries such as Clothing Production as well as Food Production are all Local, but we also still maintain the high technology of the Internet and Computers and Communications.
Doom Lite is the next Major Category, probably the largest one overall in terms of numbers amongst Doomers, though they may still be outnumbered by Cornucopians. There is quite a bit of crossover between Doom Lite and Cornucopians, they tend to differ most in terms of their views on the Politics, Economics and Overshoot/Die-Off questions. Under the Doom Lite category you find the Brave New Worlders, Rail & Sailers and Transition Townies.
Brave New Worlders
BNWs have one of the most depressing views of the Future, the Fascist Boot Stomping on the Face of Humanity FOREVER view. They include a vast variety of Conspiracy Theorists who believe Illuminati/Zionist/Aliens or some variant will enslave most of the Human Population, chip everybody with Tracking Implants and run the world in perpetuity as a Satanic Playground. You could place this subgroup under Full Doom also, but since it supposes that the Ubermeisters will retain a high level of technology and standard of living for themselves while the remaining population lives in squalor, it is not really Full Doom. You don’t find many Bloggers that are BNWs, but MANY commenters. Quasi-Diner PO1 shows up periodically on the Diner to express BNW viewpoints, El Gallinazo here also. On Peak Oil I ran into a BNW Plubius and Flash expressed this viewpoint often on TBP. My fellow Admins on the Diner Surly and Peter also express BNW viewpoints periodically.
Rail & Sailers
R&S folks have a more Upbeat view than the BNWs do of Doom Lite. They crossover quite a bit with the Cornucopian Amish-Fusion crowd, the main difference is that R&S Lite Doomers do realize that these technologies cannot support the current 7 Billion ambulant Homo Sapiens and that a significant Die Off event will need to take place before this can work again. In this paradigm, a smaller population close to the numbers that existed around the early 19th Century will reinvent the world of Sail and Rail transportation, with the best off of them living somewhat like the Founding Fathers who wrote the FSofA Constitution lived. I would put Jimmy Kunstler, Dmitri Orlov and Steve from Virginia from Economic Undertow into this category
Transition Townies
TTs crossover with R&S, just the focus is different for TTs. These Doom Liters look for a future of many small Independent and Self-Sufficient communities, where all Food Prodcution and Manufacturing is Local, done by Craftsmen rather than in large factories. Assuming all production can be made Local, they don’t really need the Rail or the Sail to make the paradigm work. Again, Lindsay and Erik Curren on Transition Voice are prime examples of TTs, so you can view them either as Cornucopians or Doom Liters. They aren’t real clear where they stand on the Die-Off question, basically they prefer not to cnosider it on their blogthemselves for the most part. Though they do Publish Guy McPherson so they aren’t unaware of Die Off scenarios.
The TT Model represents a Utopian Verision of the Feudal Town v 2.0 with an Upgrade to the 21st Century, with Blacksmiths and Cobblers and Weavers in a small town surrounded by Small Farms with the Farmers trading their Produce for the Manufactured Goods the Townie Craftsmen produce in a self-contained and independent economy.
I break down Full Doomers into 4 Main Sub-categories Eloi-Morlock Techno Slavers, Mad Maxers, Pharoahs and Flintstones. All FDs have in common that they see a VAST knockdown of the population of Homo Sapiens by at least 90% of current population if not more. All though also stop short of predicting an Extinction Level Event, which is the provincce of the Uber Doomer crowd. There aren’t any Major Bloggers who are FD, the closest probably is Gail from Our Finite World, but in her articles she publishes on MSM websites she always stops short of predicting FD, it is only inside the Commentary of her own Blog you can glean that Gail is FD. There are numerous smaller bloggers who are FD, Peter Michael Bauer from Urban Scout is one, I am another one. The Survivalists also provide FD perspectives, and some of them have pretty successful blogs like John Wesley Rawlings, and actually these days Brandon Smith of Alt-Market appears to fit this category also.
Eloi-Morlock Technoslavers
This subcategory represents BNWs on Steroids. These folks figure that the Illuminati/Zionist/Aliens are ENGINEERING purposefully a Massive Die-off by the prescription of the Georgia Guidestones, knocking down the population of Homo Sapiens to around 500M Human Souls they will enslave in perpetuity. The Category Title comes from H.G. Wells Time Machine, where you had creepy and disgusting Morlocks raping sweet innocent Weenas every time they exited from their Underground Bunkers. There aren’t many major Bloggers in this category, though with his Debt Slavery ideas in the past, Ashvin Pandurangi of The Automatic Earth (who also contributes here as a Diner) might have been categorized this way. More recently he fits into the Uber Doomer Sub-Category of Fundies though.
Mad Maxers
MMs are ubiquitous in the Doomer Blogosphere, they are all the Survivalists like John Wesley Rawlings who prognosticate a future filled with Zombies and Cannibals and Rambo-like Survivalists battling it out with them with Ar-15s, RPGs, IEDs, Poison Darts, Tiger Traps…you name it here. LOL. The Children of Men all battle it out in the Thunderdome for the Final Control over a post-Apocalyptic Civilization. It is none to clear in this scenario how anybody actually makes it out ALIVE, so you could call it a Lead Up to Uber Doom rather than Full Doom, but I dropped it in here under the FD category on the wild assumption a few Raging Maniacs and Warlords could manage to survive the Zero Point.
Pharoahs
The Pharoah Sub-Group is kind of an extension of the Illuminati/Zionist/Alien paradigm Reverse Engineered back past Feudalism to Ancient Egyptian society. In this case, you have full tilt Agrarian Slaves working the land while a few Pharoahs live a pretty good life comparatively to their Slaves, but there is virtually no technology around that makes it all that much different other than the fact they are better fed and have to work less.
Primitivists or Flintones
The Flintstones Sub-Group of Full Doomers are those folks who see an inexorable spin down of the few remaining Homo Sapiens to Paleolithic living standards. Stone Age technology for the most part, some Horticulture/Permaculture but no mass Agriculture and remarkabley few Homo Sapiens wandering the Earth, perhaps 1 Million or so at most if a decent portion of the Earth is not Poisoned by Nukes and Climate Change doesn’t completely wipe out current Ecosystems. Again, no major Bloggers in this category, though there are some theoreticians like Richard Duncan who proposed the original Olduvai Hypothesis back in the 90s. Minor Bloggers I know of in this category are Peter Michael Bauer and myself.
The final Main Category of Uber Doomers I break down to Eco-Doomers, 4 Horsemen, and Fundies. They all kind of overlap, just the Focus of each group is different.
Eco-Doomers
This sub-category focuses on the Climatic Changes which most of them believe are resultant from the increasing Carbon Dioxide content of the atmosphere, which they also generally attribute to he burning of Fossil Fuels over the last 2 Centuries for the most part. Said EDs believe we have already passed an IRREVERSIBLE TIPPING POINT toward Global Warming that will render just about all life on earth above the level of the Tardigrades to be unsustainable. A COMPLETE COLLAPSE of the Ecosystem is IMMINENT, inside the next Century at the outside, perhaps less time left than that befor we are ALL DEAD. Chief Blogosphere proponent of this idea would be Guy McPherson of Nature Bats Last..
4 Horsemen
This sub-category of focuses on the varying ways Homo Sapiens are Engineering their own Extinction through the Biblical methods of Famine, Plague, War & DEATH. If you think that we are all going to the Great Beyond resultant from Global Thermonuclear War, Pandemics of Bird Flu, Crop Failures due to Drought or Floods or just distribution problems of the Herding of mass numbers of the Impoverished into Death Camps for Recycling in the Human Waste Reprocessing Facility in San Antonio, you fit the sub-category of a 4 Horseman.
Fundies
These Uber Doomers look to the Bible as the main source for prediction of the Final Solution for Evil on Earth, mainly Christian Deonominations but there are some others also who Fundamentally believe that God will take retribution on the Sins of Humanity, take a few True Believers into Everlasting Glory in the Kingdom of Heaven and send everybody else to Everlasting Torment Burning in the Fire and Brimstone of HELL. Various scenarios are painted of Angels and Demons descending from Heaven to go Mano-a-Mano here on Earth, and the end result is none to good for ANYBODY who wasn’t a True Believer before TSHTF. You can find this viewpoint on many Christian Fundy websites, and as mentioned previously, Ashvin Pandurangi of The Automatic Earth and Picturing Christ now subscribes to this general rubric as defined by the Biblical Prophets.
Handicapping the End Game
Once you have all these Categories and Sub-Categories defined, you can first decide which one best suits your personality and belief structure, then you can go looking for websites and books which bolster this POV. I can assure you, whichever one you pick you will be able to find some scientist or historian or anthropologist with research to back it up and make it sound credible. Even the Fundies hire up Scientists to “prove” the Biblical Apocalypse and Second Coming of Christ scenario is literal truth.
Once you have carved out your Niche in Doomer Space, you can go out to various Blogs and Forums like the Diner here and discuss TEOTWAWKI as a card-carrying Doomer with the rest of the Doomers haunting such places. The goal of course is to figure out which one of these Sci-Fi Scenarios will work out to be the REAL FUTURE? Which one is MOST LIKELY? Based on this, how do you PLAN, and how should you Hedge against alternatative scenarios in the event the outcome you predict as most likely doesn’t win the Apocalypse Horse Race?
Of course as new evidence comes in and circumstances evolve the Odds change, but right now RE the Alaska Doom Bookie handicaps the 4 Major Categories with the following odds:
Cornucopia 10:1 Doom Lite 5:1
Full Doom 2:1 Uber Doom 5:1
This is ideal odds-making which doesn’t leave any Vigorish for the House, so if I was really Bookmaking this I would jigger the odds a bit so I couldn’t lose. In my Odds, there is a 50% likelihood for the Full Doom outcome, 20% each for Doom Lite and Uber Doom, and 10% for Cornucopian.
Breaking down the Odds inside the Full Doom Category is a bit harder. You also have to deal with Timelines on this one, since I sure don’t think we will be going Flintstones Overnight here. The fastest track to Flintstones would incorporate a period of Mad Max, which COULD occur close to overnight with failure of JIT food delivery to the Big Shities. Slower tracks to Flinstones come with the other FD categories which could persist quite a while, and if any of the Doom Lite scenarios gain some traction then Flintstones is probably a long way off. However, over a timeline say a century or two long, I’d bet on Flintstones as most likely Final Outcome.
Since none of us will live THAT long though, you might consider it a better bet to Hedge for one of the other scenarios before heading out into the Bush to go the Full Primitive. Perhaps prepare yourself to be a good Apparatchik of the Fascist State, or learn techniques for managing large scale Feudal Farms with Animal and Human Labor. Old Horseman who Dines with us occassionally seems to hedge in this direction mostly.
On the Independence level however, if you can prepare yourself for Rewilding and you can get yourself to a sufficiently REMOTE area to do it, it provides the best level of overall personal security. I support this paradigm most in my writings, although I am fully aware that trying to make a go of it out in the wilderness anywhere it still exists is a very low survival percentage endeavor for most people. Low as it is though, it is likely quite a bit higher survival percentage than anyone caught inside the Big Shities the Day After JIT collapses. Wait a day too long to make your Bugout, it’s going to be Dog Eat Dog in those places. Or really more explicitly stated, Human Eats Human. A situation you definitely want to avoid if you possibly can.
Anyhow, Best of Luck to all the Diners with their choices and paradigms to negotiate the ZERO POINT, the End of Industrial Civilization and the Age of Oil, TEOTWAWKI.
RE
Diner Newz Channels
Off the keyboards of RE and Joe
Discuss this article at the Diner Newz Channels
One of the real benefits of being a Regular Diner is the fact we have several Diners who are Newz Aggregators, Newz Hounds who regularly Surf the Web to find stories which do not usually turn up in the Google search engine or on MSM websites. Newzy Joe here put up a GREAT Selection of articles on various Water and Oil issues well worth reading to stay Up to Speed on how TEOTWAWKI is proceeding here.
Below here, the latest selection of Doom Articles from Newzy Joe.
RE
Off the keyboard of Newzy Joe
When I was a bit younger …say 25 yrs old, give or take seven years…I wouldn’t think twice about seeking and and participating in an event like the one video’d above. In comparison, I made MANY trips to the monolith waterslides in Myrtle Beach SC – for two summers in the college days. But the activity above looks much more exciting to me.
Exxon OIL Co. Pouts and Takes “Slim Profits” Home
Pig Shit Water = Diarrhea Fertilizer = Polluted Drinking Water
Tajikistan: 27 billion barrels of OIL could be a geopolitical game-changer
SeaWater levels rising faster than previously thought
HYDROFRACKING CATFIGHT!
565,000 pounds of OILed material brought to the surface
Hydrofracking Study – Yeah, I fucking trust the EPA
Shell OIL Co. and Blood Money
“Land of 10,000 Lakes” Needs To Conserve Water
Hydrofracking in the Schoolyard
Newzy Joe is not the only Reporter inside the Diner, we also have Golden Oxen reporting on the Precious Metals stories, Agelbert reporting on Renewables and Ecological problems, and Surly reporting on OWS and Protest issues on a regular basis. In my Frosbite Falls Daily Rant, I also often will post Newz Stories from around the net which generally do not get much airplay on the MSM.
The Blog here is only the Front Page of the Diner. Much more to read about The End of the Age of Oil inside the Doomstead Diner.
RE
Why Natural Gas isn’t Likely to be the World’s Energy Savior
Off the keyboard of Gail Tverberg
Published on Our Finite World on October 17, 2012
Discuss this article at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasbord inside the Diner
We keep hearing about the many benefits of natural gas–how burning it releases less CO2 than oil or coal, and how it burns with few impurities, so does not have the pollution problems of coal. We also hear about the possibilities of releasing huge amounts of new natural gas supplies, through the fracking of shale gas. Reported reserves for natural gas also seem to be quite high, especially in the Middle East and the Former Soviet Union.
But I think that people who are counting on natural gas to solve the world’s energy problems are “counting their chickens before they are hatched”. Natural gas is a fuel that requires a lot of infrastructure in order for anything to “happen”. As a result, it needs a lot of up-front investment, and several years time delay. It also needs changes on the consumption side (requiring further investment) that will allow this natural gas to be used. If the cost is higher than competing fuels, this becomes a problem as well.
In many ways, natural gas consumption is captive to other things that are happening in the economy: an economy that is industrializing rapidly will easily be able to consume more natural gas, but an economy in decline will find it hard to scrape together funds for new ways of doing what was done previously, now with natural gas. Increased use of renewables seems to call for additional use of natural gas for balancing, but even this is not certain, because in many parts of the world, natural gas is a high-priced imported fuel. Political instability, often linked to high oil and food prices, creates a poor atmosphere for new Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) facilities, no matter how attractive the pricing may seem to be.
In the US, we have already “hit the wall” on how much natural gas can be absorbed into the system or used to offset imports. US natural gas production has been flat since November 2011, based on EIA data (Figure 1, below).
Figure 1. US Dry Natural Gas Production, based on data of the US Energy Information Administration.
Even with this level of production, and a large shift in electricity production from coal to natural gas, natural gas is still on the edge of “maxing out” its storage system before winter hits (Figure 2, below).
Figure 2. US natural gas in storage, compared to five-year average. Figure prepared by US Energy Information Administration, Weekly Natural Gas Storage Report as of October 5, 2012.
World Natural Gas Production
The past isn’t the future, but it does give a little bit of understanding regarding what the underlying trends are.
Figure 3. World natural gas production, based on BP’s 2012 Statistical Review of World Energy data.
World natural gas production/consumption (Figure 3) has been increasing, recently averaging about 2.7% a year. If we compare natural gas to other energy sources, it has been second to coal in terms of the amount by which it has contributed to the total increase in world energy supplies in the last five years (Figure 4). This comparison is made by converting all amounts to “barrels of oil equivalent”, and computing the increase between 2006 and 2011.
Figure 4. Increase in energy supplied for the year 2011, compared to the year 2006, for various fuels, based on BP’s 2012 Statistical Review of World Energy data.
In order for natural gas to be an energy savior for the world, natural gas consumption would need to increase far more than 2.7% per year, and outdistance the increase in coal consumption each year. While a modest increase from past patterns is quite possible, I don’t expect a miracle from natural gas.
Natural Gas: What Has Changed?
The basic thing that has changed is that fracking now permits extraction of shale gas (in addition to other types of gas), if other conditions are met as well:
- Selling price is high enough (probably higher than for other types of natural gas produced)
- Water is available for fracking
- Governments permit fracking
- Infrastructure is available to handle the fracked gas
Even before the discovery of shale gas, reported world natural gas reserves were quite high relative to natural gas production (63.6 times 2011 production, according to BP). Reserves might theoretically be even higher, with additional shale gas discoveries.
In addition, the use of Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) for export is also increasing, making it possible to ship previously “stranded” natural gas, such as that in Alaska. This further increases the amount of natural gas available to world markets.
What Stands in the Way of Greater Natural Gas Usage?
1. Price competition from coal. One major use for natural gas is making electricity. If locally produced coal is available, it likely will produce electricity more cheaply than natural gas. The reason shale gas recently could be sold for electricity production in the United States is because the selling price for natural gas dropped below the equivalent price for coal. The “catch” was that shale gas producers were losing money at this price (and have since dropped back their production). If the natural gas price increases enough for shale gas to be profitable, electricity production will again move back toward coal.
Many other parts of the world also have coal available, acting as a cap on the amount of fracked natural gas likely to be produced. A carbon tax might change this within an individual country, but those without such a tax will continue to prefer the lower-price product.
2. Growing internal natural gas use cuts into exports. This is basically the Exportland model issue, raised by Jeffrey Brown with respect to oil, but for natural gas. If we look at Africa’s natural gas production, consumption, and exports, this is what we see:
Figure 5. Africa natural gas production, consumption, and exports, based on BP’s 2012 Statistical Review of World Energy.
In Africa, (mostly northern Africa, which exports to Europe and Israel), consumption has been rising fast enough that exports have leveled off and show signs of declining.
3. Political instability. Often, countries with large natural gas resources are ones with large oil resources as well. If oil production starts to drop off, and as a result oil export revenue drops off, a country is likely to experience political instability. A good example of this is Egypt.
Figure 6. Egypt’s oil production and consumption, based on BP’s 2012 Statistical Review of World Energy.
No matter how much natural gas Egypt may have, it would not make sense for a company to put in an LNG train or more pipeline export capability, because the political situation is not stable enough. Egypt needs oil exports to fund its social programs. The smaller funding amount available from natural gas exports is not enough to make up that gap, so it is hard to see natural gas making up the gap, even if it were available in significant quantity.
Iran is a country with large natural gas reserves. It is reportedly looking into extracting natural gas for export. Again, we have a political stability issue. Here we have an international sanctions issue as well.
4. “Need the natural gas for myself later” view. A country (such as Egypt or the United States or Britain) that has been “burned” by declining oil production may think twice about exporting natural gas. Even if the country doesn’t need it now, there is a possibility that vehicles using natural gas could be implemented later, in their own country, thus helping to alleviate the oil shortage. Also, there are risks and costs involved with fracking, that they may not choose to incur, if the benefit is to go to exporters.
5. Cost of investment for additional natural gas consumption. In order to use more natural gas, considerable investment is needed. New pipelines likely need to be added. Homeowners and businesses may need to purchase gas-fired furnaces to raise demand. If it is decided to use natural gas vehicles, there is a need for the new vehicles themselves, plus service stations and people trained to fix the new vehicles. Additional natural gas storage may be needed as well. Additional industrial production is difficult to add, unless wages are low enough that the product being sold will be competitive on the world market.
Existing “pushes” toward better insulation have the effect of reducing the amount of natural gas used for heating homes and businesses, so work in the opposite direction. So do new techniques for making nitrogen-based fertilizer using coal, rather than using natural gas.
6. Touchy balance between supply and consumption. If additional production is added, but additional uses are not, we have already seen what happens in the United States. Storage facilities get overly full, the price of natural gas drops to unacceptably low levels, and operators scramble to cut back production.
The required balance between production and consumption is very “touchy”. It can be thrown off by only a few percent change in production or consumption. Thus an unusually warm winter, as the United States experienced last year, played a role in the overly full storage problem. A ramp up of production of only a few percent can also cause an out of balance situation. Unless a developer has multiple buyers for its gas, or a “take or pay” long-term contract, it risks the possibility that the gas that is has developed will not be wanted at an adequate price.
7. Huge upfront investment requirements. There are multiple requirements for investing in new shale gas developments. Each individual well costs literally millions of dollars to drill and frack. The cost will not be paid back for several years (or perhaps ever, if the selling price is not high enough), so debt financing is generally needed. If fracking is done, a good supply of water is needed. This is likely to be a problem in dry countries such as China. There is a need for trained personnel, drilling rigs of the right type, and adequate pipelines to put the new gas into. While these things are available in the United States, it likely will take years to develop adequate supplies of them elsewhere. All of the legislation that regulates drilling and enables pipeline building, needs to be in place as well. Laws need to be friendly to fracking, as well.
Growth in Exports to Date
Exports grew as a percentage of natural gas use through about 2007 or 2008.
Figure 7. World natural gas exports as percentage of total natural gas produced, by year, based on EIA data (older years) and BP’s 2102 Statistical Review of World Energy for 2010 and 2011.
In recent years, natural gas exports have fallen slightly as a percentage of total gas extracted. Thus, if world natural gas supplies have risen by an average of 2.7% per year for the past five years, exports available for import have risen a little less rapidly than the 2.7% per year increase. A major ramp-up in export capability would be needed to change this trend.
While we hear a lot about the rise in exports using LNG, its use does not seem to be adding to the overall percentage of natural gas exported. Instead, there has been a shift in the type of export capacity being added. There are still a few pipelines being added (such as the Nord Stream pipline, from Russia to Germany), but these are increasingly the exception.
The Shale Gas Pricing Debate
Exactly what price is needed for shale gas to be profitable is subject to debate. Shale gas requires the payment of huge up-front costs. Once they are drilled and “fracked,” they will produce for a long period. Company models assume that they will last as long as 40 years, but geologist Arthur Berman of The Oil Drum claims substantial numbers are closed down in as few as six years, because they are not producing enough natural gas to justify their ongoing costs. There is also a question as to whether the best locations are drilled first.
Logically a person would expect shale-gas to be quite a bit more expensive to produce than other natural gas because it is trapped in much smaller pores, and much more force is required to extracted it. In terms of the resource triangle that I sometimes show (Figure 8, below), it epitomizes the low quality, hard to extract resource near the bottom of the triangle that is available in abundance. We usually start at the top of the resource triangle, and extract the easiest and cheapest to extract first.
Figure 8. Author’s illustration of impacts of declining resource quality.
Berman claims that prices $8.68 or higher per million Btu are needed for profitability of Haynesville Shale, and nearly as high prices are needed to justify drilling other US shale plays. The current US price is about $3.50 per million Btu, so to be profitable, the price would need to be more than double the current US price. Prices for natural gas in Europe are much higher, averaging $11.08 per million Btu in September 2012, but shale gas extraction costs may be higher there as well.
The US Energy Information Administration admits it doesn’t know how the economics will work out, and gives a range of projected prices. It is clear from the actions of the natural gas industry that current prices are a problem. According to Baker Hughes, the number of drilling rigs engaged in natural gas drilling has dropped from 936 one year ago to 422, for the week ended October 12, 2012.
Backup for Renewables
One area where natural gas excels is as a back up for intermittent renewable energy, since it can ramp up and down quickly. So this is one area where a person might expect growth. Such a possibility is not certain, though:
1. How much will intermittent renewables continue to ramp up? Governments are getting poorer, and have less funds available to subsidize them. They do not compete well on when they go head to head with fossil fuels, nuclear, and hydroelectric.
2. When intermittent renewables are subsidized with feed in tariffs, and requirements that wind power be given priority over fossil fuels, it can provide such an unlevel playing field that it is difficult for natural gas to be profitable. This is especially the case in locations where natural gas is already higher-priced than coal.
The Societal “Recipe” Problem
Our economy is built of many interdependent parts. Each business is added, taking into account what businesses already are in place, and what laws are in effect. Because of the way the economy currently operates, it uses a certain proportion of oil, a certain proportion of natural gas, and more or less fixed proportions of other types of energy. The number of people employed tends to vary, too, with the size of the economy, with a larger economy demanding more employees.
Proportions of businesses and energy use can of course change over time. In fact, there is some flexibility built in. In particular, in the US, we have a surplus of natural gas electricity generating units, installed in the hope that they would be used more than they really are, and the energy traded long distance. But there is less flexibility elsewhere. The cars most people drive use gasoline, and the only way to cut back is to drive less. Our furnaces use a particular fuel, and apart from adjusting the temperature setting, or adding insulation, it is hard to make a change in this. We only make major changes when it comes time to sell a car, replace a furnace, or add a new factory.
In my view, the major issue the world has been dealing with in recent years is an inadequate supply of cheap oil. High priced oil tends to constrict the economy, because it causes consumers to cut back on discretionary spending. People in discretionary industries are laid off, and they tend to also spend less, and sometimes default on their loans. Governments find themselves in financial difficulty when they collect fewer taxes and need to pay out more in benefits. While this issue is still a problem in the US, the government has been able to cover up this effect up in several ways (ultra low interest rates, a huge amount of deficit spending, and “quantitive easing”). The effect is still there, and pushing us toward the “fiscal cliff.”
The one sure way to ramp up natural gas usage is for the economy as a whole to grow. If this happens, natural gas usage will grow for two reasons: (1) The larger economy will use more gas, and (2) the growth in the economy will add more opportunities for new businesses, and these new businesses will have the opportunity to utilize more natural gas, if the price is competitive.
I have compared the situation with respect to limited oil supply as being similar to that of a baker, who is trying to bake a batch of cookies that calls for two cups of flour, but who has only one cup of flour. The baker is able to make only half a batch. Half of the other ingredients will go unused as well, because the batch is small.
To me, discovering that we have more natural gas than we had before, is analogous to the baker discovering that instead of having a dozen eggs in his refrigerator, there are actually two dozen in his refrigerator. In fact, he finds he can even go and buy more eggs, if he is willing to pay double the price he is accustomed to paying. But the eggs really do not fix the missing cup of flour problem, unless someone can find a way to change eggs into flour very cheaply.
Basic Energy Types
To me, the most basic forms of energy resources are (1) coal and (2) oil. Both can be transported easily, if it is possible to extract them. Natural gas is very much harder to transport and store, so it is in many ways less useful. It can be made work in combination with oil and coal, because the use of coal and oil make it possible to build pipelines and make devices to provide compression to the gas. With coal and oil, it is also possible to make and maintain electric transmission lines to transport electricity made with natural gas.
I sometimes talk about renewable energy being a “fossil fuel extender,” because they hopefully make fossil fuels “go farther”. In some ways, I think natural gas is an extender for oil and coal. It is hard to imagine a society powered only by natural gas, because of the difficulties in using it, and the major changes required to use it exclusively.
In the earliest days, natural gas was simply a “waste product” of oil extraction. It was “flared” to get rid of it. In many parts of the world, natural gas is still flared, because the effort it takes to collect it, transport it, and make it into a useful product is still too high.
The hope that natural gas will be the world’s energy savior depends on our ability to make this former waste product into a product that will replace oil and coal. But unless we can put together an economy that needs and uses it, most of it probably will be left in the ground. The supposedly very high reserves will do us no good.
The Hypocrisy called American Justice
Off the keyboard of Phillip Farruggio
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This snippet from the main section of today’s USA Today in Brief section on page 2: Hearings Begin At Gitmo for 9/11 Terror Suspects….” The military judge did agree with the defense lawyers who said their clients shouldn’t have to attend the rest of the week-long hearing because it dredges up memories of treatment in CIA detention. The pre-trial hearing includes an effort by prosecutors to prevent (my italics) the accused from revealing details of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques.” Duh, that means torture folks! Take a guess who it was that instructed John Yoo and Jay Bybee to write the protocols to circumvent the Geneva Accords and embrace the use of enhanced interrogations AKA torture? You know the little guy with the glasses who sat there, during his confirmation hearing to become Bush Junior’s new Attorney General. It was none other than Alberto Gonzales, the one who Senator Joe Biden told “I like ya, and I’m probably going to vote for ya “(he did). Biden knew, well before those hearings even began, that Fredo Gonzales was directly linked to those protocols. Jay Bybee, for his immoral deeds, was promoted to a federal judgeship- why not? John Yoo was hired by that liberal UC Berkley for a professorship. The age of hypocrisy is center stage.
So, we have what they call enemy combatants remain detained at Gitmo, the place that Barack Obama promised us four years ago that he would shut down. Who are these people, many of whom have been incarcerated without their day in court for almost a decade? Are they terrorists by the textbook definition? Maybe handfuls are truly bad guys who want to kill Americans just for some fanatical religious cause. Then again, what we do know as fact is that after the (illegal) invasion of Afghanistan in 2002, the warlords AKA poppy producers, gobbled up and sold many Afghans to the Americans for very high bounties… I mean, like very high cash rewards. In many circumstances, the word of a warlord could send an Afghan off to Gitmo and our enhanced interrogations. Please watch Alex Gitney’s fine documentary Taxi to the Dark Side and see how things were working 10 years ago. We now know about what went on at Abu Ghraib prison, don’t we?
Last night’s second presidential debate AKA town hall meeting was one more round of hypocrisy at the highest levels. For the second time, and also with last weeks’ Biden vs. Ryan debate, little if nothing was even discussed about A) what in the hell are we even doing occupying Afghanistan and Iraq in the first place? ;B) when will all those innocent civilians we killed with our Shock and Awe and drone attacks influence the group conscience of our nation? C) the % of our tax dollars we spend for this military empire ( 56 cents of every federal tax dollar received in fiscal year 2011 ) ;D) why do we continue to maintain, at a costly expense, over 850 + bases in over 100 different countries? ; E) How drastic cuts in military spending could positively solve our state and city budget shortfalls?
Instead of real debate on what is truly bankrupting our economy and our soul as a nation, these 2 Party scam job debates only serve up hot button peripheral issues and lots of “He’s wrong! That‘s not true! “Four thousand young Americans are dead, along with hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan citizens, for what? Did you ever hear McCain and Obama in 2008 discuss the run-up to the invasions? Of course, the whole 9/11 Truth movement has been marginalized and actually cartoonized by a compliant media and 2 Party politicians. You see, nothing of truth even exists anymore in mainstream Amerika. Instead, we have what we are now living through during this season of the horserace. Stop looking at the horse’s head and focus on the other end, and watch what comes out.
PA FARRUGGIO
October 17th, 2012
Update: POTUS Debate #3
Sellouts: An Empire Love Story
They were supposed to have a foreign policy debate last night between Obama and Romney. What you saw is exactly what you have been getting from the embedded politicians and mainstream media for God only knows how many years! Not one time during the pre debate and post debate talking heads shows, or during the actual 90 minute claptrap, was there ever a mention of just how much the military spending is. No one dared to bring up the fact that over 50 cents of each of our federal tax dollars goes to fund our War Empire. Readers of this writer’s work have read this over and over, and by now are most likely numbed by it. Yet, to any out there who still believe in the fairy tale of Two Party Democracy, please take caution before you go and vote.
This writer has a theory that seems each day to be closer to the truth. That being that anyone we find in political elected office, OR having any position of influence in (so called) mainstream media journalism (columnists, hosts of shows or talking head regular guests) has got to be a total sellout! For if they were not so, they would never see their name in lights or on a printed page. Period! The proof in the pudding is exactly what transpires during this latest 2012 Presidential horserace. Never has there been the issue of our 800+ bases worldwide and the obscene spending on our military empire. Both the president and his ‘ game show host Mr. Brylcream ‘ opponent love to talk about the deficit and the economy etc. Yet, they refuse to deal with the fact that it is the obscene military spending on phony wars and occupations that have the rulers of this empire happy as can be. The more the politicians sidestep the truth of what really ails us, the more the money is pumped out of our pockets and into theirs. So, with these two sellout candidates and their respective talking head media supporters, we get column A) and column B). Romney and his gang want column A) which is more and more military spending, in excess of the record breaking $ 563 billion last year ( which was almost double what we spent 10 years earlier- record-breaking at the time ). Column B) is Mr. Obama and his gang proud to say that he expects the military spending to remain the same or perhaps a wee bit higher. Meanwhile, we have Mom and Pop businesses going under, layoffs, severe state and city budget cuts… you know the drill?
No mention last night of the perils that the Palestinians are facing under the Israeli boot. No, only how Israel is our best ally and friend. Ask any member of the massive Israeli peace movement and they would say to both candidates “With friends like that…” The president was so proud of what we did to Libya with our bombing campaign that killed more innocent civilians than it did the regime’s military. Ditto for what we did to the Iraqis under Bush and Cheney, and now our drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan under a Democratic president. Boy oh boy, the movers and shakers of this Military Industrial Empire are laughing all the way to their banks, the money they are all making out of this ****. Yet, the majority of those who actually will go and vote only see the issues that the empire controlled media want them to focus on. Shame on them! Guess what? When all the smoke clears on November 7th, the Fat Cats who run this empire could not give a rat’s ass who the suckers put in 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Most likely, they would rather see Obama re-elected so as to use him (as they have already) to ‘Keep the natives off the streets ‘when the next depression finally takes hold. To date, we have had only a mere foreshadowing of it… the rest is on the way.
PA Farruggio
October 23rd, 2012
{Philip A Farruggio is son and grandson of Brooklyn, NYC longshoremen. He is a free lance columnist (found on Information Clearing house, Dandelion Salad, Doomstead Diner, Activist Post, 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 }
Orwellian Nightmare or Technological Utopia
Off the keyboard of Anthony Cartalucci
Published on Land Destroyer on October 16th, 2012
Craig Venter discusses 3D DNA printers at Wired's Living by Number Health Conference in New York City. The technology, systems, and policies presented at the event are neither good nor evil - they are only what those who wield them make them out to be. Currently much of this technology is controlled by large corporations, institutions, and organizations. By getting better informed and involved in the development and use of this technology, we can ensure that this technology is used for the greater good of humanity, rather than leveraged against it for the benefit of a technocratic elite.
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Wired’s “Living by Numbers” Health Conference.October 16, 2012 - Wired Magazine has conducted a “Living by Numbers” health conference in New York City, drawing together experts and leaders involved in medicine, science, technology, and business to share their perspective on the progress and future of healthcare. The underlying theme of the “Living by Numbers” conference was the gathering and applying of information regarding our health to improve the prevention and treatment of injuries and sickness.
The implications of the conference were far reaching in both the profound positive impact the emerging technologies and systems presented could have, as well as the vast capacity for abuse that each possesses.The conference was sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, IBM, BASF, BodyMedia, iHealth, 2morrow Mobile, and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Speakers included Craig Venter of the J. Craig Venter Institute and Synthetic Genomics, Stephen Wolfram of Wolfram Research, Sue Siegel of GE, and retired US Army Brigadier General Rhonda Cornum.
The term “tracking” was prevalent throughout the talks. Several presenters revealed that data collected from Google and Facebook were regularly used in research, specifically for predicting trends almost instantaneously. Of course, in the context of these talks, such methods were presented as being purely beneficial in regards to spotting pandemics and improving healthcare efficiency.
Smart products including phones and home appliances were presented that could record data, be used for health monitoring, and even replace or augment existing medical devices. There were implantable sensors that could log data and monitor vital signs, and GE and Google executives talking about taking a more active, not to mention Orwellian and intrusive role in employees’ habits and lifestyles, and how technology and information-gathering could make such efforts more effective.
There were also talks involving technology such as 3D DNA printers, presented by Craig Venter, that if widely disseminated into the hands of an informed, technically complement medical community, could vastly improve healthcare and regenerative medicine, as well as strip the monopolies, and all the dangers associated with them, from large biotech firms like Monsanto, Bayer, and Cargill.
Coupled with the concept of “self-tracking” presented by Tim Ferriss, and increasingly cheaper and more capable medical equipment making it into the hands of better informed patients as mentioned by Eric Topol of the Scripps Research Institute, we see a possible future quite the opposite of anything Orwellian. But it is also a future large corporations are already arraying their resources against to prevent from coming into fruition.
Ultimately, the conference was about technology. Technology is a double edged sword. It can cut both ways, and how it is wielded depends mostly on the hands it is held with. Currently, this technology is in the hands of large corporations, institutions, and organizations. And while many of those involved in the development of these networks, technologies, and policies are well-intentioned, the danger exists that those at the very top, the same corporate-financier interests that fund policy think-tanks that engineer wars as well as economic and political manipulation on a global scale, have truly malevolent intentions.
This is a real problem. Perhaps the problem. Technology has reached a point where the very building blocks of what makes us human can be manipulated and controlled to such an extent, it can either liberate us from disease, injury, and even aging, or render us permanently and irrevocably inferior to those who control this technology. Likewise, the control and use of digital information can create either a tool of infinite benefit, or a vast, invasive, inescapable control grid. Coupled together, exists either a technological utopia, or an Orwellian nightmare, all depending on who controls the technology – a malevolent elite, or humanity as a whole.
The key to solving this problem is by simply getting informed and getting involved. The more informed, technically competent people that become involved in the development, use, and improvement of this technology, the more difficult it will be for any corporation or institution to monopolize and leverage the technology against others, ensuring that it is used for the collective benefit of humanity.
Technology, and more specifically biotechnology, is becoming increasingly accessible to the average person through online resources and community laboratories like New York City’s GenSpace and Boston’s BossLab. As technology in general continues to advance and costs continue to go down, the tools once used solely by large corporations, institutions, and organizations are now becoming available to local schools, community laboratories, and independent researchers and developers. While there are many fears of this technology getting into the hands of people intent on creating catastrophes, it must be remembered that the technology will also make it into the hands of many more people interested in defending against such catastrophes.
The choice between an Orwellian nightmare or a technological utopia is entirely up to us. We can choose to be perpetually paralyzed by political ploys, crass, superficial distractions, and shallow consumerist endeavors, or we can choose to assert our own collective will above that of the corporate-financier interests who have for so long dominated humanity and seek to dominate it to an ever greater degree. We can assert our will by becoming informed and involved in the very disciplines that build a modern civilization – engineering, design, and sciences of all kinds. If we can do this individually, even in the smallest way, taking even but a single step forward in the right direction, collectively we can begin replacing the existing paradigm in great strides.
Behavior of Complex Systems
Off the keyboard of Monsta666
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| Introduction from RE:
The Diner is happy to add Monsta666 as one of our Native Diner Authors. His contributions inside the Diner are detailed and insightful, and he often brings a different perspective to many threads pursued at the Diner Tables. In my last two articles, The Burning of the Great Library at Alexandria and Panarchy & the One-to-the-Many: The Final Countdown, I viewed the Collapse of Industrial Civilization from the perspective of recurring cyclical events, which occur on differing timescales in a Fractal manner.This of course is not the only way to look at this collapse, it also can be viewed from the perspective Complex Systems Theory, pioneered by Joseph Tainter, and applied recently to the collapse by David Korowicz. Monsta takes a concise look here at how these concepts are affecting the progress of Cascade Failure of systems throughout our society.The rest below from the keyboard of Monsta666. |
I do find that one of the big differences between the doomer lites and normal doomers comes from whether one grasps the normal behaviour of complex systems and consider factors such as efficiency and resiliency. The people who do place a higher importance on such issues tend to hold a more pessimistic outlook while those who do not value or consider such factors in any great depth tend to hold a more optimistic outlook for our world economy. The most notable example I can recall where a system thinker projected a detailed doomer scenario is that of David Korowicz with his report on Financial System Supply-Chain Cross-Contagion. For those unfamiliar with his work I would advise reading the 78 page .pdf file here. If this file is too long I would recommend reading the blog entry of Watching the Global Economic System by George Mobus as a suitable short summary. In either case both sources provide a good backdrop to what I will discuss later on this article.
At the moment our economic system has undergone a process spanning several centuries from a point of high resiliency and low efficiency to one that is highly efficient but carries significantly less resilience. This process of increasing efficiency and interconnections has resulted in greater profits as the resource and energy stocks are allocated in an increasingly more efficient manner. These increased profit margins that can come from greater efficiency arise because the amount of output per unit input declines meaning the costs of the inputs are lowered relative to the proceeds of output. This process of increased efficiency often comes at a cost of resiliency; as the means of production become leaner and carry less redundancy. To offer an example of this many businesses today operate with significantly lower stocks of inventories and much of this remaining inventory arrives on a Just-In-Time basis. This process reduces storage costs but means any unplanned event can cause the business to grind to a halt more quickly as there is less of a buffer to absorb these shocks.
This increased efficiency and declining resiliency is also further exacerbated by the increased amount of interconnections. This increase in the number of interconnections has also resulted in the economic system undergoing a process of consolidation where more and more factors of production have been concentrated into fewer but larger organisations. This consolidation process while offering some increased resiliency from local shocks has meant that the nodes have become less autonomous and more dependent on the overall system to meet its needs. Since there are fewer but larger players it means the whole system has become more vulnerable to wider systemic shocks. While smaller shocks can be more easily absorbed larger shocks have a greater potential of causing cascading failures in the overall system. This occurs because although smaller shocks can be absorbed more readily by a larger network if there is a shock sufficiently large to overwhelm one node the amount of flows/stocks that will get disrupted is likely to be sufficient to cause failures of other nodes. Such examples can be seen in large electrical distribution networks where if there is a failure higher up the chain where more electrical power is transmitted then a failure of this module is likely to cause failure in other nodes as all the excess load is offloaded to other nodes which are then more likely to become overloaded and fail as well.
Another important element to consider is that of risk. In a larger system the risks are never entirely eliminated but merely dispersed. In other words the costs of a disruption are no longer borne by one party but are diffused to many members of society. To offer an example of this phenomenon, before the advent of widespread trade a local farmer could only depend on the food they produced as well as that of his nearby neighbours. If there happened to be drought the farmer would absorb all of the costs from this disruption. With the advent of more widespread trading this risk has afforded the farmer greater resiliency but has made him more dependent on the overall system to provide his income and wellbeing as he depends on the incomes of other trading partners to sell his produce. He is no longer entirely self-sufficient and depends on distant markets to meet his income. However even with this arrangement the risk of disruption has not been eliminated; it has merely been diffused across more party members. As a result, if there is a disruption then this will be borne with rising food prices.
This diffusion of risk while acceptable or even desirable can also create an insidious effect of making it appear that risk has been eliminated when it has merely been diffused and displaced. This perception of no risk can lead market participants to act out in an overly aggressive or optimistic manner heightening the chances of systemic failures. This behaviour of underestimating risk was most famously seen just prior to the 2008 financial market crisis where various mortgages were bundled into mortgage backed securities. This process diffused the risk of mortgage defaults across many more participants but it did not eliminate the risk; it merely displaced it. The general perception however was the risks had been eliminated and the resulting over exuberant behaviour that came from this incorrect assumption almost resulted in the total failure of the financial system.
While the economic system that has developed is highly effective at allocating and expanding resource extraction efficiently it is less resilience and becomes less resilient year on year. This overall behaviour comes because the objective of the system is to expand and increase efficiencies (or profits) and since resilience is not an objective of the system devised it is always the factor that is sacrificed to promote its primary objectives. However as the resilience lowers then the set of suitable conditions required to maintain current system behaviour narrows and the range of parameters for it to achieve a dynamic equilibrium becomes more difficult to maintain.
Like all complex system, once under stress there will be various feedback mechanisms that will be placed on the overall system. At this moment the system is under some stress however the various negative feedback loops (stabilising loops) serve to maintain system integrity. These negative feedback loops can be seen everywhere for example the price of oil places a strain on the economic system. To compensate for this stress factor the system undergoes a process of demand destruction and allocates this critical resource in a more efficient manner that primarily serves to keep the core functions running. This reallocation of resources serves to maintain the system while it is under stress. Another analogy can be made when the human body is suffering from hypothermia. In this state the body will cut circulation from the peripheral regions such as the arms and legs to maintain a normal temperature at the core. These two negative feedback processes come from two different set of complex systems but they both achieve the same purpose of maintaining or preventing the death of the overall system. I am sure with some thought you could offer some other negative (stabilising) feedback loops.
However this behaviour of the two complex systems highlighted will result in similar outcomes if the factor causing the distress is not relieved in short order. In the case of the human body if circulation is not restored to the arms and legs then eventually the cells in those regions will slowly die and if no further action is taken the regions will develop gangrene and these infected regions will spread to the other regions (a contagion effect) where the whole body dies. A similar process will occur in the economic system where the peripheral regions such as the PIIGS or MENA countries suffer first. When those regions economies finally collapse their bad debts will pass toxic amounts of risk to the core economies and then those will eventually cease to operate thus a contagion effect serves to cause a series of cascading that brings the overall system down.
Also in all this, we need to remember there are positive feedback (self-reinforcing) feedback loops. In the case of the economy a positive feedback loop can be found in economies suffering from deflation where lower demand for products will mean more job losses which then results in more demand destruction and further job losses. Such feedback loops are often known as vicious circle when describing a negative cycle or virtuous cycle when describing something positive. These positive feedback mechanisms – if left unconstrained by negative feedback loops – can cause the system to radically change in short order. However at this moment of time it seems the various negative feedback loops are roughly as powerful as the positive feedback loops so the overall system seems to be in some kind of dynamic equilibrium. However in time it is quite likely that the force of positive feedback loops will become more powerful than the negative feedback loops so the parameters in the system will change and the stresses and risks will escalate.
As this happens the system will leave the island of stability and it will soon reach a tipping point i.e. the point when the systems response to a stress event is disproportionate to the stress itself. It is impossible to say when this tipping point will be reached but this point will come provided the stress factors are not removed or contained. When that happens it is likely we will see dramatic changes in behaviour (or collapse) in the overall system. Most system thinkers are aware of such points and even a recent IMF report on oil prices does highlight the fact there would be a tipping point in oil prices that can cause significant changes in the behaviour of various economies. In either case I would say this tipping point is something that is often neglected by doomer lites as they feel the system can carry on getting more and more stressed without the overall system suddenly undergoing drastic changes in behaviour. This lack of tipping point does not generally happen in complex systems or in ecology so I do not see any reason why the economic, political or social systems will fair any differently, they are complex systems after all.
Saying all that, one should not draw the conclusion that all complex systems are inherently unstable. Some complex systems are highly adaptable, resilient and can withstand large disturbances in the level of stocks and flows before being pushed out from its equilibrium range. Such examples of stable complex systems occur in many natural ecosystems which exhibit great stability despite their extreme complexity. What needs to be stressed is the fact that the current economic system man has devised is a complex system that is highly unstable because one of the prime objectives of this particular complex system is to increase efficiency and promote growth. This increased efficiency and accompanying growth often come at the expense of resilience and this lack of resilience is what makes the system unstable.
What needs to be remembered when making an assessment of how a system behaves and will operate is to consider what the primary objectives of a complex system are. Every system has a primary objective and this objective will be maintained at any cost, even to the detriment of other important factors. With humans the primary goals is to avoid death and reproduce. These objectives will be maintained at any cost even if it means the cost of a limb, local habitat or any other large cost. The cost of life may even be an acceptable cost if the first objective is reproduction. The same concepts described here can also be applied to our economic system. Since the primary objectives of our current economic system are efficiency and growth then redundancy and resiliency will be an anathema to our system as not only does redundancy means less efficiency (which translate to less profits) it also means each subsystem can operate more autonomously which is not good for the illuminati who wish to control everything by making its subjects more dependent on the system to provide its needs.
Nobel Hypocrisy Wins Again
Off the keyboard of Steve Lendman
Published on Steve Lendman’s Blog on October 12, 2012
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- three to four million Southeast Asian Vietnam War deaths;
- the bloody overthrow of Chile’s Salvador Allende; Augusto Pinochet’s reign of terror;
- support for some of the worst global despots;
- Indonesia’s Surharto was one; Kissinger backed his bloody West Papua takeover; he also encouraged his East Timor genocide;
- support for Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, its rise to power and reign of terror;
- backing of Pakistan’s overthrow of Bangladesh’s democratically elected government; a half million deaths followed;
- his 1974 National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200) advocated genocide; he called it forced world population control; he wanted worthless eaters removed; he recommended eliminating 500 million people by 2000 and millions more annually; and
- numerous other global crimes against humanity were committed during his tenure as Nixon and Ford’s National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. He served as administration Svengali.
Are you a Hobbit?
Off the keyboard of Jason Heppenstall
Published on 22 Billion Energy Slaves on October 13, 2012
Simon Dale's Hobbit style house in Wales
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I will begin this week’s post with a confession that few of you could have guessed from the limited information I reveal about myself in the global cyber commons aka The Matrix. Here are some clues: I grew up in the English Midlands, I’m of average height for a Brit (i.e. a dwarf by Scandinavian standards where I live), I have a fondness for real ale and my idea of pure unsurpassed bliss is sitting beside an open fire, smoking a pipe and listening to the slow monotonous tung of a grandfather clock.
Yes, that’s right; it’s something I have suspected for a while – I am a hobbit.
As if further proof were needed, I can rummage in my drawers and find scraps of paper with crude drawings of earth built ‘hobbit holes’ in the style of that made by Simon Dale (see main image), and what’s more, my toes are hairier than the average. I’m pluckier than the average person could guess, and although I have never outwitted a dragon, I did, alas, have a promising career as a burglar in my younger days (more on my reckless past in a future post).
But this post is not about me and my hairy toes – this post is about EVIL.
Speaking of toes, I once had a tattoo made in Guatemala by a man from Los Angeles who told me he had tattooed the name of Sean Penn’s dead dog onto his big toe (i.e. Sean Penn’s big toe, not his own). The fact that I just revealed that Sean Penn has his dead dog’s name inked onto his big toe makes me a celebrity news breaker and I fully expect to quadruple the visitor count to 22BillionEnergySlaves this week as a result, given that Sean Penn’s web presence is double that of all news relating to peak oil – I hope one or two of those visitors will stay.
Anyway, back to the plot. Draw a deep breath, because I’ve been contemplating evil all week, and the various forms it can take. But what is evil? I’m not sure. I’d define it as an action that causes gross suffering to sentient beings and/or wanton destruction of part of the biosphere for psychological satisfaction.
Here are my conclusions about evil if you are in a rush and don’t have time/can’t be bothered to read the rest of the post: evil does exist, and mostly it is dressed up as good. What’s more, technology can act as a catalyst of evil.
I realize that evil is a strong word. I believed in evil as a child – you know the kind of evil I mean – the kind personified by the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the kid-munching giants in the BFG. Then, as I got older, I started to think that evil didn’t really exist and it was more a case of stupidity, or senselessness, on the part of the people I had previously labelled evil. This belief was bolstered by a flirtation with Buddhism, and even the Dalai Lama has said something to the effect that people are not ‘evil’ they are just making mistakes that will negatively affect their karma.
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| The Childcatcher: probably quite evil in a conventional way |
Well, whatever. Recently I’ve come around again to thinking that evil does exist, and we’re liberally marinated in the stuff. What’s more, there are three types of evil people – or people who employ evil means, more precisely. The most common-garden recognisable variety evil is committed by psychopaths. You know the type; they will capture you, lock you in a box and torture you for days before ending your life in a most unpleasant manner and then walk around wearing your genitals for kicks. Whether these people are simply insane or not, I don’t really care – evil is a good enough label for me.
The second type of evil doer is of the same breed as the above, but more refined and clever. Not wishing to get blood on their own hands these people rise to positions of power and then channel their evil ways through the power they have attained. Whether they are the president of a company or the president of a nation doesn’t really matter, they get their kicks from, as George Orwell put it, stamping on a human face forever.
Then there’s the third kind of evil. This is a far less visible type, but by sheer biomass is probably the weightiest of them all. The evil I talk of is evil dressed up as good. Everyone’s at it, it seems. From the countries who think their shit don’t stink because they have ‘progressive policies’ for their citizens (while quietly exploiting the Third World for their own benefit), to the various NGOs who act as virus carriers of ideology to the far corners of the globe, and rabid corporate backed scientists who are pushing all manner of destructive technologies into the biosphere in the name of humanitarianism.
We’re all complicit in this last scam. Indeed, living in the ‘developed’ world, it is all but impossible to not contribute in some way to the systems that enslave our fellow men and creatures. This applies to some more than others, of course, but I type these words on a laptop that was in all probability assembled by wage slaves (in the name of giving someone a job), manufactured and transported half way across the world by climate-damaging oil (in the name of economic growth), produced in a country where the environmental costs of its manufacture were borne by the ecosystem and the health of the human population (in the name of free trade), sold to me by some corporation who will probably be contributing money to whoever wins the next election in the US in order to keep their profitable racket going (in the name of free speech and democracy) and, finally, uploaded onto a blogging platform that is owned by a company which plans to turn the human race into cyborgs (see late week’s post).
What’s a blogger to do? Throw the computer into the garbage and retreat to a cave in the Himalayas? Chuck myself onto the nearest compost heap and await the end? Start watching the X Factor and try to become ‘adjusted’?
J.R.R Tolkien knew what evil was. His time in the Somme, during the First World War, showed him the depths that humans could plunge to. Would the German machine gunners who gunned down so many young men have considered themselves evil? I don’t think so.
Tolkien would never be drawn on the meaning of the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings. Nevertheless, we can probably assume it was to do with nuclear weapons. Destructive technology was Tolkien’s bugbear. In one quote he hinted at the meaning, seemingly saying that once some kind of destructive power had been brought into being it began to live a life of its own:
“I should say that it was a mythical way of representing the truth that potency (or perhaps potentiality) if it is to be exercised, and produce results, has to be externalized and so as it were passes, to a greater or lesser degree, out of one’s direct control.”
Which, to me, is the theme of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien drew on Scandinavian and Anglo Saxon mythology for his inspiration. He was all too aware that our native mythology had been utterly supplanted by Christianity, and what remained of it in Wales and Scotland, was mostly Celtic in origin. Instead, he was driven by a desire to create an English mythology – even if it was ‘made up’ – never anticipating the success he would encounter in such an endeavour.
As I mentioned above, I grew up in ‘Tolkien country’. My childhood was spent close to Oxford, where Tolkien lived and worked as a professor of linguistics at the university – I was probably lying in my cot, aged two, when he died. I hadn’t even had a chance to read The Hobbit at that point.
Turning back the clock, when young John lived in Warwickshire it was a very rural (and it still is, to a degree) but the hamlet he lived in, Sarehole Mill, near Hall Green, was some miles from the encroaching spread of Birmingham; England’s second city and the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. I spent most of my teenage years in this area, which is now well and truly part of the spread of the city and not a very pleasant place to be unless you are a connoisseur of suburban blight (sorry, Hall Greenians – okay, to be fair, it still has its nice parts). I lived for a year very close to Sarehole Mill, which is now embedded in a run-down urban zone where you are as likely to hear Urdu spoken as you are English. It’s almost impossible today to recognise this as a place that inspired Tolkien to invent the fictional Shire, surrounded as it is by busy dual-carriageways, Indian takeaways and dodgy car repair shops.
Here’s a picture of the pub where Tolkien used to chat to his friend C.S.Lewis (of Narnia fame) called the Eagle and Child (known by locals as the Bird and Baby).
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| The Eagle and Child in Oxford, where Tolkien would meet up with fellow writers |
But the surrounding countryside, now some miles away, remains recognisably ‘Shire-esque’, and you can still visit the places where he was inspired to write about the Barrow Mounds and various other places that crop up in his books. There’s even a farm called Bag End and a road called Hobbs Moat Road. If you’ve ever wondered why the unusual chapter ‘The Scouring of the Shire’, in which various low-down characters are driven from the realm, was appended to the end of LOTR, then it’s my guess that it was Tolkien’s cathartic way of dealing with the destruction of his beloved rural idyll by way of fantasy.
So, back to evil. When I see articles like this one, about a new iPad for babies (sorry, it’s in Danish), I can’t help thinking that the kind of evil we should surely be worried about is the kind that we all-too-often take for granted as ‘normality’. How exactly did the marketers of this particular product manage to convince themselves they were adding to the sum total of human welfare? Or the development agencies who consider that they are doing Amazonian tribes a favour by rounding them up and building them somewhere to live that looks like this (but we must cut infant mortality!):
If a visiting alien economist (and I pray there are none ‘out there’) were to analyse our setup, he/she/it would quickly deduce that the ‘enlightened’ first world is a giant face-sucking vampire squid, to borrow a phrase, on the rest of the planet – just by looking at trade deals alone. For every one of us with our iPods and designer kettles and reality TV programmes, there are 10 people on the breadline packed like peas in a pod into a single room, heating dirty water from a beaten up kettle over some burning sticks and living with the reality of not having a TV or any other form of consumer electronics device. What kind of way is that to run a planet?
Anyway, my personal jury’s still out on whether there are truly ‘evil’ forces out there, or whether we are just suckers for unleashing forces that could be considered evil and setting up systems that promote evil. I suppose I should mention Rudolph Steiner, who had some pretty deep thoughts on this subject. He didn’t see the world in black and white terms, and for that we can be thankful. Instead, it is my understanding, he considered the whole progressive materialist fallacy as evil – or at least bad – through and through, with that evil coming in two different flavours which, together, can balance one another out.
These two concepts he named Luciferic and Ahrimanic, with the former being concerned mainly with spirit and cosmology and the latter being concerned with materialism, science and ‘hard facts’. Thus, we are living in Ahrimanic times, by his reckoning, with evil being channelled or justified in that way. There’s an awful lot more to it than that and it’s well worth reading up on his ideas.
So, getting back to hobbits, who are resolutely not evil because they are earthy creatures and not concerned with metaphysics or playing psychic power games, we can perhaps see that what this world needs right now is more hobbits and less evil wizards (marketers, politicians, thaumaturgic manipulators), orcs (mindless consumers, imperial soldiers) and gollums (tortured addicted souls).
Are you a hobbit? You don’t have to look like one. If you hunger for peace and quiet and the chance to feel the moist earth between your toes, to have a small place to call home where it is safe to raise a healthy family and grow a vegetable patch or an orchard, and if the word ‘permaculture’ is more attractive to you than ‘monoculture’ then chances are you have hobbit blood flowing through your veins. And of course, it’s not easy being a hobbit in a world full of orcs and dragons, but we can take heart that we are a resourceful and resilient breed, often at our best during the most testing of times (and often quite lazy at all other times).
So if you are a hobbit reading this then I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve, so please carry on reading and bear the following in mind:
Panarchy & The One to The Many-The Final Countdown
Off the keyboard of RE
Discuss this article at the Geopolitics Table inside the Diner
Although Seccesionary Movements still appear to be a bit far off into the future here in the FSofA, this aspect of the Collapse has already hit over in Eurotrashland, most notably right now in Spain where the Catalans are making a lot of noise about splitting off from the Castillian control of Spain to form their own “new” country. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the UK Telegraph has been covering the talk of Catalonia Secession in quite some detail lately:
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.
This isn’t the only place in Europe where talk of a breakup of a country into component parts is being discussed though. There is now talk of Secession in Scotland, one of the main constituents of the “United Kingdom”, which includes Great Britain, Wales and Ireland as well as Scotland. From Bill Jamieson on The Scotsman:
Many big questions remain unanswered ahead of the signing of an accord on the referendum, writes Bill Jamieson
What is the objective of independence? As David Cameron and Alex Salmond are set to sign an accord on the referendum at St Andrew’s House next week – a formal signing ceremony that the First Minister wishes to take place in front of the world’s press and television cameras – it may be useful for the SNP annual conference next week to clarify the benefits it believes will flow from a Scottish secession from the Union.
In few other countries has the aspiration for independence been so closely focused on the economic pros and cons of self-government. Many supporters may feel this is second-order detail. But there is a sizeable proportion of Scottish voters who are not yet decided and for whom economic considerations will be critical to their decision.
Argument has already been engaged on projections of North Sea oil revenues, public spending, borrowing and tax. Important as these are now set to become, debate here is in danger of missing a key pillar of the SNP case. This is that independence cannot be judged on the basis of linear statistical projections of income and expenditure alone. For independence will, of itself, help release our entrepreneurial energies: it will bring about a cultural change, releasing our animal spirits. It will, in short, be transformative of our economic performance.
Besides these internal Secessions in the making of course is the big one we all have been hearing about for quite ome time, the breakup of the Eurozone itself, administered out of the European Parliament in Brussels. It reamins unclear who will be the first to leave the EZ, Greece or one of the other PIIGS countries who are failing miserably under the “Euro Straight Jacket” as Nigel Farage refers to it, or the more “successful” Northern European countries like Germany and Finland who are getting a bit tired of Bailing Out their impoverished cousins to the South.
What does seem certain of course is that the European Union is well into Collapse phase now, and is unlikely to survive in current form much more than another year or two, if that.
Preceeding both of these breakups by quite a bit also, we have the collapse of the Soviet Union after the fall of the Berlin Wall into its many component Nation-States like Russia, Ukraine, Belarus etc.
Essentially, this represents a One-to-the-Many fracturing of Goobermint Structures which have been consolidating since Agriculture began around 10,000 years ago. it is an absolute REVERSAL of a trend that has been in place for a very long time, though it accelerated tremendously with the onset of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th Century.
What does this new trend MEAN for the nature of our societies as we move forward here further into a low energy footprint society?
Going back to my earliest writings on the Peak Oil Forum, one of the first epiphanies I had after witnessing the Collapse of Bear Stearns was that the Banking System which functions as the “Glue” holding this society together was on the road to a One-to-Many fracture. Not only Banks would be affected, but the Nation-States themselves, which really are just Big Banks themselves. At one time they were Bigger Banks than the TBTF Banks currently running Global Economic systems, but in the years since the Industrial Revolution these large Banking Houses have become Supra-National entities, larger than the Nation-States.
Since the collapse appears to progress upward from the smallest and weakest Financial Entities to the Largest ones, it seems likely that the progress here will see collapse of the various Nation-States before the TBTF banks, but they then also will fracture in One-to-the-Many devolution.
Where this really comes into play is in the Future Picture many people hold as true, a Brave New World/1984 picture of One World Goobermint, with a Fascist Boot Stamping on the Face of Humanity FOREVER.
The picture Rod Serling paints in Obsolete is one we are ALREADY immersed in, it is not a projected FUTURE anymore. However, just as we have now Past Peak Oil, in all likelihood we are reaching the Peak of Globalism and the massive and overarching Nation States and Transnational Corporations that have turned the world into a simalcrum (thank you Charles Hugh Smith 
) of the Brave New World/1984 paradigm.
The One World Order isn’t becoming MORE likely now, it is rapidly becoming LESS likely as an ultimate outcome here. All evidence points to an ONGOING and ACCELLERATING collapse of the main Conduits used for Global Control, centered around the collapsing Energy Supply used to power these things and the collapsing Monetary System used to organize it all up.
This is not simply borne out by the observation of the system decay, there is plenty of good THEORY as well from the world of Biological and Ecological systems to refer to as well, pioneered mainly by C.S “Buzz” Holling & Lance Gunderson in their work identifying 4 Phases in the Collapse and Reconstruction of Ecosystems.
a four-phase adaptive cycle. Holling and Gunderson (2002:32) suggest that most, although not all, such systems follow a four-phase cycle of (1) “exploitation” (r); (2) “conservation” (K); (3) “release” (Ω) or “creative destruction,” a term derived from Schumpeter (1943); and (4) “reorganization” (α). The first two stem from standard ecological theory, in which an ecosystem’s r phase is dominated by colonizing species tolerant of environmental variation and the K phase, by species adapted to modulate such variation. However, Holling and Gunderson (2002) say that “ …two additional functions are needed.” The corresponding phases, especially Ω, are typically much briefer: in a forest, Ω might be a fire or insect outbreak that frees nutrients from biomass, whereas the α phase involves soil processes limiting nutrient loss. The adaptive cycle involves changes in three main variables: resilience; potential in the form of accumulated resources in biomass or in physical, human, and social capital; and connectedness, meaning the tightness of coupling among the controlling variables that determine the system’s ability to modulate external variability. In the r phase, potential and connectedness are low but resilience is high; in K, resilience decreases while the other values increase. Eventually, some internal or external event triggers the Ω phase, in which potential crashes; finally, in α, resilience and potential grow, connectedness falls, unpredictability peaks, and new system entrants can establish themselves. Holling and Gunderson (2002) stress that the adaptive cycle is a metaphor that can be used to generate specific hypotheses; exact interpretations of resilience, potential, and connectedness are system dependent.
The beauty of the Holling-Gunderson model of Panarchy is that it applies across the board to just about all ecosystems, from Trees and Forests to Insects to Mammalian life forms. It also has direct applications in Economics as well. Much of the work done on this stuff was done back in the 1970s, but some of it goes back as far as the 1940s.
In a direct parallel to this work, you have the “4th Turning” Generational theory of Strauss & Howe, which identifies 4 major Eras that modern Homo Sapiens passes through on roughly and 80 year cycle. Each of these eras has a direct parallel in the cycles desribed by Holling & Gunderson.
What is fundamentally different between these models is the Timeline issue, the Holling/Gunderson model is a time independent model which can work on many different timescales, where as the Strauss & Howe model is fixated on the 80 year timeline of modern history.
If all you beleive is at work here is the Fourth Turning concepts, then given 10-20 years or so we should work through the collapse phase and begin the rebuilding for another Generation Cycle.
What really seems to be at work though is a much longer cycle for Homo Sapiens, that goes back roughly 10,000 years to the beginnings of Agriculture. We worked through the Exploitation and Conservation phases of this, with one final Blowout Free for All exploitaiton of Fossil fuels to drive Industrialization in the final era of this. We no longer have sufficient resources to exploit for a rebuild phase, and the vast expansion of Human Biomass that it enabled has also depleted the Ag resource base we used to get to the point we could exploit the fossil fuels resources.
As it appears to me, we are not just on the cusp of a Fourth Turning, but a Release Phase in the Holling/Gunderson model that will undermine all the structures built to organize Civilization since the beginnings of Agriculture.
In the near term, the most obvious collapse is coming inside the Monetary System, which developed in tandem with Agriculture. I first became aware of this watching the collapse of Bear Stearns back in 2007, followed rather quickly by the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. It was at this time I realized that the Monetary System was undergoing a Cascade Failure event, and that in succession it would take down ever larger Banks and Financial Organizations, including of course Nation-States, which until just recently were the Biggest Banks of all. They have since been superceded in this role by a few Supra-National TBTF Banking institutions however.
So it was not a big jump for me in 2008 to predict that it would lead to the collapse of Nation States and a One-to-Many breakup, which we have been witnessing for a while in MENA, now also apparent in Spain and the United Kingdom. In fact this began quite a bit earlier with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but since the USSR was not in direct linkage to the Capitalist system run through the BIS, it’s collapse did not directly begin the Cascade Failure effect we see in evidence now.
The monetary system we use developed in the Exploitaition phase of growth described by Holling & Gunderson, and through the Conservation phase has only been maintained through numerical legerdermain, which only works for a while. So though the general population and Civilization experienced near constant growth, only briefly plateauing during the Middle Ages, the associated monetary system has suffered repeated failures during this period, in fact on just about precisely the timeline of Strauss & Howe’s 4th Turnings. In fact I made the case to Jim Quinn (a big fan of Strauss & Howe’s theories) while I was blogging with him on the Burning Platform that the 4 Turnings were merely the outcome of the average lifespan of a monetary system with an average interest rate in the 2-3% range. Jim never bought that idea completely, but it was one of the few we didn’t completely go ballistic on each other on. LOL.
As we look at the outcomes already extant here of the progress of the Monetary System collapse, it is clear that it is working its way inward from Peripheral Economies to the Core Economies. Also clear is that some of the TBTF Banks are actually BIGGER than Nation-States now and may last longer than the N-S they are chartered in, though legally it is hard to imagine how that can occur.
If you consider that it has taken about 4 years from the collapse of Bear Stearns to make it to collapsing the Spanish N-S and presenting the real possibility of Catalan Secession, on a linear scale another 4 years before we have similar effects here in the FSofA is reasonable, though it could go a good deal faster than that since Cascades can turn into Avalanches at certain Tipping Points. Such a tipping point in the case of the Monetary System would be the complete collapse of a Major Currency, in this case the Euro. The Dollar is likely to get a BRIEF bounce from a Euro collapse, but the instability that would create would be so vast it is likely the Dollar itself collapses shortly thereafter.
Money as it exists today is an artifact of the Growth phase of Civilization, and cannot function without that growth. When you also consider that Money is the “Glue” that holds this Civilization together, it is difficult to conclude otherwise that when the Monetary system collapse, the Civilization we know goes with it. “Money Makes the World Go-Round” the saying goes, and so when the money STOPS working, the World as We Know It STOPS going round also. TEOTWAWKI.
Making prognostications about how we will proceed in the aftermath of such a collapse are exercises in extreme speculation, since such a collapse has never been recorded in Human History. The Collapse of the Tower of Babel in the Mesopotamian Era and the Collapse of the Roman Empire offer only a glimpse into what might occur here, and of course the outcome of those collapses was none too good either. If you take some passages in Revelation as being representative of how the collapse went down in Babylon, you get none too pretty a picture from that:
Revelation 18
King James Version (KJV)
18 And after these things I saw another angel come down from heaven, having great power; and the earth was lightened with his glory.
2 And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.
3 For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies.
4 And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.
5 For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities.
6 Reward her even as she rewarded you, and double unto her double according to her works: in the cup which she hath filled fill to her double.
7 How much she hath glorified herself, and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her: for she saith in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow.
8 Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire: for strong is the Lord God who judgeth her.
9 And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning,
10 Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come.
11 And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no man buyeth their merchandise any more:
12 The merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet, and all thyine wood, and all manner vessels of ivory, and all manner vessels of most precious wood, and of brass, and iron, and marble,
13 And cinnamon, and odours, and ointments, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men.
14 And the fruits that thy soul lusted after are departed from thee, and all things which were dainty and goodly are departed from thee, and thou shalt find them no more at all.
15 The merchants of these things, which were made rich by her, shall stand afar off for the fear of her torment, weeping and wailing,
16 And saying, Alas, alas that great city, that was clothed in fine linen, and purple, and scarlet, and decked with gold, and precious stones, and pearls!
17 For in one hour so great riches is come to nought. And every shipmaster, and all the company in ships, and sailors, and as many as trade by sea, stood afar off,
18 And cried when they saw the smoke of her burning, saying, What city is like unto this great city!
19 And they cast dust on their heads, and cried, weeping and wailing, saying, Alas, alas that great city, wherein were made rich all that had ships in the sea by reason of her costliness! for in one hour is she made desolate.
20 Rejoice over her, thou heaven, and ye holy apostles and prophets; for God hath avenged you on her.
21 And a mighty angel took up a stone like a great millstone, and cast it into the sea, saying, Thus with violence shall that great city Babylon be thrown down, and shall be found no more at all.
22 And the voice of harpers, and musicians, and of pipers, and trumpeters, shall be heard no more at all in thee; and no craftsman, of whatsoever craft he be, shall be found any more in thee; and the sound of a millstone shall be heard no more at all in thee;
23 And the light of a candle shall shine no more at all in thee; and the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride shall be heard no more at all in thee: for thy merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived.
24 And in her was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth.
This of course does not bode well for the Gold & Silver Bugs out there, since apparently the PMs held no more value than any of the other Goods being traded in the marketplace of Babylon, along with the Souls of Men.
Despite that though, in the aftermath of this collapse, the type of Ag society it represented did re-emerge and grow again with the expansion of the Roman Empire until its collapse, and then in the aftermath of that re-emerged in a Feudal Society, eventually culminating in Capitalism and Industrialization, courtesy of the discoveries in Science and Mathematics made during the Enlightenment.
In neither the case of Babylon or Rome had the population of Homo Sapiens grown to 7 Billion Human Souls. In neither case had Nuclear Weapons or Nuclear Power Plants with vast quantities of poisonous Spent Fuel ponds been created. In neither case was the Planet experiencing dramatic Climate and Geotectonic shifting altering the very environment we all live under in ways which cannot be absolutely predicted, but which certainly show trend lines that are none to good no matter how you measure them or what you believe the underlying causes to be. All of these factors conspire to make the impending collapse far WORSE than those experienced by Babylon and Rome.
When you observe all these factors in synergy, it becomes quite difficult to offer much HOPE for Humanity, or even for most living organisms above the level of the Tardigrades, and some like Guy McPherson make the case that this is an Extinction Level Event on the order of the Permian Extinction 252 Million Years Ago. This may be so, but even if true will not occur Overnight here.
The questions of how to deal with such a massive upheaval on the Indidvidual level are the questions we seek to deal with here in the Doomstead Diner. If it truly does turn into an ELE, in the end we all will go to the Great Beyond, but who wants to be the FIRST to DIE? if you value Life for yourself and your children, you seek to find a way to SURVIVE the great conflagrations to come. Are there ANY foolproof solutions to this problem? None yet have turned up at the Diner Tables, but some Solutions presented are better than others and becoming aware of issues that Transcend physical survival into the the world of Psychological and Spiritual preparation also serve as endless fodder for the Diners to chew on.
The Doomstead Diner is not an easy place to take a meal, ever, but on these pages you will find a level of Truth you can find nowhere else on the Net. At least no place to my knowledge anyhow. Join us here as we prepare ourselves for the Final Countdown.
RE
On the Path Toward Living Wild
Off the keyboard of Peter Michael Bauer
Published on Urban Scout on October 10, 2012
The 2012 PosseThoughts on Lynx Vilden’s Stone Age Immersion Program
Since I dropped out of high school in 1998 and dedicated my life to returning to a more indigenous lifestyle, to rewilding, I spend my time divided between working odd jobs, reading, writing, learning, teaching, community organizing and wild-crafting. Early on I realized that primitive technology is a bi-product of a sustainable culture, but a sustainable culture is not the by-product of primitive technology; primitive skills are the superficial layer of indigenous people. I prefer the cultural, social, mental and permacultural aspects of rewilding because they are more foundational to creating culture. This is not to say that there are not important aspects of learning primitive technology that can aid in the creation of a sustainable culture. The superficial layer is still an important layer of culture. In order to fully understand this, I decided to dedicate the summer of 2012 to focusing purely on the crafting of primitive technology.
One of the most inspiring people teaching these crafts is Lynx Vilden and her school the Living Wild School. I have known about her for years and always wanted to attend her program. I signed up for her summer immersion program, a three month long program that culminates with living in the wilds for the final month, with only “stone age” gear; no metal, no plastic. I had an amazing and challenging time and I learned a great deal. These are my thoughts about my experience.
This is a fantastic program for gaining proficiency in primitive skills. Even before the classes started, I was already gaining proficiency in skills. The list of required items to bring this year made it clear that this was not a class for beginners. I had to show up with a minimum of 6 large brain-tanned deer skins. While I had tanned a couple deer skins before, I did not have proficiency. I spent about two months of preparation working on all the things that I needed to bring with me. Each week of the program had a different theme: buckskin clothes, containers, felted blankets, fishing kits, etc. Every day we would get up and begin working on crafts together or on our own when we needed space. After weeks of working on projects and crafting with our hands we became much more proficient in crafting skills.
Eating out of my clay pot. Delicious!
Practical application of primitive technology is what makes the Living Wild School unique. Learning how to craft primitive technology is only half the experience: you must learn to use the crafts in practical ways. Lynx Vilden is doing something that not many others in this country are doing: teaching and experimenting with using primitive technology on a day to day basis, deep in the woods. We learned nuances of using primitive tools that you could only learn through real world application. Things like how to make arrows for target practice, how to lift a clay pot from the coals, how to fix rawhide sandals with a bone awl under the moonlight, and how to adjust a tumpline on a pack basket. One morning after a cold night I spent the day stitching up my wool blanket to create a draft-free sleeping bag. Another day I stitched ties onto my fur hat to keep it from falling off during the night. Everyday we would spend a little time tweaking our tools to better match our needs and the demands of the environment. Crafting primitive skills is fun and great, but gaining experience in real life application completes the knowledge base. In my mind, this is the most important aspect of what Lynx teaches.
Living in close quarters with others who are enthusiastic about and experienced with primitive technology felt priceless. I consider myself an out-going recluse. I like social engagement, but often feel too much anxiety to leave the house. Meeting new people, putting myself in someone else’s program, these are things I rarely do. It was worth it. I made a lot of friends, and even when there was drama it almost felt like it was created just to change up the monotony of our lives. Having people to share knowledge with, to experiment and learn with, helped to maximize my goal of proficiency. This is the amazing power of collective knowledge and experience; you can learn a lot more from a group than from a single person. This bridged the gap between classes when Lynx was off taking care of other business.
Living outdoors for the summer changed me. There were many things that I learned that were not directly related to crafting primitive skills, but from making a transition from living on the grid, to living off the grid. For the first two and a half months we were camped in the woods. Meals were cooked over fires, food was kept cool in holes that we dug in the ground, we hauled water from the spring and from the faucet across a large meadow. This was challenging for me, particularly because of my diet and bowel problems. At first I wanted to leave, feeling very stressed from not having a system and routines that kept my body comfortable and my IBS symptoms in check. By the middle of the summer I felt like I was flying. I never wanted to live indoors or cook on a regular stove again. There was no revelation, no powerful transformation. This change was gradual, as my comforts expanded and routines strengthened and became easier. It also didn’t turn my into a fundamentalist about it. I really love living outdoors, but I’m not a missionary now. It just feels good and I’m going to figure out how I can continue to live in a similar way here at my home.
On the trail to paradise.In reality, we weren’t living wild. We were simply camping, with modern-made primitive tools. There wasn’t much that separated us from other mountain back-packers other than our clothes and tools. Our stone age human ancestors lived sustainably on the planet for hundreds of thousands of years, tending the wild through regenerative methods of food production. Their myths, culture and traditions passed on this knowledge and kept the land and people healthy and happy. This is what “living wild” looks like to me: people living in cooperative groups, managing the land in a regenerative manner. We did not learn cooperative group dynamics. We did not learn regenerative land management. Sure, we were hunting and gathering, but not like hunter-gatherers. This was my one caveat with the program: looking wild is not the same thing as living wild.
Looking wild has deeply subconscious benefits to rewilding. There is a reason people say “Appearances are everything.” In a recent study, volunteer participants were asked to take a test. Half of them wore white coats that they were told was a doctor’s jacket, while the other half wore white coats they were told was a painter’s jacket. The results showed that people, when wearing the doctor’s lab coat, scored higher on the tests than those wearing the painter’s coat. These were, in reality, the same coat. Their perception of themselves changed depending on what they were wearing, and how those clothes are perceived. Image is perception and perception carries the ability to alter how you think. People often act as though “superficial” things like a persons image do not effect us. In reality, it does and on a very deep level.
What Lynx has done with her programs is create inspirational imagery of white people–who have no real life record of indigenous imagery–looking indigenous, without stealing from native cultures. Beyond what Lynx’s program does for creating proficiency in her students, the imagery she creates does an amazing job of giving us back a modern, visual, indigenous identity. Lynx is an artist and her students become her models. The images strike a cord deep in people, of ancestral remembrance. They seem to say, “It is possible for us to reclaim this identity.” The photographs of the programs she runs have much more reach than the limits of her class size; viewers on her website can pour over the iconic images that sit on every page. Everyone I know who has gone to her website has felt a spark of inspiration. The dream for many, becomes actualized in these images. These images are altering the way we think about ourselves and about our indigenousity. This is huge. These benefits need to be studied and examined in depth.
My few criticisms come with an expiration date. As the rewilding movement continues to grow, it is absorbing the primitive skills community. Primitive skills are becoming a gateway to rewilding. As this happens, the principles of indigenous land management and social organization models are becoming more foundational to understanding and practicing primitive skills. As Lynx’s program grows and changes, these principles with undoubtably become rooted in the experience. The goal, after all, is living wild and living wild can only be accomplished through adapting traditions of tending the wild.
More than a teacher, a leader, or a guide, Lynx is a catalyst. Lynx is pushing the edge of primitive skills further towards rewilding, by making it about actually using the technology to live. Through the people she teaches, inspires and brings together, through re-creating indigenous identity, she plays a major role in the rewilding renaissance and I am glad to have met her and got to know her over the summer. I look forward to seeing her continue to give people the experience that I had this summer, and to watch how the larger community benefits and grows together.
I highly recommend this program. Check it out here: www.lynxvilden.com
Weekly Steve Lendman-10/11/2012
Off the keyboard of Steve Lendman
Published on the Steve Lendman Blog
Discuss these articles at the Epicurean Delights Smorgasboar inside the Diner
War or No War on Iran
by Stephen Lendman
In Shakespearean terms, indeed that’s the question. Longstanding regime change plans are known. Means to achieve them have been ongoing for years.
A previous article put it this way:
Red lines, timelines, deadlines, sanctions, sabotage, subversion, cyber attacks, assassinations, saber rattling, falsified IAEA hype, ad nauseam warmongering, Netanyahu/Barak bluster, spurious accusations, manipulated to fail P5+1 talks, and inflammatory headlines up the stakes for war.
Washington also uses color revolutions. Some work. Others don’t. Iran’s so-called “green” one was made in America.
After Iran’s June 12, 2009 election, days of street protests and clashes with security forces followed. Washington stirred the pot and caused them. They replicated previous efforts elsewhere. Regime change is the common thread.
Spurious Western media reports claimed electoral fraud. A new vote was demanded. Events replicated Georgia’s “rose revolution” and Ukraine’s “orange” one. Both worked.
The Iranian scheme failed. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won fair and square. He became the Islamic Republic of Iran’s sixth and current president. What Iranian voters chose, Washington wasn’t able to put asunder. It hasn’t stopped trying.
One scheme follows others. Iran’s so-called nuclear/existential threat makes headlines. They repeat ad nauseam. The power of repetition gets most people to believe them.
Lincoln said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time….” Too many people are always fooled on issues mattering most.
What’s more important than war and peace. Public ignorance lets America get away with murder. It happens repeatedly against one targeted country after another.
Will Washington attack Iran? Will it be done jointly with Israel? More on that below. The Islamic Republic poses no threat. It hasn’t attacked another country in two or three centuries. It threatens none now. It’s nuclear program is peaceful.
Netanyahu is menacing. He’s toxic, belligerent and dangerous. He’s a world class thug. He’s Israel’s worst ever leader. He threatens Jews as well as Muslims.
Most Israelis are fooled. They may, in fact, reelect him. On October 9, he announced early elections. He said coalition partners can’t agree on budget priorities. Scheduled fall 2013 elections now shift to early next year.
Iran will be issue one. On October 10, Haaretz headlined “Nuclear Iran will star in Netanyahu’s bid for re-election, not Israel’s economy,” saying:
Fear trumps human need. “Netanyahu will highlight the approaching nuclear danger and portray himself as the only Israeli leader realistic enough – and tough enough – to deal with it.”
He repeats the Big Lie ad nauseam. He promises action against a bogus “Iranian threat.”
“Netanyahu prefers to focus on Iran rather than the economy, since Israeli elections are usually decided on the people’s anxiety about their security. And the economic horizon beyond the election looks grim indeed.”
From now through election, expect scurrilous anti-Iranian propaganda. It’ll probably get him reelected. Fear works that way. What’s coming post-election bears close watching.
David Rothkopf serves as Foreign Policy (FP) magazine’s CEO and Editor-at-Large. Formerly, he and former Clinton National Security Advisor Anthony Lake co-founded Intellibridge Corporation.
Sourcewatch said in launching Intellibridge, Rothkopf had help from “several former government officials and spooks, including Anthony Lake and former CIA director John Deutch….” Former Clinton administration officials hold top posts.
Intellibridge provides “open-source intelligence, customized content,and analysis to the military and corporations.”
Earlier, Rothkopf was Kissinger Associates managing director and US Deputy Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade Policy.
He and FP support Washington’s imperial agenda. On October 8, he headlined “A Truly Credible Military Threat to Iran,” saying:
America and Israeli may surgically strike Iran. Washington will do most heavy lifting. Israel will ride shotgun. Netanyahu won’t go it alone. He needs US approval and support.
Romney’s been baiting Obama on Iran. In an October 8 Virginia Military Institute speech, he claimed:
“Iran today has never been closer to a nuclear weapons capability. It has never posed a greater danger to our friends, our allies, and to us.”
“The President has failed to lead in Syria….Our ally Turkey has been attacked. And the conflict threatens stability in the region.”
“It is time to change course in the Middle East….I will put the leaders of Iran on notice that the United States and our friends and allies will prevent them from acquiring nuclear weapons capability.”
“(W)e must make clear to Iran through actions – not just words – that their nuclear pursuit will not be tolerated.” He barely stopped short of urging war.
He’s in campaign mode. Whether he’ll follow through if elected isn’t known. The possibility very much is real.
He claimed Obama hasn’t slowed Iran’s “pursuit” of nuclear weapons. Rothkopf called the issue a “centerpiece of the Romney campaign’s argument that Obama has not been tough enough on Iran….”
He hasn’t “offered a credible military threat” to deter what, in fact, doesn’t exist.
Rothkopf said unnamed Obama advisors told him privately that “they wonder about his commitment and that of the US military to taking action against Iran.”
Up to now, he’s been “dragging his feet,” but no longer. White House and Israeli officials are “closer together in their views in recent days.”
While no precise red line exists, Netanyahu’s preferred military option “is considerably more limited and lower risk” than full-scale war.
Saying so greatly understates the threat and potential catastrophic consequences. Attacking Iran is madness. Tehran’s response will be swift and strong. It’ll be far more robust than anything Israel previously experienced.
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. US facilities and ships will be attacked.
Economic consequences will be severe. Sharply higher oil prices will follow. Global recession will deepen. Israel and America will be more hated than ever. War may happen anyway.
Understating what’s at stake is irresponsible. Is Rothkopf urging war? Claiming low risk consequences suggests it. According to his unnamed source, “(t)he strike might take only ‘a couple of hours’ in the best case and only would involve a ‘day or two’ overall.”
It “would be conducted by air, using primarily bombers and drone support.” It’s “politically palatable.” It’ll set back Iran’s nuclear program “many years….without civilian casualties – it would have regional benefits.”
Yellow journalism is bad enough. Practically endorsing catastrophic war is unconscionable and madness.
He quoted an unnamed warmonger claiming a “transformative outcome: saving Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, reanimating the peace process, securing the Gulf, sending an unequivocal message to Russia and China, and assuring American ascendancy in the region for a decade to come.”
Transformative indeed in all the wrong ways.
It’s well known, or should be, that Israel can’t go it alone. Its capability isn’t up to destroying Iran’s Fordo facility. It’s built deep underground within a mountain for protection.
Powerful bunker busters (possibly mini-nukes) are needed. Using them won’t assure success. At the same time, Israeli aircraft on their own may be unable to deliver a potential knockout punch.
The Wilson Center’s Iran Project assessed benefits and costs. Its conclusions didn’t please warmongers. Iran can retaliate with “conventionally armed ballistic missiles capable of striking most of the region, including Israel,” it said.
War could last years. Military and economic costs will be high. A New American Foundation study said attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities assures disaster.
Another by Harvard’s Olin Institute for Strategic Studies said Iranian mines and missiles can block the Strait of Hormuz, halt or greatly curtail oil shipments, and “it could take many weeks, even months, to restore the full flow of commerce, and more time still for the oil markets to be convinced that stability has returned.”
A 2008 Washington Institute for the Near East Policy (WINEP) study said two decades after the Iran/Iraq war, the Islamic Republic’s naval capabilities now excel. They’re able to wage effective asymmetric warfare against larger naval forces.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Navy (IRGCN) is highly motivated, well-equipped, and well-financed. It’s a formidable force. It controls the Strait of Hormuz choke point.
WINEP added that if Washington and/or Israel attacks Iran, its response will be proportional to damage it sustains.
It bears repeating. Attacking Iran is madness for good reason. Claiming otherwise is unconscionable. It also avoids explaining serious international law violations.
Preemptive aggressive wars are illegal. Hot or cold warriors don’t seem to care.
Cooked or Accurate US Employment Numbers
by Stephen Lendman
For over a decade, US job prospects have been dismal. Since crisis conditions erupted in 2008, they’ve been dire for millions wanting work.
Since Obama took office in January 2009, job creation has been pathetic. Numbers reported during the weakest US recovery on record largely failed to compensate for others lost.
Monthly Labor Department (BLS) data report inaccurately. America’s broken jobs engine isn’t explained. The latest 7.8% unemployment rate is blarney. Based on the 1980s calculation model, real unemployment approaches 23%.
You’d never know it from irrational exuberance following the October 5 BLS report. “Better News on Jobs” headlined a New York Times editorial, saying:
The report “was stronger than expected.” It’s also true that more needs to be done “to maintain and create jobs,” The Times admitted. It also called the unemployment rate drop from 8.1% to 7.8% “partly due to a statistical fluke and partly to more part-time employment.”
It has nothing to do with the latter. It has everything to do with huge numbers of workers dropping out of the labor force monthly for lack of jobs. Healthy economies have them for virtually anyone wanting work. No longer.
Moreover, most jobs created are poor temporary or part-time low wage/low or no benefit ones. People take them to eat and avoid having to sleep on city streets.
The Times left unexplained what’s most important to know. A Washington Post editorial was worse. It headlined “Jobs report shows an economy on the move,” saying:
Before taking office in January 2009, Obama told Post editors that job creation was his “number-one priority.” Grade him F for not delivering or trying.
Not according to the Post, saying: “Friday’s employment report gave Mr. Obama a reason to crow.”
“Unemployment probably would have been worse but for some of (his) policies….”
False! Obama helped Wall Street, not Main Street. His so-called fiscal stimulus went mostly for corporate tax cuts and others to rich elites. Ordinary people got austerity, not help. Current dire conditions show it.
An October 9 NYT editorial claimed otherwise. Headlined “Conspiracy World,” it covered more than unemployment. It said many Republicans see Obama “as the center of a broad and malevolent liberal conspiracy to upend the truth.”
Both parties and supportive media scoundrels wage relentless war on it.
The latest unemployment numbers “make the administration look good.” They’re, in fact, dismal, but Republicans take issue with anything appearing to help Obama, even if untrue.
Some called the latest BLS numbers “cooked.” The Times berated anyone “mistrust(ing) the most basic functions of government.”
They should be exposed and denounced for what they are.
BLS and other federal bureaucrats resist “political pressure and manipulation,” claimed The Times. Conspiracists claim otherwise. Sometimes they’re right. Insiders don’t go public and admit it.
Instead of giving Obama undeserved credit, the Post, Times and other supportive media should explain how badly he failed.
Economist Paul Craig Roberts excels in doing it. On October 5, he headlined “Another Phony US Employment Report: Spiraling Number of Involuntary Part-Time Workers,” saying:
BLS reported jobs created fell way short of population growth. Healthy US economies would be producing nearly three times the reported number monthly.
BLS said 2.5 million “persons were marginally attached to the labor force.” Orwell couldn’t have said it better. They want work but can’t find it. BLS made them non-persons. Millions of others bump dangerously close to the same status.
America’s economy is sick. Roberts explains it often. He omits ambiguity. He says what people need to know. Dire US employment prospects show up monthly in huge involuntary part-time worker increases. Similar full-time dropouts also reflect it.
High-paying/good benefit full-time manufacturing, high-tech, and other professional jobs are disappearing. They’re now offshore in low-wage countries.
Growing numbers of Americans must settle for part-time Walmart, bartending, waitressing, ditch-digging, and other rotten service jobs they don’t want but have no choice.
America’s “New Economy” is as phony as Iraq’s WMDs. Reality falls way short of rhetoric.
Economist Jack Rasmus appears regularly on the Progressive Radio News Hour. He reports accurately on economic and financial conditions. Like Roberts, he explains what’s most important to know. He’s world’s different from tout-TV analysts and business press headlines.
He questioned the accuracy of BLS jobs reports. They’re not falsified, but something very much is wrong and has been previously.
For the last three years, an unexplained phenomenon repeated. Rasmus is one of few economists explaining it. It’s significant and needs highlighting. It suggests something out of whack, besides much else about suspect and inaccurate BLS reporting.
Each fall and winter, well above trend job gains are reported. In contrast, every spring/early summer gains “collapse. There is indeed something going on with the jobs numbers, though it’s not falsification,” says Rasmus.
Last month’s Household Survey mysteriously showed outsized gains. Given current conditions, they made no sense. They reflect one or two phenomena, believes Rasmus.
Employers are either replacing full-time workers with part-time/temp ones, or they’re hiring for the latter two categories because economic prospects aren’t encouraging.
In calculating its headline U-3 unemployment rate, part-time workers count the same as full-time ones. Hiring them in place of permanent employees reflects “very weak labor market” conditions.
Fictitious new business formations also help explain inordinately high part-time hiring. Estimates are suspect. Media scoundrels report them like gospel.
Something is very wrong with BLS reports. Problems are more extensive than one month’s numbers. When divergence is so great between the Establishment (Payroll) and Household (Population) Surveys, something indeed is amiss.
As or more important is the extraordinary seasonal divergence. One year’s aberration wouldn’t matter. Three consecutive years shows something else entirely. “Something is wrong.”
America’s economy is sick. Labor market reality reflects it. It’s not “rapidly mending.” Over 23 million remain jobless. Trillions of dollar of tax cuts, banker bailouts, corporate subsidies, and other handouts did nothing to mend things.
Nor did QE ad infinitum. The most radical ever monetary/fiscal experiment failed.
In the first so-called presidential debate, neither candidate discussed “anything remotely representing a jobs program.”
Obama and Romney don’t care. They want more for bankers, war profiteers, and other corporate favorites. People needs don’t matter. Bipartisanship reflects let-em-eat-cake indifference, government of, by, and for them alone, force-fed austerity, unfair “free” trade deals, permanent wars, and harsh crackdowns on non-believers.
Nothing ahead next year looks promising. Both parties are in lockstep. People needs aren’t addressed. America’s military alone actively recruits. Join the army. See the world. Lose a limb or two or three.
Lose your emotional stability and future prospects. Nothing abroad justifies fighting for. Nothing good domestically awaits returning vets. Hot wars target America’s enemies. Financial ones affect ordinary people back home. Both have deadly consequences.
A new IMF report signaled trouble. “The recovery has suffered new setbacks, and uncertainty weighs on the outlook,” it said. “Downside risks have increased and are considerable.”
Worldwide growth will match 2009 recession levels. Global recession may follow. Out-of-control government debt is pandemic. Expect higher interest rates, lower profits, and weak financial markets.
US 2013 fiscal cliff austerity assures harder times ahead. Similar cuts across Europe smother the continent. Employment gains are fake, a mirage. Business and consumer confidence are “exceptionally” fragile. Market rallies are head-fake traps.
Dismal prospects loom. Companies cut staff in hard times. Expect them in 2013. Rasmus predicts nasty recession conditions. Past forecasts he made proved accurate. Stay tuned. He, Roberts, and others reporting accurately will update their outlooks ahead.
posted by Steve Lendman @ 11:50 PM
Tuesday, October 09, 2012
Venezuelan Electoral Postmortems
by Stephen Lendman
Chavistas celebrated Sunday’s victory. Bolivarianism triumphed over exploitive neoliberal harshness. In open, free, and fair elections, Venezuelans got to choose. It’s constitutionally mandated. Every vote counts equally.
Americans don’t have that right. On November 6, choice won’t be the ballot. Column A matches Column B. Money power chooses candidates and winners. Some election! No wonder half the electorate ops out.
On October 7, Venezuelans turned out in record numbers. Over 80% of registered voters showed up. Turnout was so great, many waited hours to exercise their franchise.
It’s important because what they say matters. They wanted Chavez for another six years and got him. They want Bolivarianism sustained and deepened.
Chavez pledged he’ll do it. He keeps promises. Vows US leaders make aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. Obama broke every major one he made.
It shouldn’t surprise. It’s the American way. Bolivarianism chooses another. Its good example shames Western faux democracies. Today they’re more hypocrisy than ever.
Prioritizing wealth, power and imperial interests means depriving most people of vital social services. No wonder unemployment, poverty, homelessness, hunger, and overall human misery keep growing.
Venezuela is mirror opposite. Beneficial social change is prioritized. It shows. Poor people are helped generously. Child mortality fell from 20 per 1,000 to 13. Unemployment dropped from 14.5% to 7.6%. Income inequality is Latin America’s lowest. Poverty was cut in half. Extreme poverty fell from 23.4% to 8.5%.
According to Census figures, half of US households are impoverished or bordering on it. Real unemployment approaches 23%. Most jobs are temporary or part-time low pay/poor or no benefit ones. They’re rotten. With no other choice, people take them. It’s either that or starve and sleep on city streets.
America’s industrial base is a shadow of its former self. It’s located offshore in low wage countries. US workers are left high and dry. Conditions keep worsening, not improving.
Venezuela’s far from perfect. Violent crime, corruption, high inflation, infrastructure needs, and a menacing northern neighbor are worrisome. Chavez’s health is uncertain. His cancer’s in remission. If it returns and he can’t serve, who’ll succeed him isn’t clear.
Venezuela’s poor love him for good reason. They turned Sunday evening into New Year’s eve. Victory was sweet, and they celebrated.
Sour grapes showed up prominently elsewhere. It’s standard practice after every Bolivarian triumph. More on that below.
Venezuela is comprised of 23 states, a Capital District (Caracas), and offshore Federal Dependencies. Chavez carried 21 states and Caracas. Lead opponent Capriles took Zulia and Carabobo states.
Venezuela’s state-of-the-art electoral process shames America’s. It’s far less susceptible to fraud and identity theft than elsewhere.
Postal and proxy votes are excluded. Fingerprints identify voters electronically. Paper receipts verify ballots cast. They’re recorded and available for recounts if needed.
Every candidate was identified by name and full color photo. It helps assure votes are cast as intended. Observers monitored fairness. Opposition supporters turned out in force. They agreed. Voting was open, free and fair.
The Union of South American Nations praised what went on. Mission head Carlos Alvarez said:
“Venezuela has given an exemplary demonstration of what the functioning of democracy is and has taught a lesson to the world.”
“Venezuela strengthened democracy in the nation and the region.”
Alvarez also praised Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE). He called its work “extraordinary.” It’s a model to help “achieve the construction of a South American electoral system.”
Throughout Sunday, everything proceeded smoothly. No major disturbances occurred. Opposition strategists hoped otherwise. They planned to highlight fraud and other irregularities but couldn’t find any.
Capriles had no recourse but to concede defeat. He left unsaid why most Venezuelans spurned them. They need no explanations. Triumphant Chavismo is all that matters.
On January 10, Chavez begins his fourth term. He told supporters he’s not waiting. “(F)or me,” he said, “the new cycle begins today. We’re obligated to be better every day, more efficient, obligated to respond with greater efficiency to the needs of people.”
He promised “to be the best president that I have been in these years.” Take him at his word. He’ll try because he cares. Imagine if US and other Western leaders felt this way and showed it. Perhaps another time in a new era, but not now. Other priorities take precedence.
Beating up on Bolivarianism
If you can’t beat ‘em, beat up on ‘em. Sour grapes postmortems made headlines. Scoundrel media editorials and op-eds featured them.
The Wall Street Journal’s Mary O’Grady is ideologically to the right of many neocons. Her style reflects character assassination. Her rhetoric drips with vitriol. She wins awards for genuflecting to power and suppressing vital truths for power brokers who pay her.
Her electoral postmortem was typical. She headlined “Chavismo Wins, Venezuela Loses,” saying:
“Control of the media and the voting polls, plus some old-fashioned fear, have won Hugo Chávez six more years.”
False, false and false! Corporations control virtually all Venezuelan major broadcast and print media. They unanimously endorsed Capriles. Venezuela’s electoral process is called the world’s best for good reason. Voters turned out en masse because it matters. Neoliberal extremists alone stoke fear.
O’Grady lied saying internal Capriles polling showed he’d “win by three to four percentage points.” Days before October 7, opposition insiders privately conceded. They knew they had no chance to win and said so.
Chavez “seized control of television and radio stations and used them during the campaign…” Those same stations opposed him. They promoted Capriles. They featured him on air.
“Mr. Capriles tried to tap into (Venezuelan) misery by presenting himself as a social democrat….” He’s a wealthy neoliberal hard-liner. He deplores beneficial social change. If elected he’d return Venezuela to its bad old days. Voters wanted none of him and his extremism.
O’Grady’s litany of canards infested her piece. Ones included sound like America, not Venezuela. She never misses a chance to beat up on Chavez. She was true to form calling him a “dictator,” a “world-class demagogue.”
He “mortgaged Venezuela to help him buy another six years in power….(N)o one believes that the final vote spread reflects the public’s opinion of the winner.”
“With China underwriting his populism and Cuba manning his intelligence and security apparatus, his near-term comfort in Miraflores palace is practically guaranteed.”
O’Grady reflects the worst of US opinion journalism. Yellow can’t begin to describe it.
WSJ writers Jose de Cordoba and Sara Schaefer Munoz had their say. They were dishonest in less strident form than O’Grady. They headlined “Victory Tightens Chavez Grip on Power,” saying:
“Another decisive electoral victory for Hugo Chávez has convinced many Venezuelans in the opposition that his only vulnerabilities are a turn for the worse in the ailing president’s health or a sharp drop in oil prices.”
“The win allows Mr. Chávez to press ahead with his Socialist revolution, deepening government intervention in the economy, including price controls and nationalizations.”
“Observers see him as likely to continue his role as the leading voice against U.S. interests in the region, enhancing alliances with everyone from Tehran to Beijing.”
What else would a Murdoch publication say. They have marching orders, salute and obey. So does Carnegie Endowment for International Peace analyst Moises Naim. The Journal writers quoted him saying:
“You have the head of a petrostate with authoritarian propensities who controls the legislative branch, the supreme court, the electoral tribunal and the oil industry which generates 98% of the country’s wealth, without any checks and balances.”
The entire article wreaked with misinformation. Corporate media scoundrels offer nothing else.
Bloomberg headlined “Chavez Election Victory Signals Accelerated Socialist Revolution,” saying:
Since taking office in 1999, “he nationalized more than 1,000 companies or their assets…” Nationalizations were far fewer. He paid fair compensation every time. No one was cheated.
“With voters giving the former paratrooper another six-year term, he’ll probably push policies, such as currency controls and takeovers, that have driven away investors….”
Chavez combines populism with business friendly practices. Level playing field politics perhaps best describes it. Before crisis conditions erupted in 2008, banker profits were so high they said they were “having a party.”
During today’s hard times, Venezuela’s growth is impressive. Q II 2012 advanced 5.4%. In contrast, Europe’s in recession. America is close. Economist Jack Rasmus predicts it in 2013. He calls overall conditions dire.
In a section devoted to Chavez, The New York Times said the “fiery socialist defeated a youthful, more moderate challenger….”
“He is an ailing and politically weakened winner facing an emboldened opposition that grew stronger and more confident as the voting neared, and at times seemed to have an upset victory within reach.”
The Times spent the last dozen years or longer beating up on him mercilessly. It can’t bear admitting social democracy works. It supports wealth and power. It spurns ordinary people. It calls fascist America democratic. It calls the real thing in Venezuela autocratic. Truth was never The Times’ long suit.
The Dallas Morning News was no better. Its editorial headlined “Venezuela’s sad electoral statement,” saying:
“Score another lamentable election victory for Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. The fiery, anti-U.S. revolutionary now has another six-year term to continue with the plans he launched after his first election in 1998 to dismantle Venezuela’s free-market economy and pursue his anachronistic socialist agenda.”
Washington has “national security” concerns to worry about for another six years. Chavez “rankled US leaders” by friendly relations with governments America opposes.
His “so-called Bolivarian revolution has proved hollow. Revolutionary socialism is almost impossible to sustain….Chavez should increasingly be dismissed for what he is – a toothless tiger.”
Media scoundrels call success failure. Their arguments don’t wash. Rhetoric substitutes for hard truths. Too bad so many people believe them. Venezuelans aren’t fooled. They support what works and showed it.
Pre-election, the London Guardian headlined “Hugo Chavez: a strongman’s last stand,” saying:
“No one ever accused Hugo Chávez of thinking small. He casts politics as an existential contest between good and evil, the oppressed and the oppressor.”
The election will decide “the comandante(‘s)” fate “and his revolution. (It) hangs by a thread….Chávez surrounded himself mostly with mediocrities, valuing loyalty over competence.”
“His legacy will be debated for decades….Many outsiders made up their minds long ago. There was Chávez the dictator who jailed opponents, sponsored terrorists and left his people hungry.”
“Chavez….is a hybrid: a democrat and autocrat, a progressive and a bully.” The Guardian also called him “a caudillo (strongman)” running a “dysfunction(al)” economy.
It’s hard imagining any broadsheet letting this trash end up in print. Inconvenient truths are ignored. Admitting them would discredit everything else said.
Shameless editorials and op-eds hounded Chavez for years. In its November/December 2005 Extra edition, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) headlined “The Op-Ed Assassination of Hugo Chavez,” saying:
Pat Robertson literally wanted him killed. Even so-called “moderate” columnists beat up on him mercilessly. The usual characterizations call him a strongman, autocrat, dictator, another Hitler.
“In studying the opinion pages of the top 25 circulation newspapers in the United States during the first six months of 2005, Extra! found that 95 percent of the nearly 100 press commentaries that examined Venezuelan politics expressed clear hostility to the country’s democratically elected president.”
It was no different earlier and perhaps worse today. The longer Chavez survives and gets majority Venezuelan support, the more media scoundrels beat up on him.
It’s nearly impossible finding major media commentaries portraying him accurately. Doing so would be out of character. Contributors would be out of work. Party line opinion only is tolerated. Truth and full disclosure are prohibited. It’s the American way.
posted by Steve Lendman @ 11:53 PM
NATO Edges Closer to War on Syria
by Stephen Lendman
Waging war is easy. Instigate provocative incidents. Blame them on targeted countries. False flags work as planned. So do Big Lies repeated enough times to get most people to believe them.
Stoking fear is a common thread. So is claiming good v. evil. Mix well with misinformation and duplicity. Sun Tzu was right saying wars depend on deception. It’s been that way since antiquity. Modern technology makes it easier.
Churchill said lies get halfway around the world before truths get their pants on. Global communication today is instant. Sending hawkish information everywhere is as simple as ready, aim, fire.
Washington and NATO partners are involved in multiple direct and proxy wars. More are planned. Word hasn’t gotten out but it’s coming.
Obama and Romney want war. So does NATO Secretary-General Fogh Rasmussen. He’s a consummate liar. Numerous times he said NATO won’t intervene in Syria. It’s been planned all along.
It’s ongoing. America, Britain, France and Turkey are lead belligerents. They’ve been involved since winter last year. Much goes on covertly.
If NATO didn’t want war, its key countries would be supporting peace. Death squad armies wouldn’t have been recruited. Training, funding, arming, and directing them wouldn’t have been ongoing since conflict erupted in March 2011.
Nor would terrorists be given safe haven in Turkey on Syria’s border. Provocations throw fuel on the fire. Last June, two Turkish warplanes lawlessly entered Syrian airspace low and fast. Doing so showed hostile intent.
One escaped unharmed. Syrian anti-aircraft fire downed the other in its own waters. Assad was blamed for Turkey’s provocation. War could have erupted but didn’t at the time.
The latest cross-border incident makes it more likely. Inflammatory rhetoric increases the possibility. Turkey’s been shelling Syrian territory for six days.
Assad had nothing to do with mortar fire on Turkish territory. Free Syrian Army (FSA) militants are responsible. It doesn’t matter. Only who’s blamed counts. Fingers always point the wrong way. Media scoundrels spread Big Lies. They’re repeated ad nauseam.
Warmongering officials advance the ball for war. Turkish ones play with fire. As one of 28 NATO countries, it’s obligated in ways it wouldn’t be if independent. It also borders Syrian territory.
Prime Minister Erdogan has been hawkish for months. President Abdullah Gul marches with him in lockstep.
“The worst-case scenario is happening in Syria at the moment. Syrian people are suffering and the developments there affect Turkey. We have citizens who have lost their lives,” he said.
“In such a moment, we are always in consultations with our government and chief of General Staff. Whatever necessary is being done, as you know. And it will continue to be done.”
“Sooner or later, a transition will occur. But our wish is (for it to happen) before more blood is shed and before Syria is ruined. I am of the opinion that the international community should actively be involved.”
Did he ask NATO to declare war? What else can international intervention mean? It’s been involved all along short of launching Libya 2.0. Turkey’s role is lead belligerent. Whatever its preference, it’s acquiescent.
Except perhaps for EU admission, it’s hard imagining what it hopes to gain. War on its southern neighbor assures spillover in its own territory. Heavy casualties and destruction will follow.
Most Turks and key opposition parties oppose war. Erdogan and Gul risk their futures for going against the tide. They’re in lockstep with Washington’s agenda. The will of their own people is spurned.
Politically it’s a bad strategy. Maybe they have other aims in mind. Maybe they’re biting off more than they can chew. Maybe they’ll get burned or worse in the process.
They’ve already got enough blood on their hands. So does NATO’s Rasmussen. He’s a war criminal multiple times over. How many more corpses will he tolerate on his conscience?
Ahead of an earlier October Brussels meeting, he said:
“I would add to that that obviously Turkey can rely on NATO solidarity, we have all necessary plans in place to protect and defend Turkey if necessary.”
He did little to cool tensions, adding:
“We hope that all parties involved will show restraint, and avoid an escalation of the crisis. I do believe that the right way forward in Syria is political solution.”
If he believed it, he’d work with other NATO members and to call off their dogs. Since conflict erupted last year, belligerence was prioritized. Alleged humanitarian concerns and fake peace plans were subterfuge for what’s planned.
On October 9, Rasmussen’s rhetoric grew sharper. “We have all necessary plans in place to protect and defend Turkey if necessary,” he said.
Damascus needs defending, not Ankara. Rasmussen commended Turkey for its restraint. Shelling Syrian territory for six days hardly shows it. Clearly it makes war more likely.
“Obviously Turkey has a right to defend herself within international law,” claimed Rasmussen. “I would add….that Turkey can rely on NATO solidarity.”
Rasmussen and Erdogen both sound Orwellian. The NATO chief commends Turkish shelling as restraint. Erdogan practically says the best way to achieve peace is wage war.
Perhaps he also believes freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength. Maybe Turks will get fed up enough to remove him and likeminded warmongers before their country get embroiled over its head.
On condition of anonymity, NATO officials said plans in place are longstanding. In response to Washington’s regime change agenda, perhaps they were readied in the 1990s.
Turkey is a willing client state. It risks its own well-being. Partnering with America’s imperium has consequences. The price of imperial arrogance may be too much to pay.
Syrians paid dearly for months. Thousands died. Dozens more die daily. On October 9, twin blasts rocked a military base near Damascus. Suicide bombers perhaps were involved.
Dozens were reported killed. Many others were wounded. It’s the latest in a series of major attacks. The Al Qaeda-linked Al-Nusra Front took credit. It claimed it was avenging Muslims “oppressed or killed” by Assad.
On October 9, Voice of Russia headlined “NATO invasion of Syria: coming soon, rated X,” saying:
Growing signs suggest it. It’s likely baked in the cake. Perhaps one spark too many will ignite it. They’re easy to create. They’re ongoing now cross-border. Erdogen already got parliamentary approval. Shelling may get more intense.
If Syria responds in kind, all bets are off. Turkey suggests it’s spoiling for war. It moved tanks and other heavy weapons to its southern border. It has 25 F-16s and other aircraft positioned in Diyarbakir. It’s in the country’s Kurdish region.
They attacked four alleged PKK sites in Iraq. It followed a near parliamentary declaration of war on Syria. It barely stopped short. After an earlier in October NATO meeting, the following statement was issued:
“In view of the Syrian regime’s recent aggressive acts at NATO’s southeastern border, which are a flagrant breach of international law and a clear and present danger to the security of one of its Allies, the North Atlantic Council met today, within the framework of Article 4 of the Washington Treaty….”
“In the spirit of indivisibility of security and solidarity deriving from the Washington Treaty, the Alliance continues to stand by Turkey and demands the immediate cessation of such aggressive acts against an Ally.”
At the behest of any member, Articles 4 or 5 can be invoked.
Article 4 calls for members to “consult together whenever, in the opinion of any of them, the territorial integrity, political independence, or security of any” is threatened.
Article 5 considers an armed attack (real or otherwise) against one or more members, an attack against all, and calls for collective self-defense.
Will NATO invoke it next? Will full-scale war follow? Heightened tensions increase the likelihood. If it’s planned, it’s virtually certain. Perhaps another pretext will launch it. As explained above, it’s as simple as ready, aim, fire. Heaven help regional countries if it’s ordered.
A Final Comment
Mossad-connected DEBKAfile’s (DF) October 9 headline added another possible wrinkle of its own. “US, Israel plan October Surprise. Others: Israel can do it alone,” it said.
DF said an Israeli/Iranian war already is ongoing. It cited the UAV Israel downed over its territory days earlier. DF blamed Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas.
This writer called it a likely false flag. No regional country has anything to gain. For Israel, it’s a convenient casus belli. If one scheme doesn’t work, new ones are easy to invent. Israel does it often. So does Washington.
DF points fingers at Iran for practically everything it claims harms Israel. Tehran, of course, is victim, not perpetrator. So are Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, and other Palestinian resistance groups.
The idea that Israel can go it alone is nonsense. Its capability isn’t up to the challenge. It won’t dare attack Iran without Washington’s approval and support. DF knows it but claims otherwise.
Perhaps it’s playing stalking horse for something else big planned. Full-scale war on Syria seems most likely. If it comes, it won’t be pre-announced. Nor will war on Iran or on any other countries. Targets aren’t given advance notice to prepare.
posted by Steve Lendman @ 11:52 PM
Monday, October 08, 2012
Chavez Win Strengthens Bolivarianism
by Stephen Lendman
Several previous articles said Venezuelans won’t tolerate going back to their ugly past. On Sunday, they proved it. They voted in record numbers.
Long lines queued hours before dawn. Polls stayed open well into the night so everyone coming out could vote.
Turnout was nearly 81% of Venezuela’s 19,119,809 registered voters. US elections usually get around 50%. Off-year congressional races average under 40%.
From 1960 – 2010, the highest percentage participation was 63.1%. It was in 1960 when Kennedy defeated Nixon. The lowest turnout was 49.1% in 1996 when Clinton bested Bob Dole.
In the off-year 2010 congressional election, a meager 37.8% participated. America’s electoral process lacks credibility. Duopoly power permits no choice. Big Money always wins.
Venezuelans get the real thing. Their electoral process is the best in the world. It’s independently judged open, free and fair. Every vote counts. They’re tabulated fully and honestly.
US elections are rigged. Politics in America reflect more hypocrisy than democracy.
Overnight Sunday into Monday pre-dawn, Venezuelans celebrated. Fireworks went off in Caracas. People honked horns, waved flags, and cheered. Thousands massed outside the Miraflores presidential palace. Chavez rallied them.
From a balcony overlooking the crowd, he raised a sword once belonging to 19th century independence hero Simon Bolivar. “The revolution has triumphed,” he said! Venezuelans “voted for socialism.”
“Viva Venezuela! Viva the fatherland! The battle was perfect and the victory was perfect!”
“Today we’ve shown that Venezuela’s democracy is one of the best democracies in the world, and we will continue to show it.”
“Venezuela will never return to neoliberalism and continue in the transition to socialism of the 21st century.”
“I want to make a recognition to the whole Venezuelan people, the whole Venezuelan nation. Today the country of Bolivar was reborn.”
In response, supporters chanted, “Viva Le Patria. “Ooh Aah, Chavez won’t go!”
Speaking for others perhaps a Vargas fisherman said, “I’m crying with joy. In the next six years, we will deepen the revolution.”
A construction worker said, “I can’t describe the relief and happiness I feel right now.”
A teacher said, “Chavez is my joy. He will continue protecting the poor and defenseless.”
After his victory was announced, Chavez tweeted:
“Thank you, my God. Thanks to everyone. Thanks my beloved people!!! Viva Venezuela!!! Viva Bolivar!!!”
An email sent this writer showed an image of him displaying a Chicago Daily Tribune headline saying, “CAPRILES DEFEATS CHAVEZ.”
It replicated Harry Truman holding up the notorious Chicago Daily Tribune (now the Chicago Tribune) early November 3, 1948 front page headlining “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.”
The broadsheet to this day hasn’t erased the memory it would like everyone to forget.
Argentina’s President Cristina Fernandez tweeted congratulations, saying:
“Your victory is our victory! And the victory of South America and the Caribbean!”
Bolivian President Evo Morales replicated her tweet, saying:
“Your victory is also ours. It is of South America and the Caribbean. Congratulations President Chavez!”
Cuban President Raul Castro was one of the first leaders to send congratulations. Chavizmo was triumphant. Sunday was celebratory time. Monday it’s back to business.
Chavez said that he’ll deepen socialism in the next six years. Many problems need addressing. He promised to continue working to alleviate them.
It’s not easy turning around a money power run country run for generations. Since taking office in February 1999, Chavez did plenty. Venezuelans rewarded him with six more years. He deserved it. On January 10, he’ll be inaugurated to deepen Bolivarianism as he promised.
Around 10PM Sunday night, with 90% of votes counted, National Electoral Council (CNE) president Tibisay Lucena announced electoral results.
Chavez led Capriles by 54.42% to 44.97%. He was ahead by around 1.3 million votes. It was more than enough to assure victory. With 98% of votes counted, Chavez upped his victory margin to 1.5 million votes. He won 55 – 44%. Other candidates got 1% combined.
Lucena said, “Once again we’ve had a calm electoral process without problems, with the joy of this people who decided to vote massively today.”
Corporate media scoundrels stopped just short of sour grapes. For over a decade, they pilloried him mercilessly. They can’t bear having a hemispheric good example shame how America is run. The difference between both countries is stark. Previous articles explained it.
The New York Times has been one of his lead antagonists. On October 7, it headlined “Chavez Wins New Term in Venezuela, Holding Off Surge by Opposition.”
“Surge?” On Sunday it failed to show up except in a fake Spanish ABC newspaper mid-afternoon exit poll. It didn’t surprise. It was published in Miami, Colombia, Chile and Venezuela.
It claimed opposition candidate Henrique Capriles Radonski won. The corporate run Varianzas agency released it. It said he defeated Chavez by 51.3% to 48.06%.
Perhaps it tried to deter Chavez supporters from voting later in the day. Not a chance. They wanted another six years and got them.
Venezuelan Solidarity Campaign (VSC) secretary Francisco Dominguez said:
“Fake exit polls are one way in which opponents of the current government have previously tried to discredit the results of elections where Hugo Chavez has won clear majorities.”
“This is part of a political game – a dirty war played by the Venezuela right-wing.”
“Journalists who have reported these polls believing them to be credible have later been embarrassed to have found themselves exploited for political motives.”
“Given that polling is not permitted on election day in Venezuela, any such polls should be treated skeptically.”
“There is the very real risk that this is part of a propaganda war by sections of the right-wing opposition with the aim of creating destabilization and unrest.”
“It would be irresponsible of journalists to give this poll any credence. To use it risks inadvertently supporting a campaign from the more extreme sections of the Venezuelan opposition to try to claim that any defeat at today’s election is simply the result of fraud.”
“As both campaigns said earlier today, people should await the official results from that will be released in the next few hours.”
The Times called Chavez a longtime “fiery foe of Washington.” He’s opposes neoliberal injustice and imperial ravaging. Times editorial policy supports them.
The article claimed Chavez is “an ailing and politically weakened winner facing an emboldened opposition that grew stronger and more confident as the voting neared, and held out hope that an upset victory was within reach.”
In fact, opposition insiders knew they had no chance and said so. Capriles was too far behind to win. Days before October 7, cohesion among them began disintegrating. A previous article discussed it. Corporate media scoundrels said nothing.
They pretended that Capriles had a good chance to win. It was laughable on its face. The Times said “Chavez spent much of the year insulting and trying to provoke Mr. Capriles and his followers.”
He gave them hell for good reason. He explained what they are and the danger they pose. Venezuelans remember the bad old days and want none of it repeating.
Instead of explaining beneficial social change under Chavez, The Times said “Venezuela is mired in problems, including out-of-control violent crime, crumbling roads and bridges, and power blackouts…”
True enough. These problems and others need addressing. Chavez promised to do more. America has these and many more unaddressed festering problems harming most people nationwide.
The Times failed to notice. It also downplayed the sharp drop in poverty and unemployment under Chavez. He’s waged war on inequality and human need. These and other vital issues go begging in America. Instead of fixing them, they’re getting worse.
On October 6, a scurrilous Washington Post editorial headlined “Venezuela eyes change,” saying:
“IF HUGO CHAVEZ is an autocrat, how could he be in danger of losing the Venezuelan presidency in an election on Sunday?”
“Polls show a race to the wire between the caudillo and challenger Henrique Capriles Radonski. An opposition victory would mean an epochal change of political direction in one of the world’s largest oil producers….”
Fact check
Independent democrats Washington dislikes are called autocrats and much worse. A close race? It never was close throughout the campaign except in fake polls claiming it.
Indeed an opposition win would be “epochal” for all the wrong reasons. Venezuelans wanted none of it. They had final say.
Many Post editorials are scandalous and disreputable. This one was no different. It claimed Chavez “feels obliged to stage elections (but) in an environment that heavily favors the regime.”
“Mr. Chavez controls Venezuela’s courts, election commission and most television channels, which bombard the population with propaganda.”
All of the above explains America, not Venezuela. Claiming otherwise is vicious and patently untrue.
Venezuelan voters are “intimidated,” claimed the Post. Chavez “is in danger of losing (because of) the havoc he has wreaked in what was once Latin America’s richest country.”
In fact, he turned a cesspool into a model social democracy. That notion is verboten in America. Money power won’t tolerate it. Neither do media scoundrels.
The editorial went on to pillory Chavez with one canard after another. Like all members of America’s corporate media establishment, the Post adheres to its strict code of suppressing truth and full disclosure.
Its notion of freedom and social democracy is none at all. It claimed Chavez’s “days as Venezuela’s leader are numbered.” It suggested a possible electoral loss.
It urged “Venezuela’s neighbors, and the Obama administration, should be ready to react if he attempts to remain in power by force.” It barely stopped short of recommending coup d’etat authority to oust him. Perhaps a future editorial will go further.
The Financial Times was more measured. It headlined “Chavez wins new term in Venezuela.” It covered his electoral win in 10 concise paragraphs. Pejoratives were omitted.
It said he “frustrat(ed) the opposition’s best chance of beating him after 14 years in power and reconfirming him as one of Latin America’s most commanding political figures.”
Indeed so for good reason. As long as he’s healthy, wants to keep serving, and keeps doing the right things, he’ll likely to remain so. Venezuelans won’t tolerate the alternative.
On October 8, Russia Today (rt.com) headlined “Here to stay: Chavez wins Venezuelan presidency,” saying:
He won a fourth term convincingly. There never was any doubt. Only the turnout and margin of victory remained to be determined. With nearly all ballots counted, now we know.
Crowds were jubilant for good reason. Six more years. Viva Chavez. Viva the kind of social democracy Americans can’t even imagine.