Collapse Gap Revisited

by Dmitry Orlov

Club Orlov (February 04 2010)


Richard Heinberg has done something that sorely needed doing: he has performed a Collapse Gap analysis for USA and China. In a lengthy and detailed article {1} he argues that, just as the USA is less prepared for collapse than the USSR was, the USA is less prepared for collapse than China. This is perhaps unsurprising (few countries are less prepared than the USA). Collapse-preparedness affects how many people will be able to survive the collapse, and how bad a time they are likely to have in doing so.

But there is much more to it than that. Richard makes several excellent new points that should be taken on board. Here, I will mention just three (perhaps adding a slight personal twist to each). For the full details, please go and read the full article {1}.

* The governments of both USA and China are not trying to avert collapse but simply to delay it. Averting collapse would involve overcoming problems caused by fossil fuel depletion, ecosystem limits such as soil and fresh water, climate disruption due to global warming, and an economic system predicated on exponential growth. Neither government is up to the task of solving any of these, and so the obvious choice for them is to stall for time, hoping that the other one collapses first.

* Although whichever country collapses first will immediately find itself at an obvious disadvantage vis a vis the other, that advantage is likely to be short-lived. Unlike the collapse of the USSR, the collapse of either USA or China will devastate the other, with major repercussions for the other major economies. There will be no country left standing that will be capable of effecting an economic rescue. The collapse of either USA or China will trigger the collapse of the other, marking a permanent, global transition to a new state.

* Since collapse is unavoidable, the obvious fall-back strategy would be to invest in local resiliency and self-sufficiency. Since neither government appears the least bit interested in such matters, it is time for us to recognize them for what they are to us: utterly irrelevant. Paying attention to national politics can only distract us from doing whatever we can as individuals and local communities.

In the past Richard has done his best to nudge governments in the right direction, especially with regard to adjusting to fossil fuel depletion, whereas I have always felt that they can go and nudge themselves. You see, from my point of view, only a fool would want to go a-nudging the Central Committee of the Politburo toward adopting better policies. Here, perhaps once there was hope; and now it's gone. Unfortunately, many people continue to believe in the miraculous properties of national politics and policy. However, Richard is no longer one of them, and this makes me a bit more hopeful for the rest of us.

Link {1} http://www.postcarbon.org/article/67429-china-or-the-u-s-which-will


http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2010/02/collapse-gap-revisited.html


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

We're Weimar

Clusterfuck Nation

by James Howard Kunstler

Comment on current events by the author of
The Long Emergency (2005)

www.kunstler.com (February 08 2010)


Future historians who try to chart the unraveling of the USA's political tapestry might point to two events of the past week. The obvious first one was the Tea Party convention at Nashville. It was held not accidentally at the ridiculous Opryland Hotel and resort in the city's outer suburban asteroid belt, right next to the circumferential freeway, and next door to the defunct (1997) Opryland USA theme park, an attraction based on the cute idea that Tennessee rubes were too dumb to spell the word opera - so the symbolism was perfect.

Behind the incoherent cargo of conflicting complaints that makes up Tea Party doctrine - like "keeping the government's hands off our medicare!" - stands the more basic dissolution of the Sunbelt's miracle economy, along with the pain and bewilderment of the southern peckerwood political nexus that rose out of the dust after World War Two to build the suburban nirvana of universal air-conditioning, happy motoring, Jesus tub-thumping, over-eating, and Friday night football that defined Sunbelt culture. They sense now that history is about to thrust them back into the okra patch, with the hookworms and the chiggers, as the economy whirls down the drain, and the car dealerships close up, and the idle production homebuilders succumb to methedrine addiction, and the price of Reba McEntire tickets exceeds their dwindling resources, and they are none too happy about any of that.

Of course this Sunbelt political culture has tentacles and outposts all over the USA, wherever a few generations of laboring folk enjoyed debt-fueled parabolic rises in living standards during the cheap oil decades, and now find themselves in foreclosure hell, indentured to the very WalMarts that they welcomed with open arms (and allowed to destroy their local businesses) - and, of course, it's yet another paradox that these are the same folk who will still defend the big box masters to their deaths. The America they stand for is a weird contradictory mish-mash of Confederate nostalgia, hyper-individualism that really owes allegiance to nothing, racial enmity, religious paranoia, and potemkin patriotism - especially involving anything in the constitution that allows them to wriggle out of obligations to the public interest at the same time that they get to push other groups of people around.

The Tea Party people are the corn-pone Nazis I have been warning you about. They are gathering strength in numbers as President Obama and congress fritter away their remaining legitimacy in a manner of governance that more and more resembles an endless Chinese Fire Drill. The delusional craziness of the Tea Partyists exists in direct proportion to the wimpy deceit of the government, especially in matters of money and statistics reporting. Our political leaders are resorting to wholesale deceit because the truth of our situation - comprehensive bankruptcy - is too painful to dwell on and for the most part they are too chicken too state it.

This brings me to the second telling event of last week when President Obama said, kind of off-hand, apropos of the US economic situation, "You don't blow a bunch of cash on Vegas when you're trying to save for college. You prioritize. You make tough choices." Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (of Nevada) was all over Mr Obama like a cheap suit for that. I'm sorry that the President didn't slam back the craven Mr Reid and pull his upper lip over the top of his head. Fuck Las Vegas and fuck Nevada, and fuck all the casino operators in every pulsating gambling venue around this country. The last thing we need is to continue believing that it is possible to get something for nothing, or an industry based on that false principle. I'd go a lot further and shut down legalized gambling all over the USA, send it back to the margins, to the alleys, to the berm between the WalMart and the Target Store, to the basement boiler rooms, to the public bathrooms, to wherever it will be identified as indecent, shameful, and not healthy.

Notice, by the way, that the Tea Party people have never made an issue about the disgusting gambling "industry" - not even the Jesus thumpers among them, for all their pretense about decency and propriety. I suppose this is precisely because a cardinal article of Tea Party faith is that it should be possible to get something for nothing. You should be entitled to collect social security even while you inveigh against the intrusion of big government into your life and the horrible prospect that it will get its mitts on your Medicare! And when Jeezus comes to take you home, that place will be just like Opryland USA was in its heyday, with Dolly Parton in every suite and all the pulled pork sandwiches under heaven's dome ...

As the contest heats up this year between Tea Partydom and the Weimar-like remnant of the party in power expect to see a political vortex form that will suck the little remaining coherence out of American life. Personally, I'd like to see Mr Obama have a little fun with his adversaries, even if it seals his fate as a one-term president. I'd like to see him start by using the just-proposed national forum on health care reform as a rope-a-dope moment to expose opponents to reform as the bought-and-sold errand boys they are.

In the meantime, it appears that nothing will stop the epochal forces underway in global finance from spinning out of control. Illusions are getting hammered hard now and nations are lining up for the long trip home out of modernity to something that will look more like the seventeenth century, if they're lucky.

http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/02/were-weimar.html


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

The Peak Oil Crisis

2010 - An Annus Horribilis

by Tom Whipple

Fall Church News-Press (January 06 2010)


For Queen Elizabeth, 1992, the year Windsor Palace caught on fire and several of her kids separated, was an annus horribilis [horrible year], for the rest of us the coming year may well turn out to be horrible too.

While our leaders and the media continue to tell us that we have turned an economic corner and that all will be well soon, the underlying data, for those willing to look, tell a far different story.

Just as climate scientists debate the existence of a "tipping point", beyond which rising global temperatures are uncontrollable, there may exist an economic tipping point beyond which control of the US and global economies is beyond the powers of government.

Although another economy-crushing oil price spike in the next twelve months is a possibility, it is the sovereign debt crisis and all that it entails that seems to be a more imminent threat as we enter 2010. Oil prices, however, are back over $80 a barrel, and although few are predicting a price surge in the near future, China, India and several other Asian economies are growing rapidly. There is a good market for the oil that is being produced somewhere and OPEC production has been climbing of late, eating into the cartel's spare capacity to produce more oil.

Of immediate concern, however, is the situation surrounding national debts, particularly that of the US which happens to issue the world's reserve currency. For the last nine months, Washington has been engaging in a variety of unprecedented fiscal activities which hopefully will prevent the US economy from sinking into further economic difficulties. The government has bought up nearly a trillion dollars worth of bad assets from the banks in order to free up capital and keep them solvent.

To support the policy of keeping federal interest rates close to zero, the US Federal Reserve also has been buying up billions dollars worth of new treasury securities. Thanks to the $1 trillion plus deficit the US is now running, Treasury securities are being issued in quantities that have never been seen before and as government revenues continue to plunge are likely to be issued in ever greater quantities.

Amidst the chaos of rising unemployment, spiraling foreclosures, collapsing real estate prices, amazingly enough, the US equity markets have been rising steadily. Some astute observers are beginning to question just what it going on. How can tens of billions of US Treasury securities be auctioned off at such low interest rates each week while many traditional foreign buyers, like China, are backing away from purchasing more US debt as fast as they can without crashing the value of their holdings? How can sensible investors be buying so much stock that prices continue to rise steadily at a time when real unemployment likely is above twenty percent and the prospects for earnings growth by US companies is as bad as it has been in the last eighty years?

The answer, of course is that they probably can't, and this is why suspicions about just what is going on are starting to be raised. Close examination of available data suggests to some that traditional buyers of US stocks such as retail investors, hedge and mutual funds and foreigners simply aren't there on a scale needed to support nine months of some of the fastest growth the equity markets have ever seen.

There are suspicions about the Treasury's auctions too which are consistently oversubscribed with buyers clamoring to buy massive quantities of debt. Obviously there is only one place that all these billions can be coming from and that is the US Federal Reserve which has the capability of creating unlimited amounts of money simply by typing on a computer - you don't even have to bother to print money anymore.

The theory of what is going on is simple - the Federal Reserve creates a trillion or so dollars and sends lots of it to the big investment banks, called primary dealers, in return for stacks of nearly worthless mortgages the banks collected during the recent housing boom. In return for letting them unload nearly a trillion dollars of worthless securities on the taxpayer, the banks oblige the government by using many of those billions to buy Treasury securities from the government at close to zero interest and to buy enough stocks to keep the market steadily rising.

Everybody is happy. The great depression has been halted in its tracks, the stock market is soaring, signaling to the unwary that all is well, and Wall Street's multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses are preserved for yet another year.

The question of the year is how long this federal effort can continue. The controlling factor will be interest rates and the length of time the government can keep interest rates close to zero as it issues trillions in new and refinanced securities. A few interest points higher and housing becomes unaffordable given the strictures on lending. A few more and the US debt becomes unaffordable.

However, this is not our only problem. Some people who follow and understand the intricacies of the US money supply say that it is in contraction. Whenever this has happened in the past, the economic situation has gotten worse - sometimes much worse. Then we have the Chinese who seem likely to use their massive foreign reserves to import more oil and spark another price strike. If this is not enough, there are always the Iranians who have managed to get themselves so wrapped up in theocracy they might just set off another Middle East war threatening much of the world's oil supply.

If any of these developments should occur in the next twelve months we are going to see not only an annus horribilis, but many anni horribiles ("dreadful years") too.

_____

Tom Whipple is a retired government analyst and has been following the peak oil issue for several years.

http://www.fcnp.com/commentary/national/5551-the-peak-oil-crisis-2010-an-annus-horribilis.html

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/51248


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Endgame

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (February 03 2010)

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society


I've mentioned more than once in these essays the foreshortening effect that textbook history can have on our understanding of the historical events going on around us. The stark chronologies most of us get fed in school can make it hard to remember that even the most drastic social changes happen over time, amid the fabric of everyday life and a flurry of events that can seem more important at the time.

This becomes especially problematic in times like the present, when apocalyptic prophecy is a central trope in the popular culture that frames a people's hopes and fears for the future. When the collective imagination becomes obsessed with the dream of a sudden cataclysm that sweeps away the old world overnight and ushers in the new, even relatively rapid social changes can pass by unnoticed. The twilight years of Rome offer a good object lesson; so many people were convinced that the Second Coming might occur at any moment that the collapse of classical civilization went almost unnoticed; only a tiny handful of writers from those years show any recognition that something out of the ordinary was happening at all.

Reflections of this sort have been much on my mind lately, and there's a reason for that. Scattered among the statistical noise that makes up most of today's news are data points that suggest to me that business as usual is quietly coming to an end around us, launching us into a new world for which very few of us have made any preparations at all.

Here's one example. Friends of mine in a couple of midwestern states have mentioned that the steady trickle of refugees from the Chicago slums into their communities has taken a sharp turn up. There's a long history of dysfunction behind this. Back in 1999, Chicago began tearing down its vast empire of huge high-rise projects, promising to replace them with less ghastly and more widely distributed housing for the poor. Most of the replacements, of course, never got built. When the waiting list for Section 8 rent subsidies, the only other option available, got long enough to become a public relations problem, the bureaucrats in charge simply closed the list to new applicants; rumors (hotly denied by the Chicago city government) claim that poor families in Chicago were openly advised to move to other states. Whether for that reason or simple economic survival, a fair number of them did.

Fast forward to the middle of 2009. Around then, facing budget deficits second only to California, the state of Illinois quietly stopped paying its social service providers. In theory, the money is still allocated; in practice, it's been more than six months since Illinois preschools, senior centers, food banks, and the like have received a check from the state for the services they provide, and many of them are on the verge of going broke. Subsidized rent has apparently taken an equivalent hit. Believers in free-market economics have been insisting for years that the end of rent subsidies would let the free market reduce rents to a level that people could afford, but I don't recommend holding your breath; this is the same free market, remember, that gave the United States some of the world's worst slums in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The actual effects have been instructive. Squeezed between sharply contracting benefits and a sharply contracting job market, many of Chicago's poor are hitting the road, heading in any direction that offers more options. Forget the survivalist fantasy of violent hordes pouring out of the inner cities to ravage everything in their path; today's slum residents are instead becoming the Okies of the Great Recession. In the process, part of business as usual in the United States is coming to an end.

Illinois is far from the only state that backed itself into a corner by assuming that rising tax revenues from a bubble economy could be extrapolated indefinitely into the future. 41 US states currently face budget deficits. California has received most of the media attention so far, a good deal of it focused on the political gridlock that has kept the state frozen in crisis for years. Behind the partisan posturing in Sacramento, though, lies a deeper and harsher reality. The state of California is essentially bankrupt; nearly all the mistakes made by the once-wealthy states of the Rust Belt as they slid down the curve of their own decline have been faithfully copied by California as it approaches its destiny as the Rust Belt of the 21st century. I wonder how many local governments in neighboring states have drawn up plans for dealing with the tide of economic refugees once California can no longer pay for its welfare system, and the poor of Los Angeles and other California cities join those of Chicago on the road?

I could go on, but I think the point has been made. State governments are the canaries in our national coal mine; their tax receipts are one of the very few measures of economic activity that aren't being systematically fiddled by the federal government. The figures coming out of state revenue offices strike a jarring contrast with the handwaving about "green shoots" and an imminent return to prosperity heard from Washington DC and the media. Across the country, every few months, states that have already cut spending drastically to cope with record declines in tax income find that they have to go back and do it all over again, because their revenue - and by inference, the incomes, purchases, business activity, and other economic phenomena that feed into taxes - has dropped even further. Now it's true that state budgets get hit whenever the economy goes into recession, and keep on hurting even when the recession is supposed to be over, but compared to past examples, the losses clobbering state funding these days are off the scale, and a great many programs that have been fixtures of American public life for as long as most of us have been living are facing the chopping block.

A different reality pertains within the Washington DC beltway. Where states that fail to balance their budgets get their bond ratings cut and, in some cases, are having trouble finding buyers for their debt at less than usurious interest rates, the federal government seems to be able to defy the normal behavior of bond markets with impunity. Despite soaring deficits, not to mention a growing disinclination on the part of foreign governments to keep on financing the same, every new issuance of US treasury bills somehow finds buyers in such abundance that interest rates stay remarkably low. A few weeks ago, Tom Whipple of ASPO {*} became the latest in a tolerably large number of perceptive observers who have pointed out that this makes sense only if the US government is surreptitiously buying its own debt.

{*} http://www.energybulletin.net/node/51248

The process works something like this. The Federal Reserve, which is not actually a government agency but a consortium of large banks working under a Federal charter, has the statutory right to mint money in the US. These days, that can be done by a few keystrokes on a computer, and another few keystrokes can transfer that money to any bank in the nation. Some of those banks use the money to buy up US treasury bills, probably by way of subsidiaries chartered in the Cayman Islands and the like, and these same off-book subsidiaries then stash the T-bills and keep them off the books. The money thus laundered finally arrives at the US treasury, where it gets spent.

It may be a bit more complex than that. Those huge sums of money voted by Congress to bail out the financial system may well have been diverted into this process - that would certainly explain why the Department of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York have stonewalled every attempt to trace exactly where all that money went. Friendly foreign governments may also have a hand in the process. One way or another, though, those of my readers who remember the financial engineering that got Enron its fifteen minutes of fame may find all this uncomfortably familiar - and it is. The world's largest economy has become, in effect, the United States of Enron.

Plenty of countries in the past have tried to cover expenses that overshot income by spinning the presses at the local mint. The result is generally hyperinflation, of the sort made famous in the 1920s by Germany and more recently by Zimbabwe. That I know of, though, nobody has tried the experiment with a national economy in a steep deflationary depression, of the sort that has been taking shape in America and elsewhere since the real estate bubble crashed and burned in 2008. In theory, at least in the short term, it might just work; the inflationary pressures caused by printing money wholesale could conceivably cancel out the deflationary pressures of a collapsing bubble and a contracting economy - at least for a while.

The difficulty, of course, is that pumping the money supply fixes the symptoms of economic failure without treating the causes, and in every case I know of, governments that resort to it end up caught on a treadmill that requires ever larger infusions of paper money just to maintain the status quo. Sooner or later, as the amount of currency in circulation outstrips the goods and services available to buy, inflation spins out of control, the currency loses most or all of its value, and the economy grinds to a halt until a new currency can be issued on some sounder basis. In 1920s Germany, they managed this last feat by taking out a mortgage on the entire country, and issued "Rentenmarks" backed by that mortgage. In the wake of the late housing bubble, that seems an unlikely option here, though no doubt some gimmick will be found.

It's crucial to realize, though, that this move comes at the end of a long historical trajectory. From the early days of the industrial revolution into the early 1970s, the United States possessed the immense economic advantage of sizable reserves of whatever the cutting-edge energy source happened to be. During what Lewis Mumford called the eotechnic era, when waterwheels were the prime mover for industry and canals were the core transportation technology, the United States prospered because it had an abundance of mill sites and internal waterways. During Mumford's paleotechnic era, when coal and railways replaced water and canal boats, the United States once again found itself blessed with huge coal reserves, and the arrival of the neotechnic era, when petroleum and highways became the new foundation of power, the United States found that nature had supplied it with so much oil that in 1950, it produced more petroleum than all other countries combined.

That trajectory came to an abrupt end in the 1970s, when nuclear power - expected by nearly everyone to be the next step in the sequence - turned out to be hopelessly uneconomical, and renewables proved unable to take up the slack. The neotechnic age, in effect, turned out to have no successor. Since then, for most of the last thirty years, the United States has been trying to stave off the inevitable - the sharp downward readjustment of our national standard of living and international importance following the peak and decline of our petroleum production and the depletion of most of the other natural resources that once undergirded American economic and political power. We've tried accelerating drawdown of natural resources; we've tried abandoning our national infrastructure, our industries, and our agricultural hinterlands; we've tried building ever more baroque systems of financial gimmickry to prop up our decaying economy with wealth from overseas; over the last decade and a half, we've resorted to systematically inflating speculative bubbles - and now, with our backs to the wall, we're printing money as though there's no tomorrow.

Now it's possible that the current US administration will be able to pull one more rabbit out of its hat, and find a new gimmick to keep things going for a while longer. I have to confess that this does not look likely to me. Monetizing the national debt, as economists call the attempt to pay a nation's bills by means of a hyperactive printing press, is a desperation move; it's hard to imagine any reason that it would have been chosen if there were any other option in sight.

What this means, if I'm right, is that we may have just moved into the endgame of America's losing battle with the consequences of its own history. For many years now, people in the peak oil scene - and the wider community of those concerned about the future, to be sure - have had, or thought they had, the luxury of ample time to make plans and take action. Every so often books would be written and speeches made claiming that something had to be done right away, while there was still time, but most people took that as the rhetorical flourish it usually was, and went on with their lives in the confident expectation that the crisis was still a long ways off.

We may no longer have that option. If I read the signs correctly, America has finally reached the point where its economy is so deep into overshoot that catabolic collapse is beginning in earnest. If so, a great many of the things most of us in this country have treated as permanent fixtures are likely to go away over the years immediately before us, as the United States transforms itself into a Third World country. The changes involved won't be sudden, and it seems unlikely that most of them will get much play in the domestic mass media; a decade from now, let's say, when half the American workforce has no steady work, decaying suburbs have mutated into squalid shantytowns, and domestic insurgencies flare across the south and the mountain West, those who still have access to cable television will no doubt be able to watch talking heads explain how we're all better off than we were in 2000.

Those of my readers who haven't already been beggared by the unraveling of what's left of the economy, and have some hope of keeping a roof over their heads for the foreseeable future, might be well advised to stock their pantries, clear their debts, and get to know their neighbors, if they haven't taken these sensible steps already. Those of my readers who haven't taken the time already to learn a practical skill or two, well enough that others might be willing to pay or barter for the results, had better get a move on. Those of my readers who want to see some part of the heritage of the present saved for the future, finally, may want to do something practical about that, and soon. I may be wrong - and to be frank, I hope that I'm wrong - but it looks increasingly to me as though we're in for a very rough time in the very near future.

_____

John Michael Greer, The Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA), has been active in the alternative spirituality movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of more than twenty books, including The Druidry Handbook (Weiser, 2006) and The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age (New Society, 2008). He lives in Cumberland, Maryland.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010/02/endgame.html


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

The Anti-Empire Report

by William Blum

www.killinghope.org (February 06 2010)


"In America you can say anything you want - as long as it doesn't have any effect". -- Paul Goodman

Progressive activists and writers continually bemoan the fact that the news they generate and the opinions they express are consistently ignored by the mainstream media, and thus kept from the masses of the American people. This disregard of progressive thought is tantamount to a definition of the mainstream media. It doesn't have to be a conspiracy; it's a matter of who owns the mainstream media and the type of journalists they hire - men and women who would like to keep their jobs; so it's more insidious than a conspiracy, it's what's built into the system, it's how the system works. The disregard of the progressive world is of course not total; at times some of that world makes too good copy to ignore, and, on rare occasions, progressive ideas, when they threaten to become very popular, have to be countered.

So it was with Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States (1980). Here's Barry Gewen an editor at the New York Times Book Review (June 05 2005) writing of Zinn's book and others like it:

There was a unifying vision, but it was simplistic. Since the victims and losers were good, it followed that the winners were bad. From the point of view of downtrodden blacks, America was racist; from the point of view of oppressed workers, it was exploitative; from the point of view of conquered Hispanics and Indians, it was imperialistic. There was much to condemn in American history, little or nothing to praise ... Whereas the Europeans who arrived in the New World were genocidal predators, the Indians who were already there believed in sharing and hospitality (never mind the profound cultural differences that existed among them), and raped Africa was a continent overflowing with kindness and communalism (never mind the profound cultural differences that existed there).

One has to wonder whether Mr Gewen thought that all the victims of the Holocaust were saintly and without profound cultural differences.

Prominent American historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr once said of Zinn: "I know he regards me as a dangerous reactionary. And I don't take him very seriously. He's a polemicist, not a historian."

In the obituaries that followed Zinn's death, this particular defamation was picked up around the world, from the New York Times, Washington Post, and the leading American wire services to the New Zealand Herald and Korea Times.

Regarding reactionaries and polemicists, it is worth noting that Mr Schlesinger, as a top advisor to President John F Kennedy, played a key role in the overthrow of Cheddi Jagan, the democratically-elected progressive prime minister of British Guiana (now Guyana). In 1990, at a conference in New York City, Schlesinger publicly apologized to Jagan, saying: "I felt badly about my role thirty years ago. I think a great injustice was done to Cheddi Jagan." {1} This is to Schlesinger's credit, although the fact that Jagan was present at the conference may have awakened his conscience after thirty years. Like virtually all the American historians of the period who were granted attention and respect by the mainstream media, Schlesinger was a cold warrior. Those like Zinn who questioned the basic suppositions of the Cold War abroad, and capitalism at home, were regarded as polemicists.

One of my favorite Howard Zinn quotes: "The chief problem in historical honesty is not outright lying. It is omission or de-emphasis of important data. The definition of 'important', of course, depends on one's values." {2} A People's History and his other writings can be seen as an attempt to make up for the omissions and under-emphases of America's dark side in American history books and media.

Haiti, Aristide, and ideology

It's a good thing the Haitian government did virtually nothing to help its people following the earthquake; otherwise it would have been condemned as "socialist" by Fox News, Sarah Palin, the teabaggers, and other right-thinking Americans. The last/only Haitian leader strongly committed to putting the welfare of the Haitian people before that of the domestic and international financial mafia was President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Being of a socialist persuasion, Aristide was, naturally, kept from power by the United States - twice; first by Bill Clinton, then by George W Bush, the two men appointed by President Obama to head the earthquake relief effort. Naturally.

Aristide, a reformist priest, was elected to the presidency, then ousted in a military coup eight months later in 1991 by men on the CIA payroll. Ironically, the ousted president wound up in exile in the United States. In 1994 the Clinton White House found itself in the awkward position of having to pretend - because of all their rhetoric about "democracy" - that they supported the democratically-elected Aristide's return to power. After delaying his return for more than two years, Washington finally had its military restore Aristide to office, but only after obliging the priest to guarantee that after his term ended he would not remain in office to make up the time lost because of the coup; that he would not seek to help the poor at the expense of the rich, literally; and that he would stick closely to free-market economics. This meant that Haiti would continue to be the assembly plant of the Western Hemisphere, with its workers receiving starvation wages, literally. If Aristide had thoughts about breaking the agreement forced upon him, he had only to look out his window - US troops were stationed in Haiti for the remainder of his term. {3}

On February 28 2004, during the Bush administration, American military and diplomatic personnel arrived at the home of Aristide, who had been elected to the presidency once again in 2002, to inform him that his private American security agents must either leave immediately to return to the United States or fight and die; that the remaining 25 of the American security agents hired by the Haitian government, who were to arrive the next day, had been blocked by the United States from coming; that foreign and Haitian rebels were nearby, heavily armed, determined and ready to kill thousands of people in a bloodbath. Aristide was then pressured into signing a "letter of resignation" before being kidnaped and flown to exile in Africa by the United States. {4} The leaders and politicians of the world who pontificate endlessly about "democracy" and "self-determination" had virtually nothing to say about this breathtaking act of international thuggery. Indeed, France and Canada were active allies of the United States in pressing Aristide to leave. {5}

And then US Secretary of State Colin Powell, in the sincerest voice he could muster, told the world that Aristide "was not kidnaped. We did not force him onto the airplane. He went onto the airplane willingly. And that's the truth." {6} Powell sounded as sincere as he had sounded a year earlier when he gave the UN his now-famous detailed inventory of the chemical, biological and nuclear weapons that Saddam Hussein was preparing to use.

Howard Zinn is quoted above saying "The chief problem in historical honesty is not outright lying. It is omission or de-emphasis of important data". However, that doesn't mean the American mainstream media don't create or perpetuate myths. Here's the New York Times two months ago: "Mr Aristide, who was overthrown during a 2004 rebellion ..." {7} Now what image does the word "rebellion" conjure up in your mind? The Haitian people rising up to throw off the shackles put on them by a dictatorship? Or something staged by the United States?

Aristide has stated that he was able to determine at that crucial moment that the "rebels" were white and foreign. {8} But even if they had been natives, why did Colin Powell not explain why the United States disbanded Aristide's personal security forces? Why did he not explain why the United States was not protecting Aristide from the rebels, which the US could have done with the greatest of ease, without so much as firing a single shot? Nor did he explain why Aristide would "willingly" give up his presidency.

The massive US military deployment to Haiti in the wake of the earthquake has been criticized in various quarters as more of an occupation than a relief mission, with the airport in the capital city now an American military base, and with American forces blocking various aid missions from entering the country in order, apparently, to serve Washington's own logistical agenda. But the large military presence can also serve to facilitate two items on Washington's political agenda - preventing Haitians from trying to emigrate by sea to the United States and keeping a lid on the numerous supporters of Aristide lest they threaten to take power once again.

That which can not be spoken

"The purpose of terrorism is to provoke an overreaction", writes Fareed Zakaria, a leading American foreign-policy pundit, editor of Newsweek magazine's international edition, and Washington Post columnist, referring to the "underwear bomber", Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and his failed attempt to blow up a US airliner on Christmas day. "Its real aim is not to kill the hundreds of people directly targeted but to sow fear in the rest of the population. Terrorism is an unusual military tactic in that it depends on the response of the onlookers. If we are not terrorized, then the attack didn't work. Alas, this one worked very well." {9}

Is that not odd? That an individual would try to take the lives of hundreds of people, including his own, primarily to "provoke an overreaction", or to "sow fear"? Was there not any kind of deep-seated grievance or resentment with anything or anyone American being expressed? No perceived wrong he wished to make right? Nothing he sought to obtain revenge for? Why is the United States the most common target of terrorists? Such questions were not even hinted at in Zakaria's article.

At a White House press briefing concerning the same failed terrorist attack, conducted by Assistant to the President for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security John Brennan, veteran reporter Helen Thomas raised a question:

Thomas: "What is really lacking always for us is you don't give the motivation of why they want to do us harm ... What is the motivation? We never hear what you find out on why."

Brennan: "Al Qaeda is an organization that is dedicated to murder and wanton slaughter of innocents ... [They] attract individuals like Mr Abdulmutallab and use them for these types of attacks. He was motivated by a sense of religious sort of drive. Unfortunately, al Qaeda has perverted Islam, and has corrupted the concept of Islam, so that [they're] able to attract these individuals. But al Qaeda has the agenda of destruction and death."

Thomas: "And you're saying it's because of religion?"

Brennan: "I'm saying it's because of an al Qaeda organization that uses the banner of religion in a very perverse and corrupt way".

Thomas: "Why?"

Brennan: "I think ... this is a long issue, but al Qaeda is just determined to carry out attacks here against the homeland".

Thomas: "But you haven't explained why". {10}

American officials rarely even make the attempt to explain why. And American journalists rarely press them to explain why; certainly not like Helen Thomas does.

And just what is it that has such difficulty crossing the lips of these officials? It is the idea that anti-American terrorists become anti-American terrorists to retaliate for what the United States has done to countries or people close to them or what Israel has done to them with unequivocal American support.

Osama bin Laden, in an audiotape, also commented about Abdulmutallab: "The message we wanted you to receive through him is that America shall not dream about security until we witness it in Palestine". {11}

We have as well the recent case of Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a Jordanian doctor-turned-suicide bomber, who killed seven CIA employees at a base in Afghanistan December 30. His widow later declared: "I am proud of him ... My husband did this against the US invasion". Balawi himself had written on the Internet: "I have never wished to be in Gaza, but now I wish to be a ... car bomb that takes the lives of the biggest number of Jews to hell". {12}

It should be noted that the CIA base attacked by Balawi was heavily involved in the selection of targets for the Agency's remote-controlled aircraft along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, a program that killed more than 300 people in the previous year. {13}

There are numerous examples of terrorists citing American policies as the prime motivation behind their acts {14}, so many that American officials, when discussing the newest terrorist attack, have to tread carefully to avoid mentioning the role of US foreign policy; and journalists typically fail to bring this point home to their reader's consciousness.

It works the same all over the world. In the period of the 1950s to the 1980s in Latin America, in response to a long string of hateful Washington policies, there were countless acts of terrorism against US diplomatic and military targets as well as the offices of US corporations.

The US bombing, invasion, occupation and torture in Iraq and Afghanistan, the bombing of Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, and the continuing Israeli-US genocide against the Palestinians have created an army of new anti-American terrorists. We'll be hearing from them for a terribly long time. And we'll be hearing American officials twist themselves into intellectual and moral knots as they try to avoid confronting these facts.

In his "State of the Union" address on January 27, President Obama said: "But if anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors, and stop insurance company abuses, let me know". Well, ending America's many wars would free up enough money to do anything a rational, humane society would want to do. Eliminating the military budget would pay for free medical care for everyone. Free university education for everyone. Creating a government public works project that could provide millions of decently-paid jobs, like repairing the decrepit infrastructure and healing the environment to the best of our ability. You can add your own favorite projects. All covered, just by ending the damn wars. Imagine that.

Notes:

1. The Nation, June 4 1990, pages 763-4

2. Failure to Quit: Reflections of an Optimistic Historian (1993), page 30

3. http://killinghope.org/bblum6/haiti2.htm

4. Statement of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, March 5 2004, from exile in the Central African Republic, Pacific News Service (San Francisco); David Swanson, "What Bush Did to Haiti", January 18 2010 {15}; William Blum, Rogue State (2002), pages 219-20

5. Miami Herald, March 1 2004

6. CNN, March 1 2004

7. New York Times, November 27 2009

8. Aristide statement, op cit

9. Newsweek, January 18 2010, online January 9

10. White House press briefing, January 7 2010

11. ABC News, January 25 2010

12. Associated Press, January 7 2010

13. Washington Post, January 1 2010

14. Rogue State (2002), chapter 1, "Why do terrorists keep picking on the United States?"; this chapter ends in 2005; some later examples can be provided by the author.

{15} http://davidswanson.org/node/2415

William Blum is the author of:-

Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War Two (Common Courage Press, 1995)

Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower (Zed Books, 2002)

West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir (Soft Skull Press, 2002)

Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire (Common Courage Press, 2004)


Portions of the books can be read, and copies purchased, at http://www.killinghope.org and previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website.

To add yourself to this mailing list simply send an email to bblum6@aol.com
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Or put "remove" in the subject line to do the opposite.

Any part of this report may be disseminated without permission. I'd appreciate it if the website were mentioned.

http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer78.html


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

The Oceans Are Coming - Part Three

Remaining Afloat

by Keith Farnish and Dmitry Orlov

ClubOrlov (January 17 2010)


The first two parts of this series drew a surprising amount of vitriol from people who vehemently deny the merits of the case for adapting to rapid climate change and rising sea levels - greater even than the piece ridiculing the Teabaggers {1}. The torrent of comment spam got so bad that I had to shut down comment submission altogether. It was probably fed to some extent by the various interests which were fighting to make the Copenhagen Conference a fiasco. I really do like giving people the ability to publish thoughtful, reasonable, helpful comments, and so as a compromise I have decided to turn comment submission back on, but only for registered users (including OpenID). Those who wish to dispute the reality of climate change should perhaps go to {2}.

Had Noah built his arc and the Great Flood never materialized, he would have felt very, very silly indeed! Noah could thank God for such an accurate weather forecast. In the biblical story, once the waters receded, God told Noah that there won't be any more Great Floods, and some of us may still find comfort in this bit of divine dispensation, but rising ocean levels are a fact that more and more of us will be forced to take into account as we redraw our coastal maps. How fast are the ocean levels rising? Well, that's where we have a bit of problem. When making plans, it is helpful to be armed with the most accurate and up-to-date forecasts; laying plans for tomorrow based on yesterday's forecast seems like folly. And yet that is precisely what our incomplete understanding of climate dynamics forces us to do.

In Part One of this series, just a couple of months ago, we cheerfully wrote: "The East Antarctic Ice Sheet (that's the big blob that surrounds the South Pole just off-centre) seems to be quite stable, and should remain that way for the next few centuries". That would have been nice, because the East Antarctic ice sheet holds somewhere around eighty percent of all the fresh water on the planet; if it were to melt, the sea level would go up by between twenty and 36 metres (75 to 120 feet) and coastal maps would need to be redrawn more or less from scratch. But then shortly after we posted the second part of this series, Nature Geoscience published a study {3} showing that the East Antarctic Ice Sheet was undergoing a decline in thickness:

In agreement with an independent earlier assessment, we estimate a total loss of 190 (plus or minus 77) billion tons per year, with 132 (plus or minus 26) billion tons per year coming from West Antarctica. However, in contrast with previous GRACE estimates, our data suggest that East Antarctica is losing mass, mostly in coastal regions, at a rate of 57 (plus or minus 52) billion tons per year, apparently caused by increased ice loss since the year 2006.

"Accurate quantification of Antarctic ice-sheet mass balance and its contribution to global sea-level rise remains challenging", the authors are quick to caution. Nevertheless, the study concludes that "in contrast to previous estimates ... [the new measurements] indicate that as a whole, Antarctica may soon be contributing significantly more to global sea-level rise". In Part One we cited the aforementioned GRACE satellite system as a way of assessing potential ice losses from Greenland, and based on it we assumed - wrongly as it turned out - that East Antarctica would be safe. Taking into account everything that has been discussed earlier in this series, this shouldn't come as a surprise. Typically, we don't know what exactly to expect or when to expect it, but we do know that it will be worse than what we should have been expecting before. Should we wait to act until scientific certainty has been achieved? If we do, will it be too late to prepare or to adapt?

Newsflash! {4} It now appears that a couple of big Antarctic glaciers - Pine Island Glacier and Thwaite's Glacier next to it - have passed their tipping points. They have floated off the sea-bed, and will now disintegrate, resulting in as much as a half-metre rise above previously estimated sea level by the end of the century.

We are not in a position to face down the ocean, saying "This far, Ocean, and not a centimetre further!" Our worst-case scenario is that our worst-case scenario is going to continue getting worse and worse. We cannot limit our planning activities to this or that mythical upper bound. When our knowledge fails us, our myths are there to guide us. The success of Noah's mission did not depend on having an accurate estimate of how high the waters would rise, because his arc floated.

* * *

Were the advances all gradual, as are experienced from day to day on the deep ocean island chains of Tuvalu, Mauritius and The Seychelles (where the governments, perversely, still encourage mass tourism by carbon-spewing jet aircraft) then the threat to the thickly-settled low-lying coastlines of the world could, possibly, be managed in an orderly manner. Managed retreat would certainly be a possibility. The threatened areas could be redesignated as flood-zones, to be used only for low-value farming and aquaculture. Coastal inhabitants would be gradually resettled further inland. As swaths of coastal real estate are knocked down to make room for more sea, abatement procedures would be followed to prevent the coastal waters from being poisoned by toxic chemicals or choked with floating debris. In preparation, new navigation channels could be dug and seawalls and jetties constructed further inland.

But no such opportunities will present themselves in most places where cyclones smash into the coast, inundating mile upon mile of lowland with salt water. Storm surges can suddenly overtop shoreline defences that seemed sufficient the day before, spreading their watery fingers across fenlands and farms. Then the storm sewers back up, breeding typhoid-spreading rats and malaria-spreading mosquitoes wherever the water pools in stagnant reaches. In such cases, emergency evacuation and resettlement remains the only option. But emergency management capabilities are restricted, and will become completely inadequate as the frequency of such emergencies continues to increase.

As we showed in Part Two, especially with the story of the Netherlands, you can only hold back the tide for so long before the inevitable happens. What is crazy about the way we occupy the coastal region is not that we do it at all - there is a good living to be made there, as the crofters of North West Scotland found prior to the Clearances, and as the seemingly daredevil occupants of the Sundarbans do today. No, what is crazy about the way we occupy the coastal region is that civilized humans assume that the coastline is fixed. Civilized humans are wont to stand at the water's edge and not so much dare it, as deny that the sea can take what they feel is so rightly theirs. Yet anyone with a rudimentary understanding of coastal geomorphology knows that many coastal regions are dynamic, their relative stability dependent on the strength of the currents and waves and the resistance of the material from which the coast is built. Shingle and sand move with the dominant current along the shore, depleting one part of the coast and building up another. Where the coast loses its protective skirt, the water can rapidly eat into the land, causing slumps and falls which themselves are carried away by the water. Some places are luckier than others - and it is a matter of luck - to be blessed with mangroves, salt marshes, coral reefs or natural shoals that reduce the impact of the waves and undersea currents. Other places may be more resistant to change: a granite or basalt coastline will withstand the harshest of conditions for eons, even long after all the soil has been scoured off by storms. Most shorelines are continuously moving. When the sea cooperates, it is possible, for a time, to constrain them using embankments or dikes. But the sea always wins in the end. The sea is the ultimate wilderness. We may play its game and sometimes even win, but it will never play by our rules. This much we know and it would be foolish of us to think that it could be otherwise.

Just how foolish? Here is an example {5} from New South Wales, Australia, where the local council have forcefully rejected the do-nothing option:

The "do nothing" option will not be considered by Port Macquarie-Hastings Council as a response to the management of coastal erosion at Lake Cathie, says the council's coastal and estuaries committee. Local campaigner and Lake Cathie resident Leslie Williams said that local Illaroo Road residents were pleased to see this option removed and that consideration would now focus on alternatives such as beach nourishment, seawalls and planned retreat.

PMHC's development and environment director Matt Rogers said the "do nothing" option had been dismissed in the report to go before the next council meeting, as the council recognised the impact of that option on residents and was unacceptable. The council will also consider moves to permit residents to make contributions to protection work, while development applications for Illaroo Road properties would not be accepted until the erosion issue was resolved.

Notice that last bit? It would appear that development applications will not be accepted until Illaroo Road is made safe from the rising oceans. Given the latest ocean rise forecasts, this is a perfectly sensible procedural delay (not to be confused with the "do nothing" option). Illaroo Road will be underwater for a short spell - just a few thousand years - but then, with luck, the Earth will enter yet another ice age, glaciers will grow again, the waters will retreat, and, in due course, Illaroo Road properties will be developed. This is industrial-strength foolishness, and is surely symptomatic of the megalomania that also makes civilized people believe you can keep burning oil and coal as long as you keep pumping the carbon dioxide underground. The erosion issue will never be "resolved": something's got to give ... eventually.

* * *

Apart from such "proactive" approaches, those living low-lying coastal areas around the world really have just two choices:

1. Keep denying the reality of climate change and the effects of increased storm energy and sea level rise; or, with similar naivete, accept that things are changing but assume that their political leaders will somehow be able to deal with it.

2. Face reality, take matters into their own hands, and find ways to adapt. Take to higher ground, or remain near the coast but prepare for a life afloat and on the move.

* * *

If you are thinking of ignoring everything written so far in this series and making your decisions based on the business-as-usual scenario our political leaders love so much, we would urge you to reconsider - while you have the option. Even if sea-level rise does not achieve the catastrophic levels that are becoming more and more likely with each new scientific study, your ability to adapt is going to be constrained by the way you get around. Your speed may vary, but overall it will be inversely proportional the speed at which the current petroleum-based transport infrastructure falls apart, as the reality of crude oil's terminal decline and resource scarcity begin to hit home. Before too long, you will be on foot - if you are still on dry ground, that is - and, if not, you will need a boat of some sort. Having an internal-combustion engine to push it around is certainly a convenience, but you wouldn't want to be left stranded due to lack of fuel.

One can reasonably imagine that certain internal combustion vehicles will stay in sporadic use longer than others. On the water, smaller motorised craft - dinghies, launches, and tenders - use little fuel, are very energy-effective for the services they render, and so are likely to persist for some time. On land, the pay-off per unit energy is much lower, and so internal-combustion vehicles are likely to be relegated to the realm of pure luxury from whence the "horseless carriage" originally emerged. Limousines for weddings and hearses for funerals will perhaps remain motorised the longest, moving slowly over unpaved roads, since people would still be willing to pay extra for dignity on special occasions. We can also foresee that certain groups, such as governments, mafias, armed gangs and other social predators will be able to secure a supply of fuel the longest. It is difficult to imagine that such a winding-down can transpire uniformly smoothly and peaceably. Inevitably, geography will be the determining factor: remote population centres, to which fuel must be brought overland, will have their supply curtailed long before those that are close to pipelines, railway lines, seaports or shipping channels. In communities that find themselves without access to transport fuels, much of the remaining economic activity will centre around gathering the necessary resources in order to escape, and they will steadily depopulate, leaving behind the old and the sick.

We can foresee that road traffic will be greatly reduced, as paved roads revert to dirt and become eroded and, in places, impassable, as bridges collapse from lack of maintenance, and as predation by both local officials and highwaymen increases both the costs and the dangers. Both pedestrian traffic and caravans of pack animals will try to evade official and unofficial predation, opting for the less popular, more circuitous footpaths instead of the direct and open road. Canals and other navigable waterways will once again play a much larger role in inland transport, with barges pulled by draught animals along towpaths and with sail-boats carrying freight and passengers along the sea-coasts. As the sea-ports that currently serve container ships, bulk carriers and tankers are submerged under the rising seas, the current hub-and-spoke transport networks will collapse, and smaller coastal communities will once again find ample reason to want to build and provision ocean-going vessels, to make seasonal migrations and to trade with faraway lands.

* * *

At the same time, the need for transport will only grow, as millions of environmental refugees diffuse across the world looking for a new place to settle, and, not finding any, remain perpetually on the move. Rapid climate change is putting an end to the last ten thousand years of unusually stable climate. It was this rare episode of climate stability that has allowed agriculture to develop and flourish and previously nomadic tribes to settle down in one place without starving. It even allowed agrarian societies to produce such large food surpluses that cities and towns could become established, eventually growing to millions of inhabitants, all fed using cash crops grown elsewhere. As the climate reverts to its chaotic historical norm, people everywhere will be forced to abandon such sedentery patterns of inhabiting the landscape in favour of the more usual migratory and nomadic existence, minimising the risk of starvation by diversifying food sources across large geographic areas, and making seasonal migrations to avoid extremes of hot and cold.

Even as the rising oceans devastate many coastal areas, the areas far inland will become far less welcoming. Global warming will make extreme weather events, such as the 2003 European heat wave, which resulted in 37,451 deaths, an annual happening. Many inland areas, such as much of the southern United States, which are currently only survivable in the summer thanks to widespread access to air conditioning, will no longer be survivable. Ocean water's moderating effect on climate will make the coasts seem relatively inviting in spite of the erosion and the flooding. However, erecting permanent structures on such an impermanent terrain seems like a foolish thing to do. On the other hand, being able to take to the waves is an insurance policy that might pay you double if you are smart enough. Not only will seas and oceans, coastal waters, waterways inevitably reemerge as the default means of movement, but also as the places where the circumstances will force many people to live. This they should be able to do, provided their dwellings can float and move about without energy from fossil fuels.

* * *

Imagine life on the ocean water, and a community that is connected through its mutual dependence on the wildly dynamic coastal belt. Imagine your home being a boat; moving with the winds, the tides and the currents, rising and settling on the wash of floodwater. This is really not as outlandish as it might sound. Options for post-industrial sailboat-building are described in quite a lot of detail in Dmitry's article "Twenty-First Century Transport", which will appear in Slaying The Hydra, Gillian Fallon and Richard Douthwaite, editors, Green Books, May 2010. The design he proposes has been rather thoroughly thought out and many of its elements rigorously tested.

On board are all the systems needed to make it a self-contained mobile survival capsule. Water for drinking and washing is provided through rainwater collection with a solar still for back-up. Illumination and electricity for communications and navigational equipment and lights comes from a few solar panels and a small wind generator. For sanitation, there is a composting toilet, its proceeds used to fertilize bits of permaculture tucked away on shore. For heating and cooking and getting rid of the inevitable damp, there is a wood stove, the wood generally available in the form of driftwood. What's more, it is very hard to starve because the coastal zone tends to be very productive: Dulse seaweed, clams, oysters, mussels, sea urchins, sea cucumbers, conchs, edible periwinkles and what's left of the fish provide a year-round banquet. A sea breeze provides the air conditioning. A few ratty old sails and a couple of long sculling oars provide the propulsion when the time comes for a change of venue. The same boat that can dry out at low tide on a mud flat or nosed onto a sheltered stretch of beach can be sailed halfway across the world quite safely and comfortably. It wouldn't win any races, but then it doesn't have to be sailed by a professional crew of acrobatic sea-monkeys either.

* * *

The sea exerts a powerful pull on the imagination of the landlubber. Go to any seaside on a warm, sunny day, and you will see quite a few people spread out along the embankment, sitting or standing, staring vacantly over the water. From the water they look like ants. Go ashore and visit any newsstand, even one quite far inland, and you are sure to find some sailing magazines, full of airbrushed photographs of bikini-clad women on top of similarly well-buffed large floating toys. The sea is the ultimate escape fantasy. The landlubbers assume, and rightly sow, that just out of sight of land lies a different world, one which shore-side society will never be able to fully oppress.

The shore-side landscape has been carved up into various types of boxes and rectangles. Architects never tire of putting boxes on top of, next to, or inside of other boxes; this seems to exhaust their range of motions. People inhabit these boxes, starting with the crib and ending with the coffin. In the interim, they use four-wheeled boxes to navigate the maze between house boxes, job boxes and shopping boxes. All of this fixation on rectilinear geometry is supposed to make them safe and comfortable, but it also makes them dream of escape. Escape to sea, of course, is an obvious choice, because any body of water - even a smallish one - is automatically a wilderness, while the ocean is a force of nature par excellence - unconquerable by man, guaranteed to utterly destroy and humiliate any human contrivance designed to keep it in check. The land has been carved up into rectangles and boxes, but the sea-coast (the wet side of it, that is) remains a relative wilderness precisely because it cannot be carved up quite so easily.

Strange though it may seem, the wilderness starts right at the water's edge. If our ocean-gazers turned their gaze to the boats bobbing around at anchor or at moorings, and looked carefully, they would notice that some of these stationary boats are, in fact, inhabited. Here is a dinghy tied up to the stern of one; another has towels drying on the lifelines; a third has a bit of smoke coming from a chimney above the wheelhouse - somebody is cooking lunch. Unbeknownst to most of the box-dwellers on shore, there is rather a large tribe of "live-aboards" - people who live aboard boats. Some keep their boats in posh marinas and emerge from the cabin in the morning wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase. Others live at anchor, setting a few crabpots or fishing off the stern to catch their dinner, and rowing themselves ashore periodically to do an odd job or gather some supplies. Some boats make semi-annual pilgrimages in search of warmer or cooler weather; others have a summer holiday, during which they visit picturesque places along the coast; still others stay put, growing a thick beard of seafood. Living on a boat is in general much more economical than living on land, and it is possible, if one is skilled, to make a living of it without very much monetary input at all. But it is certainly not for everybody. Some people try it and after a while give up, others have been living aboard for decades and are not about to stop.

Many others are about to start living on the water, even though they don't know it yet. The problem is, their houses don't float, don't move, and they aren't particularly habitable without the wires and pipes that hook them to various services. When the water comes, they are submerged and disintegrate. Living on a boat may have its challenges and annoyances, but living in a flooded house is close to impossible. And so, if the landscape you inhabit is in danger of becoming flooded, cut off from the mainland, or generally uninhabitable, why not build a boat instead of a house, or next to the house, and float away when the time comes. It is quite possible for an amateur with limited funds to build a craft that is roomy enough to house a family, relatively immune to wind and waves, happily sits upright on any relatively level bit of ground, rides well to anchor, and contains all the necessities and even a modicum of luxuries, for a perfectly civilized existence.

As a residence, a sailboat offers a unique combination of safety, civilization and freedom. It may be raining cats and dogs and blowing so hard that tree-branches are flying about on shore, but on a boat anchored in a sheltered spot, once you lash down a few things on deck and descend the companionway, you enter a different world. Standing in the cabin, you are up to your chest in water, but the water is outside, while inside it is warm and dry, you have your own source of electricity from the wind generator, fresh rainwater is gurgling down into the water tanks, and, what's more, you do not have to ask anyone's permission or pay anyone for the right to be there. If someone minds you being there, or if the place is uninviting, once the storm passes you hoist sails, pull up anchor, and look for another spot.

* * *

In a world where rising seas are already putting millions of people at risk of losing their homes, their lives, or both, a programme of building large numbers of inexpensive, practical, utilitarian and versatile sailing craft is a direct way to provide flood-proof, earthquake-proof and storm-proof habitation, to build communities, to create local resilience, and to provide hope for a survivable future. It is a way to create connections between different parts of the planet that can survive into the post-industrial age. It offers a way to transport people and goods in a fashion that avoids predation that will be an inevitable element of a disrupted time. It offers us an opportunity to make sure that we remain a seafaring species even as the fossil fuel era recedes into history, and gives us a way to salvage something very useful out of the wreckage of our industrial past.

Links:

{1} http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/09/caution-white-people.html

{2} http://www.darwinawards.com/

{3} http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v2/n12/abs/ngeo694.html

{4} http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18383-major-antarctic-glacier-is-past-its-tipping-point.html

{5} http://www.camdencourier.com.au/news/local/news/general/residents-reject-do-nothing-erosion-option/1706506.aspx

_____

Keith Farnish is author of "Time's Up! An Uncivilized Solution To A Global Crisis" (http://www.timesupbook.com) and also writes The Earth Blog and The Unsuitablog. He enjoys being a husband and dad, walking around and growing things.


http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2010/01/oceans-are-coming-part-iii-remaining.html


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Bank rules miss their target

by Richard A Werner

Special to The Daily Yomiuri (February 04 2010)


US President Barack Obama's proposed government restrictions on bank speculation are a step in the right direction. But they are like opening an umbrella, when the roof needs fixing. Banning proprietary trading and bank ownership of hedge funds improves financial markets, because the vast game of insider trading that has been going on for decades in the world's major financial centres may be discouraged, whereby large banks and securities firms abused client confidentiality and their privileged position as counterparty to large transactions in order to take bets on their own books ahead of or against their own clients. This is the sort of conflict of interest that former New York District Attorney Eliot Spitzer rightly and somewhat heroically campaigned against. And that's why President Obama's rules to ban proprietary trading and bank-owned speculative vehicles, such as hedge funds and private equity funds, are a good thing.

But something happened when these long overdue restrictions were announced. Some of President Obama's advisers must have mixed up their notes or got confused. For poor Mr Obama ended up giving the impression that he actually believed these sort of restrictions would prevent, or perhaps even end, banking crises and the intermittent transfer of vast tax funds to the banking sector (every ten to twenty years).

These restrictions have little if anything to do with the causes of banking crises. They do nothing about banks' dangerous involvement in speculative finance. With such new rules, there will be just as many banking crises in the future as in the recent past (over 100 in the past thirty years). At the World Economic Forum in Davos, bankers argued (in vain) against Mr Obama's restrictions, by correctly pointing out that proprietary trading was not the main cause of the banking crisis. Such trading should be banned, but not because it causes banking crises (but because insider trading is illegal and taking bets against your clients on the basis of your knowledge of their positions is unethical). If we also want to prevent banking crises, something else will need to get banned, namely the activity that was the main cause of the banking crisis.

Proprietary trading can be defined as banks "taking risky bets with their own capital to make money on the financial markets". Whether it is a hedge fund's investment programs, private equity funds' business techniques, the operation of structured investment vehicles (SIVs) investing in subprime mortgages or merger & acquisitions (M&As) - almost all such apparently sophisticated financial "innovations" of the past decades rely on something rather simple and old-fashioned (about 5,000 years old - the age of our banking system, which started in Babylon): plain vanilla bank credit. All the above, including bank credit to hedge funds or credit for mergers and acquisitions constitutes, just as much as proprietary trading, banks "taking risky bets with their own capital to make money".

Banning banks' direct investment in or ownership of such ventures won't prevent them from extending credit to these speculators. Worse, their credit extension is only backed by a fraction of their own capital, hence it is more dangerous than proprietary trading (which technically might be said to be "fully" backed by capital, though in fact it is fully backed by the tax-payer). Thus banning banks' speculative investment for their own books must be done together with a ban on banks' lending to speculators.

The full extent of the problem and hence the need for such a measure will only be understood what makes banks special: they enjoy the public privilege of being authorised to manufacture and allocate about 98 percent of the money supply. That's why there is in fact no such thing as a "bank loan": When banks "lend" money, they actually create credit and hence "coin" new money. Whenever their newly created money is used for transactions that are not part of the real economy (such as all the above financial transactions), asset price inflation is created and an unsustainable bubble comes about that, if large enough, will threaten the banking system and lead to calls for tax payer-funded bailouts.

If US conglomerate Kraft wants to buy British confectionery firm Cadbury, let them do it, but why should this US firm be allowed to fund its takeover by being given newly created British pounds, with the money proudly produced and handed over to Kraft by a British government-owned bank? RBS provided more than 600 million euro for Kraft's purchase of Cadbury - an example of unproductive credit creation. Why not instead create credit and lend it to the many productive and innovative British small and medium-sized firms? (You know the answer: it's more work and generates smaller bonuses per bank staff; and the government and central bank do nothing about changing these wrong incentives). The millions provided by RBS will be handed to all those shareholders who sell their shares to Kraft, and hence will be injected into financial markets, fueling asset inflation, while the small firm credit crunch continues.

Since under the guidance of the government banks have been given the go-ahead to reengage in speculative credit creation on a grand scale over the past year, we should not be surprised that asset prices have been driven up again. Intriguingly, the German government, when hesitantly claiming to welcome President Obama's restrictions on banks' proprietary trading, said that the financial sector should be "made to pay for future financial crises" (Finance Minister Schaeuble). It seems they are wise enough to start talking about the next banking crisis.

That, indeed, is also the view taken by the IMF. On February 1, its managing director, Mr Dominique Strauss-Kahn, argued that the best way to respond to the American and British banking crisis was to impose new taxes on international financial transactions, which the IMF wishes to receive. This would serve two purposes, Mr Strauss-Kahn says: It would encourage the financial sector to take fewer risks, and secondly, it would raise money for the future banking crises - that seem to be on the horizon. This statement makes obvious that, like me, Mr Strauss-Kahn does not believe that such a tax (often called "Tobin tax") would prevent future banking crises.

So why is that major regulators and decision-makers wish to engage in "reforms" of the banking system, which might achieve various things, but will ensure that the cycle of recurring banking crises will continue? Eliot Spitzer and his fine nose for conflict of interest have not yet identified the problem that the IMF and the World Bank thrive on crises. Why else would countries allow the young IMF staff to boss around their governments and dictate structural adjustment programmes that have now been proven to make people worse off? (A 2008 report in a medical journal by Cambridge and Yale scientists demonstrated that where the IMF treads, public health spending goes down, and tuberculosis goes up).

Meanwhile, World Bank economists have said on record that they do not mind financial crises that much, because they are "a window of opportunity" - for what? For "structural reform" (of the free market type imposed by the IMF that allows greater access to large international corporations) and for a "transfer of ownership" (you guessed right; not a transfer from the few to the many).

If one was serious about preventing bubbles, banking crises and indebting tax payers further, one would not stop at banning banks' proprietary speculative investments, but simply ban all bank credit creation for unproductive use, which includes all bank credit for financial transactions. Let the speculators speculate, and ideally without charging a tax that will fund unhealthy bureaucracies, but prevent them from gaining access to the public privilege to create money, and let them try to raise the money in the oh-so-efficient capital markets. With this simple rule to ban banks' credit for financial transactions, there won't be asset boom/bust cycles, speculators and bankers would have lower bonuses, risk in financial markets would be reduced, and, most importantly, there won't be any more banking crises. For it is the creation of credit for use in transactions that are unproductive and do not contribute to GDP (financial transactions) that creates asset bubbles and banking crises.

_____

Werner, DPhil (Oxon), is professor of international banking at the School of Management, University of Southampton, author of Princes of the Yen (M E Sharpe, 2003), and in 2003 was selected as "Global Leader for Tomorrow" by the World Economic Forum in Davos.

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/columns/commentary/20100205dy01.htm


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

The Next Great Transformation

by John Feffer

Foreign Policy In Focus (February 02 2010)


By one estimate {1}, China has been at the top of the global economy for eighteen out of the last twenty centuries. That's an impressive track record, whatever you might think of imperialism, communism, and all the other systems that have prevailed in that vast country over the centuries. Even President Obama made a nod in China's direction in last week's State of the Union address {2}. "We know the country that harnesses the power of clean, renewable energy will lead the 21st century", he said. "And yet, it is China that has launched the largest effort in history to make their economy energy efficient".

Translation: China is kicking our butt.

The common wisdom is that the Chinese economy has prospered in the last two decades despite rather than because of communism. Only after Beijing began to privatize agriculture and embrace market mechanisms did the Chinese economy begin to post double-digit growth. Once the free market came to China, how could the country fail to succeed with its history of global economic dominance and 1.3 billion energetic citizens? Meanwhile, the Chinese government, according to this conventional view, is all dead weight: corrupt, censoring, and clinging to its poorly performing state-owned enterprises.

But what if the Chinese government, for all of its defects, has been part of the solution rather than part of the problem?

Learning from its neighbors in East Asia, the Chinese government made shrewd investment choices from the 1980s on. The often heavy hand of the government was able to redirect resources in a more targeted way than the invisible hand of the market. In 1998, for instance, Beijing announced massive investment in higher education. Over the next four years, writes {3} Robert Fogel in Foreign Policy, "enrollment in higher education increased 165 percent, and the number of Chinese studying abroad rose 152 percent". A better-educated workforce translated into greater productivity.

Even more dramatic was China's 863 program, its great leap forward in technology launched in 1986. In 2001, because of its dependence on dirty coal and imported oil, the government decided to focus this program on renewable energy. "In 2006, Chinese leaders redoubled their commitment to new energy technology", writes {4} Peter Osnos in The New Yorker. "They boosted funding for research and set targets for installing wind turbines, solar panels, hydroelectric dams, and other renewable sources of energy that were higher than goals in the United States. China doubled its wind-power capacity that year, then doubled it again the next year, and the year after. The country had virtually no solar industry in 2003; five years later, it was manufacturing more solar cells than any other country."

Now, let's upend another piece of conventional wisdom. China's success isn't because it became "more like us" in adopting liberal market reforms. Rather, China's transformation is a wake-up call that we have to become more like them.

What the world needs now, in other words, is a second great transformation.

At the end of the 1920s, the global market economy collapsed. As historian Karl Polanyi argued in his landmark work The Great Transformation {5}, liberal, communist, and fascist governments all responded to this collapse in the same way: by subordinating the economy to the imperatives of the state.

Today, with the global economy in a tailspin, we face a similar situation. The current crisis has pulled back the curtain to reveal the same flaws in the global market economy that Polanyi diagnosed in the 1940s. The additional challenge is the global environmental crisis. This time around, we cannot afford to simply grow our way out of this problem. Instead, governments of very different ideological hues must all subordinate the economy to the imperatives of the environment.

As he demonstrated in his State of the Union address, Obama understands the importance of the Chinese approach to our energy and environmental crisis. But he has only half-heartedly applied these lessons to the US economy. His budget freeze deprives the US government of the tools necessary to effect a great transformation.

This isn't a horse race. Ultimately, it doesn't matter whether China or the United States has the larger economy in 2025. What matters is whether the world's largest economies will together usher in a new economic model. This great transformation will rely on the great lever of the state to shift resources toward energy efficiency and sustainability, and direct both global and national markets toward optimal outcomes for the planet.

The state is not by definition benign. Beijing's treatment of dissidents and Tibetans is no more appetizing than Washington's treatment of detainees and Afghans. But China has begun the difficult task of rehabilitating the state. That must be the Obama administration's long-term goal as well. As long as "government" remains a dirty word in the United States, forget about deep transformation. We'll just be stuck with business. As usual.

Pacific Pushback

One of the most unpleasant prerogatives of the state is the overseas sale of weapons. The United States routinely decries the conduct of other weapons-selling states such as North Korea, Iran, and Pakistan. But the United States remains the Wal-Mart of arms merchants. It has been quietly adding more fuel to the fire in the Middle East with $25 billion in arms sales {6} in the last two years. Over in the East, meanwhile, Washington's recent announcement that it will sell $6 billion of weapons to Taiwan has got the Chinese up in arms. In a rather delicious turnabout, Beijing has announced that it will slap sanctions {7} on US companies that are involved in this deal.

And how do the US media react to Beijing's discomfort? China has become {8} "strident" and adopted a "new triumphalist attitude", writes John Pomfret in The Washington Post. Because it's angry at the United States for pouring billions of dollars of arms into an often-hostile territory on its border? What country wouldn't get a little strident in the same situation?

Another example of Chinese stridency is in South Asia. As Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) columnist Conn Hallinan points out, despite a burgeoning trade relationship, India and China have been inching toward war. But here, too, Washington is part of the problem. The US strategy of cultivating India as a key ally in Asia to balance China appears to be backfiring. "Some Indian analysts go so far as to say that China has now replaced Pakistan as India's greatest threat", he writes in China and India Battle over Thin Air {9}. "And indeed, Beijing has been uncharacteristically assertive in pushing its claims to a sizable chunk of India's Arunachal Pradesh state. Why are the two huge Asian nations facing off over ground that all but the hardiest of goats avoid? The answer involves both colonialism's bitter legacy and current US efforts to maintain its pre-eminent role in the region."

Elsewhere in Asia, 6,000 Japanese gathered in Tokyo {10} over the weekend to protest US military bases. They want the United States to close down the aging Futenma base in Okinawa. And they don't want the United States to proceed with plans to build a new base near the Okinawan city of Nago. Last week, local elections in Nago brought in a new mayor who is also opposed to the planned base.

When will Washington wake up to the new realities on the ground in Asia?

Impunity 1, Justice 1

In Peru last month, justice was finally served. The Supreme Court convicted former president Alberto Fujimori in four cases of human rights abuses. He faces 25 years in prison.

"The trial of Alberto Fujimori was a milestone in the struggle against impunity in Peru, setting a new standard for the Peruvian courts", write {11} FPIF contributors Jo-Marie Burt and Coletta Youngers. "It's the first time that a democratically elected head of state in Latin America has been found guilty of crimes against humanity. It's also the first time that a former president has been extradited to his home country to face human rights charges. Other trials against former heads of state, such as Liberia's Charles Taylor or Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic, were carried out in internationally constituted courts. With the Fujimori verdict, Peru has established an important precedent: National governments can hold their former leaders accountable and not even a former head of state is above the law."

No such luck for Sri Lanka. Last week, the man responsible for last year's assault on the Tamil Tigers, Mahinda Rajapaksa, won re-election as president.

"Last May, President Rajapaksa promised UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon to investigate allegations of laws-of-war violations", writes FPIF contributor Arthur Dewey in War Crimes in Sri Lanka {12}. "No action was taken, however, until November, when the publication of the State Department report compelled Rajapaksa to appoint a six-member committee of 'experts' to 'examine [its allegations] carefully'. The committee's only mandate was to provide recommendations to the president in December (now postponed to April), and its members do not appear to be independent-minded."

Another Batch of Grades

Obama saw his overall grade-point average rise a bit this week, as his report cards on gender, multilateralism, and human rights came in.

The president's highest mark so far comes from his policy on gender. Although acknowledging that the administration's policies on war and the global economy have had negative impact on women, FPIF contributors Christine Ahn and Susanna Handow give the administration a B for its focused attention to gender issues. "Perhaps the most tangible evidence of the administration's support of women through US foreign policy is the additional $1.66 billion allocated through the foreign operations budget of the State Department for programs directly targeting women and girls", they write {13}. "The Obama administration also emphasized the need to integrate gender and women's empowerment across all foreign aid programs. They've even tacked on $3.1 million to create a new Office for Global Women's Issues at the State Department."

Just a notch below that grade is Obama's mark in multilateralism: B-. "The Obama administration has aligned the United States publically with the United Nations and its surrounding multilateral structures", writes {14} FPIF senior analyst Ian Williams. "In one of the few concrete steps it's taken, Congress honored the White House request to pay US arrears to the UN for the first time in thirty years. Admittedly, Washington still pays nine months in arrears, and there are huge debts for peacekeeping contributions. But the payments are a big step forward from when any dyspeptic legislator with a grudge against the world could use the UN as a whipping boy."

Finally, the administration earned a high C on human rights. "Obama's failure to more boldly address human rights concerns has alienated much of Obama's progressive base of support", writes {15} FPIF senior analyst Stephen Zunes. "The right wing, meanwhile, disingenuously portrays Obama as retreating from his predecessor's supposed support for democracy and human rights. Although the Bush administration provided even more assistance to governments engaged in human rights abuses and used pro-democracy rhetoric largely as a ruse for empire, Obama's lukewarm support for human rights has enabled right-wingers to seize the moral high ground. As a result, the perceived weakness of the Obama administration's human rights record raises important ethical and political questions."

Links:

{1} http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/01/04/123000000000000?page=0,3

{2} http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/remarks-of-president-barack-obama-address-to-joint-session-of-congress/

{3} http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/01/04/123000000000000?page=0,0

{4} http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/12/21/091221fa_fact_osnos

{5} http://books.google.com/books?id=xHy8oKa4RikC&dq=%22the+great+transformation%22+polanyi&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=IB9oS-zIH46XlAepjYiGCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CBcQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=&f=false

{6} http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/30/AR2010013001477.html

{7} http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/01/31/china.us.taiwan.arms/

{8} http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/30/AR2010013002443.html

{9} http://www.fpif.org/articles/china_and_india_battle_over_thin_air

{10} http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1247281/Thousands-protest-Tokyo-U-S-military-presence-Japan.html

{11} http://www.fpif.org/articles/fujimori_faces_justice

{12} http://www.fpif.org/articles/war_crimes_in_sri_lanka

{13} http://www.fpif.org/articles/gender_b

{14} http://www.fpif.org/articles/mulilateralism_b-

{15} http://www.fpif.org/articles/human_rights_c
_____

John Feffer is co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus.

http://www.fpif.org/articles/the_next_great_transformation


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

Wisdom of the uncivilized crowds

by Suraj Kumar

sunson.livejournal.com (January 28 2010)

commasutra

Picture this: A remote indian village in the Ganges delta a few hundred years ago. The farmer starts his day by letting his flock of ducks into his irrigated fields. The water from the river brings with it, besides nutrients and alluvium, some unwanted (for the crops) pests too. But that is not a problem - the ducks will keep the pests in control. Not only that, they will turn them pests into manure and drop it right inside the pool of collected water to be anaerobically decomposed under the water. Maybe the farmer doesn't realize it and thinks the Sun god and Nature godesses are helping him. But that's just a coincidence that's helping him continue his ways. They worship the arrival of the Stork (which, by the way, even the Japanese and Chinese do. Coincidence? I'm willing to bet Mexicans do that too!) There are still pockets in India where people's lifestyles are frozen in time and haven't pretty much changed.

The saying goes Unity in Diversity and its true for stable ecosystems. Agriculture as it has been practiced in India over centuries has relied and depended on nature's forces and whether we evolved our practices, designed the system by hand or got it by sheer luck overnight ... every Indian alive today is a proof that we survived in this region for several thousand years. The fertility due to the unique geographical structure of the sub-continent is a natural gift. Consciously / sub-consciously / systemically realizing it and living on it for thousands of years is wisdom.

The Great Change

Then came along the colonialists. We all kinda know what happened. I'd just like to place an exerpt from Lord Macaulay's speech in the British Parliament on 2nd February 1835 (quoted elsewhere in various contexts on the web (typically nationalistic sounding ones). I first found it in Amartya Sen's book The Argumentative Indian (2005):

I have traveled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such calibre, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and, therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self-esteem, their native self-culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation.

Several things changed after the advent of the colonialists. Some for "our" good, one could argue? For instance, the Colonialists left at the end of a major war (one of the root-causes was Colonisation itself!). India was Freed, right? That specific form of exploiting India's resources changed from that of direct occupation to a more subtle and effective form called "Free Trade". The Bretton Woods system ratified all Capitalist nations' interests in continued exploitation of natural resources by the still-ruling powers of the world (namely US, Britain, France, et al). Free Trade, in other words, is a system of exploitation of a so-called Third World nation's resources by someone with Little Green Pieces of Paper on the lines of "If you let me take your stuff, you'll get these little green pieces of paper using which you can buy the finished goods I produce using your nation's resources".

Female infanticide

Besides improvement in the quality of lives of those people who accepted the little green pieces of paper, there were arguably some other improvements. For instance, They 'taught' the peoples what it means to be "humane". Female infanticide, what a terrible and ruthless thing it is! But ... it is also important to realize that this so-called "inhumane" killing of the girl baby is a very effective means of population control. (By no means am I justifying or arguing for female infanticide here. Far from it.)

In the wild, many males go unmated. A male doesn't mean more individuals. A female that survives, however, very likely results in more children. Educating the females coupled with eradication of female infanticide would have worked. But with India, it was a half done job ... and that's worse than not doing the job at all!

Take away that population stabilisation mechanism of Female Infanticide and add to it the joke called the Green Revolution, India saw her population rise and her once-stable ways of life completely changed forever. Today, we're a billion plus and to feed that growing population we had to adopt ways of agriculture that was previously not thought of. Today, India boasts of vast areas of degraded soil on the planet. It is only imperative that she would end up in this situation given the decisions that were made by the so-called Leaders of that Era.

Where be the Wisdom?

... The colonialists are back - under the names of Monsanto, DuPont and several other multinational "Agri Businesses" who promise to solve the problem of world's poverty (does that ring a bell?). Last time, it was by releasing the locked up Nitrogen in a finite endowment of Natural Gas to create Fertilizers, developing an infrastructure of Farm Mechanisation that relied (and still relies) on Fossil fuels (specifically Diesel) and quickly releasing up water stored in deep Aquifers through the use of, yet again, cheap fossil fuels (a significant portion of Electricity comes from Coal + Oil + Natural Gas).

This time, they're back with the same old excuse of attempting to solve World's poverty by manipulating our domesticated life forms' DNA.

... so what exactly is their system of "solving world hunger"?

1. The company has had a successful herbicide product called Round Up. (Remember, Agent Orange?) The herbicide kills just about anything in it's way. Earlier, farmers had to exercise care when spraying the herbicide because they ran the risk of killing their crops too. Roundup is a non-selective weed killer. The paradox with Life is that, the more we apply Selection Pressure, the more "evolved" the species we're trying to kill becomes. This is because those individuals that could be killed are already gone! The ones that remain are the ones who were difficult to kill in the first place and if they manage to leave their progeny, those progeny are likely equally difficult too! Over just a few generations, things become very difficult for one generation of humans. The use of just the herbicide alone didn't scale well. We talk "scale" only when we talk growth. However, Stability needs resilience. The job done by the frogs, the sparrows, the spiders, the lizards and the earthworms were now replaced by one single plastic bottle with a TradeMarked logo on it. How neat?

2. Since the Herbicide solution didn't scale they had to do a round two of their fight against nature - through Genetic Engineering. They "invented" a new "variety" of crop that were resistant to the herbicide (called "Round up ready $whatever"). All was good for a while, until recently (two years ago) when farmers started reporting Super Weeds. Life evolves in amazingly powerful ways. This was just one example.

3. Genetic Engineering has two peculiar problems:

a. Bugs: If a Microsoft writes buggy code, they can send a "fix". But what happens when there are "bugs" in the Genetically Engineered code? How do you fix a plant? Today's Genetic Engineering methods are still crude. Its not like we insert a nano-particle that reads through the genes and 'modifies' the genes. They merely insert some other animal's genes that produces the desired proteins!

b. Intellectual Property: Life replicates. That's the equivalent of piracy, only naturally done by the bees.

To avoid these two problems, they introduced Terminator Technology. Simply put, the seeds produced by the GM crops aren't seeds. They cannot produce new plants when sown. They're merely grains for consumption. Seed saving - The very practice that brought about agriculture, will no longer be applicable since the seeds are all impotent. I'm sure we have all read about Farmer suicides and the wide-spread cause of suffering due to this very enslavement.

Ah, solve hunger by killing people? That makes sense! Oh wait, that "scale" requires farm machinery which, by today's infrastructure, is all designed to run on Diesel.

Now, I'd like to draw you to the end of this post by instilling a sense of hope through this real life story that I've been quite proud of ...

In our farm, We decided to sow only native variety rice seeds (we picked two varieties namely "Garudan Samba" and "Gandakasala". We had to obtain them with much difficulty since the government makes only narrow-mindedly designed rice varieties from the IRRI available to the farmers). At first, the locals (having forgotten their own ways of traditional, resilient agriculture) laughed at us and even questioned if such things will be "practical" in today's world. Grace be to the all merciless, non-existent God! The rains poured and destroyed their crops at a completely unseasonal time. Our crops were damaged, but not destroyed completely. Now, they are beginning to see the advantanges.

They're curious to find out how to obtain these seeds. They're still using pesticides. But they're beginning to see the birds perched atop our now-growing trees helping with pest control. They're still using fertilizers but that's because (1) fertile, naturally rich soils aren't anywhere around; our soil has just begun the recovery from the damages due to prolonged nitrogen fertilizer use in the past (that is, before we bought this land), and (2) fertilizers are still pretty much free flowing in this Peak Moment.

I've become pretty much cynical that most of the times its only the shock doctrine that helps bring the masses to Reality. Those very things can also be learnt by applying thought, however challenging or even depressing that might seem initially.

If you'd like to "take away" anything from this post: All I ask the reader is to switch to locally produced foods that is not GM. Every paisa is a profit that helps further their ways of enslavement and suffering. It kills our wisdom, however foolish and ridiculous it might sound to the "Free Thinking" west. Ridicule works and we must not fall prey to their old ways. Free Thought brings with it a sense of confidence and a dash of arrogance. Knowing that arrogance is Wisdom. Evolutionary studies today show that the genetic differences amongst the so-called "races" is totally insignificant and that it has just been mere chances that led to the rise and fall of several civilizations. The people of this sub-continent didn't use Coal in 19th century and Oil in the 20th century like what the "Colonisers" have been doing. But that's just a finite resource. The success of the west is only temporary and eventually they'll have to deal with reality in ways we've all come to accept in the past - thousands of years ago.

An American Indian quote to end the post:

Only after the last tree has been cut down,
Only after the last river has been poisoned,
Only after the last fish has been caught,
Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten.

_____

Suraj Kumar, who posts under the name sunson, is a software engineer living in Bangalore, India. His homepage is http://sunson.in/.

http://sunson.livejournal.com/


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

The Crisis Is Not Over

by Paul Craig Roberts

Vdare.com (January 23 2010)


Readers ask if the financial crisis is over, if the recovery is for real and, if not, what are Americans' prospects. The short answer is that the financial crisis is not over, the recovery is not real, and the US faces a far worse crisis than the financial one. Here is the situation as I understand it:

The global crisis is understood as a banking crisis brought on by the mindless deregulation of the US financial arena. Investment banks leveraged assets to highly irresponsible levels, issued questionable financial instruments with fraudulent investment grade ratings, and issued the instruments through direct sales to customers rather than through markets.

The crisis was initiated when the US allowed Lehman Brothers to fail, thus threatening money market funds everywhere. The crisis was used by the investment banks, which controlled US economic policy, to secure massive subsidies to their profits from a taxpayer bailout and from the Federal Reserve. How much of the crisis was real and how much was hype is not known at this time.

As most of the derivative instruments had never been priced in the market, and as their exact composition between good and bad loans was unknown (the instruments are based on packages of securitized loans), the mark-to-market rule drove the values very low, thus threatening the solvency of many financial institutions. Also, the rule prohibiting continuous shorting had been removed, making it possible for hedge funds and speculators to destroy the market capitalization of targeted firms by driving down their share prices.

The obvious solution was to suspend the mark-to-market rule until some better idea of the values of the derivative instruments could be established and to prevent the abuse of shorting that was destroying market capitalization. Instead, the Goldman Sachs people in charge of the US Treasury and, perhaps, the Federal Reserve as well, used the crisis to secure subsidies for the banks from US taxpayers and from the Federal Reserve. It looks like a manipulated crisis as well as a real one due to greed unleashed by financial deregulation.

The crisis will not be over until financial regulation is restored, but Wall Street has been able to block re-regulation. Moreover, the response to the crisis has planted seeds for new crises. Government budget deficits have exploded. In the US the fiscal year 2009 federal budget deficit was $1.4 trillion, three times higher than the 2008 deficit. President Obama's budget deficits for 2010 and 2011, according to the latest report, will total $2.9 trillion, and this estimate is based on the assumption that the Great Recession is over. Where is the US Treasury to borrow $4.3 trillion in three years?

This sum greatly exceeds the combined trade surpluses of America's trading partners, the recycling of which has financed past US budget deficits, and perhaps exceeds total world savings.

It is unclear how the 2009 budget deficit was financed. A likely source was the bank reserves created for financial institutions by the Federal Reserve when it purchased their toxic financial instruments. These reserves were then used to purchase the new Treasury debt. In other words, the budget deficit was financed by deterioration in the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve. How long can such an exchange of assets continue before the Federal Reserve has to finance the government's deficit by creating new money?

Similar deficits and financing problems have affected the EU, particularly its financially weaker members. To conclude: the initial crisis has planted seeds for two new crises: rising government debt and inflation.

A third crisis is also in place. This crisis will occur when confidence is lost in the US dollar as world reserve currency. This crisis will disrupt the international payments mechanism. It will be especially difficult for the US as the country will lose the ability to pay for its imports with its own currency. US living standards will decline as the ability to import declines.

The financial crisis is essentially a US crisis, spread abroad by the sale of toxic financial instruments. The rest of the world got into trouble by trusting Wall Street. The real American crisis is much worse than the financial crisis. The real American crisis is the offshoring of US manufacturing, industrial, and professional service jobs such as software engineering and information technology.

Jobs offshoring was initiated by Wall Street pressures on corporations for higher earnings and by performance-related bonuses becoming the main form of managerial compensation. Corporate executives increased profits and obtained bonuses by substituting cheaper foreign labor for US labor in the production of goods and services marketed in the US

Jobs offshoring is destroying the ladders of upward mobility that made the US an opportunity society and eroding the value of a university education. For the first decade of the 21st century, the US economy has been able to create net new jobs only in domestic nontradable services, such as waitresses, bartenders, sales, health and social assistance and, prior to the real estate collapse, construction. These jobs are lower paid than the jobs were that have been offshored, and these jobs do not produce goods and services for export.

Jobs offshoring has increased the US trade deficit, putting more pressure on the dollar's role as reserve currency. When offshored goods and services return to the US, they add to imports, thus worsening the trade imbalance.

The policy of jobs offshoring is insane. It is shifting US GDP growth to the offshored locations, such as China, thus halting growth in US consumer incomes. For the past decade, US households substituted an increase in indebtedness for the lack of growth in income in order to continue increasing their consumption. With their home equity refinanced and spent, real estate values down, and credit card debt at unsustainable levels, it is no longer possible for the US economy to base its growth on a rise in consumer debt. This fact is a brake on US economic recovery.

Stimulus packages cannot substitute for the growth in real income. As so many high value-added, high productivity US jobs have been offshored, there is no way to achieve real growth in US personal incomes. Stimulus spending simply adds to government debt and pressure on the dollar, and sows seeds for high inflation.

The US dollar survives as reserve currency because there is no apparent substitute. The euro has its own problems. Moreover, the euro is the currency of a non-existent political entity. National sovereignty continues despite the existence of a common currency on the continent (but not in Great Britain). If the dollar is abandoned, then the result is likely to be bilateral settlements in countries' own currencies, as Brazil and China now are doing. Alternatively, John Maynard Keynes' bancor scheme could be implemented, as it does not require a reserve currency country. Keynes' plan is designed to maintain a country's trade balance. Only a reserve currency country can get its trade and budget deficits so out of balance as the US has done. The prospect of US default and/or inflation and decline in the dollar's exchange value is a threat to the reserve system.

The threats to the US economy are extreme. Yet, neither the Obama administration, the Republican opposition, economists, Wall Street, nor the media show any awareness. Instead, the public is provided with spin about recovery and with higher spending on pointless wars that are hastening America's economic and financial ruin.

_____

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan's first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He can be reached at paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com

http://vdare.com/roberts/100202_crisis.htm
http://www.countercurrents.org/roberts030210.htm

Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

The Jive Economy

Clusterfuck Nation

by James Howard Kunstler

Comment on current events by the author of
The Long Emergency (2005)

www.kunstler.com (February 01 2010)


What started out as a case of The Emperor's New Clothes now has America looking like the world's biggest nudist colony, with everyone in the long chain of power and authority admiring each other's splendid new (imagined) pimp suits. George W Bush (remember him?) wasn't kidding when he discounted the function of objective reality in our national life, saying, "we make our own reality". This apparently hasn't changed much with a new chief at the top.

A nice example popped up last week with the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) index for the fourth quarter of 2009. The equation affects to measure the growth in economic activity and this particular release imputed that the US economy had expanded at an annualized rate of 5.7 percent. Wow, impressive! We must be digging a new Panama Canal or something.

It turned out to be based largely on some jive about inventory "investments" - meaning, I guess, that the Ronco Corporation has laid in 1.7 million Dial-O-Matic food slicers and Showtime Rotisseries in the expectation that American stock market investors will enter 2010 creaming off their mutual fund profits to spend wildly on every infomercial prompt beamed at them over the graveyard shift at Fox News.

Memo to nation: we're not really growing, we're shrinking. Is this necessarily a bad thing? I dunno. Unlike, say, the stockholders of Toll Brothers I'm not so sure that "housing starts" represents my idea of a healthy economy - since it really means we're destroying every cornfield and cow pasture left outside our cities, which will play havoc with our national life when the reality of our Wile E Coyote agribusiness fiasco starts to hit home and we discover what cornfields and cow pastures were really all about in the first place.

Likewise, the standard processors of news media go orgasmic when they announce car sales figures of eleven million units annualized, or something like that. Isn't that wonderful: more cars on the San Diego Freeway and the Cross Bronx Expressway. Ever larger parking requirements for the new WalMart. More trips-per-household to buy milk and Fruit Loops. Do you really think that more suburban sprawl makes this a better nation? When our soldiers bleed out in the sands of Central Asia, will their last thoughts be of the curb cut between the Best Buy and the Burger King?

By the way, it is established fact that the GDP figure benefits from increases in medical services, meaning that the more obese, diabetic, two-pack-a-day cigarette smokers this country produces, the better off our economy is assumed to be. Bring on the Little Debbie Snack Cakes! Let's turn up the dial on hospital admissions!

But as I said, our economy is not really expanding, it's contracting - and pretty swiftly. The question is how will we manage this contraction and what kind of nation do we become as this occurs.

For the moment, we are a nation committed to sustaining the unsustainable, and because this is the case we invite grievous political mischief as it becomes ever more obvious that the populace is being swindled - and the populace becomes ever more ticked off about it. Thus, you get the Tea Bagger movement, and things like it, where the disenfranchised meld legitimate complaints with fantasies and conspiracy theories, and produce an incoherent agenda based on ideas like "keeping the government out of Medicare!" One can easily see a movement like this ramping up into full-bore corn-pone Naziism - and for a nice dramatic enactment of such a scenario I recommend my new three-act stage play Big Slide, which we've posted over at the podcast.

The Republican resurgence now underway - or imagined to be, I'm not really sure - casts photogenic clods like Massachusetts's new senator Scott Brown as heralds of a new free market Golden Age, in which WalMart will profitably manage every moment of daily life from grocery shopping to banking to medical care to the mortuary (and perhaps even war). Little thought has been allotted to exactly what the role of citizens might be in such a nirvana. I suppose we'd become an endless chain of $8-an-hour "greeter associates" - which is at least a step above being a national feedlot of polled Herefords. But I wouldn't want to be mistaken as a shill for the Democratic party, either, since the Obama team has opted for creating its own reality as much as its predecessor bunch did. The result will certainly be the election of countless maniacs to congress this fall, especially of the theocratic-despotic brand - creationists, alien abductees, economics professors from bible colleges, Sunbelt war hawks, Lyndon LaRouche acolytes, Nativists, Palinites, crusaders against the New World Order, anti-Bilderbergers ... the whole appalling menu of thought-disorder cases now roiling in the breakdown lane of American history.

They are our future, these yeast people and mudskippers, because the intelligent minority of this nation lacks the one thing that animates intelligence in the service of reality, and that is the courage to tell the truth. I suppose this is what galls so many former Obama boosters: that the "hope" vested in him would be enacted in truth-telling, which would lead to "change" in the choices we make about doing things. What we ended up with seems to be something like a false champion with a good line of talk. Mr Obama may yet be pushed into a recognition of the reality he did not personally create, and this may occur as the US economy heads much more drastically south in the months ahead. Something similar might have been the case for Mr Lincoln. He might have coasted along through 1861 trying to sweet-talk Dixie - but the South Carolinians went apeshit on him from the get-go, and then there was no turning back from the ensuing conflagration.

More probably, we'll be dragged kicking and screaming into an epochal contraction of economy, something the industrial world hasn't really seen before, something more severe even than the Great Depression we never stop chattering about (as though it was like The Hundred Years War). Instead of preparing for it intelligently by doing things like promoting small scale local farming, local networks of commerce, and rebuilt railroads (things, incidentally, which are within the powers of government to promote) we'll squander our dwindling capital and political resources fighting over the table scraps of the twentieth century. Life is tragic, history is merciless, and societies don't always make good collective choices. Visit Big Slide {1} for a taste of what might be coming.

{1} http://kunstler.com/BigSlide

{2} http://www.kunstlercast.com/

http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/02/the-jive-economy.html


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html