The Future That Wasn't, Part One:

"The Sunset-Drowning of the Evening Lands"

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (December 26 2007)

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


I'd planned to devote this week's Archdruid Report post to the fine and practical art of composting, and for good reason. It's one of the most important and least regarded techniques in the ecotechnic toolkit, and it's also a near-perfect model for the way that today's mindlessly linear conversion of resources to waste can be brought back around in a circle, like the legendary ouroboros-snake that swallows its own tail, to become the sustainable resource flows of the human ecologies of the future.

Still, that profoundly worthwhile topic will have to wait a while. Even the most mercenary writer is now and then at the mercy of his muse, held hostage by some awkwardly timed bit of inspiration that elbows other projects aside, and I think that most of us who write for a living learn sooner or later to put up with the interruption and write out what has to be written. If this sudden veering from the pragmatic issues central to the last few posts needs a justification, that's the only one I have to offer.

Well, maybe not quite the only one. The holiday season now lurching past is not a time I particularly enjoy. Our solstice ceremony a few days back was a bright spot, mind you; midsummer is a more significant occasion in my Druid faith, but it's as pleasant as it is moving to gather with local Druids in the circle of the sacred grove to light the winter solstice fire and celebrate the rebirth of the sun in the depths of winter. Nor do I find anything in the least offensive in the Christian celebrations of the season. As human beings, we're all far enough from the luminous center of things that we have to take meaning where we can find it; if someone can grasp the eternal renewal of spirit in darkness through the symbol of the midwinter birth of Jesus of Nazareth, I can't find it in myself to object. From my perspective, though not from theirs, of course, we're celebrating the same thing.

Nor, for that matter, do I turn Scroogelike at the thought of gifts, big dinners, and too much brandy in the egg nog. I can't think of a human culture in the northern temperate zone that hasn't found some reason to fling down life's gauntlet in the face of winter with a grand party. Whether it's the Saturnalia of the ancient Romans, when cold grim Saturn turns back just for a moment into the generous king of the Golden Age, or the Hamatsa winter dances of the Kwakiutl nation of Canada's Pacific coast, when the cannibal giant Baxbakualanooksiwae, "Eater of Men at the River Mouth", is revealed as the source of mighty spiritual gifts, this sort of celebration reflects a profound set of realities about our life in the world. Besides, I'm fond of brandy, and egg nog, and a good party now and then, too.

No, what makes the midwinter holidays a less than rapturous time for me is the spectacle of seeing the things I've just listed redefined as artificial stimulants for a dysfunctional economy supported by nothing so straightforward as honest smoke and mirrors. When front page news stories about Christmas center on whether consumer spending this holiday season will provide enough of an amphetamine fix to keep our speed-freak economic system zooming along, I start wishing that Baxbakualanooksiwae and his four gigantic man-eating birds would consider adding corporate vice-presidents and media flacks to their holiday menu. And that, dear readers, is what sent me for refuge to Oswald Spengler. A mild depression can be treated with Ogden Nash poems and Shakespeare comedies, but when things get really grim it's time for the hair of the dog; the same effect that leaves the soul feeling oddly lighter after taking in a Greek tragedy, or listening to an entire album of really blue blues, hits a history geek like myself after a chapter or two of Der Untergang des Abendlandes.

I insist on the German title, by the way. The splendor of Germany's literature and the curse on its history come from the same source, the brilliant but sometimes misleading way the German language naturally expresses abstract ideas in concrete, sensuous terms. Untergang, which gets turned in English into the anemic Latinism "decline", is literally "going under", and calls to mind inevitably the last struggles of the drowning and the irrevocable descent of the sun below the western horizon. Abendland, the German for "the West", is literally "the evening land", the land toward sunset. Put them together and the result could be turned into a crisp line of iambic pentameter by an English poet - "the sunset-drowning of the evening lands" - but there's no way an English language book on the philosophy of history could survive a title like that. In German, by contrast, it's inevitable, and for Oswald Spengler, it's perfect.

Spengler has been poorly treated in recent writings on the decline and fall of civilizations. Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Compex Societies, for example, takes him to task for not providing a scientific account of the causes of societal collapse, which is a little like berating Michelangelo for not including accurate astrophysics in his frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. Spengler was not a scientist and never pretended to be one. He was a philosopher of history; in some ways, really, he was an artist who took the philosophy of history for his medium in place of paint or music. This does not make his contributions to our understanding of history less relevant. It's only in the imagination of the most fundamentalist kinds of scientific materialism that scientific meaning is the only kind of meaning that there is. In dealing with human behavior, above all, a sonnet, a story, or a philosophical treatise can prove a better anticipation of the flow of events than any scientific analysis - and the decline and fall of our present civilization, or any other, is preeminently a story about human behavior.

Tainter's critique also fails in that Spengler was not even talking about the fall of civilizations. What interested him was the origin and fate of cultures, and he didn't mean this term in the anthropological sense. In his view, a culture is a overall way of looking at the world with its own distinct expressions in religious, philosophical, artistic, and social terms. For him, all the societies of the "evening lands" - that is, all of western Europe from roughly 1000 CE on, and the nations of the European diaspora in the Americas and Australasia - comprise a single culture, which he terms the Faustian. Ancestral to the Faustian culture in one sense, and its polar opposite in another, is the Apollinian culture of the classic Mediterranean world, from Homeric Greece to the early Roman empire; ancestral to the Faustian culture in a different sense, and parallell to it in another, is the Magian culture, which had its origins in Zoroastrian Persia, absorbed the Roman Empire during its later phases, and survives to this day as the Muslim civilization of the Middle East. Other Spenglerian cultures are the Egyptian, the Chinese, the Mesopotamian, and the two great New World centers of civilization, the Mexican-Aztec and the Andean-Incan.

Talking about the rise and fall of a culture in Spengler's sense, then, isn't a matter of tracing shifts in political or economic arrangements. It's about the birth, flowering, and death of a distinctive way of grasping the nature of human existence, and everything that unfolds from that - which, in human terms, is just about everything that matters. The Apollinian culture, for example, rose out of the chaotic aftermath of the Minoan-Mycenean collapse with a unique vision of humanity and the world rooted in the experience of the Greek polis, the independent self-governing community in which everything important was decided by social process. Greek theology envisioned a polis of gods, Greek physics a polis of fundamental elements, Greek ethics a polis of virtues, and so on down the list of cultural creations. Projected around the Mediterranean basin first by Greek colonialism, then by Alexander's conquests, and finally by the expansion of Rome, it became the worldview and the cultural inspiration of one of the world's great civilizations.

That, according to Spengler, was also its epitaph. A culture, any culture, embodies a particular range of human possibility, and like everything else, it suffers from the law of diminishing returns. Sooner or later, everything that can be done from within the worldview of a culture - everything religious, philosophical, intellectual, artistic, social, political, you name it - has basically been done, and the culture fossilizes into a civilization. Thereafter the same things get repeated over and over again in endless combinations; disaffected intellectuals no longer capable of creativity settle for mere novelty or, worse still, simple shock value; artistic and intellectual traditions from other cultures get imported to fill the widening void; technology progresses in a kind of mechanical forward lurch until the social structures capable of supporting it fall away from underneath it. Sooner or later, the civilization falls apart, basically, because nobody actually believes in it any more.

What made this prophecy a live issue in Spengler's time was that he placed the twilight of Western culture and the beginning of its mummification into Western civilization in the decades right after 1800. Around then, he argued, the vitality of the cultural forms that took shape in western Europe around 1000 began trickling away in earnest. By then, in his view, the Western world's religions had already begun to mummify into the empty repetition of older forms; its art, music, and literature lost their way in the decades that followed; its political forms launched into the fatal march toward gigantism that leads to empire and, in time, to empire's fall; only its science and technology, like the sciences and technologies of previous cultures, continued blindly on its way, placing ever more gargantuan means in the service of ever more impoverished ends.

Exactly how the Faustian culture would metastasize into a future Faustian civilization he did not try to predict, but one element of the transition seemed certain enough to find its way into his book. The society that would play Rome to Europe's Greece, he suggested, was none other than the United States of America. In the brash architecture of American skyscrapers and the casual gesture that flung an army across the Atlantic to save France and England from defeat in the last years of the First World War, he thought he saw the swagger of incipient Caesarism, the rise of the empire that would become Faustian culture's final achievement and its tomb.

It was a common belief at that time. Interestingly enough, it also shaped the thought of Spengler's counterpart and rival, the British historian Arnold Toynbee, whose ten-volume A Study of History stands like hoplites in a Greek phalanx not far from the couch where Spengler and multiple cups of good oolong offered some consolation for the wretched orgy of economic excess and hallucinated well-being playing itself out outside my windows. For Toynbee, who shared Spengler's cyclical theory of history but rejected all his philosophy and most of his conclusions, the natural next step in the unfolding of history was the transition from a time of troubles to a planetary empire, and like many English intellectuals in the twilight of the British Empire, he expected an alliance between the United States and the British Commonwealth to become the seed of that empire-to-be.

As it turns out, though, this plausible and widely held belief was quite incorrect, and the actions taken by three generations of politicians and intellectuals in response to that belief are all too likely to play out with disastrous results in the fairly near future. We'll discuss that in next week's post.
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The Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA), John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books, including The Druidry Handbook (Weiser, 2006). He lives in Ashland, Oregon.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/


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

The price of a living forest

by Mark Lynas

New Statesman (November 22 2007)


The blunt economic truth is clear: deforestation can never be stopped as long as trees are worth more dead than alive

The two environmentalists never stood a chance. As they drove into the small Honduran town of Guarizama on 20 December last year, armed men forced Heraldo Zúñiga and Roger Iván Cartagena to the side of the road, dragged them from their car, stood them against a wall next to the municipal building in full view of passers-by, and shot them. Although at least forty shots were fired, Zúñiga survived long enough to denounce those who had hired the assassins - the timber barons who are making a fortune by razing the region's pine forests and exporting wood to the United States.

Such is the price of taking on the power of the illegal timber trade. But almost as shocking as the murders of those who try to protect the forests in countries such as Honduras is that neither the US nor the EU has any enforceable means of stopping illegal timber imports.

Now, after a long campaign, the Environmental Investigation Agency is supporting a rare bipartisan legislative effort in the US Congress to choke off domestic demand for imported illegal wood products. Promoted by Republicans and Democrats alike, as well as by an unusual coalition of environmental and industry groups, the Legal Timber Protection Act would make it a crime to import or sell illegally sourced timber. The EU is also on the way to similar legislation.

Despite these positive moves, however, the blunt economic truth is clear: deforestation can never be stopped as long as trees are worth more dead than alive. As Andrew Mitchell, director of the Oxford-based Global Canopy Programme, points out, the only thing that can safeguard the survival of tropical forests in the long term is a market value. This means generating hard-currency income flows to countries and communities that host forests, in recognition of the "ecological services" that these intact woodlands provide to the rest of humanity.

Mitchell is co-sponsor of the Forests Now Declaration - an attempt to persuade governments meeting at the UN climate negotiations in Bali next month to bring forests into the world's emerging carbon markets and thereby put a price on their protection. Deforestation accounts for a fifth of global greenhouse-gas emissions - more than the entire transport sector, including international aviation - and yet emissions avoided by reducing deforestation are not eligible for carbon credits. Indeed, because its forests are being so rapidly cleared and burned down (in part to produce supposedly climate-friendly palm oil for biofuels), Indonesia is the world's third-largest carbon emitter after China and the United States. With billions now circulating in carbon markets around the world, Indonesia can potentially be paid to keep its forests standing rather than chop them down. Major forest countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Papua New Guinea have already lent the proposal their support.

Climate change presents humanity with a non-negotiable requirement to live within the planet's ecological limits, but these limits also include the need to protect finite resources such as the world's remaining forests. Bali presents governments with an ideal opportunity to address both issues at the same time - and to ensure that other environmental problems are not aggravated in our rush to tackle climate change.

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Mark Lynas is a climate change writer and activist, author of the acclaimed book High Tide (Tandem, 2004) and fortnightly columnist for the New Statesman. He was selected by National Geographic as an 'Emerging Explorer' for 2006, and blogs on www.marklynas.org

http://www.newstatesman.com/200711220028


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

The White Plague

An excerpt from "The Spread of European Settlement", Chapter 7 of
A Green History of the World (Penguin, 1991) by Clive Ponting


Despite the rise in population and the large extension of the settled area, Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries remained a backward region, on the margins of the main developments of world history. China was the most populous and advanced country in the world and the Islamic states of the Mediterranean and Near East, about to be revived under the Ottoman empire, were culturally far in advance of a relatively impoverished Europe. The crusades were a short-lived enterprise and Christian control of parts of the Levant, in most places maintained for no more than a few decades, passed almost without disturbing the Islamic world. In 1241 the Mongols reached the river Oder and western Europe only avoided invasion after the Mongol victory at the battle of Wahlstatt because of the death of the Mongol leader Ogodai and the resulting internal confusion within the empire. Nevertheless a few decades later the Mongols ruled the most extensive empire the world had ever seen stretching from the Volga in the west to China in the east and taking in large parts of south-west Asia. The rise of the Ottoman Turks in the fourteenth century destroyed most of the last remnants of the Byzantine empire (which had already been undermined by the conquest of Constantinople by the western Christians during the Fourth Crusade in 1204), although Constantinople itself survived until 1453. But the Turks pushed further westwards and defeated the Christians at the battle of Nicopolis in 1396 to extend their control over most of the Balkans and later conquered Cyprus and other islands in the eastern Mediterranean. At the same time the Chinese were also exploring further westwards - the eunuch admiral Cheng Ho led seven armadas of sixty-two vessels and 37,000 soldiers, between 1405 and 1430, to twenty countries as far apart as Kamchatka in the north and Zanzibar off the east coast of Africa. If it had not been for the death of the Emperor and the subsequent faction fighting at court that brought about a new policy of shunning external contacts, the Chinese might well have gone on to 'discover' much of the world before Europe did so.

The remarkable transformation in the fortunes of Europe that was to lead not just to a reshaping of the political map of the world but to extensive control over the world's resources began in the fifteenth century. The great advantage for the countries of western Europe was that exploration westwards encountered no strongly organised states like those in the Mediterranean and further east which were able to challenge European power. Spain and Portugal, the first nations to explore the eastern Atlantic and launch the long period of European expansion overseas, established control over the Atlantic islands (the Canaries and the Azores) in the fifteenth century and the Portuguese continued their voyages down the west coast of Africa. Once they had rounded the Cape in 1488 they were able to make use of the already well-established trade routes of the Indian ocean to obtain goods for sale in Europe. The Portuguese, with a population of only about one-and-a-half million, had little military power and were not able to challenge seriously the existing states of India and south-east Asia. They were, however, able to capture a few key trading sites - Goa (1510), Malacca (1511) and Hormuz (1515) - their main aim being not conquest of territory but trade and exploitation of the wealth of the area. The Spanish, moving westwards into the Caribbean after Columbus's voyage in 1492, encountered only relatively primitive tribes on the various islands. When they reached the mainland they found more advanced states in the Aztec and Inca empires but, because of the slow development of complex societies in the Americas, technologically these indigenous empires were still at least three thousand years behind the Europeans. Conquest, also taking advantage of internal dissension within the empires, was therefore a relatively easy task even for the small number of Spaniards involved. The Portuguese found people at a level equivalent to those of the Caribbean islanders in Brazil after 1500 and soon established settlements along the coast.

The first phase of European expansion, from 1500 to about 1700, was largely confined to the Spanish and Portuguese conquests of central and south America, the settlement of north America, principally by the British and French, and the extension of trade along the African coast and into the Indian ocean and south-east Asia. The second phase, lasting from about 1750 to 1850, saw the British defeat the French for control over the Indian sub-continent, growing trade between Europe and China and the settlement of Australia and New Zealand. In the last phase after 1850 attention was concentrated on carving up Africa and in 1919, after the defeat of the Ottoman empire in the First World War, France and Britain established control over most of the Near East. The last European war of conquest came in 1935 when Italy defeated the long-lived empire of Ethiopia. Throughout this period there was a wave of European settlement spreading across the globe. The settlers of North America pushed westwards to the Pacific, the new colonies of Australia and New Zealand were founded and the colonial settlements along the coasts of South America pushed further inland. In parallel with these developments came the great expansion of Russia moving out from its narrow enclave in the north centered around Moscow. In 1552 and 1554 the Khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan on the Volga were conquered, opening up the regions to the south and east of Moscow to settlement. For the next three centuries Russians from the north and Ukrainians from the west moved into this wooded steppe area and by the early eighteenth century a quarter of the Russian population was living in the region. At the end of the eighteenth century the defeat of the Turks opened up the grass steppes around the Black Sea to settlement. In the first half of the nineteenth century about fifty million acres of new land were brought into cultivation by farmers in the Ukraine and Volga areas. But the Russians were also moving eastwards. In 1581 they crossed the Urals and parties of traders and developers rapidly moved across Siberia, covering over 3,000 miles in sixty years, founding Tomsk in 1604 and reaching the Pacific coast at Okhotsk in 1649. By 1707 Kamchatka was conquered and thirty years later settlements in Alaska were established. This process was nominally under state control but in practice, especially outside the towns, Russia was as much a frontier society as the United States.

Although the Spanish easily conquered the societies of the Caribbean together with the Aztec and Inca empires, the extension of European settlement was a slow process. In Africa new settlements were largely confined to coastal trading posts until well into the nineteenth century. In China influence was restricted to a few trading stations until the middle of the nineteenth century. Even in North America, European settlement was almost entirely in an area to the east of the Appalachians until about 1800. By that date only a small number of Europeans had settled abroad. The white population of North America was about five million, that of South America some 500,000 and Australia 10,000 (New Zealand had still not been settled). Few of these were free settlers. About two-thirds of the whites who went to America before the Revolution were indentured servants forced to work for their masters for a period of years before being granted their freedom - if they lived long enough, and most did not. Until the 1830s the majority of emigrants to Australia were convicts and only New Zealand was entirely settled by free people. The great wave of European emigration did not begin until the 1820s when the combined pressures of rapidly rising population in Europe, poor food supplies and a low standard of living (plus better transport) all encouraged emigration. Between 1820 and 1930 about fifty million people emigrated from Europe. Apart from the White Highlands of Kenya, and Costa Rica, few settled in the tropics; most went to the United States and the white colonies of Canada, Australia and New Zealand together with South America. The same upsurge can be seen in the movement of people from Russia to the sparsely populated and difficult lands of Siberia. In the early eighteenth century the total population of Siberia was about 250,000 (although European settlers already outnumbered the natives). A hundred years later there were 1.5 million people living there, and the figure was nine million by 1914. It is now over thirty million.

The expansion of Europe resulted in a complex clash of cultures. The long-established, advanced and culturally secure societies such as India and China survived best, although they eventually succumbed in differing degrees to European political, military and economic power. (Only Japan was able to maintain its independence politically and economically.) The people who suffered the most were the less developed societies, in particular the population of the Aztec and Inca empires, and the native peoples around the globe who were still gatherers and hunters or primitive agriculturalists. Many indigenous societies disintegrated under European pressure when they were not deliberately destroyed. The stark truth is that the native peoples lost their land, livelihood, independence, culture, health and in most cases their lives. Despite differences in approach the common themes running strongly through European attitudes to the process were a disregard for the native way of life and an overwhelming urge to exploit both the land and the people. In every continent people such as the native Indians of North and South America, the Aborigines of Australia and the islanders of the Pacific found that their societies collapsed under European influence. The story of the natives under the impact of Europe is one of soaring death rates brought about by disease, alcohol, and exploitation together with social disruption and the decline of native cultures, especially under the influence of the missionaries. The Europeans showed little or no interest in native beliefs or customs until anthropologists in the last hundred years tried to investigate the remains of the shattered societies.

Just how rapidly the vulnerable native societies in the Americas could collapse is demonstrated by events on Santo Domingo, one of the first islands to be discovered by Columbus. At the time of the Spanish conquest the population was about one million yet within forty years, after intense exploitation, slavery and many deaths through European diseases, there were only a few hundred natives left. The same happened on an even larger scale in Mexico after the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs in 1519. There the population fell from about 25 million in the early sixteenth century to some six million by 1550 and to one million about 1600. The complex culture which had evolved over thousands of years could not withstand such catastrophic losses. The people were unable to come to terms with this disaster and their way of life and beliefs disintegrated. Many of the surviving natives were enslaved even though native slavery was technically illegal in the Spanish empire after 1542. In the first half of the sixteenth century over 200,000 Indians were taken from Nicaragua alone as slaves. Slavery continued on the borders of the Spanish empire for centuries - the Araucanians in southern Chile were used as slaves until the 1680s and the Apache, Navaho and Shoshoni in the north until the nineteenth century. After the conquest of the Incas in Peru in the 1530s the native population fell to about a quarter of its pre-conquest level under the pressure of the forced extraction of food, slaughter of the flocks of llamas, new European diseases and labour exploitation by both the Spanish civil and religious powers. The natives were forced into two highly dangerous occupations. The first - cultivation of the coca plant took place in the lowlands where the natives from the Andes found it very difficult to live. About half of the workers died during their spell at the plantations, most from 'mal de los Andes', a wart-like disease spread by an insect, that destroyed the nose, lips and throat. The second area where the Spaniards exploited native labour was in the silver mine at Potosi, 12,000 feet up in the Andes. It was discovered in 1545 and forced labour was introduced in 1550, after the Spanish found that African slaves could not live at this height. By the early seventeenth century about 60,000 Indian labourers were employed at any one time in wretched conditions. They were forced to stay underground for a week at a stretch without coming up to the surface. Not surprisingly such treatment, together with the miserly rations they received and the use of highly toxic mercury in processing the metals, produced a very high death rate. In both Mexico and Peru the indigenous culture was destroyed, much of it simply to secure loot. Nearly all the great treasures of the Aztec and Inca states were melted down and shipped to Europe. Altogether between 1500 and 1650 Spain imported about 450,000 pounds weight of gold and thirty-five million pounds weight of silver from the Americas.

Like the Spaniards, most of the Portuguese regarded the Indians as inferior beasts to be exploited as much as possible. The missionaries wanted their souls (but also their bodies for work) and others just wanted their land and labour. Even when the number of European settlers had increased significantly and the number of Indians was reduced, the disregard of the natives' rights and welfare continued. The first settlers did not plan to work themselves and expected the Indians to do it for them. The Indian attitude, like so many gathering and hunting groups, was that they had no need to work because they already had the goods that they needed. The Portuguese rapidly captured and enslaved as many Indians as they could and when the supply proved to be inadequate moved in people from Africa as slaves. As one early commentator on the Portuguese immigrants in the mid-sixteenth century wrote:

'The first thing they try to obtain is slaves to work the farms. Anyone who succeeds in obtaining two pairs or half a dozen of them has the means to sustain his family in a respectable way, even though he may have no other earthly possessions. For one fishes for him, another hunts and the rest cultivate and till his fields.'


By 1610 in the province of Bahia there were 2,000 white settlers, 4,000 black slaves and 7,000 Indian slaves on the large-scale sugar plantations that were already well established. In 1600 when almost all the eastern seaboard of Brazil was under Portuguese control there were about 50,000 white immigrants but 100,000 slaves. Many of the coastal Indians died of disease or migrated to the interior so that by the 1630s when the Dutch captured north-east Brazil they found a largely deserted land - along 800 miles of coast where a century earlier there had been hundreds of thousands of Indians there were a mere 9,000 left.

As the Indians moved inland to avoid the white settlement, large slaving expeditions were set up to find the slaves the whites still wanted. There was a long tussle between the Jesuits, who set up 'missions' that were effectively sugar and cattle plantations where the Indians were forcibly converted, and the settlers over who should have control of the remaining Indians. The Jesuits organised some of these slaving expeditions (the rebuilding of the cathedral of Sao Luis in 1718 was financed by one of them), branded the natives on capture and forced them to work on their missions. In the seventeenth century white settlement was moving away from the coast into the dry sertao inhabited by the Tapuia Indians who were forcibly removed as large cattle ranches were set up. In the 1690s the discovery of gold in north-east Brazil brought on a gold rush in which the local Indians were enslaved and exploited by the prospectors. Even though slavery was abolished at the end of the nineteenth century in Brazil, the exploitation and destruction of the natives continued. Numbers fell rapidly - about half the tribes still in existence in 1900 are now extinct and the Indian population, which probably numbered about two-and-a-half million in 1500 before the arrival of the Portuguese, is now less than 200,000 and still declining. Since independence the Brazilian government has made only token gestures towards protecting the Indians. In 1967 the official government agency for protecting the Indians (SPI) had to be disbanded after an investigation showed that it had carried out deliberate genocide by introducing disease amongst the Indians and joined with speculators in large-scale robbery and murder. It was described by the Brazilian Attorney-General as 'a den of corruption and indiscriminate killings'. Its successor FUNAI has done little to protect the Indians. The attitude of the Brazilian government is best summed up by an official spokesman who said:

'When we are certain that every corner of the Amazon is inhabited by genuine Brazilians and not by the Indians, only then will we be able to say that the Amazon is ours'.


The Indians of North America suffered as much as those further south. In 1500 the native population of the current area of the United States was about one million, with a wide variety of cultures and ways of life. Within four hundred years these had virtually been wiped out. The Indians were able to adapt to some of the things that the Europeans brought with them such as horses and metal tools. The plains Indians abandoned agriculture, domesticated the horse and used it to hunt buffalo. Others such as the Iroquois used European weapons to establish a large empire, covering present day New York, Pennsylvania and the upper Ohio valley. Many of the first European settlements such as Jamestown actually depended on the Indians for their very survival in their early stages but once they were firmly established the latent hostility of the settlers soon surfaced. Within a few years of the first settlements in New England, the Puritans, who believed God was on their side in killing the heathen Indians, were at war with the local tribes. Already in the seventeenth century the first 'reservations' were established to remove the Indians from land the Europeans wanted and all along the eastern seaboard Indian numbers were in decline. Of the early settlers only the Quakers in Pennsylvania treated the Indians with any degree of decency and humanity.

From very early in the European settlement of North America a pattern in the treatment of the Indians emerged. The first contacts were usually with European fur traders, who encouraged the Indians to trap animals and trade them for a variety of European goods. This phase of relative prosperity rarely lasted long and the Indians soon came under pressure from the advancing frontier of European settlement. In many cases the Europeans at first bought land from the Indians but, sooner rather than later, war broke out, which, even if they had a few initial successes, the Indians eventually lost and they were then forced to cede large amounts of land. Once they were in decline the Indians would be forced to give up more and more land until they were no longer able to support themselves on what remained of their ancestral territory. Then they migrated westwards (putting more pressure on other tribes) or were forced onto reservations where the poor land, combined with disease, alcohol and massive cultural disruption, led to very high death rates and often extinction of the tribe. For the first two hundred years of European settlement this encroachment was largely confined to the area east of the Appalachians. From the early nineteenth century the Indians had to face the full weight of American expansion. Although land sales were enforced (at nominal prices) this method proved inadequate in clearing the amount of land the whites wanted. In the southern United States, as the pressure to extend cotton cultivation increased, the Cherokees, who had adopted a settled and reasonably prosperous way of life with schools and even their own newspaper, remained a major obstacle to white exploitation of their land. A forced removal bill was passed through Congress; the Cherokees were paid half a million dollars in compensation and a total of 90,000 Indians were forced westwards by the army. About 30,000 died as a result of conditions on the march. The process continued with other tribes and in other parts of the country. For example, between 1829 and 1866, the Winnebagos were forcibly moved westwards six times and the population fell by a half. By 1844 there were less than 30,000 Indians in the whole of the eastern United States, most of them living in a remote around Lake Superior.

In a series of brutal wars in the 1860s and 1870s the Indians on the Great Plains were brought under control and removed from all the best land. About twenty-five tribes were relocated to 'Indian Territory' (now Oklahoma), where rudimentary attempts were made to make them break with the past and lead settled lives but most of the government assistance was squandered by corrupt contractors. When Oklahoma was opened for white settlement in the early twentieth century the Indians were removed to even worse land. Between 1887 and 1934, the Indians lost two-thirds of their remaining land (86 million acres) and were left with the worst desert or semi-desert parts that the whites did not want. Conditions on the reservations were terrible and most Indians had to exist on meagre government grants at the bottom of the social and economic ladder and with their institutions and way of life rapidly disintegrating. Despite some improvements in the 1930s and after, the Indians remained the most depressed minority in the United States, suffering from discrimination, a very low standard of living and high infant mortality, and left largely dependent on federal government welfare.

The impact of the Europeans on the peoples of the Pacific was equally dramatic. Before the arrival of the Europeans the area was not quite the Arcadia that some accounts, and European wishful thinking (particularly prevalent in the eighteenth century) about an idealised primitive existence, suggested. Warfare and cannibalism were, in fact, widespread but the area was relatively free of disease - it had no smallpox, measles, typhus, typhoid, leprosy, syphilis or tuberculosis - subsistence was obtained with little effort and the way of life was easy going. The European impact from the late eighteenth century meant the arrival of alcohol and a host of fatal diseases and the onset of massive cultural disruption. By 1900 the native population had collapsed to about a fifth of its level before the arrival of the Europeans. The population of Hawaii fell from about 300,000 at the end of the eighteenth century to 55,000 in 1875 and that of Rarotonga in the Cook Islands went from 7,000 in 1827 to 1,850 in 1867. In places the native society was effectively wiped out altogether. For instance, when the Russians arrived in the Aleutian Islands in the 1750s they forced the natives to work, hunting sea otters, so that the furs could be sent back to Europe and China. As a result, the animals were virtually extinct within thirty years and when the native population had collapsed to about five per cent of its original level, the survivors were resettled on the Pribilof Islands to continue working for the Russians.

The story of Tahiti is an illustration of what happened across the whole of the Pacific in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. On his second visit to the island in 1773, Captain James Cook was already worried by the impact the Europeans were having on native peoples, as he wrote in his journal:

'We debauch their morals already prone to vice and we introduce among them wants and perhaps diseases which they never before knew ... If any one denies the truth of this assertion let him tell what the natives of the whole extent of America have gained by the commerce they have had with Europeans'.


The violent crews of the whalers which called at the island (about 150 a year by the 1830s) introduced prostitution, venereal diseases and alcohol but the changes deliberately imposed by the first missionaries after 1797 had the effect of permanently undermining the islanders' way of life. The native religion was abolished and Tahitian music, tattooing and the wearing of floral garlands were banned. The natives were forced to wear European clothes and to work gathering coconut oil for export. Within a relatively short period the population was drastically reduced and the local culture was destroyed. In the 1770s, when the first Europeans arrived, the population was about 40,000: it had dropped to 9,000 when the islands were annexed by France in the 1840s and eventually fell to less than 6,000. When the author of Moby Dick, Herman Melville, visited the islands in the 1840s whilst working on a whaler, he was shocked at the condition of the islanders, as was the painter Paul Gaugin when he arrived in the 1890s:

'The natives, having nothing, nothing at all to do, think of one thing only, drinking ... Many things that are strange and picturesque existed here once, but there are no traces of them left today; everything has vanished. Day by day the race vanishes, decimated by the European diseases ... there is so much prostitution.'


On one of his voyages to the Pacific Captain Cook also visited Australia where he came across the Aborigines still living in much the same way as when they first arrived on the continent 40,000 years earlier. He was impressed by the friendliness of the natives and their way of life, writing that, 'they may appear to some to be the most wretched people on earth but in reality they are far happier than we Europeans'. The botanist on the expedition, Joseph Banks, reached the same conclusion: 'Thus live these I had almost said, happy people, content with little, nay, almost nothing'. The British government, though, decided to turn the country into a penal colony and the first fleet of prisoners arrived in what is now Sydney Harbour in 1788. The Aborigines tried to live their lives in the face of a wild frontier society run by slave labour and violence and up against a continually expanding area of European settlement, but coexistence proved impossible. All land was declared a possession of the Crown but the natives could not understand the idea of land ownership, which was utterly alien to their traditions, and could not adjust to that or the equally strange new legal system introduced in the colony. The indigenous population were denied any claim to the land or to the same rights as Europeans. For example, in 1805, the colonial authorities decided that since the Aborigines could not understand European law there was no need to put them on trial and they could therefore be dealt with by immediate settler 'justice'. As the Europeans took more and more of the land, the Aborigines resisted but the conflict was hopelessly one-sided - some 2,000 Europeans were killed along the frontier but about 20,000 Aborigines died. Those who were not killed on the frontier or forced to retreat into the more inhospitable parts of the country were left as beggars and prostitutes, ruined by alcohol, on the edges of the towns. By the 1840s in the Sydney area there were just a handful of survivors.

When a Pole, Count Strzelecki, visited the country in the 1830s, he left an account which contrasts vividly with Captain Cook's experience only sixty years before. This time the Aborigines were described as:

'Degraded, subdued, confused, awkward and distrustful, ill concealing emotions of anger, scorn or revenge, emaciated and covered with filthy rags; these native lords of the soil, more like spectres of the past than living men, are dragging on a melancholy existence to a yet more melancholy doom'.


That doom came first on Tasmania. Sporadic warfare between the Europeans and the natives, who numbered about 5,000 at the end of the eighteenth century, began in 1804 and continued with a long series of atrocities committed by the whites. By 1830 only about 2,000 Aborigines were left alive but the Governor of the island decided to remove them altogether from the settled central part of the island. A seven week drive across the island by a line of troops and settlers captured only a small number of Aborigines but by 1834 all of them had been expelled from Tasmania to Flinders Island in the Bass Strait. There, thoroughly disoriented, particularly by the attempts of evangelical Christians to make them wear European clothes and give up their native habits and traditions, they declined rapidly. By 1835 there were only 150 of them left alive and by 1843 just forty-three remained. The last lonely and neglected survivor of the Tasmanian Aborigines died in 1876. The Aborigines on the mainland declined too as their ancestral lands were expropriated by the white settlers and they were forced into ever less hospitable country, attacked by the whites or left on the fringes of white society. A few managed to preserve their way of life in the more remote areas but all of them suffered from extensive discrimination.

The last major area of the world to fall under European domination was Africa. Although the sheer scale of the continent and the problems of access made it difficult to wipe out whole peoples and cultures, the results of European intervention and eventual control were still drastic. The slave trade was the main form of contact between Europe and Africa for the first three hundred years after the Portuguese made their voyages along the coast, and economic exploitation was to remain at the core of the relationship. Unlike the native Americans and the inhabitants of the Pacific, the Africans were part of an area subject to many of the same diseases as Europeans and so did not suffer the rapid decline in numbers experienced by the other groups - indeed the Europeans suffered more, especially from tropical diseases. In the areas where the Europeans did choose to settle, a common feature was expropriation of native land. In Algeria 20,000 French settlers took six million acres of the best land and left 630,000 natives with twelve million acres of poor land. In Southern Rhodesia 50,000 whites owned 48 million acres and 1.5 million blacks had 28 million acres. In South Africa the blacks (over three-quarters of the population) were left with just twelve per cent of the land and nearly half of that was in semi-arid areas. When South Africa took over the former German colony of south-west Africa in 1919 under a League of Nations mandate, sixteen per cent of the population was white but they owned sixty per cent of the land including all the best farm land, the mineral deposits and the ports. As Leutwein, the first German Governor, wrote in July 1896, in a moment of candour: 'Colonization is always inhumane. It must ultimately amount to an encroachment on the rights of the original inhabitants in favour of the intruders.'

The Europeans also brought with them an innate sense of superiority, tinged with a strong degree of racism. Although some Europeans tried hard to improve life for the natives through medical and educational programmes, many undermined the local culture by forcing them to adopt European ways. Few seemed to be worried by the decline of native culture. The British Commissioner of Kenya wrote in 1904: 'There can be no doubt that the Masai and many other tribes must go under. It is a prospect which I view with equanimity and a clear conscience.' Beneath the surface, and often not even well disguised, was a contempt for the Africans, well expressed in a petition from the German settlers in south-west Africa to the Colonial Office in July 1900:

'From time immemorial our natives have grown used to laziness, brutality and stupidity. The dirtier they are, the more they feel at ease. Any white man who has lived among natives finds it almost impossible to regard them as human beings at all in any European sense.'


The history of German south-west Africa (now Namibia) gives a striking picture of the realities of European colonialism. It is an important example because it took place not in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries but at a time when Europe prided itself on being the most advanced society in the world. South-west Africa was inhabited by three main tribal groups - the Ovambo in the north, the Herero (nomadic cattle raisers) and the Nama, who had been forced into the region by the expansion of white settlement in South Africa - and there was continual conflict between the different tribes. The area was allocated to Germany at the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference, which divided most of the remaining independent parts of Africa between the European powers. Within twenty years the Africans were dispossessed of all their land and turned into an underclass of labourers living in appalling conditions. German settlement remained small - 2,000 in 1896, 4,700 in 1903 and 14,000 in 1913 - compared with a native population estimated at 500,000 in the 1890s. German control was exercised through a steadily expanding area of direct military administration and indirect rule through the tribal chiefs. The German plan for the colony was to set up large-scale cattle ranches owned by the settlers and employing cheap African labour. This inevitably involved taking over tribal land, dispossessing the natives and disrupting African life. The outbreak of a rinderpest epidemic in 1897, which killed ninety per cent of the Herero's cattle, followed by a malaria epidemic brought about the disintegration of Herero society. During the next seven years the Germans showed no concern with preserving the native way of life even in the areas allowed to them and were in the first stages of establishing an apartheid society with the Africans confined to native reserves.

In 1904 the Herero and Nama, faced with a bleak future as labourers on land they once owned, rose in revolt. In response the German authorities embarked on a policy of suppressing and destroying the African inhabitants. At the end of a brutal military campaign the Herero were reduced from a population of about 80,000 to 16,000 after many were imprisoned in camps that were little better than death camps. The Nama revolt lasted till 1907 and by the end half the tribe were killed. A large part of the remaining Herero and Nama tribesmen were pursued into the desert where, as the official German report commented: 'The arid Omaheke [a desert in north-east Namibia] was to complete what the German army had begun: the extermination of the Herero nation'. All land still occupied by Africans was expropriated, they were banned from raising cattle and all tribal organisations were dissolved. The Africans were turned into a class of landless labourers needing an identity card and travel permit to move around the country and ninety per cent of males were forced to work for Europeans. In 1915 a survey showed that three-quarters of the Africans were either paid wages insufficient to buy a subsistence diet or instead given food that was similarly inadequate for their needs. The Africans were, therefore, reduced to scavenging to try and survive. With their culture and native way of life destroyed and continuing to suffer a low level of violence and killings from the white settlers, the Africans had been reduced to an underclass. There was no change for the better when the territory was administered by South Africa after 1919.

The expansion of Europe was a disaster for the native peoples of those areas of the world which could hot survive as independent, or quasi-independent entities or restrict the amount of European contact. Some, such as the Tasmanian Aborigines, were exterminated, others suffered a huge fall in numbers through various different combinations of disease, warfare, alcohol and economic and social disruption. All saw their native culture and way of life undermined and often destroyed by Europeans determined to impose their own values. This saga of displacement and destruction was not confined to the early stages of European expansion and colonialism but continued throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. In many areas of the world it is still continuing as newly independent states continue the assault on the few remaining native tribes in the world who still try to maintain their old way of life. The expansion of Brazilian settlement and economic exploitation into the Amazon has resulted in the extermination of some tribes and the few now remaining are on the verge of destruction. Indonesia's vast transmigration programme - the move of settlers from the densely populated central islands such as Java to the outlying islands - has meant tribespeople have been attacked and killed.

The spread of European settlement overseas opened up huge new areas of the world for exploitation, with a devastating impact on the flora and particularly the fauna of the world. It also meant a recasting of economic relations and increasing European domination and manipulation of other economies so that they grew the food and produced the goods that Europe required. As part of the same process European ideas have also come to dominate the world. What ideas about the relationship between humans and the rest of life on earth had Europe inherited and how did it develop, transform and add to them?


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

Liberals, Labor give up on global warming

by Renfrey Clarke

Green Left Weekly (November 02 2007)


The scientists are horrified. But not being media-savvy publicists, they generally leave their shocking findings in scientific journals. The politicians quote cautious statements issued by scientific committees early in the decade, and worry about scaring off corporate funding. The business executives look for the chance of new profits, and hire public relations experts to advise them on cultivating a green image.

Meanwhile, the public drifts in a fog of apprehension, worried, but hoping that somehow things might still turn out all right. Just once in a while some hard fact pierces the mist.

In September, for example, it was revealed that Arctic sea ice had been melting at a completely unanticipated rate. Then in October, climate author and current Australian of the Year Professor Tim Flannery pointed out that new data showed total greenhouse gases in the atmosphere already at levels that could cause dangerous climate change.

"That's ... beyond the worst-case scenario as we thought of it in 2001'', Flannery was quoted as saying. "We already stand an unacceptable risk ... the need for action is ever more urgent".

One signal after another is pointing to a greenhouse emergency much more dire than is commonly perceived or admitted. A drastic, world-scale re-organising of economic and social structures and priorities is needed, starting immediately. But you'd never guess it from the climate change positions of the Liberal and Labor parties.

After years of denying human responsibility for global warming, the Howard government finally admits that some response is needed - but not so far-reaching as to affect economic growth or profits. The federal Liberals refuse to set any firm target for future Australian greenhouse emissions. Instead, they promise an emissions trading scheme by 2011.

For true believers like PM John Howard and his deputy Peter Costello, the market provides all the answers - and if it doesn't, you've asked the wrong questions.

Kevin Rudd's ALP is only nominally better. Labor too promises a market in greenhouse emissions, to be operating by 2010. In addition, the ALP sets the goal of cutting Australian greenhouse emissions by sixty percent by 2050. But this target - which is to underpin the price of carbon emissions in Labor's trading scheme - is grossly inadequate.

The truth is that the Liberal and Labor parties, like the top business circles whose priorities shape their thinking, have given up on global warming. They simply aren't prepared to take the steps needed to preserve a planet anything like the one we know at present.

In the business pages of right-wing newspapers, such perspectives are occasionally revealed with startling frankness. "We should abandon our fantasies, acknowledge that carbon emissions will continue to grow, and plan accordingly", an October 18 article in Rupert Murdoch's Australian concluded.

Needless to say, the politicians don't phrase their thoughts as bluntly as this. Their statements are full of soothing platitudes about responsibility to future generations. And to reassure the sceptical-minded, concrete proposals are generally accompanied by claims of scientific backing.

The ALP's key document on greenhouse gas reduction is a media statement entitled "Labor's Greenhouse Reduction Target - Sixty Percent by 2050 Backed by the Science". Issued by the party's environment spokesperson Peter Garrett on May 2 this year, the statement has since been painstakingly analysed in a Carbon Equity posting by journalist David Spratt, available at http://www.carbonequity.info/docs/alppolicy.html.

Garrett's statement is a strangely evasive piece of work. It has little to say about the findings of climate scientists, especially in recent times, and fails to establish clearly why the "Sixty by 2050'' target was chosen.

Is this target designed to limit world temperature increases to a particular figure? Is it, perhaps, linked to the increase of two degrees Celsius - relative not to the present, but to pre-industrial temperatures - that scientists consider the maximum allowable if we are to avoid setting off dangerous additional warming mechanisms?

Garrett's statement, however, nowhere mentions the figure of two degrees Celsius.

What is the maximum level of atmospheric greenhouse gases, expressed as parts per million (ppm) by volume of carbon dioxide equivalent, that Labor sees as permissible if further climate change is to be averted? This is not clearly spelled out.

Garrett cites a number of scientific studies as backing his position, but the one that is given prominence is a 2000 report by the British Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution.
Climate science has come a long way since 2000. And as Spratt observes, the British Royal Commission report itself relied on data from a United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report from 1995. At that time, the study of climate change was in its relative infancy. Predictions of temperature rises and of their impacts were tentative, and calls to action muted.

While making heavy use of outdated science, the ALP's statement ignores or misrepresents more recent findings. In particular, Spratt establishes, the use that the statement makes of a 2006 CSIRO report on climate change is misleading and deceptive. In citing the report's predictions for temperature rises, Labor ignores the rise of 0.6 degrees Celsius that occurred during the Twentieth Century. The difference is fundamental - between a rise that might be bearable, and one that would propel global warming to dangerous heights.

Meanwhile, what would the ALP's "Sixty by 2050" target be likely to result in, if applied uniformly by the countries that are major greenhouse gas emitters?

When he quotes the 2000 report by the Royal Commission, Garrett in oblique fashion identifies "Sixty by 2050" with stabilising world atmospheric greenhouse gases at a level of 550 ppm. As Spratt relates, the consensus of recent studies is that these gases need to remain at a much lower level if temperature rises are to stay below two degrees Celsius. For example, P Baer and M Mastrandrea in a 2006 paper conclude that "450 ppm CO2-equivalent has a fifty percent chance of staying below two degrees Celsius; 550 ppm CO2-equivalent has a ten to twenty percent chance of staying under two degrees Celsius".

British science writer George Monbiot quotes the British government's Environment Department in 2003 as concluding that "with an atmospheric carbon dioxide stabilisation concentration of 550 ppm, temperatures are expected to rise by between two and five degrees Celsius".

Labor's greenhouse reduction target, we may conclude, would almost certainly see world average temperatures rise far into the danger zone. Summarising the evidence, Spratt states that "Labor's Sixty by 2050 policy is consistent with a temperature target of three degrees Celsius".

What would a world three degrees hotter than at present be like? It would not include the Great Barrier Reef, bleached and dead at temperatures little above those of today. Nor would it have a place for the forests of the Amazon, even now on the brink of being transformed into savannah. Nor, after a hundred years or so, would it include large areas of today's coastal cities, or most of Holland and Bangladesh. The last time global temperatures were three degrees higher than at present was in the Pliocene period some three million years ago. At that time, there were no icecaps in the Northern Hemisphere, and sea levels were around 25 metres higher than they are now.

Such a planet would be much less capable than now of sustaining billions of human beings. Most of today's temperate farmlands would be arid, or would have turned into tropical savannah, where agriculture is notoriously difficult. The biosphere, drastically simplified by the extinction of many of today's species, would be radically unstable.

If temperatures were to rise to three degrees above present levels, would they stay there, and not rise further? We can have no guarantees.

One reason why climate scientists are now so definite on the need to limit greenhouse gas concentrations is that today's science has an increasingly sophisticated grasp of "positive feedback mechanisms" and "tipping points". Earlier analyses often treated climate processes as "linear" - that is, as involving steady, relatively gradual change. But in nature, gradual quantitative change often ends in abrupt shifts. As human-produced greenhouse emissions cause the Earth to heat up, the danger is that natural processes will kick in that turn the biosphere itself into a huge additional source of warming.

There are many such potential "tipping points". With only a slight increase on present temperatures, soils that now are carbon sinks will become carbon sources. When Arctic permafrost melts - as is now starting to happen - rotting peat generates the potent greenhouse gas methane. Other factors to be considered range from the burning of drought-ravaged Amazonian forests, to possible releases of vast quantities of methane from cold mud on the Arctic seabed.

Naturally, predictions of how such mechanisms might operate in a very different future can only be approximate. But the possibilities include the ultimate disaster scenario - a rerun of the Permian Extinction of 251 million years ago, when only a small minority of complex life-forms managed to survive.

When we face the potential for such outcomes, there can be no weighing of profits, or even of general economic prosperity, against the measures needed to halt further increases in greenhouse gas levels. As Flannery has indicated, we are already into the danger zone where even with present emissions concentrations one tipping point or another could be passed, and runaway global warming could begin.

What is now required if a more or less recognisable planet is to be saved? In his 2006 book Heat, British writer George Monbiot has performed the vital work of summarising the recent science and calculating the emissions cuts that will be needed.

Citing a study by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact in Germany, Monbiot concludes that to have a good chance of holding global temperature rises to less than two degrees Celsius, we need to stabilise greenhouse gas levels below 440 ppm of carbon dioxide equivalent. The present level is close to 460 ppm.

While still requiring profound changes, the task of cutting greenhouse gas concentrations to a little under present levels might not seem too daunting. Unfortunately, things are not so straightforward.

The trouble is that the biosphere is steadily losing its capacity to soak up carbon. Warmer seas and soils absorb less carbon dioxide, as do water-stressed forests. Instead of the current four billion tonnes of carbon locked away each year, the British Meteorological Office predicts the biosphere of 2030 will be able to absorb only 2.7 billion tonnes.

By 2030, the Earth's population is expected to have increased to 8.2 billion. That means that for carbon stabilisation, emissions must be cut to no more than 0.33 tonnes per person per year.

Billions of the world's people are currently responsible for emitting much less than this. If total world emissions of carbon into the atmosphere now stand at more than seven billion tonnes per year - nearly three times the level needed for eventual stabilisation - that is because the developed countries emit much higher amounts per capita, ranging up to the appalling figure of 5.63 tonnes per person per year in Australia.

It would not be fair to demand that the world's poorest people give up on raising their living standards in order to keep the world's rich driving SUVs. Indeed, any attempt to insist on this would mean that no country cut its emissions, and that the world proceeded directly to climatic Armageddon. Consequently, countries like Australia must cut their emissions drastically by 2030 to meet the stabilisation target of 0.33 tonnes per capita. For Australia, that means a cut of 95%. Our country has to aim at ending almost all its net carbon emissions over the next 22 years.

It cannot be that the ALP's policy researchers are ignorant of the real situation. The "Sixty by 2050" position has been chosen for political reasons, not scientific ones. Labor leaders have clearly calculated that "Sixty by 2050" will reassure the public that Labor is responding to the challenges of global warming, while not putting big business offside by suggesting that the ALP's climate change policies will substantially affect profits.

Off the record, Garrett and his front-bench colleagues might argue that the overriding task is to defeat the Howard government, which refuses to name any emissions target. But once in office, are the Labor leaders going to turn around and admit that they lied to voters? And would Labor confront the corporate rich, who subtly but unmistakably let it be known that they will fight any move that cuts significantly into profits? Loyalty to the capitalist class, to its interests and perspectives, is incorporated into the brains of ALP politicians at a molecular level.

Nor have the Greens, who call for reductions of thirty percent below 1990 levels by 2020 and of eighty percent by 2050, really confronted the necessities of the age. Of nationally organised Australian political parties, only the Socialist Alliance with its target of ninety percent reduction by 2030 puts forward a demand anywhere close to what is needed.

It is not by chance that it is only a socialist party, that takes no responsibility for the interests of big capital, that accepts the reality and pledges to act on it.


http://www.carbonequity.info/docs/alppolicy.html


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

Agriculture: Closing the Circle

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (December 18 2007)

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


Our modern faith in progress embodies a rich harvest of ironies, but one of the richest unfolds from the way it redefines such concepts as improvement and advancement. To most people nowadays, the way things are done today is by definition more advanced, and therefore better, than the way things were done at any point in the past. This curious way of thinking, which is all but universal in the industrial world among people who haven't though [thought through?] its implications, starts from the equally widespread belief that all of human history is a straight line that leads to us. It implies in turn that the only way into the future that counts is the one that involves doing even more of what we're already doing right now.

It's easy to see why this sort of self-congratulatory thinking is popular, but just now it may also be fatal. The entire industrial way of life is built on the ever accelerating use of non-renewable resources - primarily but not only fossil fuels - and it therefore faces an imminent collision with the hard facts of geology, in the form of non-negotiable limits to how much can be extracted from a finite planet before depletion outruns extraction. When that happens, ways of living that made economic sense in a world of cheap abundant resources are likely to become non-viable in a hurry, and beliefs that make those ways of living seem inevitable are just another obstacle in the way of the necessary transitions.

Agriculture, the foundation of human subsistence in nearly all of the world's societies just now, offers a particularly sharp lesson in this regard. It's extremely common for people to assume that today's industrial agriculture is by definition more advanced, and thus better, than any of the alternatives. It's certainly true that the industrial approach to agriculture - using fossil fuel-powered machines to replace human and animal labor, and fossil fuel-derived chemicals to replace natural nutrient cycles that rely on organic matter - out-competed its rivals in the market economies of the twentieth century, when fossil fuels were so cheap that it made economic sense to use them in place of everything else. That age is ending, however, and the new economics of energy bid fair to drive a revolution in agriculture as sweeping as any we face.

What needs to be recognized here, though, is that in a crucial sense - the ecological sense - modern industrial agriculture is radically less advanced than most of the viable alternatives. To grasp the way this works, it's necessary to go back to the concept of ecological succession, the theme of several earlier posts on this blog.

Succession, you'll remember, is the process by which a vacant lot turns into a forest, or any other disturbed ecosystem returns to the complex long-term equilibrium found in a mature ecology. In the course of succession, the first simple communities of pioneer organisms give way to other communities in a largely predictable sequence, ending in a climax community that can maintain itself over centuries. The stages in the process - seres, in the language of ecology - vary sharply in the way they relate to resources, and the differences involved have crucial implications.

Organisms in earlier seres, to use more ecologists' jargon, tend to be R-selected - that is, their strategy for living depends on controlling as many resources and producing as many offspring as fast as they possibly can, no matter how inefficient this turns out to be. This strategy gets them established in new areas as quickly as possible, but it makes them vulnerable to competition by more efficient organisms later on. Organisms in later seres tend to be K-selected - that is, their strategy for living depends on using resources as efficiently as possible, even when this makes them slow to spread and limits their ability to get into every possible niche. This means they tend to be elbowed out of the way by R-selected organisms early on, but their efficiency gives them the edge in the long term, allowing them to form stable communities.

The difference between earlier and later seres can be described in another way. Earlier seres tend toward what could be called an extractive model of nutrient use. In the dry country of central Oregon, for example, fireweed - a pioneer plant, and strongly R-selected - grows in the aftermath of forest fires, thriving on the abundant nutrients concentrated in wood ash, and on bare disturbed ground where it can monopolize soil nutrients. As it grows, though, it takes up the nutrient concentrations that allow it to thrive, and leaves behind soil with nutrients spread far more diffusely. Finally other plants better adapted to less concentrated nutrients replace it. Thus the fireweed becomes its own nemesis.

By contrast, later seres tend toward what could be called a recycling model of nutrient use. The climax community in those same central Oregon drylands is dominated by pines of several species, and in a mature pine forest, most nutrients are either in the living trees themselves or in the thick duff of fallen pine needles that covers the forest floor. The duff soaks up rainwater like a sponge, keeping the soil moist and preventing nutrient loss through runoff; as the duff rots, it releases nutrients into the soil where the pine roots can access them, and also encourages the growth of symbiotic soil fungi that improve the pine's ability to access nutrients. Thus the pine creates and maintains conditions that foster its own survival.

Other seres in between the pioneer fireweed and the climax pine fall into the space between these two models. It's very common across a wide range of ecosystems for the early seres in a process of succession to pass by very quickly, in a few years or less, while later seres take progressively longer, culminating in the immensely slow rate of change of a stable climax community. Like all ecological rules, this one has plenty of exceptions, but the pattern is much more common than not. What makes this even more interesting is that the same pattern also appears in something close to its classic form in the history of agriculture.

The first known systems of grain agriculture emerged in the Middle East sometime before 8000 BCE, in the aftermath of the drastic global warming that followed the end of the last ice age and caused massive ecological disruption throughout the temperate zone. These first farming systems were anything but sustainable, and early agricultural societies followed a steady rhythm of expansion and collapse most likely caused by bad farming practices that failed to return nutrients to the soil. It took millennia and plenty of hard experience to evolve the first farming systems that worked well over the long term, and millennia more to craft truly sustainable methods such as Asian wetland rice culture, which cycles nutrients back into the soil in the form of human and animal manure, and has proved itself over some 4000 years.

This process of agricultural evolution parallels succession down to the fine details. In effect, the first grain farming systems were the equivalents, in human ecology, of pioneer plant seres. Their extractive model of nutrient use guaranteed that over time, they would become their own nemesis and fail to thrive. Later, more sustainable methods correspond to later seres, with the handful of fully sustainable systems corresponding to climax communities with a recycling model of nutrient use and stability measured in millennia.

Factor in the emergence of industrial farming in the early twentieth century, though, and the sequence suddenly slams into reverse. Industrial farming follows an extreme case of the extractive model; the nutrients needed by crops come from fertilizers manufactured from natural gas, rock phosphate, and other non-renewable resources, and the crops themselves are shipped off to distant markets, taking the nutrients with them. This one-way process maximizes profits in the short term, but it damages the soil, pollutes local ecosystems, and poisons water resources. In a world of accelerating resource depletion, such extravagant use of irreplaceable fossil fuels is also a recipe for failure.

Fortunately, as last week's post showed, the replacement for this hopelessly unsustainable system - if you will, the next sere in the agricultural succession - is already in place and beginning to expand rapidly into the territory of conventional farming. Modeled closely on the sustainable farming practices of Asia by way of early 20th century researchers such as Albert Howard and F H King, organic farming moves decisively toward the recycling model by using organic matter and other renewable resources to replace chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and the like. In terms of the modern mythology of progress, this is a step backward, since it abandons chemicals and machines for compost, green manures, and biological pest controls; in terms of succession, it is a step forward, and the beginning of recovery from the great leap backward of industrial agriculture.

This same model may be worth examining closely when it comes time to deal with some of the other dysfunctional habits that became widespread in the industrial world during the fast-departing age of cheap abundant fossil fuel energy. In any field you care to name, sustainability is about closing the circle, replacing wasteful extractive models of resource use with recycling models that enable resource use to continue without depletion over the long term. It's a fair bet that in the ecotechnic societies of the future - the climax communities of human technic civilization - the flow of resources through the economy will follow circular paths indistinguishable from the ones that track nutrient flows through a healthy ecosystem. How one of the more necessary of those paths could be crafted will be the subject of next week's post.

_____

The Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA), John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books, including The Druidry Handbook (Weiser, 2006). He lives in Ashland, Oregon.Tuesday,

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2007/12/agriculture-closing-circle.html#links


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

Linux is about to take over the low end of PCs

by Steven J Vaughan-Nichols

DesktopLinux.com (December 07 2007)


Sometimes, several unrelated changes come to a head at the same time, with a result no one could have predicted. The PC market is at such a tipping point right now and the result will be millions of Linux-powered PCs in users' hands.

The first change was the continued maturation of desktop Linux. Today, no one can argue with a straight face that people can't get their work done on Linux-powered PCs. Ubuntu {1}, PCLinuxOS {2}, MEPIS {3}, OpenSUSE {4}, Xandros {5}, Linspire {6}, Mint {7}, the list goes on and on of desktop Linuxes that PC owner can use without knowing a thing about Linux's technical side. People can argue that Vista or Mac OS X is better, but when Michael Dell runs Ubuntu Linux on one of his own home systems {8}, it can't be said that Linux isn't a real choice for anyone's desktop.

Another change occurred when Nicholas Negroponte proposed the so-called $100 laptop, the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) machine {9}. He couldn't get them built for quite that price - they cost about $200 {10} - but that's still remarkably cheap and they're available today.

Not long after OLPC was announced, Intel and other companies came up with their own take on an inexpensive PC: the Classmate PC {11}. By 2007, it had become clear that you could build a laptop that was good enough to run desktop Linux for about $200.

That gave other hardware vendors an idea. If you could build a no-frills PCs that ran Linux, why not make sub-$500 computers with a bit more power and sell them to consumers? That's exactly what Asus did with its Xandros Linux-powered ASUS Eee UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC) {12}, which lists for about $400. At about the same time, Everex introduced its gOS TC2502 gPC {13}. Available first only from Wal-Mart, these $199 desktop systems are also now also available from ZaReason {14}, an open-source VAR.

And how are these sub $500 computers and laptops doing? Everex is building them as fast as it can and has announced that its forthcoming laptop version, the CloudBook, has already been picked up by a major US reseller. At the same time, according to an unconfirmed report, ASUS is planning on selling 3.8 million Eees in its next fiscal year {15}.

While all this has been going on, broadband Internet connectivity has become almost as easily available as cell phone coverage. It is a small town indeed where there's not some kind of free Wi-Fi available at a local coffee shop or library. You may have to pay for Wi-Fi at the airport or in your hotel, but Wi-Fi is almost always there. And, at home, well I'm living on a rural mountain overlooking a national forest and I have 3M-bps DSL coming in to my house.

Google has made billions from this simple fact. It's not just about search and ads anymore, though. Google has found that there's a big demand for its office Google Apps. And not just from home users; Capgemini {16}, a multibillion dollar international consulting company, is using GAPE (Google Apps Premier Edition) {17} for one of its offices.

Four trends: user-friendly Linux desktops, useful under-$500 laptops and desktops, near-universal broadband, and business-ready Internet office applications. Put them together and you have a revolution.

For the last two decades, we've been buying expensive desktop operating systems on business PCs running from $1,000 to $2,000. On those systems, we've been putting pricey desktop-centric office suites like Microsoft Office. That's a lot of money, and the convergence of the above trends is about to knock it for a loop.

Here's the business case. You tell me if it's not compelling. You can buy 100 $500 PCs running a free version of Linux, hook them to a high-speed Internet connection for a $1,000 a year and use GAPE at $50 per user account per year. Finally, we'll throw in a grand for a Linux server. That's $57,000 for your equipment, your connectivity, your operating system and your applications.

Now, let's say you want to run Vista Business. First, you'll need 100 PCs that can run it. The cheapest deal I can find today for machines I'd consider adequate for Vista Business, which is to say they must have at least two gigabytes of RAM, is for the Dell OptiPlex 320 at $707 a PC. Of course - unlike with Linux, which always includes an office suite, OpenOffice - for those times when the Internet is down, you'll need to buy an office suite. If you went with Microsoft Standard 2007, with a little shopping you can get it for the upgrade price of about $200 per copy. So, on the PC side alone, we're looking at $90,700.

All done? Not quite. To get the most from Microsoft Office 2007, you really need to be operating it with a minimum of Microsoft Server 2003 ($4,994 base price plus 100 CALs [client access licenses]), Exchange 2007 ($7,399 base price plus 100 CALs) and SharePoint 2007 ($13,824 base price plus 100 standard CALS). If you're running Windows you probably already have Server, so we won't count it. Throw in another two grand for the Exchange 2007 and SharePoint 2007 servers, and a grand for the Internet connection, and (insert sound of old-fashioned adding machine) the final total is $114,923.

So, by my calculations, all those trends have joined together to make a Linux-based small business using Google applications instead of Exchange and SharePoint cost less than half its Microsoft-based twin.

Worse still, if you're Microsoft, you can't really defend yourself. Linux desktops run just dandy on low-end, under-$500 PCs. Vista Basic, which comes the closest to being able to run on these systems, is unacceptable since it doesn't support business networking. Office 2007 also won't run worth a darn on these systems. And somehow, I can't see Microsoft optimizing its applications to work with Google Apps instead of Exchange and SharePoint.

Put it all together, and here's what I see happening. In the next few quarters, low-end Linux-based PCs are going to quickly take over the bottom rung of computing. Then, as businesses continue to get comfortable with SAAS (software as a service) and open-source software, the price benefits will start leading them toward switching to the new Linux/SAAS office model.

You'll see this really kick into gear once Vista Service Pack 1 appears and business customers start seriously looking at what it will cost to migrate to Vista. That Tiffany-level price tag will make all but the most Microsoft-centric businesses start considering the Linux/SAAS alternative.

Microsoft will fight this trend tooth and nail. It will cut prices to the point where it'll be bleeding ink on some of its product lines. And Windows XP is going to stick around much longer than Microsoft ever wanted it to. Still, it won't be enough. By attacking from the bottom, where Microsoft can no longer successfully compete, Linux will finally cut itself a large slice of the desktop market pie.

Links:

{1} http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS9663741090.html

{2} http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS2784733365.html

{3} http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS5895218861.html

{4} http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS9522087546.html

{5} http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS3073255522.html

{6} http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS3107365614.html

{7} http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS7491263673.html

{8} http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS5149877302.html

{9} http://www.desktoplinux.com/articles/AT5734583728.html

{10} http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS2104554099.html

{11} http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS9423478881.html

{12} http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS5557994061.html

{13} http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS8642294935.html

{14} http://www.zareason.com/shop/product.php?productid=16160

{15} http://www.dailytech.com/ASUS+Well+Sell+38+Million+Eees+in+2008+Some+with+Windows/article9887.htm

{16} http://www.capgemini.com/

{17} http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2215565,00.asp

_____

Ziff Davis Internet Linux & Open Source Editor Steven J Vaughan-Nichols has been using and writing about technology and business since the late 1980s and thinks he may just have learned something about them along the way. He can be reached at sjvn@vna1.com.

http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS2414535067.html


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

The Post-Oil Economy

After The Techno-Fix

by Peter Goodchild

Countercurrents.org (December 22 2007)


"Even when grappling with the idea of economic disintegration, Americans attempt to cast it in terms of technological or economic progress: eco-villages, sustainable development, energy efficiency and so on. Under the circumstances, such compulsive techno-optimism seems maladaptive." -- Dmitry Orlov, "Our Village"


The path beyond petroleum begins by considering five principles: that alternative sources of energy are insufficient; that hydrocarbons, metals, and electricity are inseparable; that advanced technology is part of the problem, not part of the solution; that post-oil agriculture means a smaller population; and that the basis of the problem is psychological, not technological.

Everything in modern industrial society is dependent on oil and other hydrocarbons. From these we get gasoline, heating fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, lubricants, plastic, paint, synthetic fabrics, asphalt, pharmaceuticals, and many other things. Speaking in more general terms, we can say that we are dependent on hydrocarbons for manufacture, for transportation, for agriculture, for mining, and for electricity. The peak of world oil production is (or was) about thirty billion barrels a year, supporting a human population of nearly seven billion. In the entire world, there are perhaps a trillion barrels of oil left to extract - which may sound like a lot, but isn't. By 2030, annual oil production will be less than half of what it was at its peak.


1: Alternative Sources of Energy Are Insufficient

Alternative sources of energy will never be of much use, mainly because of the problem of "net energy": the amount of energy output from alternative sources is not sufficiently greater than the amount of energy input (which is hydrocarbons). Alternative sources are not sufficient to supply the annual needs of "industrial society" as the term is generally understood.

The use of unconventional oil (tar sands, shale deposits, heavy oil) poses several problems. The first is that of insufficient net energy. The second is that of extreme pollution. The third is that is even if we optimistically assume that about 700 billion barrels of unconventional oil could be produced, that amount would equal only about fifteen years of global oil demand.

Fuel cells cannot be made practical, because such devices require hydrogen derived from hydrocarbons. Biofuels (for example, from corn) require enormous amounts of land and still result in insufficient quantities of net energy. Hydroelectric dams are reaching their practical limits. Nuclear power will soon be suffering from a lack of fuel and is already creating serious environmental dangers.

Solar, wind, and geothermal power are only effective in certain areas and for certain purposes. Such types of power, in any case, are of significant value only when converted into electrical energy, requiring the use of disposable batteries and some very rare metals. In terms of ecology (that is, the relationship between population and resources), these types of power are therefore no better than the hydrocarbon-based power they are intended to replace.

The world uses fifteen terawatts of power every year. It's hard to imagine how much energy that is; it's more than "a lot". By 2030 the world's oil supply will be so depleted that the Industrial Age will be over, for all practical purposes. Yet proponents of "alternative energy" hope to transform the entire planet in a time frame that would be implausible even in a work of science fiction.

The quest for alternative sources of energy is not merely illusory; it is actually harmful. By daydreaming of a noiseless and odorless utopia of windmills and solar panels, we are reducing the effectiveness of whatever serious information is now being published. When news articles claim that there are simple painless solutions to the oil crisis, the reader's response is not awareness but drowsiness. We are rapidly heading toward what has been described as the greatest disaster in history, but we are indulging in escapist fantasies.


2: Hydrocarbons, Metals, and Electricity Are Inseparable

Iron ore of the sort that can be processed with primitive equipment is becoming scarce, and only the less-tractable forms will be available when the oil-powered machinery is no longer available - a chicken-and-egg problem. Copper, aluminum, and other metals are also rapidly vanishing. Metals were useful to mankind only because they could once be found in concentrated pockets in the earth's crust; now they are irretrievably scattered among the world's garbage dumps.

Electricity is not a source of energy; it is only a carrier of energy. That energy comes mainly from coal, natural gas, nuclear power plants, or hydroelectric dams. Coal is terribly inefficient; only a third of its energy is transferred as it is converted to electricity. At the same time, the electrical grids are perpetually operating at maximum load, chronically in need of better maintenance and expensive upgrading. The first clearly marked sign of "the end" may be the failure of electricity.

Hydrocarbons, metals, and electricity are all intricately connected. Each is inaccessible - on the modern scale - only when the other two are present. Any two will vanish without the third. If we imagine a world without hydrocarbons, we must imagine a world without metals or electricity. There is no way of breaking that "triangle".


3: Advanced Technology Is Part of the Problem, Not Part of the Solution

Whatever choices may be available in the future, they will not be found in advanced technology, in "high-tech" solutions. There are three reasons why that is so. In the first place, any "alternative-energy" devices would have to be created from plastics and metals. Secondly, they would have to be controlled by electricity. Finally, they would have to be created by large and sophisticated machines and transported over long distances. But the whole point in speculating about "alternative energy" in the first place is to find an answer to that particular crisis - the fact that none of those three factors will exist in future years.

In addition, all that we think of as "modern industrial society" has its "sociological" components: intricate division of labor, large-scale government, and high-level education. Without hydrocarbons, metals, and electricity, we will find ourselves in a pre-industrial world in which there is no material infrastructure allowing those "sociological" components to exist.

Advanced technology is part of the problem to be solved, not the solution itself. There may be some form of technology that can save us from the depletion of hydrocarbons, but it is certainly not "high". To speak of "high-tech methods" as if they were largely synonymous with "methods employing alternative sources of energy" is ultimately self-contradictory and self-defeating.

We cannot enter a "post-carbon" world. Life on Earth has been "carbon" for at least half a billion years. It will not change in the next decade or so.


4: Post-Oil Agriculture Means a Smaller Population

Modern agriculture is dependent on hydrocarbons for fertilizers (the Haber-Bosch process combines natural gas with atmospheric nitrogen to produce nitrogen fertilizer), pesticides, and the operation of machines for harvesting, processing, and transporting. The Green Revolution was the invention of a way to turn petroleum and natural gas into food. Without hydrocarbons, modern methods of food production will disappear. Food production will be greatly reduced, and there will be no practical means of transporting food over long distances.

The starting point is to think in terms of a smaller radius of activity. The globalized economy has to be replaced by the localized economy. In the post-oil world, most food will be produced at a local level. The catch, however, is that most of the world's surface is permanently unsuitable for growing food: the climate is too severe, or the land is too barren.

Nevertheless, a small human population might survive on agriculture, at least if it reverted to some primitive methods. Some Asian cultures brought wild plant material from the mountains and used it as fertilizer, thereby making use of the N-P-K (et cetera) of the wilderness. Many other cultures used wood ashes. The nutrient "source" of the wilderness fed the nutrient "sink" of the farmland. (This is one of the basic principles behind all "organic gardening", although few practitioners would admit it or even know it.)

Using primitive technology, it will not be possible to feed a world population that has anywhere near the present size. Even the "alternative" catch-phrases harbor a number of misconceptions. "Intensive gardening", for example, is possible only with a garden hose and an unlimited supply of water. "Organic gardening" relies on sources of potassium, phosphorus, and other elements that will not be available without modern techniques of mining and transport. The maximum population that can be supported, therefore, is about four people per hectare of arable land.


5: The Basis of the Problem Is Psychological, Not Technological

As the oil crisis worsens there will be various forms of aberrant behavior: denial, anger, mental paralysis. There will be an increase in crime, there will be strange religious cults or extremist political movements. The reason for such behavior is that fundamentally the peak-oil problem is not about technology, and it is not about economics, and it is not about politics. It is partly about humanity's attempt to defy geology. But it is mainly about psychology: most people cannot grasp what William Catton refers to as "overshoot".

We cannot come to terms with the fact that as a species we have gone beyond the ability of the planet to accommodate us. We have bred ourselves beyond the limits. We have consumed, polluted, and expanded beyond our means, and after several thousand years of superficial technological solutions we are now running short of answers. Biologists explain such expansion in terms of "carrying capacity": lemmings and snowshoe hares - and a great many other species - have the same problem; overpopulation and over-consumption lead to die-off. But humans cannot come to terms with the concept. It goes against the grain of all our religious and philosophical beliefs.


Further Reading:

BP Global Statistical Review of World Energy. Annual.
http://www.bp.com/statisticalreview

Campbell, Colin J. The Coming Oil Crisis. Brentwood, Essex: Multi-Science, 1997.

Catton, William R, Jr Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. Champaign, Illinois: U of Illinois P, 1980.

Deffeyes, Kenneth S. Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001.

Gever, John, et al. Beyond Oil: The Threat to Food and Fuel in the Coming Decades. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Ballinger, 1986.

Meadows, Donella H et al. The Limits to Growth: a Report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind. 2nd edition. New York: Universe, 1982.

_____

Peter Goodchild is the author of Survival Skills of the North American Indians (Chicago Review Press, 1999). He can be reached at petergoodchild@interhop.net

http://www.countercurrents.org/goodchild221207.htm


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

(Mis)Understanding a Banking Industry in Transition

Under deregulation the industry became dysfunctional - but economists still won't revise their anti-regulation script.

by William K Black

http://www.dollarsandsense.org/ (November / December 2007)


The US financial system is, once again, in crisis. Or, more precisely, twin crises - first, huge numbers of defaults among subprime mortgage borrowers, and second, massive losses for the holders of new-fangled investments comprised of bundles of loans of varying risk, including many of those subprime mortgages.

These crises should shock the nation. Our largest, most sophisticated financial institutions have followed business practices that were certain to produce massive losses - practices so imprudent, in precisely the business task (risk management) that is supposed to be their greatest expertise, that they have created a worldwide financial crisis.

Why? Because their CEOs, acting on the perverse incentives created by today's outrageous compensation systems, engaged in practices that vastly increased their corporations' risk in order to drive up reported corporate income and thereby secure enormous increases in their own individual incomes. And those perverse incentives follow them out the door: CEOs Charles Prince, at Citicorp, and Stanley O'Neal, at Merrill Lynch, had dismal track records of similar failures prior to the latest disasters, but they collected massive bonuses for their earlier failures and will receive obscene termination packages now. Pay and productivity (and integrity) have become unhinged at US financial institutions.

As this goes to print, Treasury Department officials are working with large financial institutions to cover up the scale of the growing losses. This is the same US Treasury that regularly prates abroad about the vital need for transparency. And a former Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, who failed utterly in his fiduciary duty as lead board member at Citicorp to prevent the series of recent abuses, will become Citicorp's new CEO.

To even begin to understand events in the US and global banking industries, you have to look back at the seismic shifts in the industry over the past thirty to forty years, and at the interplay between those shifts and government policy. The story that continues to unfold is one of progressively worse policies that make financial crises more common and more severe.

These policies have their boosters, though. Chief among them are neoclassical banking and finance economists, whose ideology and methodologies lead them into blatant misreadings of the realities of the industry and the causes of its failures. When the history of this crisis-ridden era in global finance is written, the economists will no doubt be given a significant share of the blame.


A New Era of Crisis

The changes in the US banking industry in recent decades have been so great that a visitor from the 1950s would hardly recognize the industry. Over two decades of intense merger and acquisition activity has left a far smaller number of banks, with assets far more concentrated in the largest ones. Between 1984 and 2004, the number of banks on the FDIC's rolls fell from 14,392 to 7,511; the share of the US banking industry's assets held by the ten largest banks rose from 21% in 1960 to nearly sixty percent in 2005. At the same time, nonbank businesses that lend, save, and invest money have proliferated, as have the products they sell: a vast array of new kinds of loans and exotic savings and investment vehicles. And the lines have blurred between all of the different players in the industry - between banks and thrifts (for example, savings and loans), between commercial banks and investment banks. These changes were made possible by the deregulation of the industry. Bit by bit, beginning in the 1970s, the banking regulations put into place in the wake of the Great Depression were repealed, culminating in the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999, which removed the remaining legal barriers to combining commercial banking, investment banking, and insurance under one corporate roof. The new world of combined financial services is exemplified by the deal, inked (but ostensibly illegal) before the 1999 law was passed, that merged the insurance and investment-banking giant Travelers with Citibank, at the time the nation's number-one commercial bank.

These transformational changes in domestic banking, along with the related effects of economic globalization both in the United States and abroad, have produced recurrent crises in the financial sector. Indeed, the current era has seen over 100 major banking crises, in countries around the globe. Thomas Hoenig, head of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank, emphasized the remarkable and disturbing facts in a meeting with fellow heads of supervision:

A 1996 survey by the IMF [International Monetary Fund] ... found that 73 percent [133 of 181] of their member countries had experienced significant banking problems during the preceding fifteen years. Many of these problems led to substantial declines in GDP [and] serious disruptions in credit and capital markets ...


To date none of these crises has led to a global Great Depression. Only a few were larger in absolute terms than the 1980s S&L debacle in the United States. Yet many imposed a much greater relative cost, measured as a percentage of the country's GDP. Some caused severe, depression-like economic problems in the affected nation. Some produced contagion effects that caused severe crises in other nations. And acute banking crises can cause long-term harm. Japan is a rich nation and can afford a fifteen-year banking crisis - but the world economy cannot. The crisis cut Japan's economic growth to near-zero for a decade, in turn creating contagion effects in the many countries for whom Japan was a major trading partner or a significant source of capital investment. Tens of millions of people remain in poverty in Asia and Africa as a result.

The recurrent banking crises have come as a shock to the United States, given the dearth of bank failures over the first three decades after World War II. The first severe postwar US banking crisis was stemmed from the large loans that top US banks made to sovereign borrowers (that is, nations), largely in Latin America. The banks had claimed that sovereign loans offered high returns with minimal default risk because the nation could always repay the loan by printing more money. Citibank head Walter Wriston notoriously implied that countries could not go broke. The claim was absurd. However, banking regulators took no effective action to restrain this lending.

The 1982 Mexican default led to contagion and fears of an international meltdown, but the Federal Reserve and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) took effective action. Brazil experienced a long economic slowdown that contributed to an imminent default on its loans from major US banks. A Brazilian default could have rendered several of our largest banks insolvent. The banks were rescued by a combination of bailouts to Brazil through the IMF and the World Bank and flawed (albeit permissible under so-called Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, or GAAP) "troubled-debt restructuring" to cover up the losses. Brazil used the bailouts to pay minimal interest on the US bank loans and ultimately recovered; while several US banks took serious losses, none failed.

On the heels of this crisis came the savings and loan crisis, an unprecedented debacle which saw the collapse of some 1,000 S&Ls and which cost US taxpayers about $125 billion dollars - primarily the cost of repaying to depositors money that criminal S&L heads had literally stolen from their institutions.

The causes of these crises are varied. They typically occur, however, when large banks are in essence looted by their owners and managers (a phenomenon known as "control fraud") or when there are financial bubbles in which assets become massively overvalued.

Economists who conduct case studies of banking crises commonly report the existence of substantial control fraud. Looting played a prominent role in the S&L debacle. Here is the conclusion of the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement (NCFIRRE):

The typical large failure was a stockholder-owned, state-chartered institution in Texas or California where regulation and supervision were most lax ... The failed institution typically had experienced a change of control and was tightly held, dominated by an individual with substantial conflicts of interest ... In the typical large failure, every accounting trick available was used to make the institution look profitable, safe, and solvent. Evidence of fraud was invariably present as was the ability of the operators to "milk" the organization through high dividends and salaries, bonuses, perks and other means. In short, the typical large failure was one in which management exploited virtually all the perverse incentives created by government policy.


Looting has played a significant role in banking crises around the world. It became so prevalent in the states of the former Soviet Union that it inspired a new term of art, "tunneling", to describe the process of the CEO and owners converting a company's funds to their private benefit.

In addition to the national banking crises, fraud has caused spectacular failures of large banks. The Bank for Credit and Commerce International (BCCI - known informally as the "Bank for Crooks and Criminals International"), Barings Bank, and Continental Bank all stunned the public when they failed. BCCI was the largest bank in the developing world, Barings was England's oldest bank, and Continental was America's third largest bank. Each one collapsed with minimal public warning.

And, of course, more recently control fraud played a role in a number of spectacular business failures outside of the banking industry including Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco. This fact makes it obvious that the conventional economic wisdom, which blames this era's wave of bank failures and banking crises on regulation and deposit insurance (which are specific to the banking industry) is just wrong. Despite this, mainstream economists persist in their diagnosis, rarely scrutinizing the deregulation and privatization that many observers believe in fact triggered these crises.

_____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____
SIDEBAR: Deposit Insurance Spreads, Despite Economists' Protests

Banking economists now overwhelmingly criticize deposit insurance. This represents a major change. The prior consensus, shared by Milton Friedman and John Kenneth Galbraith alike, praised deposit insurance for ending the periodic runs on uninsured banks that helped cause the Great Depression. Today, however, the conventional economic wisdom is that deposit insurance may stop runs, but at the expense of encouraging banks to make imprudent loans and take excessive risks. (Neoclassical economists widely view insurance as inherently creating an incentive for insured parties to act in unduly risky ways because of the safety net that insurance provides - a phenomenon termed "moral hazard".)

This claim is dubious: economists do not offer a credible mechanism whereby deposit insurance could lead to the ills they claim it causes. Deposit insurance does not protect the shareholders or the CEO - the two groups (the first, in theory; the second, in practice) that control a bank. It is the depositors who are insured. Thus, they must be the ones who are subject to moral hazard - in other words, the argument against deposit insurance must be based on the claim that it reduces the incentive of depositors to exercise "private market discipline" by pulling their money out of a bank they believe is being poorly run or looted. But there is no credible evidence that depositors are capable of either discerning frauds or avoiding runs on healthy banks based on false rumors. Indeed, studies have shown that even private-sector financial experts who specialize in evaluating the health of banks cannot do so effectively.

Proponents of the view that deposit insurance causes banking failures display an unrecognized logical inconsistency. Their proposed reform is to rely on private market discipline to prevent management from looting the bank or lending imprudently in a bubble. But, if we assume hypothetically that private market discipline is effective against CEOs who would be so inclined, then it should normally be effective despite the presence of deposit insurance. Deposit insurance does not remove private market discipline where the bank is owned by shareholders (unless the CEO owns all the stock) or where the bank issues uninsured subordinated debt. Yet during the S&L crisis, control fraud (the looting of an institution by its own managers or owners) was most common in S&Ls owned in stock form, with the largest losses overwhelmingly among stock S&Ls. In these cases deposit insurance did not preclude private market discipline; market discipline was simply inadequate to prevent control fraud. Some opponents of deposit insurance proclaim the S&L debacle to be their primary example - a flat misreading of the facts.

The empirical evidence economists use to support their critique of deposit insurance is inconsistent. Moreover, even where the adoption of deposit insurance is correlated with a rise in bank failures, the causal relationship may be just the opposite of what economists claim. Nations with early signs of an impending banking crisis may adopt deposit insurance to reduce the risks of runs. Developing nations tend to adopt deposit insurance in conjunction with privatization - which itself often prompts a banking crisis. More broadly, in part because of the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of the neoliberal "Washington Consensus", the number of nations adopting deposit insurance increased sharply in the last two decades. Banking crises have indeed been far more common over this same period - precisely because these radical transitions have been occurring in nations with weak institutions, too few regulators with too little experience, patterns of bank ownership that maximize conflicts of interest, and substantial corruption.

In addition, empirical studies rely on subjective coding of different countries' deposit insurance policies, often done by economists who oppose deposit insurance. In countries with no formal deposit insurance, implicit government guarantees for banks are common. There are good theoretical and historical reasons to argue that such implicit guarantees - common in crony capitalism and kleptocracies - create greater moral hazard than explicit deposit insurance does because they can be structured to bail out a bank's shareholders and CEO as well as its creditors (as was done in Chile). But there is no way to code accurately for whether there was an implicit guarantee (or whether bank CEOs believed there was an implicit guarantee) in a particular country at a particular time.

Despite these weaknesses in both evidence and analysis, World Bank economists draw firm conclusions, opposing the adoption of deposit insurance in any nation and clearly hoping for its elimination. But the world has rejected their advice. By 2006, 95 countries had deposit insurance, over four times the number in 1983. Moreover, economists' suggestions on how to "improve" deposit insurance (require banks to issue subordinated debt, charge variable rates for deposit insurance, or require private insurance of accounts) are rarely adopted and have proven unsuccessful in practice.
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...The First Make Proud

Economists have dominated the creation of public policies to prevent banking crises. Their track record has been abysmal. They designed and implemented the disastrous deregulation that produced the US S&L debacle, they praised Japan's and East Asia's banking structures just before they collapsed, and they designed the IMF's crisis intervention strategy that intensified losses and human misery. They also designed and praised privatization programs in many transition economies that led to banking crises; they planned (and in some cases profited from) the catastrophic failure of "shock therapy" in Russia. The irony is that when financial experts were most confident in their consensus, they erred the most grievously. As Mark Twain remarked: "It's not the things you don't know that cause disasters; it's the things you do know, but aren't true".

This record of failure is disappointing and has caused great human suffering. Remarkably, the economists' hubris is unaffected by it. They are now engaged in a war against deposit insurance and regulation. At this juncture, they are losing that war, but they are persevering in their effort to reclaim their domination over banking policy.

Neoclassical banking economists are failing in this arena for three reasons. First, they neither study nor understand fraud mechanisms and the institutions that are essential to limit fraud and corruption. Second, they are shackled by an ideology that presumes that unfettered markets always produce the best outcomes and that government intervention is always bad. For instance, in their writings many of the World Bank's banking economists display a passionate contempt for democratic government and banking regulators. Third, they are mono-disciplinary. They rarely cite (and no doubt rarely examine) the literature in other relevant fields such as political science, sociology, and white-collar criminology.

Indeed, although it should be central to their study of crisis prevention, they rarely even cite the work of economist and 2001 Nobel Prize winner George Akerlof. Based on their study of the S&L crisis, which found that looting was a major cause of total S&L losses, Akerlof and Paul Romer developed an economic model of the looting control fraud.

Looters use accounting fraud to make a company appear extraordinarily profitable. Consider the S&L crisis. The worst S&L control frauds were the ones reporting the highest profitability. Moreover, the control frauds were routinely able to get a Big Eight audit firm to give them "clean" GAAP (or Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, the official standard of review in the US accounting industry) opinions for false financial statements.

Economists, in turn, relied on reported accounting profits and share prices (which rose along with reported profits) to determine whether a given S&L was well run. But relying on reported accounting earnings or stock prices must lead to perverse results when a wave of looting control frauds is expanding. Thanks to their fraudulent accounting, whatever strategies control frauds follow will look profitable, and hence praiseworthy. In the S&Ls, this led economists to praise (1) domination by an owner/CEO; (2) extremely rapid growth; (3) changes of control; and (4) large investments in acquisition, development, and contruction (ADC) loans and direct investments. Lo and behold, these factors turned out to characterize the worst failures. In other words, standard econometrics techniques led economists to praise that which was fraudulent and fatal. The error was so great that they identified the worst S&L in the nation as the best.

Worse, economists persist in the same error. During the recent expansion of the even larger wave of looting control frauds such as Enron, economists touted (1) conflicts of interest at the top audit firms (which they euphemistically restyled as "synergies"); (2) using a top-tier auditor; (3) rapid growth; and (4) granting the CEO greater stock options as positive factors that were leading to increased profits and higher share prices. It was only after the looters began to collapse that variables like these reversed their sign (from a positive to a negative correlation) and displayed their true relationship to business failure. Economists are doomed to repeat these mistakes until they adopt statistical techniques that cannot be gamed by accounting fraud.

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SIDEBAR: Offshore Banks

One particularly dark side of globalization is the rise of new offshore banks. While Switzerland now has reasonably workable procedures for tracking the funds of kleptocrats and drug traffickers, several small nations have adopted extreme forms of bank secrecy designed to cater to the needs of criminals and tax evaders. Corporations often incorporate in a tax haven because of the extremely low tax rates. In the late 1990s, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, an organization of the world's industrialized countries, created an initiative to try to curtail these abuses. Conservative think tanks sought to kill the OECD plan and convinced President Bush to block its implementation as one of his earliest actions. The administration reduced its opposition to the OECD initiative after the 9/11 attacks, when it became clear that terrorists used the offshore banks as their preferred means to move funds.
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The Economists' War Against Banking Regulation

In keeping with their skewed analysis of the recent wave of bank failures and banking crises, banking economists, including those at the World Bank and the IMF, have been waging a war against banking regulation. It is a curious assault that rests on implicit and false dichotomies between market and regulation and between types of regulation.

The World Bank economists recognize that regulation is vital to mandate accurate disclosure of corporate financial information and aid private market enforcement, but appear to believe that regulatory strength is unnecessary to induce banks to provide accurate information. That view is illogical and incorrect. Obtaining accurate information about banks is the heart of banking examination. Regulators use their powers primarily to pry out accurate information from the fraudulent; control frauds do not cooperate voluntarily.

Economists' rationale for opposing strong banking regulators typically rests on public choice theory, which holds that the actors in political systems act to maximize their own self-interest. This analysis paints politicians as corrupt and regulators as "captured" by the industries they are supposed to be regulating. World Bank economist Thorsten Beck and his colleagues summed up this view in 2003 and 2006 working papers:

"Politicians may induce banks to divert the flow of credit to politically connected firms, or powerful banks may "capture" politicians and induce official supervisors to act in the best interest of banks ...

"Government solutions to overcome market failures ... have been proven wrong in Bangladesh as across the developed and developing world ... Indeed, powerful regulators are worse than futile - they are corrupt and harmful."


Again, this analysis is nonsensical. If banks can dominate politicians and strong regulators, they can certainly dominate the design of the disclosure standards they face. In that case, pursuant to the economists' own logic, the banks will submit, and politicians beholden to them will permit, deceptive financial reports that grossly overstate banks' value. (This has, in fact, been done in many cases.) Accounting fraud, in turn, renders markets deeply inefficient and causes private market discipline to become perverse. The looters report record profits. Credit is supposed to flow to the most profitable banks. So private markets aid the CEOs looting their banks by providing them with the funds to expand rapidly. Again, the failure to understand bank accounting fraud mechanisms, which have been well explained by Akerlof and Romer, leads to a deeply flawed analysis.

(In lieu of Akerlof and Romer, the anti-regulation economists frequently cite work sponsored by Michael Milken's institute. Milken was the notorious junk-bond king and looter who caused large losses during the S&L crisis by recruiting and funding several of the worst control frauds, such as Charles Keating. Today, Milken's institute blames the S&L debacle on regulation and seeks to rehabilitate his reputation.)

This overarching logical error, their hostility to democracy, and their view of public officials as inevitably rapacious leads economists to a claim that only private parties should exert discipline against banks. The view has a number of problems. First, it is overstated. Regulators in some nations do resist political pressure. In the S&L crisis, many regulators did their job despite intense political pressure and saved over a trillion dollars in the process. On the other hand: if, over time, people are taught to believe that it is normal and rational for public officials to be rapacious, this can become a self-fulfilling prophecy as those who aim to enrich themselves sign on to become officials. Moreover, the argument proves too much. If the banks (or politicians) are powerful enough to act illegitimately through regulators, they are powerful enough to act illegitimately without regulators to achieve the same result. The argument is also based on a fundamental misunderstanding of control frauds. It is not the "powerful banks" Beck and his coauthors refer to that put pressure on regulators or politicians - it is the CEOs or their agents who do. They do not coerce regulators "to act in the best interest of banks". They coerce them in an attempt to act to help the CEO loot the bank.

In fact, the evidence shows that private parties are more subject to capture than public officials. Looting control frauds are routinely able to get top-tier audit firms to give their blessing to massive accounting fraud. The ratings agencies do no better against control fraud. Our most prestigious law firms have helped CEOs loot and destroy their clients. Private deposit insurance funds for thrifts used to exist in many states. None do now. The Maryland, Ohio, and Utah funds were each destroyed by the very first thrift that collapsed in their state thanks to control fraud. No private insurer made more than a feeble effort to exercise discipline. Instead, they acted as boosters for the CEOs who looted and destroyed their own thrifts and brought down the insurance funds with them.

Finally, the empirical studies on banking regulation rely on coding of data by economists who typically oppose regulation, rendering the results unreliable. The risks of subjective bias are acute. There is no objective measure of "strong" regulation, or capture, or "rent seeking behavior". We know that economists have claimed that the Bank Board under Chairman Edwin Gray was captured during the S&L crisis. Not so. In fact, private experts were routinely captured by the S&L control frauds. Plus, the studies focus on formal supervisory power, yet informal banking supervision is widespread and often a regulator's most effective tool. Overall, empirical studies find that better quality regulation (again, to be fair, a subjective concept) reduces banking losses.

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SIDEBAR: They Just Never Learn

Today's financial crisis offers a superb example of how their methods lead mainstream economists to endorse both private practices and public policies that are perverse. The current crisis exemplifies a variant of accounting control frauds - one in which the CEO and top managers "skim" rather than loot the company - and demonstrates the unrecognized economic costs of obscenely high CEO pay. The incentives created by typical CEO compensation packages in the financial services industry produce bad investment decisions, decisions that increase the CEO's ability to skim, but that expose the financial institution to losses and the nation and world to recurrent financial crises.

Consider the plight of the honest chief financial officer (CFO) in the modern financial world. His counterparts at rival firms are earning record returns by investing in subprime mortgages. Economists trumpet studies showing that banks' income is boosted by practices he questions, including:

* Making more subprime mortgages
* Making more of the worst mortgages such as "Ninja" loans (no verification of income, job or assets), also known as "liars' loans"
* Making subprime loans at particularly high interest rates - which draws in the riskiest borrowers because only the worst credit risks and frauds will apply
* Making loans as quickly as possible
* Growing as quickly as possible
* Reducing internal controls against fraud
* Making loans in cities known to be "hot spots" for mortgage fraud
* Qualifying borrowers by offering "teaser" interest rates that will soon increase substantially
* Making loans in areas with rapidly inflation housing bubbles
* Purchasing and holding in portfolio high-yield CDOs (collateralized debt obligations, the investment instruments backed by bundles of mortgages and other loans, often of high risk)
* Keeping minimal reserves against losses

When a housing bubble is expanding, these practices dramatically increase fees and other noninterest income, minimize expenses, and produce relatively few losses. (Losses remain low as long as house prices are rising because borrowers who get in trouble can sell their house for more than they owe or else refinance based on its market value.) Note that this pretty income picture requires accounting and securities fraud, though: reserving properly for the future losses inherent in subjecting the financial institution to this vastly increased default risk would remove the fictional accounting gain.

The combination of dramatically increased revenue, moderately reduced expenses, and minimal loss means that financial institutions that invest heavily in subprime mortgages and CDOs must report record profits while the bubble is hyperinflating.

So what is our honest CFO to do? If she does not follow the pack, her company will report substantially lower income. Its stock price will fall relative to its rivals. The CEO's and CFO's compensation and wealth will fall sharply as raises disappear, bonuses decline, and the value of their shares and stock options falls. The CFO may be fired.

The upshot is that modern compensation systems and the short-term perspective of investors and senior managers all result in perverse incentives to make grossly imprudent investments in those assets experiencing the worst bubbles. This creates a destructive cycle in which large numbers of financial institutions follow the same dysfunctional strategy, which in turn extends and inflates the bubble and produces even more accounting control frauds.
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International Convergence

Despite the flawed logic and lack of empirical support for their views, conventional banking economists, including those at the World Bank, continue to voice opposition to the creation of strong supervisory agencies. For now, however, their call has been rejected.

In the 1980s, the US government reacted to Japan's emergence as the new (apparent) dominant financial power by claiming that Japan gained an unfair advantage because its banks were permitted to operate with lower capital reserves. If all other factors are held constant, a bank held to a lower capital reserve requirement can grow more quickly, lend more cheaply, and finance greater economic growth. Complaining that the playing field was not level, the United States insisted on an international agreement to set minimum bank capital standards. The US effort succeeded in 1988, when the largest industrial nations adopted the Basel Accord. More recently, the accord was revised and expanded ("Basel II") to include more closely calibrated minimum capital requirements as well as a supervisory strategy of "prompt corrective action" against banks that fail to meet the capital requirements and a strategy to make private market discipline more effective by requiring banks to disclose more information.

The Basel Accord was a major step towards greater international uniformity of banking regulation ("convergence") among developed nations. The expansion of the European Union is another major force for convergence, as candidate nations must adopt modern banking laws and regulatory structures meeting the EU's minimum standards.

Banks are also subject to an increasing number of international treaties designed to restrict money laundering and bribery. There are, however, very few enforcement actions or prosecutions, so enforcement does not appear to be effective at this time. In addition, offshore banks remain an enormous loophole limiting the effectiveness of convergence. New banking crises have diminished substantially in nations complying with the Basel accords.

Of course, it is too early to judge whether the Basel process is responsible for this success. However, we do have cross-country evidence showing that weak regulation leads to recurrent waves of control fraud. Tests of Basel's effectiveness by one of the World Bank economists find positive relationships between stronger regulation and bank health. (These tests employed a methodology that posed less risk of subjective bias by the economists conducting the studies, but they remain inherently subjective.)

The economists' frustration, however, is understandable. They are skilled research scientists for whom econometric studies are the epitome of proof. Contrary case studies are mere "anecdotal evidence" that are fully encompassed within their data and, therefore, require no refutation. Moreover, their worldview is shaped by public choice theory. They view banking regulators as corrupt, "rent seeking" parasites who merely pretend to virtue. Alternatively, in their "capture" model, regulators are cowards who roll over to aid the control frauds. They have not been banking regulators, so they are uncontaminated and can see the truth as the empirical data reveal it to them.

Regulators, however, dominate much of the Basel process. They view the economists' disdain as an inaccurate and insulting caricature that indicates their ignorance of the real-world banking business. Regulators tend to believe in their experiences, which overwhelmingly teach that control frauds exploit regulatory weaknesses and that normally honest, sober bankers act like frat boys on spring break during financial bubbles. Imprudent lending is the norm in bubbles. Regulators have seen many econometric "proofs" of propositions they know to be false from experience. Some of them have a reasonably sophisticated understanding of the illusion of precision in empirical work and the many opportunities for subjective coding to lead even the best scholars into error. To date, the regulators have staved off the economists' war against banking regulation, and even the World Bank's economists have had to concede that the initial results of the Basel process are extremely positive.

Basel II does have a worrying component. It encourages the large banks to value their assets (which implicitly means evaluating their risk) using their own proprietary models. It is easy for these models to be designed so as to dramatically overstate asset values. The problem is compounded by the nature of proprietary models: they are secret, complex, and (perhaps) subject to frequent adjustment. That makes them a nightmare to try to regulate. And in what is essentially a form of control fraud, modern compensation systems, especially in the United States, create powerful incentives for top managers to overstate banks' asset values in order to puff up their own pay packages. Such abuse is so common that instead of "mark to market", the usual term for bringing the valuation of an asset into line with its market price, the process is often known to insiders as "mark to myth".

In the United States, the word "deregulation" still has a positive ring for many despite the disastrous results of this country's experiment in loosening the reins on the banking industry. So perhaps it is ironic that it was the United States that instigated an international effort to develop convergent banking regulations worldwide. International convergence is moving forward, and for now the pace of new financial crises has slowed. The Basel process is indeed leveling the playing field among financial services companies around the world. But what kind of field will emerge? Does the Basel process offer any hope of reshaping the new world of banking into one that better meets consumer needs and better serves the broader public interest? If the banking economists, with their ideological commitment to oppose any regulation, are kept at bay, then at least we may find out.

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William K Black is associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He was formerly the executive director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention and a senior federal financial regulator. He is the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One (University of Texas Press, 2005) and of many articles on banking.
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Sources: C.E.V. Borio and R. Filosa, "The Changing Borders of Banking: Trends and Implications", BIS Working Paper 23, 10/94; Ctr for Intl Private Enterprise, "Financial Reform: Paving the Way for Growth and Democracy", Econ Reform Today, 1995; J. Bisignano, "Precarious Credit Equilibria: Reflections on the Asian Financial Crisis", BIS Working Papers, 3/99; W. K. Black, The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, 2005; L.J. White, The S&L Debacle: Public Policy Lessons for Bank and Thrift Regulation, 1991; Federal Home Loan Bank Board, Agenda for Reform: A Report on Deposit Insurance, 1983; K. Calavita et al, Big Money Crime: Fraud and Politics in the Savings and Loan Industry, 1997; W. K. Black et al, "The Savings and Loan Debacle of the 1980's: White-Collar Crime or Risky Business?" Law & Policy 17; G. Akerlof and P. M. Romer, "Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit", Brookings Papers on Econ Activity, 1993; M. Mayer, The Greatest-Ever Bank Robbery, 1990; T. Curry and L. Shibut, "The Cost of the Savings and Loan Crisis: Truth and Consequences", FDIC Banking Review, Fall 2000; W. K. Black, "Reexamining the Law-and-Economics Theory of Corporate Governance", Challenge, 1993; C-J Lindgren et al, Bank Soundness and Macroeconomic Policy, IMF, 1996; T. M. Hoenig, "Exploring the Macro-Prudential Aspects of Financial Sector Supervision", speech to the Meeting for Heads of Supervision, BIS, Basel, Switzerland, 4/27/04; V. A. Atanasov et al, "The Anatomy of Financial Tunneling in an Emerging Market", McCombs School of Business, Research Paper Fin-04-06; N. Passas, "The Genesis of the BCCI Scandal", J Law and Soc, 3/66; P. L. Zweig, Belly Up: The Collapse of the Penn Square Bank, 1986; R. J. Herring, "BCCI & Barings: Bank Resolutions Complicated by Fraud and Global Corporate Structure"; H.R. Davia et al, Accountant's Guide to Fraud Detection and Control (2nd ed.), 2000; P. Blustein, "The Chastening: Inside the Crisis that Rocked the Global Financial System and Humbled the IMF", Public Aff, 2001; W. K. Black, "A Tale of Two Crises", Kravis Leadership Inst Rvw, Fall 2002; Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, Economic Letter, 3/06; B. H. Soral et al, "Fraud, banking crisis, and regulatory enforcement: Evidence from micro-level transactions data", Euro J Law and Econ, 4/06; J. L. Pierce, The Future of Banking, 1991; E. J. Kane, The Gathering Crisis in Federal Deposit Insurance, MIT Univ Press, 1985; A. Demirguc-Kunt and E. Detragiache, "Does Deposit Insurance Increase Banking System Stability? An Empirical Investigation", J Monetary Econ, 10/02; D. Pyle, review of "The Gathering Crisis in Federal Deposit Insurance" in J Econ Lit, 9/86; J. Santos, "Bank Capital Regulation in Contemporary Banking Theory: A review of the literature", in Financial Markets, Institutions & Instruments, 2001; A.B. Ashcraft, "Does the Market Discipline Banks? New Evidence from Regulatory Capital Mix", 10/2/06; T. Beck et al, "Bank Supervision and Corporate Finance", World Bank Policy Research Working Paper, 5/03; D. R. Brumbaugh, Jr, Thrifts Under Siege: Restoring Order to American Banking, 1988; T. Beck et al, "Bank Supervision and Corruption in Lending", 9/3/05; A. Demirguc-Kunt et al, "Banking on the Principles: Compliance with Basel Core Principles and Bank Soundness", IMF Working Paper 10/06; R. La Porta et al, "Related Lending", Quarterly J Econ, 2003; S. Johnson et al, "Tunnelling", Am Econ Assoc Papers & Proceedings, 2000; R. Haselmann et al, "How Law Affects Lending", Columbia Law and Economics Working Paper, 9/06; J. D. Edwards and J. H. Godwin, "Why Sound Accounting Standards Count", Econ Reform Today, 1995; J. R. Barth, The Great Savings and Loan Debacle, 1991.

Copyright © 2007 Economic Affairs Bureau, Inc.

http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2007/1107black.html

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

A Christmas Eve Story

by Jim Kunstler

Comment on current events by the author of
The Long Emergency (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005)

http://www.kunstler.com/ (December 24 2007)


Two things happened over this weekend before Christmas that jarred me a little. One was when an old friend said I sounded crazy, and the second was when I read the galley proof of Dmitry Orlov's forthcoming book, Reinventing Collapse (New Society Press, Spring 2008).

I ran into my old friend "G" on our town's main street, Broadway, on Saturday afternoon and we ducked out of the drizzle into a nearby coffee shop to catch up. G had worked the past twenty-five years in the software industry and recently bought the company that employed him. He was consumed now with plans for "growing" this company. I made a point not to antagonize him with my Long Emergency notions, since his obvious mental investment in the wish for a reliable "growth" economy was a bulwark of his current world view. But the conversation did get around to the various troubles in the capital markets and the possible connection of this with the global oil predicament.

G doesn't believe we have a problem with oil. He said, if the fuel efficiency of every American vehicle on the road was increased five percent, we wouldn't have to import any oil. This assertion was, shall we say, not consistent with anything I understood about the situation, and I said so, pretty much in those words, to avoid ramping rhetorically into debate mode. G said, "Do the math". I suppose G had read this "formula" somewhere and was impressed by it. "The Market", he said, would "take care" of our motor fuel problems. Just wait and see. We talked for a while about getting the railroads working again. G said it would never happen. "This isn't Europe".

I was content to let is drop, but G then said. "You know, you've been predicting all these catastrophes for years now, but we're still here, the cars are all rolling down Broadway out there, and life is going on. You're beginning to sound like a crazy person." It didn't bother me especially that G thought my my ideas were outlandish so much as being comprehensively written off by an old friend as a crazy person, someone who ... I dunno ... rummages through dumpsters and talks to himself on the street without any sign of a cell phone in hand. I didn't hasten to defend myself. G obviously needed to feel that the world would continue functioning like a well-oiled machine now that he was responsible for an operation that employed a hundred other people. We parted agreeing to acknowledge a difference in our view of things.

Dmitry Orlov's publisher sent me the galley proof to get a blurb for the dust-jacket, and I'll furnish one in short order because Reinventing Collapse is an exceptionally clear, authoritative, witty, and original view of our prospects. The thesis is that the United States is headed for troubles as broad and deep as the ones that brought down the Soviet system in Russia, though we will get there via a somewhat different route. Orlov has been in the privileged position of living under both systems at critical times, and the parallels are striking, but the differences even more so.

The Soviet experience was a collapse of consensual reality as much as of economy. Nobody could continue to support the credibility of a one-party, centrally-planned, "command" economy best represented by the joke: "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us". An economy in which nobody had any real stake other than ideological finally ground ignominiously to a halt. Once the state surrendered its authority, the society was stripped of assets. The social safety net dissolved. A lot of people on the margins slipped through the cracks and died. Eventually, the Russian economy (and government) reorganized on a different basis - largely because its remaining oil resources and annual production exceed its domestic consumption. So, this reorganized new oil-exporting state, with its shocking poles of extreme wealth and poverty, will go on for a while until the oil is gone, and then it will face more transformations.

The comparison with the American situation is chilling. For all its gross faults, Soviet Russia was ironically better prepared for economic collapse and political turmoil than we will be. For one thing, all housing there was owned by the state, and allocated under bare nominal rents, so when the economy collapsed, people just stayed in their apartments. Nobody got evicted. There was scant private car ownership in pre-1990 Russia, so gasoline allocation problems did not paralyze movement. Train service was excellent and cheap, and the cities all had a rich matrix of underground metros, on-street electric trams, and trolley-buses, which continued to run even when central authority flickered out. There was no suburban sprawl to strand and isolate people (in homes owned by banks, that can be taken away after the third monthly failure to make a mortgage payment). Official Soviet agriculture was such a fiasco for half a century that the Soviet people were long- conditioned to provide for themselves. For decades, ninety percent of the food was coming from tiny household gardens, wherever it was possible to grow stuff. When America's just-in-time supermarket resupply system wobbles, and the Cheez Doodles disappear from the WalMart shelves, few Americans will have a Plan B.

Perhaps most striking is that the Soviet collapse provoked almost no bloodshed (at least in Russia itself). The political failure was so comprehensive that the party leadership didn't even have the will to defend its prerogatives anymore, and for a while politics simply slipped into a vacuum - until Mr Putin came along and revived the oil industry and managed to get the police back on a payroll that inspired them to do their jobs. Meanwhile, the tremendous drain of the Soviet armed forces and all their equipment -apart from the nuclear arsenal (as far as we know) - was allowed to wither away, along with its monumental demands on the nation's resources.

Whatever other differences there may be between Soviet Russia and Clusterfuck Nation, a big one here is that our domestic oil consumption long ago exceeded our production capacity, and when we run into just a little supply trouble with our oil imports (apart from mere rising prices) it will shake the foundations of our economic life. We are stuck with a physical infrastructure for daily living that has no future in an oil-scarce world. Our cities, for the most part, have imploded internally. Our public transportation is grossly unbalanced on the side of private cars and airplanes utterly dependent on imported oil. At the moment, our capital finance sector is cratering in the aftermath of an unprecedented surrender of responsibility in the management of securitized debt - an event that may end up as a curious parallel to the looting of assets that occurred in the Soviet twilight.

The biggest difference, though, between Soviet Russia and America today is the psychology of the people. Soviet citizens were prepared for trouble by lifetimes of comparative hardship. I won't even go into the Stalin terror and the agony of World War Two. In more recent Soviet times, money meant little in a system without real shopping - but maintaining personal networks based on mutual trust or strength-of-character was the greatest asset in acquiring life's necessities. Americans didn't need political dictators to whip us into line - we volunteered to become a nation of TV zombies. Our fantasies are arguably more disabling than the mere cognitive dissonance that reigned in Soviet times. Liberty itself has allowed the American public to freely choose passivity, illusion, and incompetence. Anyway, when it comes out in 2008, Dmitry Orlov's book will deserve the attention of whatever thoughtful people remain in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

It was disheartening, of course, to be written off as sounding "like a crazy person", by an old friend. I don't doubt that his perception is genuine. I'm prepared to live with the disconnect between what my friends believe and what I think. I even reserve a portion of my mind for the possibility that their view may be more realistic than mine - but I won't torture myself about it. Someday, surely, I'll meet this old friend again and perhaps he'll say something like "... things didn't work out quite the way I expected ..."

In the meantime, Christmas Eve is upon us, truly my favorite night of the year (Hebrew though I am), and I am very fortunate to be going to a warm house full of people tonight where the wassail will flow. I'll be back next week with a review of 2007 and my predictions (ha!) for 2008. In the meantime, God bless us every one.

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/


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

Our Decrepit Food Factories

by Michael Pollan

The New York Times (December 16 2007)


The word "sustainability" has gotten such a workout lately that the whole concept is in danger of floating away on a sea of inoffensiveness. Everybody, it seems, is for it whatever "it" means. On a recent visit to a land-grant university's spanking-new sustainability institute, I asked my host how many of the school's faculty members were involved. She beamed: When letters went out asking who on campus was doing research that might fit under that rubric, virtually everyone replied in the affirmative. What a nice surprise, she suggested. But really, what soul working in agricultural science today (or for that matter in any other field of endeavor) would stand up and be counted as against sustainability? When pesticide makers and genetic engineers cloak themselves in the term, you have to wonder if we haven't succeeded in defining sustainability down, to paraphrase the late Senator Moynihan, and if it will soon possess all the conceptual force of a word like "natural" or "green" or "nice".

Confucius advised that if we hoped to repair what was wrong in the world, we had best start with the "rectification of the names". The corruption of society begins with the failure to call things by their proper names, he maintained, and its renovation begins with the reattachment of words to real things and precise concepts. So what about this much- abused pair of names, sustainable and unsustainable?

To call a practice or system unsustainable is not just to lodge an objection based on aesthetics, say, or fairness or some ideal of environmental rectitude. What it means is that the practice or process can't go on indefinitely because it is destroying the very conditions on which it depends. It means that, as the Marxists used to say, there are internal contradictions that sooner or later will lead to a breakdown.

For years now, critics have been speaking of modern industrial agriculture as "unsustainable" in precisely these terms, though what form the "breakdown" might take or when it might happen has never been certain. Would the aquifers run dry? The pesticides stop working? The soil lose its fertility? All these breakdowns have been predicted and they may yet come to pass. But if a system is unsustainable - if its workings offend the rules of nature - the cracks and signs of breakdown may show up in the most unexpected times and places. Two stories in the news this year, stories that on their faces would seem to have nothing to do with each other let alone with agriculture, may point to an imminent breakdown in the way we're growing food today.


The first story is about MRSA, the very scary antibiotic-resistant strain of Staphylococcus bacteria that is now killing more Americans each year than AIDS - 100,000 infections leading to 19,000 deaths in 2005, according to estimates in The Journal of the American Medical Association. For years now, drug-resistant staph infections have been a problem in hospitals, where the heavy use of antibiotics can create resistant strains of bacteria. It's Evolution 101: the drugs kill off all but the tiny handful of microbes that, by dint of a chance mutation, possess genes allowing them to withstand the onslaught; these hardy survivors then get to work building a drug-resistant superrace. The methicillin-resistant staph that first emerged in hospitals as early as the 1960s posed a threat mostly to elderly patients. But a new and even more virulent strain - called "community-acquired MRSA" - is now killing young and otherwise healthy people who have not set foot in a hospital. No one is yet sure how or where this strain evolved, but it is sufficiently different from the hospital-bred strains to have some researchers looking elsewhere for its origin, to another environment where the heavy use of antibiotics is selecting for the evolution of a lethal new microbe: the concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO.

The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that at least seventy percent of the antibiotics used in America are fed to animals living on factory farms. Raising vast numbers of pigs or chickens or cattle in close and filthy confinement simply would not be possible without the routine feeding of antibiotics to keep the animals from dying of infectious diseases. That the antibiotics speed up the animals' growth also commends their use to industrial agriculture, but the crucial fact is that without these pharmaceuticals, meat production practiced on the scale and with the intensity we practice it could not be sustained for months, let alone decades.

Public-health experts have been warning us for years that this situation is a public-health disaster waiting to happen. Sooner or later, the profligate use of these antibiotics - in many cases the very same ones we depend on when we're sick - would lead to the evolution of bacteria that could shake them off like a spring shower. It appears that "sooner or later" may be now. Recent studies in Europe and Canada found that confinement pig operations have become reservoirs of MRSA. A European study found that sixty percent of pig farms that routinely used antibiotics had MRSA-positive pigs (compared with five percent of farms that did not feed pigs antibiotics). This month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a study showing that a strain of "MRSA from an animal reservoir has recently entered the human population and is now responsible for [more than] twenty percent of all MRSA in the Netherlands". Is this strictly a European problem? Evidently not. According to a study in Veterinary Microbiology, MRSA was found on 45 percent of the twenty pig farms sampled in Ontario, and in twenty percent of the pig farmers. (People can harbor the bacteria without being infected by it.) Thanks to Nafta, pigs move freely between Canada and the United States. So MRSA may be present on American pig farms; we just haven't looked yet.

Scientists have not established that any of the strains of MRSA presently killing Americans originated on factory farms. But given the rising public alarm about MRSA and the widespread use on these farms of precisely the class of antibiotics to which these microbes have acquired resistance, you would think our public-health authorities would be all over it. Apparently not. When, in August, the Keep Antibiotics Working coalition asked the Food and Drug Administration what the agency was doing about the problem of MRSA in livestock, the agency had little to say. Earlier this month, though, the FDA indicated that it may begin a pilot screening program with the CDC.

As for independent public-health researchers, they say they can't study the problem without the cooperation of the livestock industry, which, not surprisingly, has not been forthcoming. For what if these researchers should find proof that one of the hidden costs of cheap meat is an epidemic of drug-resistant infection among young people? There would be calls to revolutionize the way we produce meat in this country. This is not something that the meat and the pharmaceutical industries or their respective regulatory "watchdogs" - the Department of Agriculture and FDA - are in any rush to see happen.


The second story is about honeybees, which have endured their own mysterious epidemic this past year. Colony Collapse Disorder was first identified in 2006, when a Pennsylvanian beekeeper noticed that his bees were disappearing - going out on foraging expeditions in the morning never to return. Within months, beekeepers in 24 states were reporting losses of between twenty percent and eighty percent of their bees, in some cases virtually overnight. Entomologists have yet to identify the culprit, but suspects include a virus, agricultural pesticides and a parasitic mite. (Media reports that genetically modified crops or cellphone towers might be responsible have been discounted.) But whatever turns out to be the immediate cause of colony collapse, many entomologists believe some such disaster was waiting to happen: the lifestyle of the modern honeybee leaves the insects so stressed out and their immune systems so compromised that, much like livestock on factory farms, they've become vulnerable to whatever new infectious agent happens to come along.

You need look no farther than a California almond orchard to understand how these bees, which have become indispensable workers in the vast fields of industrial agriculture, could have gotten into such trouble. Like a great many other food crops, like an estimated one out of every three bites you eat, the almond depends on bees for pollination. No bees, no almonds. The problem is that almonds today are grown in such vast monocultures - eighty percent of the world's crop comes from a 600,000-acre swath of orchard in California's Central Valley - that, when the trees come into bloom for three weeks every February, there are simply not enough bees in the valley to pollinate all those flowers. For what bee would hang around an orchard where there's absolutely nothing to eat for the 49 weeks of the year that the almond trees aren't in bloom? So every February the almond growers must import an army of migrant honeybees to the Central Valley - more than a million hives housing as many as forty billion bees in all.

They come on the backs of tractor-trailers from as far away as New England. These days, more than half of all the beehives in America are on the move to California every February, for what has been called the world's greatest "pollination event". (Be there!) Bees that have been dormant in the depths of a Minnesota winter are woken up to go to work in the California spring; to get them in shape to travel cross-country and wade into the vast orgy of almond bloom, their keepers ply them with "pollen patties" - which often include ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup and flower pollen imported from China. Because the pollination is so critical and the bee population so depleted, almond growers will pay up to $150 to rent a box of bees for three weeks, creating a multimillion-dollar industry of migrant beekeeping that barely existed a few decades ago. Thirty-five years ago you could rent a box of bees for $10. (Pimping bees is the whole of the almond business for these beekeepers since almond honey is so bitter as to be worthless.)

In 2005 the demand for honeybees in California had so far outstripped supply that the USDA approved the importation of bees from Australia. These bees get off a 747 at SFO and travel by truck to the Central Valley, where they get to work pollinating almond flowers - and mingling with bees arriving from every corner of America. As one beekeeper put it to Singeli Agnew in The San Francisco Chronicle, California's almond orchards have become "one big brothel" - a place where each February bees swap microbes and parasites from all over the country and the world before returning home bearing whatever pathogens they may have picked up. Add to this their routine exposure to agricultural pesticides and you have a bee population ripe for an epidemic national in scope. In October, the journal Science published a study that implicated a virus (Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus) in Colony Collapse Disorder - a virus that was found in some of the bees from Australia. (The following month, the USDA questioned the study, pointing out that the virus was present in North America as early as 2002.)

"We're placing so many demands on bees we're forgetting that they're a living organism and that they have a seasonal life cycle", Marla Spivak, a honeybee entomologist at the University of Minnesota, told The Chronicle. "We're wanting them to function as a machine ... We're expecting them to get off the truck and be fine".

We're asking a lot of our bees. We're asking a lot of our pigs too. That seems to be a hallmark of industrial agriculture: to maximize production and keep food as cheap as possible, it pushes natural systems and organisms to their limit, asking them to function as efficiently as machines. When the inevitable problems crop up - when bees or pigs remind us they are not machines - the system can be ingenious in finding "solutions", whether in the form of antibiotics to keep pigs healthy or foreign bees to help pollinate the almonds. But this year's solutions have a way of becoming next year's problems. That is to say, they aren't "sustainable".


From this perspective, the story of Colony Collapse Disorder and the story of drug- resistant staph are the same story. Both are parables about the precariousness of monocultures. Whenever we try to rearrange natural systems along the lines of a machine or a factory, whether by raising too many pigs in one place or too many almond trees, whatever we may gain in industrial efficiency, we sacrifice in biological resilience. The question is not whether systems this brittle will break down, but when and how, and whether when they do, we'll be prepared to treat the whole idea of sustainability as something more than a nice word.

_____

Michael Pollan is a contributing writer. His new book, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, will be published next month by Penguin Press.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/magazine/16wwln-lede-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin


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

Compulsory Television

by Lawrence S Wittner

History News Network (December 10 2007)


Have you noticed how television pervades public places in the United States?

Television sets now broadcast programs constantly in airports, train stations, bars, fast food areas and cafeterias on college and university campuses, elevators, and many restaurants. Have you noticed their blaring presence in waiting rooms while your car is being serviced, while you are seeing a doctor, or while you are visiting a hospital?

It is certainly hard to escape them. Some years ago, when I was lying in hospital bed after some surgery, with tubes running in and out of me, I was treated to nearly a week of television pounding away in my room day and night, presumably at the request of my (unknown and unseen) roommate. I began complaining to the nurse that I had had a serious operation and was supposed to be recuperating, rather than distracted from my own thoughts and reading during the day and kept awake at night by constant television commercials, quiz shows, and idiotic howling. But she seemed mystified as to how I could I possibly object to this treatment. Wasn't television the American Way?

Ultimately, near the end of the week, after complaints to numerous hospital officials, I was transferred to a double room where it turned out I was the only patient. It was an enormous relief - at least until I discovered that, even in this setting, a television set was churning out the usual loud and hysterical drivel. Slowly and painfully, I crawled out of bed, wheeled my various carts over to the howling monster on the wall, and turned it off! I immediately felt much better.

And I was becoming personally acquainted with the phenomenon of compulsory television.

In George Orwell's powerful novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, first published in 1949, television is a key means of maintaining a totalitarian state. It destroys independent thought - or any thought! - and convinces people to blindly follow Big Brother. The novel's hero, Winston Smith, is free to follow his own musings on occasion only because his apartment has been poorly designed and, thus, he can take refuge in a section of it that the otherwise all-pervasive television set cannot reach.

Today's reality is actually somewhat more depressing than Orwell predicted. Admittedly, we have not yet reached the level of government propaganda purveyed by television that is envisaged in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Even so, if one watches Fox News, there is not much to distinguish its jingoistic, overheated approach from the demonizing, militaristic rubbish of Pravda and Izvestia during the dark days of the Soviet Union. Moreover, television promotes endless commercialism and consumerism, in which individual greed is portrayed as the highest value and concerns about other people or the environment are marginalized.

Perhaps the most serious consequence of television is that it has fostered widespread ignorance and illiteracy. As study after study has demonstrated, it is dumbing down Americans to such an extent that no amount of remedial education in our schools can overcome its effects. A just-published report by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has found that Americans are reading less and less and that their reading proficiency is declining at very disturbing rates - a situation that the NEA chair attributed largely to television. Indeed, as virtually any college teacher can attest, today's students know much more about TV shows than they do about literature, the arts, science, civilization, or the world. Of course, nothing is terribly new about this situation. Back in May 1961, FCC chair Newton Minow accurately described television as "a vast wasteland".

What is new, though, is television's ubiquitous nature - and our consequent inability to escape its mindless blare. It has not only taken over our private homes (where we still retain the right to turn it on or off), but - in recent years - our public spaces (where we do not). We have arrived at the stage of compulsory television.

Why is television so ubiquitous in public places? Surely not because most people demand it. In the TV-drenched waiting rooms where I have sat, most people are not watching it. Indeed, many people - much like Winston Smith - are resisting television blather by trying to read, to think, or to talk among themselves. Sometimes, when it appears that no one is watching a TV program that is blasting away, I get up and ask the assemblage if anyone would mind if I turned it off. No one has ever objected.

But, if there does not seem to be much of a constituency championing all-pervasive TV, what forces lie behind the policy of compulsory television? Why are so many institutions buying apparently unnecessary television sets, paying the substantial electricity bills for them, and compelling the public to watch the broadcasters' noxious programs? Exploring these questions would make an interesting research project.

Meanwhile, here is a modest proposal. The next time you are in a public place with a television set - or multiple television sets - blaring away at you, tell a staff person that you find compulsory television aversive and suggest that you and many other patrons would prefer that the TV sets be removed. If we can drive cigarette smoking out of our public places, perhaps we can do the same with television. After all, TV merely provides a different - and perhaps even more dangerous - form of pollution: mind pollution!

_____

Dr Wittner is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book, co-edited with Glen H Stassen, is Peace Action: Past, Present, and Future (Paradigm Publishers, 2007).

http://hnn.us/articles/44904.html


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

Greening the Corporation

by Ralph Nader, Nader.org

AlterNet (November 22 2007)


The "Business of Green" and "Green is Gold" are among the phrases finding their way onto the nation's business pages and into the advertisements of major corporations.

After years of corporate greenwashing, is this wave of corporate greenmania for real? Is it more than hype when the New York Times marks a recent article with the sidebar "The market tells producers: It's go green or goodbye"?

Well, not if the impetus has to come from stronger regulation or environmentally driven government purchases. Those two pressure points have largely been kept dormant or are de minimis.

When business sees environmental management as saving it money, increasing productivity, becoming more competitive and attracting young talent, the prospect of sustainable policies taking root becomes more likely.

Obviously, it was not always viewed this way by corporate bosses who, not long ago, saw our air, water and soil as their toxic sewers.

There is still a long way to go to "green" the entire supply chain from the mines to the markets.

No corporation illustrates this broad continuum better than the Atlanta-based Interface Corporation - the country's largest commercial carpet tile manufacturer. In 1994, founder Ray Anderson started his company on its goal as a "restorative enterprise", which he described as zero net pollution and 100% recycling by 2020. The company is 45 percent there, he estimates.

Anderson speaks figures in his 100 plus lectures around the nation and world. His company's use of fossil fuel is down 45 percent, net greenhouse gas production is down sixty percent, while company sales are up 49 percent. Water use is down by a third in its manufacturing and the filling of landfill with waste is down eighty percent.

"Sustainability", Anderson told the New York Times, "pays in customer loyalty, employee spent-hard cash", plus 336 million dollars in savings since 1995.

Anderson is unique in that what he and his team have done is not anecdotal, but system wide in scope. The news is replete with one large company achieving this with lighting or that with their transportation. With Interface, ecological efficiency is across the board.

Since even a stodgy company like General Electric is moving quickly into selling "green" technology as the next profit center, why are the aggregate figures on hydro-carbon use, greenhouse gases still increasing? Because there are no national missions to take these successful examples - these best practices - and make them a mandatory floor for all companies.

I refer to mandatory performance standards by the federal government - not specific design standards - backed up by specifications set by Uncle Sam, who is the buyer of so many products we all use, for its departments and agencies. These include vehicles, building construction, paper and many other goods and services that could be purchased only from solid "green companies". (See Forty Ways to Make Government Purchasing Green by Eleanor J Lewis and Eric Weltman. Available from the Center for the Study of Responsive Law for $10. Mail orders to PO Box 19367 Washington, DC 20036.)

Mandatory federal standards and government purchasing specifications brought the people safer cars, higher recycled paper content and greater fuel efficiency for their vehicles and appliances. The deregulation craze of the past twenty-five years ended most of this forward progress.

Moreover, the retarding corporate powers are still going anti-green. They oppose a carbon tax and long overdue upgrades of fuel efficiency and pollution control standards. They want to build dozens of costly, unnecessary, unsafe atomic power plants with no less than 100% federal government loan guarantees.

This overall persistence of corporate intransigence needs to be kept in mind as the blizzard of green announcements by companies continues.

To keep our demands on industry and commerce to become more efficient, productive and environmentally benign, it is worthwhile to quote a passage drawn from Natural Capitalism (http://www.natcap.org), a book co-authored by a physicist, a lawyer and a successful businessman:

"Whether through better design or through new technologies, reducing waste represents a vast business opportunity. The US economy is not even ten percent as efficient as the laws of physics allow. Just the energy thrown off as waste heat by US power stations equals the total energy use of Japan. Materials efficiency is even worse."

Copyright (c) 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

http://www.alternet.org/story/68578/


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

Pulling the Plug

Nothing satisfies like the world beyond the screens

by Robert Michael Pyle

Orion magazine (November / December 2007)


In the spring of 1969, my Goodwill TV bit the dust. I never got around to replacing it. My household today contains a television set, but it plays only movies. There's no cable or aerial reception here, and we have no dish. I've been without television for nearly forty years, and I've never been sorry. When my stepchildren, Tom and Dory, lived with us, they adapted to the absence of ESPN, cartoons, and Magnum P I, and we all read books together before the wood stove each evening. I felt we were living an improbable but lovely idyll.

An adulthood without TV has left me not only culturally spotty but also unselective, so that in a hotel room, if I accidentally turn the thing on, I am in danger of becoming a complete television slut. In the red-eyed morning after, I rue the loss of the sweet night's sleep, the chapter read, the dreams unvisited by drivel and mayhem. Though I fondly remember sitting around our first big set in the 1950s, watching Zorro and Cosmo Topper, and my first huge crush on Gail Davis as Annie Oakley, I never regret releasing my home from television's thrall. I'm not smug about it; I'll shamelessly descend on televisioned friends for an election or beg a tape of an HBO concert, and I've become addicted to both Dallas and The West Wing when living in normally equipped homes for a season. It is recognition of this weakness that keeps me tuned out: I am just not disciplined enough to live with this device. Oh, I can exercise discipline when I really want to - less beer, more exercise, and the ritual of a daily walk, if only to the mailbox or the compost. But the immediate presence of the source of temptation always tests your resolution more keenly. So, like a bad boy who wouldn't eat his sprouts, no TV for me.

Today there are so many more screens, so many electronic appurtenances, appliances - or say appendages, given the way the body politic has been jacked into them. This is not news: the suzerainty of the cell phone, the implant of the iPod, the bramble patch of the Blackberry, the prosthesis of the Palm Pilot, and now the whole enchilada rolled into the iPhone - it's all old hat, as new as it is. In fact, the condition of human bondage to gizmos itself is an old condition. The most common postures today, cell phone elbowed to the ear or digital camera held at arm's length as if intermediary to the actual world, may be recent evolutionary mutations, but that doesn't mean there were no precedents. In Charles Frazier's novel Thirteen Moons, protagonist Will Cooper laments the imposition of the telephone in his home - "So urgent, like a watchman sounding a fire alarm, but surely false in the shrill report of the tiny hammer beating frantically against the two acorn-shaped bells". (If he could only hear the array of irritating ringtones today!) "What message short of disaster could be so pressing as to require that horrible jangle?" Will asks. "Use the post, and learn the virtues of patience and silence". This, nearly a hundred years ago!

But some kind of evolution is taking place, and cannot be ignored even by the most resolutely backward among us. At a recent family wedding, my brother-in-law Leon challenged my concern over all the switched-on kids, swapping (as I saw it) the rites of fort-building and crawdad-catching for the rights of a high-speed wireless connection. "How do you know", Leon asked me, "that these kids aren't just as stimulated, and ultimately fulfilled, as we were by making up our own games outdoors?" I had to admit that he had a point. How indeed could I be sure? But by the third glass of champagne I had an answer - or at least a couple of questions: For one, what happens to a species that loses touch with its habitat? And where will all the conservationists come from when kids no longer have a patch of ground that they can truly call my space?

I've been thinking along these lines partly because e-mail has been driving me bats. The only time I can actually feel my normally underachieving blood pressure rise is before the e-screen, inbox at 98 percent full or so, more spilling in by the hour, chiefly importuning, and no chance of ever appeasing it all. And unlike a letter, there's no grace period with e-mail: send one, and the answer comes back in a flash, demanding another right now. This creates masses of unnecessary work and entropy, which is what the e in e-mail really stands for, but worse is sitting butt-stapled to the swivel chair, eye-sutured to the flat screen, as the pernicious electroglyphs strike the terms of my existence. Years ago I took my home offline because writing, hearth, and health proved incompatible with having e-mail under my roof. Twice a week, I've been going online at the village computer center a few miles from home.

I know I am missing out on some wonderful exchanges and capabilities. But I already weep over all the indoor hours when I could actually be out, combing the moss for waterbears or contemplating the profound mystery of where people get the time to read blogs, for gods' sakes - is it at the complete expense of books? If I had a mobile phone, I could be available for anyone to reach, anytime . . . except, as Greg Brown sings, "You can try me on the cell, but most places I want to be, it don't work".

I suspect that the mass capture of our synapses by electronica may threaten not only serenity but society itself. On a recent train trip, as I was writing with pencil on paper, with one eye out the window on yellow-headed blackbirds and paint foals, I saw something that appalled me: a youngish mother, supplicating babe in one arm, the other grafted to a cell phone on which she was playing a video game. The device went on and on, zinging, pinging, and ringing away, as the baby begged for its mother's presence. She'd pause a stroke to shove a chip into the child's mouth, or tell it to watch the passing lights, but she never looked it in the eyes. "You'll drive everyone crazy if you keep on crying", she scolded.

I told her that it was the noises from her machine that were driving us crazy. "Oh, this?" she said, and muted it, but kept on playing into the night. I wanted to add, ". . . and your rotten excuse for mothering". Then the scene repeated itself with a different mother, a different baby, in the Sacramento station. These mobile moms brought to mind experiments with baby monkeys given sock dolls for surrogate mothers, and how the babies became sociopathic. This could be worse: sibling envy for a Nokia. Back in that lively spring of 1969 when the tube gave out, I certainly had no business sitting sessile before a screen. Now, having just entered what will be, at best, the last quarter or so of my life, I have even less. The last words left for his friends by a fine northeast Oregon naturalist, writer, and man, Frank Conley, felled way too soon by melanoma, drove this understanding home for me: "There will be a memorial service every day you take yourself, or someone else, out into the great outdoors - away from the monitors, videos, and TVs we see mirrored in our eyes - and learn something about birds, butterflies, or biscuitroot". Amen, Frank.

So I'm going to do it - to pull the e-plug, although I'll probably do a Web search now and then at the computer center or the library. Time will tell whether I can make a living without e-mail. In the meantime, I'm going back to the post, and the virtues of patience and silence. My loss, you'll say. Maybe so. We'll see . . .
_____

This is Robert Michael Pyle's fiftieth consecutive exploration of the territory he calls, after Darwin, The Tangled Bank. In preparation for his renunciation of electrons, his patient editors are padding his deadlines and trying to find the nearest stagecoach stop.

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/466


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

The Unsung Solution

What rhymes with waste-heat recovery?

by Bill McKibben

Orion magazine (November / December 2007)


From his desk in an office in Chicago, Jeff Smith has a bird's-eye view of the American landscape. Combing through a huge database of information compiled by the EPA, he can, almost literally, peer down every smokestack in the nation and figure out what's going on inside.

And what he sees is heat. Waste heat - one of the country's largest potential sources of power, pouring up out of those smokestacks. If it could be recycled into electricity, that heat would generate immense amounts of power without our having to burn any new fossil fuels. By immense, I mean, speaking technically, humongous. Even after he's winnowed the nation's half a million smokestacks down to the most likely customers, that leaves twenty-five thousand stacks. "An astronomical number", Smith says.

His boss at Recycled Energy Development {1}, Sean Casten, leafs through the reams of data Smith has compiled. The biggest sources of waste heat are some gas turbines used to generate power, but there are endless other examples. "Let's look at Florida", he says. "Here's a Maxwell House coffee roaster in Duval County. They're roasting beans, so all that heat has to go somewhere. About twelve megawatts' worth of potential electricity is going up the stack." Casten could take the equipment he sells, a "waste-heat recovery boiler", and stick it on top of the stack. "Basically, there's a network of tubes with water in them. The heat would hit one side of it, produce steam, and we'd use that to turn a turbine and generate electricity. It's like any other boiler, just without a flame, because the heat is already there."

Does that sound suspiciously pie-in-the-sky? Casten can drive a few miles from his Chicago office to an East Chicago plant run by Mittal Steel. A few years ago, a predecessor energy-recycling company installed this kind of equipment on the smokestacks of the plant's coke ovens. In 2004, this single steel plant generated roughly the same amount of clean energy as was produced by all of the grid-connected solar collectors throughout the world. Casten's company estimates that recycling waste heat from factories alone could produce fourteen percent of the electric power the US now uses. If you took much the same approach to electric generating stations you could, says Casten, conceivably produce the same amount of energy we use now with half the fossil fuel.

Let's cut the numbers in half to account for corporate enthusiasm. Hell, let's cut them in half again. You're still talking about one of the most effective ways to cut carbon emissions that we've got, a mature technology ready to go. You're talking about a recycling project infinitely more important than all that paper we've been bundling and glass we've been rinsing for the last two decades. Why isn't it happening everywhere? The first answer, says Casten, is that very few companies spend much time thinking about their waste heat. "How much time do you think about the useful things you could be doing with your urine?" asks Casten. "The guy at the coffee roaster is spending all day focused on roasting coffee beans so they taste good".

In a perfectly rational market, however, lots of players would see that heat disappearing up the stack, realize they're watching hundred-dollar bills spewing into the atmosphere, and set up businesses like Casten's to try and harvest it. It's not exactly simple - you need to understand how much heat each plant generates, how it varies day by day, how corrosive the other gases in the stack are, and so forth, but it's no harder than a million other technical feats that a million other companies perform every day. No harder, for instance, than singeing a coffee bean to produce a robust and roasty blend. The obstacle lies in the phrase "perfectly rational market". Electricity is essentially the opposite, a heavily regulated semi-monopoly where many of the laws work to protect the profits of utilities, and where, if you deregulate carelessly, you end up with fiascos like Enron's calculated bludgeoning of California's ratepayers.

For instance, in almost every state it's illegal for anyone but the utility to run wires across a public street. So if Casten's company generates more electricity from the smokestack of the coffee roaster than the factory can use itself, his company can't sell the surplus to the guy making coffee cans across the street. They have to sell it to the utility, which wants to pay the lowest price possible for it. The utility argues that it still bears the cost of maintaining the network of wires that constitute the grid, and if it's not selling to the coffee-can plant, that cost will have to be passed on to, say, residential customers.

This is a conundrum that environmentalists are going to have to help solve. They need to pressure regulators to pressure utilities to treat low-carbon energy as a precious resource, to make reducing global warming at least as crucial a goal as ensuring a reliable energy supply and keeping rates down. And indeed environmentalists have begun to have some successes along these lines. In lots of states, for instance, people with solar panels on their roofs can now connect to the grid more easily, and in some cases get a decent price for the power they generate.

However, solar panels and windmills are somewhat sexier than waste-heat recovery boilers, and it's possible that environmentalists have skewed their priorities accordingly. In Massachusetts, for example, Casten led an ultimately futile bid to get recycled energy included in the state's "renewable portfolio standard", the government mandate to generate an increasing percentage of the state's energy from clean sources. His opponents included some in the renewable community, who feared recycled energy would edge out wind turbines and photovoltaics for dollars. "We shouldn't set them up in a zero-sum game against each other", says Alan Nogee, director of the Clean Energy Program {2} for the Union of Concerned Scientists. Instead, he proposes yet another new standard, this one just for recycled energy - a sound idea, probably, but while it waits to get adopted, the carbon content of the atmosphere keeps on increasing.

Seth Kaplan, director of the Clean Energy and Climate Change Program {3} at the Boston-based Conservation Law Foundation, calls the controversy a perfect example of "the climate advocate's mantra: whatever the choice is, you've got to do both". It's "absolutely nuts", he says, for there to be tension between the sun-and-wind guys and the backers of recycling schemes like Casten's, especially since retrofitting factories to recover waste heat picks the lowest-hanging fruit while developing renewables helps build the energy system we'll need in the decades to come.

Kaplan's right, but if heat recycling is going to happen on the scale and at the pace required to deal with climate change, it will mean enviros being willing to focus on stuff like smokestacks and utility regulation with the same enthusiasm with which we rhapsodize about the spinning blades of windmills. That's hard - there aren't any good folk songs about waste-heat recovery boilers. And it's going to mean utilities, and the politicians who regulate them, understanding that they now have three missions: keeping the lights on, at something approaching affordable prices, on a habitable planet.

Once in a while, it turns out, we get to work on all three simultaneously. Casten just signed a contract with a factory in the Southeast that makes silicon. He'll recycle the waste heat from their stack, and as a result the solar panels made with that silicon will require a third less fossil fuel to produce. There must be a song there somewhere.


Links:

{1} http://www.recycled-energy.com/

{2} http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/

{3} http://www.clf.org/programs/index.asp?id=62


Bill McKibben's most recent book is Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (Henry Holt, 2008)

More by Bill McKibben, his articles and books at
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/mag/contributor/56/

The Orion Society, 187 Main Street, Great Barrington, Massachusetts 01230
413-528-4422 / Toll Free 888-909-6568

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/467


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

[Proposal]

VIVOLEUM

Harper's Magazine (October 2007)

From "Lifelines, Lifetimes, and Timelines: Hoisting Ourselves Up the Fossil Chain", a presentation delivered June 14 at GO-EXPO, an oil-industry conference held in Calgary, Alberta, by "Shepard Wolff"and "Florian Osenberg", impostors posing as officials working for the US National Petroleum Council and ExxonMobil's alternative-energy program. "Wolff" and "Osenberg" are members of the Yes Men, an activist group based in Brooklyn. After the presentation, both men were issued tickets for trespassing. Lee Raymond retired as CEO of ExxonMobil in 2005 and now chairs the NPC.

SHEPARD WOLFF: Ladies and gentlemen, I'm very sorry Lee Raymond couldn't make it today. He's in Washington, discussing a landmark National Petroleum Council study with President Bush before he announces the study's conclusions, complete with presidential approval, later today. But I am very pleased to be able to give you a sneak preview of that study, which shows that the United States and Canada must expand production from the Alberta tar sands by a factor of five within the next five years, and prescribes precisely the sort of government noninterference that will make this a reality. I'm especially pleased that ExxonMobil will be playing a key role in that policy - by developing a renewable energy source that will actually benefit from our development of conventional fuels while providing a fallback position for energy sustainability under any conditions that arise.

[Slide : Beautiful horizon]

But first, I need to say how wonderful it is to see, on all the faces here today, the childlike exuberance of a great industry in full flower, biting deep into all of life's opportunities and, like a giddy and well-fed infant, savoring that life to the fullest.


[Slide: Man holding up ear of wheat]

And why not? Our product, after all, has made possible everything we see around us-our whole civilization. We depend on oil for food, and for getting food to our tables. Without oil, at least four billion people would starve - and even those of us left would have a very tough time.

But I'm not here today to pat us all on the back; I'm here to speak of Plan Bs. Because the dire situation I've just mentioned is in fact possible.


[Slide: Lightning]

As we know, if climate science is right, there's a growing possibility of global calamities, triggering migration, death, and conflicts on a scale never before imagined. This spiral of trouble would make the oil infrastructure utterly useless, and starving would become the new black. We don't believe this will happen. Statistically, the chances are still far below fifty percent. But even if they're just ten percent, we as responsible corporate citizens must consider what we would do to keep the fuel flowing. We owe it to ourselves, to our shareholders, and to the very concept of sustainability.

We at Exxon firmly believe that a free market will, if left to its own devices, always find solutions to the dilemmas humanity faces. And in this case, there's a surprisingly simple solution - one that goes hand in hand with current energy policies and actually depends, for example, on our continued development of the tar sands.


[Slides: The birth of the sun; a barren earth; life; animals]

To explain how it works, let's take a trip into the past. Five billion years ago, our sun was born. For the next billion years, Earth was a wasteland, full of nothing but the dead stuff of nature.


[Slide : Sequence of evolution]

Then, one day, matter in its infinite ingenuity discovered a fabulous new way to store energy. It used sunlight and good old-fashioned rock smarts to turn water and dirt into something that could store power long enough to walk around and develop speech. Today, we call it life - but it's just an incredible solar battery that pushed its way across eons, past the shifting of continents and the burning-out of stars, transforming itself into countless species, and leaving them behind-all the way into the present -


[Slide : Suited man in conference hall]

- and into this conference hall right here today.


[Slide : Map of Mesopotamia]

Along its age-old path, this battery we call life kept getting smarter, until the Mesopotamians. Then, one day, a resident of ancient Uruk made a crucial discovery: other beings were great at storing energy.


[Slide: Resident of Uruk]

Who first had the idea to use the oil of a recently living animal to light his or her house? Whoever that Einstein was, he or she single-handedly created the energy industry and thus revolutionized civilization. For the next few thousand years, animals were burned for light and warmth.


[Slide: Puffin]

Even today, Shetland Islanders are said to lop the heads off puffins and put wicks in the stumps to make candles.


[Slide : Captain Ahab]

Europe's big innovation in this matter was the discovery of the ultimate mobile energy storehouses - those mighty leviathans of the deep, the whales, which until the late 1800s remained Europe's preferred source of illuminant energy.


[Slide: Canadian striking oil]

Then, in the mid-1800s, some folks here in Canada discovered that nature had already done a large part of the work that men were still risking their lives for! At some point, maybe an asteroid hit.


[Slide : Canadian under asteroid]

Or perhaps the earth's temperature just swung wildly south. Pretty much everything died, and the fields of death, ensepulchered by eons, were compressed into great, deep oceans - of oil. This "petroleum", so much more abundant than the fluids of the more recently departed, made possible an unprecedented scale of market performance, leading inexorably to the panoply of amazing technologies we see in the exhibit halls here today. The battery we call life had finally come into its own.

Again, there are dark mutterings today that climate change linked to oil use could lead to massive population loss, migrations, and conflicts, making pipelines and oil wells useless. Without oil, the earth's carrying capacity would go from six billion people to as low as 200 million. That would be a great tragedy. Yet why must we tremble like little children before a monster? Why can't we instead be like the man from Uruk, that Ur-industrialist who discovered a new source of energy for the world? After all, if we can ensure an uninterrupted supply of fuel in even the worst of calamities, there will be plenty of ways the market can address the new situation. What we really need is something as plentiful as petroleum but much less dependent on infrastructure - or something as useful as whales but infinitely more abundant. And therein lies the key. Just as the death of ancient life-forms meant oil for us today, so in a fuelless world the massive hydrocarbon store flowing out of the biosphere could mean a massive new resource - if we know how to tap in. Why wait millions of years? The energy is there right now. All we need to do is climb back up the fossil chain and close the circle of life.


[Slide : Vivoleum logo]

We're calling this product Vivoleum. Basically, it compresses the work of brute, stupid time into hours rather than eons. Any biomass whatsoever is quickly and cheaply turned into something close enough to gasoline to run my Escalade.


[Slide : Animation of factory]

We envision large-scale plants that will process many thousands of barrels per hour. The feedstock is cold-pressed through a series of vortex separators, blowdown evaporators, et cetera, and then further refined into ethanol, biodiesel, and so on. The plants will be fully off-site-remote-capable, requiring a minimum of on-site hands to operate. But not all plants need be large or sophisticated - the technology is simple, and the low pressures and temperatures required will allow small-scale -even mobile - refining capacity.


[Slide: Space]

Anywhere biological resources find themselves freed, Vivoleum can grant the at-risk civilization an income stream - where and when it's most needed. It's so compact that it could even work in outer space!


[Slide: Ford plant]

Here on Earth, every Vivoleum plant will be built with environmentality in mind, with living roofs just like Ford's plant in Dearborn, Michigan. All downstream waste will be turned into secondary products such as a building material we're calling Vivaboard, and the liquid effluent can be used as agricultural-grade organic brown water. These will be the greenest manufacturing centers ever built, signaling love for the earth through their very existence.


[Slide : Boxcar from the Holocaust]

Cultural sensitivity will also be paramount. Historical parallels will need to be considered carefully. But this train of thought needn't derail us. After all, when the railways in Egypt used mummies to fuel their locomotives, they were using a limited resource that could not be replenished, and they were committing a crime against history still keenly felt by Egyptologists. The Vivoleum feedstock, on the other hand, is renewable and unprecious, and it responds to the needs of a shrinking market by increasing supply, which in turn stimulates the market: the dance of capital appears in full flower.


[Slide: Captain with telescope peering over tar sands]

Indeed, unlike all other alternative-energy sources, Vivoleum will need no government push - current policies won't have to change. Vivoleum will never encroach on the market's natural right to continue seeking new pastures. The Alberta tar sands, for example, can continue providing a stimulus to Canada, the US, and the global market; and in the event climate change does prove unmanageable, Vivoleum will allow the living superstrate of our precious planet to yield an acceptable future.

Ladies and gentlemen, now I'm going to introduce someone who will explain Exxon's real purpose in coming here today - to honor an individual no longer with us. Here is the head of public relations for the Exxon Vivoleum program, also a special adviser to the NPC on Vivoleum: Florian Osenberg.


FLORIAN OSENBERG: Thank you, Shepard. Ladies and gentlemen, as you can see, I'm holding in my hand a candle. Right now there are people fanning out through the room handing out candles just like this. I want each of you to take one, and then I want you to pass the flame to your neighbor. I guess you already know something about passing the flame. From what I hear, you had the Olympic torch here in Calgary, and you managed to keep it from going out even with the oil boom to distract you.

Let me tell you a little bit about these candles. First of all, you'll notice some irregularities, maybe even bits of hair and the like. That's because they're all custom-cast and one-of-a-kind. I already see a couple of you holding your noses. This is something we haven't been able to eliminate yet, but it'll burn off quickly - impurities tend to float to the head.


[Holds up a candle]

You might look at your candle and think, What's the big deal? It's just a simple candle. Well, you're right. But that's the point. Like petroleum's liquid subterranean feedstocks, Vivoleum's ambulant feedstocks can be rendered into just about anything: paraffin, gasoline, even plastic to make a container - for an energy drink, for example. Anything.

But what's truly amazing about these candles is not that they're slightly irregular, or even that they're made from Vivoleum. What I'm personally in awe of is that the Vivoleum they're made from comes from one point-source, made available by a very generous man. His name was Reggie Watts, a real everyman, an ordinary person who, as ordinary people sometimes do, did something extraordinary. Indeed, more than anyone else I can think of, Reggie gave his all so that our company - and indeed our whole industry - could continue to fuel our fight to the finish. It's because he played such an important role in this product's development that we're honoring him here today. With no further ado, Reggie Watts!


[Video begins. An African-American man with a large Afro is sweeping a loading dock and singing Debby Boone's "You Light Up My Life".]

OLDER BUSINESSMAN: I knew Reggie because he was our cleaning man in the Houston head office.

YOUNGER BUSINESSMAN : Reggie was a great worker. He did a great job at our company.

WOMAN AT DESK: Down-to-earth, kindhearted, willing to do anything for anybody.

MAINTENANCE WORKER: He would always be singing, because that's the type of guy he was, always happy. When Reggie was there, the workplace was alive.

REGGIE WATTS: I worked in Maintenance for a while, moved up to Maintenance 2. Started doing cleanup, toxic cleanup. People said I was afraid of it, but I wasn't. I just wasn't. We had a level-three alert. I dunno, I just kind of blew it, I guess. After I heard from the doctor that I was going to die, I felt like I had something to live for.

YOUNGER BUSINESSMAN: I t was a very brave choice that Reggie made.

WATTS: I'm gonna die anyways. So, yeah, might as well give it a whirl!

YOUNGER BUSINESSMAN: Reggie was willing to make that sacrifice for the betterment of humanity, so for that we all salute him.

WATTS: I think I would like to be a candle. I think a candle would be fun because there are so many uses for a candle. I think that would be nice, like, if I was a candle on a table when people, when they first met each other. On a date. I think that would be great. I would love that. That'd be a hoot.

[Sings "You Light Up My Life". The video ends, and the organizers eject the presenters from the stage.]


WOLFF: [Speaking to reporters on the conference-room floor] We're not talking about killing anyone. We're talking about using them after nature has done the hard work. After all, 150,000 people already the from climate change-related effects every year. That's only going to go up - maybe way, way up. Will it all go to waste? That would be cruel.


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

Medicine After Oil

It could be distributed a lot more democratically

by Daniel Bednarz

Orion magazine (July / August 2007)


The scale and subtlety of our country's dependency on oil and natural gas cannot be overstated. Nowhere is this truer than in our medical system.

Petrochemicals are used to manufacture analgesics, antihistamines, antibiotics, antibacterials, rectal suppositories, cough syrups, lubricants, creams, ointments, salves, and many gels. Processed plastics made with oil are used in heart valves and other esoteric medical equipment. Petrochemicals are used in radiological dyes and films, intravenous tubing, syringes, and oxygen masks. In all but rare instances, fossil fuels heat and cool buildings and supply electricity. Ambulances and helicopter "life flights" depend on petroleum, as do personnel who travel to and from medical workplaces in motor vehicles. Supplies and equipment are shipped - often from overseas - in petroleum- powered carriers. In addition there are the subtle consequences of fossil fuel reliance. A recently retired doctor informs me, "In orthopedics we used to set fractures mostly by feel and knowing the mechanics of how the fractures were created. I doubt that many of the present orthopedists could do a good job if you took away their [energy-powered] fluoroscope or X-ray."

Despite this enormous vulnerability, public discussions of health care routinely ignore the prospect of peak oil. The proposed reforms, which seek to cover more people while holding down escalating costs, amount to little more than fiscal maneuvers. They take no notice of ecological resource constraints that will set limits on our ability to give people access to medical care.

The coming scarcity of fossil fuels, on top of inflationary costs in medicine (the prices of oil and natural gas are approximately four times what they were in 1999 and rising) and the expenses of treating Baby Boomers (a cohort twice the size of its predecessor), could overwhelm a medical system already in crisis. We can avoid collapse, however, by reducing medicine's present consumption of energy and creating a health-care system that reflects our actual relationship to resources. Ironically, peak oil can be a catalyst for creating a health-care system that is cost-effective, ecologically sustainable, and congruent with a democratic social ethos.

At present we have a tiered health-care system. At the top is a Ferrari model of care that reflects our affluence, fascination with technology, and extravagance. Ferrari care has made possible the treatment of rare life-threatening diseases and expensive procedures like organ transplants, but it has also been used for esoteric and often redundant testing and vanity procedures such as botox injections. At the bottom is a jalopy model serving over fifty million un- and under- insured Americans who very often receive no treatment, defer treatment until their condition cannot be ignored, or face economic ruin when they seek adequate care. If the two tiers persist after peak oil, they will eventually be preserved by force - armed guards at gated medical facilities - for the few able to pay, while the rest of Americans are relegated to the jalopy and faced with overt rationing, triage, and curtailment of medical care. Such an outcome would be an overt contravention of democratic values - most Americans tell pollsters they believe that health care is a human right, not a privilege awarded those with higher income.

What then should we do? The best democratic option is to replace both the Ferrari and the jalopy with a Honda. The post-peak Honda health-care model will of necessity operate with fewer overall resources and less energy than today's health-care system, and at lower cost. But it need not result in poorer quality of care. Although the United States spends more on health than any other nation - per capita health-care costs in this country are three times those in Great Britain and more than twice those in Canada - we do not have the best health outcomes. A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2006, for example, reported that "white, middle-aged Americans - even those who are rich - are far less healthy than their peers in England".

The commonsensical Honda model will emphasize public health - the prevention of disease and the promotion of health within the population as a whole - over treatment medicine, which focuses on restoring health to chronically or acutely ill individuals. Typically accomplished through the diffusion of information, low-cost therapies, and the promotion of healthful nutrition and lifestyle, preventive medicine allows people to avoid or postpone disease, and to stay clear of the costliest and most energy-intensive sectors of the medical system - doctors' offices, pharmacies, and the hospital. In the Honda model, treatment medicine would continue, but its role would be brought into better balance with the vastly more cost-effective and energy-efficient mode of preventive health care.

The public health system arose in the early decades of the last century as a response to fears of infectious diseases in our country's crowded cities. Its outlook is inherently egalitarian - if the entire community is not protected, then no one's health is assured. Public health is no longer the force it was when it sent "ladies in white uniforms" into communities to preach the Gospel of Germs, explaining the relationship between hygiene and disease prevention. Today, public health is overburdened and underfunded, receiving about five percent of health-care dollars, with the balance going to treatment medicine and to biomedical research.

Despite funding inadequacies, public health is in place and functioning. Public health workers, for example, educate about and test for HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases; they interdict infectious diseases like avian flu; they create emergency plans to deal with a variety of disaster scenarios; they monitor waste management and air and water quality. No new system needs to be invented or institutionalized to meet the health-care challenges of the coming energy transition, or, for that matter, those of climate change.

Already, some public health officials are beginning to address peak oil's effect on health care. On the national level, the Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control is investigating impacts of petroleum scarcity on pharmaceuticals. In Congress, a Peak Oil Caucus led by Roscoe Bartlett (Republican, Maryland) and Tom Udall (Democrat, New Mexico), is looking into the health risks posed by economic decline and mass unemployment, which peak oil is likely to trigger. At the local level, Indianapolis's Marion County Health Department is the first in the country to begin planning for maintaining public health services under differing scenarios of energy scarcity.

Late though the hour is, we can still avert the worst health consequences of an energy downturn, but doing so will require transforming our entire health-care system. The elitist impulse to perpetuate Ferrari care for the explicit benefit of the few at the expense of the many will persist after peak oil, and substantial citizen action will be needed to put into effect the affordable, egalitarian Honda model. Medicine itself could play a central role in this effort, by educating those who are unaware of the sweeping changes peak oil will initiate. Reprising its inaugural campaign against germs, public health could become a platform for disseminating a Gospel of Energy Conservation. For the most part, the medical community is as naive about peak oil as the rest of the citizenry. As one public health official told me after hearing about medicine's reliance on oil, "Oh my, I never thought of it that way. This is serious."

_____

Dan Bednarz is a health-care consultant in Pittsburgh. He is working to build a broad-based consortium on energy, climate, and the future of health care.

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/314/


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

Disaster Capitalism

The new economy of catastrophe

by Naomi Klein

Harper's Magazine (October 2007)


Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. --Milton Friedman


Three years ago, when I was in Baghdad on assignment for this magazine, I paid an early-morning visit to Khadamiya, a mostly Shiite area. An Iraqi colleague had heard that part of the neighborhood had flooded the night before, as it did regularly. When we arrived, the streets were drenched in slick green-blue liquid that was bubbling up from sewage pipes beneath exhausted asphalt. A family invited us to see what the frequent floods had done to their once lovely home. The walls were moldy and cracked, and every item - books, photos, sofas - was caked in the algae-like scum. Out back, a walled garden was a fetid swamp, with a child's swing dangling forlornly from a dead palm tree. "It was a beautiful garden", Durdham Yassin, the owner, told us. "I grew tomatoes".

For the frequent flooding, Yassin spread the blame around. There was Saddam, who spent oil money on weapons instead of infrastructure during the Iran-Iraq War. There was the first Gulf War, when US missiles struck a nearby electricity plant, knocking out power to the sewage-treatment facility. Next came the years of UN sanctions, when city workers could not replace crucial parts of the sewage system. Then there was the 2003 invasion, which further fried the power grid. And, more recently, there were companies like Bechtel and General Electric, which were hired to fix this mess, and which failed.

Around the corner, a truck was idling with a large hose down a manhole. "The most powerful vacuum loader in the world", it advertised, in English, on its side. Yassin explained that the neighbors had pooled their money to pay the company to suck away the latest batch of sludge, a costly and temporary solution. The mosque had helped, too. As we drove away, I noticed that there were similar private vacuum trucks on every other block.

Later that day I stopped by Baghdad's world-famous Green Zone. There, the challenges of living without functioning public infrastructure are also addressed by private actors. The difference is that in the Green Zone, the solutions actually work. The enclave has its own electrical grid, its own phone and sanitation systems, its own oil supply, and its own state-of-the-art hospital with pristine operating theaters - all protected by walls five meters thick. It felt, oddly, like a giant fortified Carnival Cruise ship parked in the middle of a sea of violence and despair, the boiling Red Zone that is Iraq. If you could get on board, there were poolside drinks, bad Hollywood movies, and Nautilus machines. If you were not among the chosen, you could get shot just for standing too close to the wall.


Everywhere in Iraq, the wildly divergent values assigned to different categories of people are on crude display. Westerners and their Iraqi colleagues have checkpoints at the entrances to their streets, blast walls in front of their houses, body armor, and private security guards on call at all hours. They travel the country in menacing armored convoys, with mercenaries pointing guns out the windows as they follow their prime directive to "protect the principal". With every move they broadcast the same unapologetic message: We are the chosen, our lives are infinitely more precious than yours. Middle-class Iraqis, meanwhile, cling to the next rung down the ladder: they can afford to buy protection from local militias, they are able to ransom a family member held by kidnappers, they may ultimately escape to a life of poverty in Jordan. But the vast majority of Iraqis have no protection at all. They walk the streets exposed to any possible ravaging, with nothing between them and the next car bomb but a thin layer of fabric. In Iraq, the lucky get Kevlar; the rest get prayer beads.

Like most people, I saw the divide between Baghdad's Green and Red zones as a simple by-product of the war: This is what happens when the richest country in the world sets up camp in one of the poorest. But now, after years spent visiting other disaster zones, from post-tsunami Sri Lanka to post-Katrina New Orleans, I've come to think of these Green Zone / Red Zone worlds as something else: fast-forward versions of what "free market" forces are doing to our societies even in the absence of war. In Iraq the phones, pipes, and roads had been destroyed by weapons and trade embargoes. In many other parts of the world, including the United States, they have been demolished by ideology, the war on "big government", the religion of tax cuts, the fetish for privatization. When that crumbling infrastructure is blasted with increasingly intense weather, the effects can be as devastating as war.

Last February, for instance, Jakarta suffered one of these predictable disasters. The rains had come, as they always do, but this time the water didn't drain out of Jakarta's famously putrid sewers, and half the city filled up like a swimming pool. There were mass evacuations, and at least fifty-seven people were killed. No bombs or trade sanctions were needed for Jakarta's infrastructure to fail - in fact, the steady erosion of the country's public sphere had taken place under the banner of "free trade". For decades, Washington-backed "structural-adjustment" programs had pampered investors and starved public services, leading to such cliches of lopsided development as glittering shopping malls with indoor skating rinks surrounded by moats of open sewers. Now those sewers had failed completely.

In wealthier countries, where public infrastructure was far more robust before the decline began, it has been possible to delay this kind of reckoning. Politicians have been free to cut taxes and rail against big government even as their constituents drove on, studied in, and drank from the huge public-works projects of the 1930s and 1940s. But after a few decades, that trick stops working. The American Society of Civil Engineers has warned that the United States has fallen so far behind in maintaining its public infrastructure - roads, bridges, schools, dams - that it would take more than a trillion and a half dollars over five years to bring it back up to standard. This past summer those statistics came to life: collapsing bridges, flooding subways, exploding steam pipes, and the still-unfolding tragedy that began when New Orleans's levees broke.

After each new disaster, it's tempting to imagine that the loss of life and productivity will finally serve as a wake-up call, provoking the political class to launch some kind of "new New Deal". In fact, the opposite is taking place: disasters have become the preferred moments for advancing a vision of a ruthlessly divided world, one in which the very idea of a public sphere has no place at all. Call it disaster capitalism. Every time a new crisis hits - even when the crisis itself is the direct by-product of free-market ideology - the fear and disorientation that follow are harnessed for radical social and economic re-engineering. Each new shock is midwife to a new course of economic shock therapy. The end result is the same kind of unapologetic partition between the included and the excluded, the protected and the damned, that is on display in Baghdad.

Consider the instant reactions to last summer's various infrastructure disasters. Four days after the Minneapolis bridge collapsed, a Wall Street Journal editorial had the solution: "tapping private investors to build and operate public roads and bridges", with the cost made up from ever-escalating tolls. After heavy rain caused the shutdown of New York City's subway lines, the New York Sun ran an editorial under the headline "Sell the Subways". It called for individual train lines to compete against one another, luring customers with the safest, driest service - and "charging higher fares when the competing lines, stingier on their investments, were shut down with tracks under water" {1}. It's not hard to imagine what this free market in subways would look like: high-speed lines ferrying commuters from the Upper West Side to Wall Street, while the trains serving the South Bronx wouldn't just continue their long decay-they would simply drown.

The same week as the bridge collapse, hysteria erupted over canceled flights and delays at London's Heathrow airport, prompting The Economist to demand "radical reform" of the "grubby, cramped" facility. London's airports are already privatized, but now, according to the magazine, they should be deregulated, allowing terminals to compete against one another: "different firms could provide different forms of security checks, some faster and dearer than others". Meanwhile, in New Orleans, schools were getting ready to reopen for fall. More than half the city's students would be attending newly minted charter schools, where they would enjoy small classes, well-trained teachers, and refurbished libraries, thanks to special state and foundation funding pouring into what the New York Times has described as "the nation's preeminent laboratory for the widespread use of charter schools". But charters are only for the students who are admitted to the system - an educational Green Zone. The rest of New Orleans's public-school students - many of them with special emotional and physical needs, almost all of them African American - are dumped into the pre-Katrina system: no extra money, overcrowded classrooms, more guards than teachers. An educational Red Zone.

Other institutions that had attempted to bridge the gap between New Orleans's super-rich and ultra-poor were also under attack: thousands of units of subsidized housing were slotted for demolition, and Charity Hospital, the city's largest public-health facility, remained shuttered. The original disaster was created and deepened by public infrastructure that was on its last legs; in the years since, the disaster itself has been used as an excuse to finish the job.

There will be more Katrinas. The bones of our states - so frail and aging - will keep getting buffeted by storms both climatic and political. And as key pieces of the infrastructure are knocked out, there is no guarantee that they will be repaired or rebuilt, at least not as they were before. More likely, they will be left to rot, with the well-off withdrawing into gated communities, their needs met by private suppliers.

Not so long ago, disasters were periods of social leveling, rare moments when atomized communities put divisions aside and pulled together. Today they are moments when we are hurled further apart, when we lurch into a radically segregated future where some of us will fall off the map and others ascend to a parallel privatized state, one equipped with well-paved highways and skyways, safe bridges, boutique charter schools, fast-lane airport terminals, and deluxe subways.


As Iraq and New Orleans both reveal, the markets opened up by crises aren't only the roads, schools, and oil wells; the disasters themselves are major new markets. The military-industrial complex that Dwight D Eisenhower warned against in 1961 has expanded and morphed into what is best understood as a disaster-capitalism complex, in which all conflict- and disaster- related functions (waging war, securing borders, spying on citizens, rebuilding cities, treating traumatized soldiers) can be performed by corporations at a profit. And this complex is not satisfied merely to feed off the state, the way traditional military contractors do; it aims, ultimately, to replace core functions of government with its own profitable enterprises, as it did in Baghdad's Green Zone.

It happened in New Orleans. Within weeks of Hurricane Katrina, the Gulf Coast became a domestic laboratory for the same kind of government run by contractors that was pioneered in Iraq. The companies that snatched up the biggest contracts were the familiar Baghdad gang: Halliburton's KBR unit received a $60 million contract to reconstruct military bases along the coast. Blackwater was hired to protect FEMA operations, with the company billing an average of $950 a day per guard. Parsons, infamous for its sloppy work in Iraq, was brought in for a major bridge-construction project in Mississippi. Fluor, Shaw, Bechtel, CH2M Hill - all top contractors in Iraq - were handed contracts on the Gulf Coast to provide mobile homes to evacuees just ten days after the levees broke. Their contracts ended up totaling $3.4 billion, no open bidding required. To spearhead its Katrina operation, Shaw hired the former head of the US Army's Iraq reconstruction office. Fluor sent its senior project manager from Iraq to the flood zone. "Our rebuilding work in Iraq is slowing down, and this has made some people available to respond to our work in Louisiana", a company representative explained. Joe Allbaugh, whose company, New Bridge Strategies, had promised to bring Wal-Mart and 7-Eleven to Iraq, was the lobbyist in the middle of many of the deals. The feeling that the Iraq war had somehow just been franchised was so striking that some of the mercenary soldiers, fresh from Baghdad, were having trouble adjusting. When David Enders, a reporter, asked an armed guard outside a New Orleans hotel if there had been much action, he replied, "Nope. It's pretty Green Zone here."

Since then, privatized disaster response has become one of the hottest industries in the South. Just one year after Hurricane Katrina, a slew of new corporations had entered the market, promising safety and security should the next Big One hit. One of the more ambitious ventures was launched by a charter air service in West Palm Beach, Florida. Help Jet bills itself as "the world's first hurricane escape plan that turns a hurricane evacuation into a jet-setter vacation". When a storm is coining, the charter company books holidays for its members at five-star golf resorts, spas, or Disneyland. With the reservations made, the evacuees are then whisked out of the hurricane zone on a luxury jet. "No standing in lines, no hassle with crowds, just a first class experience that turns a problem into a vacation ... Enjoy the feeling of avoiding the usual hurricane evacuation nightmare". For the people left behind, there is a different kind of privatized solution. In 2006, the Red Cross signed a new disaster-response partnership with Wal-Mart. "It's all going to be private enterprise before it's over", said Billy Wagner, chief of emergency management for the Florida Keys. "They've got the expertise. They've got the resources." He was speaking at the National Hurricane Conference in Orlando, Florida, a fast-growing annual trade show for the companies selling everything that might come in handy during the next disaster. Dave Blandford, an exhibitor showing off his "self-heating meals" at the conference, observed: "Some folks here said, 'Man, this is huge business-this is my new business. I'm not in the landscaping business anymore; I'm going to be a hurricane-debris contractor.'"

Much of the parallel disaster economy has been built with taxpayers' money, thanks to the boom in privatized war-zone reconstruction. The giant contractors that have served as "the primes" in Iraq and Afghanistan have spent large portions of their income from government contracts on their own corporate overhead - between twenty and 55 percent, according to a 2006 audit of Iraq contractors. Much of those funds has, quite legally, gone into huge investments in corporate equipment, such as Bechtel's battalions of earth movers, Halliburton's fleets of planes and trucks, and the surveillance architecture built by L-3, CACI, and Booz Allen. Most dramatic has been Blackwater's investment in its paramilitary infrastructure. Founded in 1996, the company has used its steady stream of contracts to build up a private army of 20,000 on-call mercenary soldiers and a military base in North Carolina worth between $40 million and $50 million. It reportedly has the ability to field massive humanitarian operations faster than the Red Cross, and boasts a fleet of aircraft ranging from helicopter gunships to a Boeing 767 {2}.

Blackwater has been called "al Qaeda for the good guys" by its right-wing admirers. It's a striking analogy. Wherever the disaster-capitalism complex has landed, it has produced a proliferation of armed groups that operate outside the state. That is hardly a surprise: when countries are rebuilt by people who don't believe in governments, the states they build are invariably weak, creating a market for alternative security forces, whether Hezbollah, Blackwater, the Mahdi Army, or the gang down the street in New Orleans.


The reach of the disaster industry extends far beyond policing. When the contractor infrastructure built up during the Bush years is looked at as a whole, what we see is a fully articulated state-within-a-state that is as muscular and capable as the actual state is frail and feeble. This corporate shadow-state has been built almost exclusively with public resources, including the training of its staff: Ninety percent of Blackwater's revenues come from state contracts, and the majority of its employees are former politicians, soldiers, and civil servants. Yet the vast infrastructure is all privately owned and controlled. The citizens who funded it have absolutely no claim to this parallel economy or its resources.

The actual state, meanwhile, has lost the ability to perform its core functions without the help of contractors. Its own equipment is out of date, and the best experts have fled to the private sector. When Katrina hit, FEMA had to hire a contractor to award contracts to contractors. Similarly, when it came time to update the Army manual on the rules for dealing with contractors, the Army outsourced the job to one of its major contractors, MPRI, because it no longer had the in-house expertise. The CIA has lost so many staffers to the privatized spy sector that it has had to bar contractors from recruiting in the agency dining room. "One recently retired case officer said he had been approached twice while in line for coffee", reported the Los Angeles Times. And when the Department of Homeland Security decided it needed to build "virtual fences" on the US borders with Mexico and Canada, Michael P Jackson, deputy secretary ofthe department, told contractors, "This is an unusual invitation ... We're asking you to come back and tell us how to do our business". The department's inspector general explained that Homeland Security "does not have the capacity needed to effectively plan, oversee, and execute the [Secure Border Initiative] program".

Under George W Bush, the state still has all the trappings of a government - the impressive buildings, presidential press briefings, policy battles - but it no more does the actual work of governing than the employees at Nike's Beaverton, Oregon, campus stitch running shoes.


The implications of the decision by the current crop of politicians to systematically outsource their elected responsibilities will reach far beyond a single administration. Once a market has been created, it needs to be protected. The companies at the heart of the disaster-capitalism complex increasingly regard both the state and nonprofits as competitors; from the corporate perspective, whenever governments or charities fulfill their traditional roles, they are denying contractors work that could be performed at a profit.

"Neglected Defense: Mobilizing the Private Sector to Support Homeland Security", a 2006 report whose advisory committee included some of the largest corporations in the sector, warned that "the compassionate federal impulse to provide emergency assistance to the victims of disasters affects the market's approach to managing its exposure to risk". Published by the Council on Foreign Relations, the report argued that if people know the government will come to the rescue, they have no incentive to pay for protection. In a similar vein, a year after Katrina, CEOs from thirty of the largest corporations in the United States joined together under the umbrella of the Business Roundtable, which includes in its membership Fluor, Bechtel, and Chevron. The group, calling itself Partnership for Disaster Response, complained of "mission creep" by the nonprofit sector in the aftermath of disasters. The mercenary firms, meanwhile, have been loudly claiming that they are better equipped than the UN to engage in peacekeeping in Darfur.

Much of this new aggressiveness flows from suspicion that the golden era of bottomless federal contracts might not last much longer. The US government is barreling toward an economic crisis, thanks in no small part to the deficit spending that has bankrolled the privatized disaster economy. Sooner rather than later, the contracts are likely to dip significantly. In late 2006 defense analysts began predicting that the Pentagon's acquisitions budget could shrink by as much as 25 percent in the coming decade.

When the disaster bubble bursts, firms such as Bechtel, Fluor, and Blackwater will lose much of their primary revenue streams. They will still have all the high-tech equipment bought at taxpayer expense, but they will need to find a new business model, a new way to cover their high costs. The next phase of the disaster-capitalism complex is all too clear: with emergencies on the rise, government no longer able to foot the bill, and citizens stranded by their hollow state, the parallel corporate state will rent back its disaster infrastructure to whoever can afford it, at whatever price the market will bear. For sale will be everything from helicopter rides off rooftops to drinking water to beds in shelters.

Wealth already provides an escape hatch from most disasters - it buys early-warning systems for tsunami-prone regions and stockpiles of Tamiflu for the next outbreak. It buys bottled water, generators, satellite phones, and rent-a-cops. During the Israeli attack on Lebanon in 2006, the US government initially tried to charge American citizens for the cost of their own evacuation, though it was eventually forced to back down. If we continue in this direction, the images of people stranded on New Orleans rooftops will not only have been a glimpse of America's unresolved past of racial inequality but will also have foreshadowed a collective future of disaster apartheid, in which survival is determined primarily by one's ability to pay.

Perhaps part of the reason so many of our elites, both political and corporate, are so sanguine about climate change is that they are confident they will be able to buy their way out of the worst of it. This may also partially explain why so many Bush supporters are Christian end-timers. It's not just that they need to believe there is an escape hatch from the world they are creating. It's that the Rapture is a parable for what they are building down here on Earth - a system that invites destruction and disaster, then swoops in with private helicopters and airlifts them and their friends to divine safety.


As contractors rush to develop alternative stable sources of revenue, one avenue of business is in disaster-proofing other corporations. This was Paul Bremer's line of work before he became Bush's proconsul in Iraq: turning multinationals into security bubbles able to function smoothly even if the states in which they are doing business crumble around them. The early results can be seen in the lobbies of many office buildings in New York or London - airport-style check-ins complete with photo-ID requirements and X-ray machines - but the industry has far greater ambitions, including privatized global communications networks, emergency health and electricity services, and the ability to locate and provide transportation for a global work force in the midst of a major disaster. Another potential growth area identified by the disaster-capitalism complex is municipal government: the contracting out of police and fire departments to private security companies. "What they do for the military in downtown Fallujah, they can do for the police in downtown Reno", a spokesperson for Lockheed Martin said in November 2004.

The contracting industry predicts that these new markets will expand dramatically over the next decade. A frank vision of where these trends are leading is provided by John Robb, a former covert-action mission commander with Delta Force turned management consultant. In a widely circulated manifesto for Fast Company magazine, he describes the "end result" of the war on terror as "a new, more resilient approach to national security, one built not around the state but around private citizens and companies ... Security will become a function of where you live and whom you work for, much as health care is allocated already".

Robb writes, "Wealthy individuals and multinational corporations will be the first to bail out of our collective system, opting instead to hire private military companies, such as Blackwater and Triple Canopy, to protect their homes and facilities and establish a protective perimeter around daily life. Parallel transportation networks -evolving out of the time-share aircraft companies such as Warren Buffett's NetJets - will cater to this group, leapfrogging its members from one secure, well-appointed lily pad to the next." That elite world is already largely in place, but Robb predicts that the middle class will soon follow suit, "forming suburban collectives to share the costs of security". These "'armored suburbs' will deploy and maintain backup generators and communications links" and be patrolled by private militias "that have received corporate training and boast their own state-of-the-art emergency response systems".

In other words, a world of suburban Green Zones. As for those outside the secured perimeter, "they will have to make do with the remains of the national system. They will gravitate to America's cities, where they will be subject to ubiquitous surveillance and marginal or nonexistent services. For the poor, there will be no other refuge." The future Robb describes sounds very much like the present in New Orleans, where two very different kinds of gated communities emerged from the rubble. On the one hand were the so-called FEMA-villes: desolate, out-of-the-way trailer camps for low-income evacuees, built by Bechtel or Fluor subcontractors and administered by private security companies that patrolled the gravel lots, restricted visitors, kept journalists out, and treated survivors like criminals. On the other hand were the gated communities built in the wealthy areas of the city like Audubon and the Garden District, bubbles of functionality that seemed to have seceded from the state altogether. Within weeks of the storm, residents there had water and powerful emergency generators. Their sick were treated in private hospitals, and their children went to private or charter schools. And they had no need for public transit. In St Bernard Parish, a New Orleans suburb, DynCorp had taken over much of the policing; other neighborhoods hired security companies directly. Between the two kinds of privatized city-states was the New Orleans version of the Red Zone, where the murder rate soared and neighborhoods like the storied Lower Ninth Ward descended into a postapocalyptic no-man's-land.


Another glimpse of a disaster-apartheid future can be found in a wealthy Republican suburb outside Atlanta. Its residents decided that they were tired of watching their property taxes subsidize schools and police in the county's low-income African-American neighborhoods. They voted to incorporate as their own city, Sandy Springs, which could spend most of its taxes on services for its 100,000 citizens and minimize the revenue that would be redistributed throughout Fulton County. The only difficulty was that Sandy Springs had no government structures and needed to build them from scratch - everything from tax collection to zoning to parks and recreation. In September 2005, the same month that New Orleans flooded, the residents of Sandy Springs were approached by the construction and consulting giant CH2M Hill with a unique pitch: Let us do it for you. For the starting price of $27 million a year, the contractor pledged to build a complete city from the ground up.

A few months later, Sandy Springs became the first "contract city". Only four people worked directly for the new municipality - everyone else was a contractor. Rick Hirsekorn, heading up the project for CH2M Hill, described Sandy Springs as "a clean sheet of paper with no governmental processes in place". The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that "when Sandy Springs hired corporate workers to run the new city, it was considered a bold experiment". Within a year, however, contract-city mania was tearing through Atlanta's wealthy suburbs, and it had become "standard procedure in north Fulton [County]". Neighboring communities took their cue from Sandy Springs and also voted to become stand-alone cities and contract out their government. One new city, Milton, immediately hired CH2M Hill for the job - after all, it had the experience. Soon, a campaign began for the new corporate cities to join together to form their own county. The plan has encountered fierce opposition outside the proposed enclave, where politicians say that without those tax dollars, they will no longer be able to afford their large public hospital and public transit system; that partitioning the county would create a failed state on the one hand and a hyperserviced one on the other. What they were describing sounded a lot like New Orleans and a little like Baghdad.

In these wealthy Atlanta suburbs, the long crusade to strip-mine the state is nearing completion, and it is particularly fitting that the new ground was broken by CH2M Hill. The corporation was a multimillion-dollar contractor in Iraq, paid to perform the core government function of overseeing other contractors. In Sri Lanka after the tsunami, it not only had built ports and bridges but was, according to the US State Department, "responsible for the overall management of the infrastructure program". In post-Katrina New Orleans, CH2M Hill was awarded $500 million to build FEMA-villes and was put on standby for the next disaster. A master of privatizing the core functions of the state during extraordinary circumstances, the company was now doing the same under ordinary ones. If disasters had served as laboratories of extreme privatization, the testing phase was clearly over.


For decades, the conventional wisdom was that generalized mayhem was a drain on the global economy. Individual shocks and crises could be harnessed as leverage to force open new markets, of course, but after the initial shock had done its work, relative peace and stability were required for sustained economic growth. That was the accepted explanation for why the Nineties had been such prosperous years: with the Cold War over, economies were liberated to concentrate on trade and investment, and as countries became more enmeshed and interdependent, they were far less likely to bomb one another.

At the 2007 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, however, political and corporate leaders were scratching their heads over a state of affairs that seemed to flout this conventional wisdom. It was being called the "Davos Dilemma", which Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf described as "the contrast between the world's favourable economics and troublesome politics". As Wolf put it, the economy had faced "a series of shocks: the stock market crash after 2000; the terrorist outrages of September 11 2001; wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; friction over US policies; a jump in real oil prices to levels not seen since the 1970s; the cessation of negotiations in the Doha round [of WTO talks]; and the confrontation over Iran's nuclear ambitions" - and yet it found Itself in "a golden period of broadly shared growth". Put bluntly, the world was going to hell, there was no stability in sight, and the global economy was roaring its approval.

This puzzling trend has also been observed through an economic indicator called "the guns-to-caviar index". The index tracks the sales of fighter jets (guns) and executive jets (caviar). For seventeen years, it generally found that when fighter jets were selling briskly, sales of luxury executive jets went down, and vice versa: when executive-jet sales were on the rise, fighter-jet sales dipped. Of course, a handful of war profiteers always managed to get rich from selling guns, but they were economically insignificant. It was a truism of the contemporary market that you couldn't have booming economic growth in the midst of violence and instability.

Except that the truism is no longer true. Since 2003, the year of the Iraq invasion, the index has found that spending has been going up on both fighter jets and executive jets rapidly and simultaneously, which means that the world is becoming less peaceful while accumulating significantly more profit. The galloping economic growth in China and India has played a part in the increased demand for luxury items, but so has the expansion of the narrow military-industrial complex into the sprawling disaster-capitalism complex. Today, global instability does not just benefit a small group of arms dealers; it generates huge profits for the high-tech-homeland-security sector, for heavy construction, for private health-care companies, for the oil and gas sectors - and, of course, for defense contractors.

The scale of the revenues at stake is certainly enough to fuel an economic boom. Lockheed Martin, whose former vice president chaired the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which loudly agitated for the invasion, received $25 billion in US government contracts in 2005 alone. Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman noted that the sum "exceeded the gross domestic product of 103 countries, including Iceland, Jordan, and Costa Rica ... [and] was also larger than the combined budgets of the Department of Commerce, the Department of the Interior, the Small Business Administration, and the entire legislative branch of government". Lockheed itself deserved to be characterized as an emerging market. Companies like Lockheed (whose stock price tripled between 2000 and 2005) are a large part of the reason why the US stock market was saved from a prolonged crash following September 11. While conventional stocks have underperformed, the Spade Defense Index, "a benchmark for defense, homeland security and aerospace stocks", went up 76 percent between 2001 and 2006 - while Standard & Poor's 500 average dropped five percent in that same period.

The Davos Dilemma is being fueled further by the intensely profitable model of privatized reconstruction that was forged in Iraq. Share prices of heavy-construction companies, which include the big engineering firms that land juicy no-bid contracts after wars and natural disasters, went up 300 percent between 2001 and July 2007. Reconstruction is now such big business that investors greet each new disaster with the excitement of hot initial public stock offerings: $30 billion for Iraq reconstruction, $13 billion for tsunami reconstruction, $110 billion for New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, $7.6 billion for Lebanon.

Terrorist attacks, which used to send the stock market spiraling downward, now receive a similarly upbeat market reception. After September 11 2001, the Dow Jones plummeted 685 points as soon as markets reopened. In sharp contrast, on July 7 2005, the day four bombs ripped through London's public transportation system, killing dozens and injuring hundreds, the US stock market closed higher than it had the day before, with the Nasdaq up seven points. A year later, on the day British law-enforcement agencies arrested twenty-four suspects who had allegedly planned to blow up jetliners headed to the United States, the Nasdaq closed 11.5 points higher, largely thanks to soaring homeland-security stocks.

Then there are the outrageous fortunes of the oil sector - a $40 billion profit in 2006 for ExxonMobil alone, the largest profit ever recorded, and its colleagues at rival companies like Chevron were not far behind. Like the fortunes of corporations linked to defense, heavy construction, and homeland security, those of the oil sector improve with every war, terrorist attack, and Category Five hurricane. In addition to reaping the short-term benefits of high prices linked to uncertainty in key oil-producing regions, the oil industry has consistently managed to turn disasters to its long-term advantage, whether by ensuring that a large portion of the reconstruction funds in Afghanistan went into the expensive road infrastructure for a new pipeline (while most other major reconstruction projects stalled), or by pushing for a new investor-friendly oil law in Iraq while the country burned, or by piggybacking on Hurricane Katrina to plan the first new refineries in the United States since the Seventies. The oil and gas industry is so intimately entwined with the economy of disaster - both as a root cause behind many disasters and as a beneficiary from them - that it deserves to be treated as an honorary adjunct of the disaster-capitalism complex.


The recent spate of disasters has translated into such spectacular profits that many people around the world have come to the same conclusion: the rich and powerful must be deliberately causing the catastrophes so that they can exploit them. In July 2006, a national poll of US residents found that more than a third of respondents believed that the government had a hand in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop them "because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East". Similar suspicions dog most of the catastrophes of recent years. In Louisiana in the aftermath of Katrina, the shelters were alive with rumors that the levees hadn't broken but had been covertly blown up in order to keep the rich areas dry while cleansing the city of poor people. In Sri Lanka, I often heard that the tsunami had been caused by underwater explosions detonated by the United States so that it could send troops into Southeast Asia and take full control over the region's economies.

The truth is at once less sinister and more dangerous. An economic system that requires constant growth while bucking almost all serious attempts at environmental regulation generates a steady stream of disasters all on its own, whether military, ecological, or financial. The appetite for easy, short-term profits offered by purely speculative investment has turned the stock, currency, and real estate markets into crisis-creation machines, as the Asian financial crisis, the Mexican peso crisis, the dot-com collapse, and the subprime-mortgage crisis demonstrate. Our common addiction to dirty, nonrenewable energy sources keeps other kinds of emergencies coming: natural disasters (up 560 percent since 1975) and wars waged for control over scarce resources (not just Iraq and Afghanistan but lower-intensity conflicts such as those in Colombia, Nigeria, and Sudan), which in turn spawn terrorist blowback (a 2007 study calculated that the number of terrorist attacks has increased sevenfold since the start of the Iraq war).

Given the boiling temperatures, both climatic and political, future disasters need not be cooked up in dark conspiracies. All indications are that if we simply stay the current course, they will keep coming with ever more ferocious intensity. Disaster generation can therefore be left to the market's invisible hand. This is one area in which it actually delivers.

The disaster-capitalism complex does not deliberately scheme to create the cataclysms on which it feeds (though Iraq may be a notable exception), but there is plenty of evidence that its component industries work very hard indeed to make sure that current disastrous trends continue unchallenged. Large oil companies have bankrolled the climate-change-denial movement for years; ExxonMobil alone has spent an estimated $19 million on the crusade over the past decade. Although the phenomenon is well known, the interplay between disaster contractors and elite opinion makers is far less understood. Several influential Washington think tanks - including the National Institute for Public Policy and the Center for Security Policy - are heavily funded by weapons and homeland-security contractors, which profit directly from these institutes' ceaseless portrayal of the world as a dark and menacing place, its troubles responsive only to force. The homeland-security sector is also becoming increasingly integrated with media corporations, a development that has Orwellian implications. In 2004 the digital-communications giant LexisNexis paid $775 million for Seisint, a data-mining company that works closely on surveillance with federal and state agencies. That same year, General Electric, which owns NBC, purchased In Vision, the major producer of controversial high-tech bomb-detection devices used in airports and other public spaces. In Vision received a staggering $15 billion in homeland-security contracts between 2001 and 2006, more of such contracts than any other company.

The creeping expansion of the disaster-capitalism complex into the media may prove to be a new kind of corporate synergy, one building on the vertical integration that became so popular in the Nineties. It certainly makes sound business sense. The more panicked our societies become, convinced that there are terrorists lurking in every mosque, the higher the news ratings soar, the more biometric IDs and liquid-explosive-detection devices the complex sells, and the more high-tech fences it builds. If the dream of the open, borderless "small planet" was the ticket to profits during the Clinton years, the nightmare of the menacing, fortressed Western continents, under siege from jihadists and illegal immigrants, plays the same role in the new millennium.

There is only one cloud that looms over the thriving disaster economy - from weapons to oil to engineering to surveillance to patented drugs. It is the threatening if unlikely scenario that this latest boom could somehow be interrupted by an outbreak of climatic stability and geopolitical peace.


Notes:

{1} If these solutions seemed to present themselves with uncanny speed, it is largely because Washington's think tanks have been on such an aggressive campaign to privatize the essential functions of the state. As a May 2007 cover story in Business Week explained, "In the past year, banks and private investment firms have fallen in love with public infrastructure. They 're smitten by the rich cash flows that roads, bridges, airports, parking garages and shipping ports generate - and the monopolistic advantages that keep those cash flows as steady as a bearing heart ... Investors can't get in fast enough."

{2} One of the most damning aspects of this industry is how unabashedly partisan it is. Blackwater, for instance, is closely aligned with the anti-abortion movement and other right-wing causes. It donates almost exclusively to the Republican Party, rather than hedging its bets like most big corporations. Halliburton sends 93 percent of its campaign contributions to Republicans; Fluor, 78 percent. Is it farfetched to imagine a day when political parties will hire these companies to spy on their rivals during an election campaign - or to engage in covert operations too shady even for the CIA?

Naomi Klein's most recent article for Harper's Magazine, "Baghdad Year Zero", appeared in the September 2004 issue. Her new book, The Shock Doctrine, from which this essay was adapted, was just published by Metropolitan Books.

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

Black Swans

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

http://www.edge.org (April 19 2004)

A black swan is an outlier, an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations. Most people expect all swans to be white because that's what their experience tells them; a black swan is by definition a surprise. Nevertheless, people tend to concoct explanations for them after the fact, which makes them appear more predictable, and less random, than they are. Our minds are designed to retain, for efficient storage, past information that fits into a compressed narrative. This distortion, called the hindsight bias, prevents us from adequately learning from the past.


Introduction

Nassim Taleb is an essayist and mathematical trader, and an "Edge Activist - a member of the literary and empirical community of scientists-philosophers". He wants to create a "platform for a new scientific-minded public intellectual dealing with social and historical events - in replacement to the 'fooled by randomness' historian and the babbling journalistic public intellectual". He is interested in the epistemology of randomness and the multidisciplinary problems of uncertainty and knowledge, particularly in the large-impact hard-to-predict rare events ("Black Swans").

He is a new breed of third culture thinker ... a scientist, an essayist, and, to add to an already rare combination, a businessman. This combination has been key to his formulation of The Black Swan as it is concerned with the interconnection between chance and the dynamics of historical events on one hand, and the cognitive biases embedded in human nature affecting our understanding of history on the other.

"Much of what happens in history", he notes, "comes from 'Black Swan dynamics', very large, sudden, and totally unpredictable 'outliers', while much of what we usually talk about is almost pure noise. Our track record in predicting those events is dismal; yet by some mechanism called the hindsight bias we think that we understand them. We have a bad habit of finding 'laws' in history (by fitting stories to events and detecting false patterns); we are drivers looking through the rear view mirror while convinced we are looking ahead."

"Why are we so bad at understanding this type of uncertainty? It is now the scientific consensus that our risk-avoidance mechanism is not mediated by the cognitive modules of our brain, but rather by the emotional ones. This may have made us fit for the Pleistocene era. Our risk machinery is designed to run away from tigers; it is not designed for the information-laden modern world."

Editor's Note: On April 8th, the day the 9/11 Commission heard testimony from Presidential advisor Condoleezza Rice, Taleb's Op-Ed piece, "Learning to Expect the Uniexpected", was published in The New York Times. After the testimony, he stopped by for a conversation. Below I present both the Op-Ed piece and the discussion. - JB

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is an essayist and mathematical trader and the author of Dynamic Hedging (Wiley, 1997) and Fooled by Randomness (2nd Edition, 2004).


Learning to Expect the Unexpected

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

New York Times Op-Ed (April 08 2004)

The 9/11 commission has drawn more attention for the testimony it has gathered than for the purpose it has set for itself. Today the commission will hear from Condoleezza Rice, national security adviser to President Bush, and her account of the administration's policies before September 11 is likely to differ from that of Richard Clarke, the president's former counterterrorism chief, in most particulars except one: it will be disputed.

There is more than politics at work here, although politics explains a lot. The commission itself, with its mandate, may have compromised its report before it is even delivered. That mandate is "to provide a 'full and complete accounting' of the attacks of September 11 2001 and recommendations as to how to prevent such attacks in the future".

It sounds uncontroversial, reasonable, even admirable, yet it contains at least three flaws that are common to most such inquiries into past events. To recognize those flaws, it is necessary to understand the concept of the "black swan".

A black swan is an outlier, an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations. Most people expect all swans to be white because that's what their experience tells them; a black swan is by definition a surprise. Nevertheless, people tend to concoct explanations for them after the fact, which makes them appear more predictable, and less random, than they are. Our minds are designed to retain, for efficient storage, past information that fits into a compressed narrative. This distortion, called the hindsight bias, prevents us from adequately learning from the past.

Black swans can have extreme effects: just a few explain almost everything, from the success of some ideas and religions to events in our personal lives. Moreover, their influence seems to have grown in the 20th century, while ordinary events - the ones we study and discuss and learn about in history or from the news - are becoming increasingly inconsequential.

Consider: How would an understanding of the world on June 27 1914, have helped anyone guess what was to happen next? The rise of Hitler, the demise of the Soviet bloc, the spread of Islamic fundamentalism, the Internet bubble: not only were these events unpredictable, but anyone who correctly forecast any of them would have been deemed a lunatic (indeed, some were). This accusation of lunacy would have also applied to a correct prediction of the events of 9/11 - a black swan of the vicious variety.

A vicious black swan has an additional elusive property: its very unexpectedness helps create the conditions for it to occur. Had a terrorist attack been a conceivable risk on September 10 2001, it would likely not have happened. Jet fighters would have been on alert to intercept hijacked planes, airplanes would have had locks on their cockpit doors, airports would have carefully checked all passenger luggage. None of that happened, of course, until after 9/11.

Much of the research into humans' risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made to counter repeatable attacks and learn from specifics. If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a certain cave, then he learns to avoid that cave. Yet vicious black swans by definition do not repeat themselves. We cannot learn from them easily.

All of which brings us to the 9/11 commission. America will not have another chance to hold a first inquiry into 9/11. With its flawed mandate, however, the commission is in jeopardy of squandering this opportunity.

The first flaw is the error of excessive and naive specificity. By focusing on the details of the past event, we may be diverting attention from the question of how to prevent future tragedies, which are still abstract in our mind. To defend ourselves against black swans, general knowledge is a crucial first step.

The mandate is also a prime example of the phenomenon known as hindsight distortion. To paraphrase Kirkegaard, history runs forward but is seen backward. An investigation should avoid the mistake of overestimating cases of possible negligence, a chronic flaw of hindsight analyses. Unfortunately, the hearings show that the commission appears to be looking for precise and narrowly defined accountability.

Yet infinite vigilance is not possible. Negligence in any specific case needs to be compared with the normal rate of negligence for all possible events at the time of the tragedy - including those events that did not take place but could have. Before 9/11, the risk of terrorism was not as obvious as it seems today to a reasonable person in government (which is part of the reason 9/11 occurred). Therefore the government might have used its resources to protect against other risks - with invisible but perhaps effective results.

The third flaw is related. Our system of rewards is not adapted to black swans. We can set up rewards for activity that reduces the risk of certain measurable events, like cancer rates. But it is more difficult to reward the prevention (or even reduction) of a chain of bad events (war, for instance). Job-performance assessments in these matters are not just tricky, they may be biased in favor of measurable events. Sometimes, as any good manager knows, avoiding a certain outcome is an achievement.

The greatest flaw in the commission's mandate, regrettably, mirrors one of the greatest flaws in modern society: it does not understand risk. The focus of the investigation should not be on how to avoid any specific black swan, for we don't know where the next one is coming from. The focus should be on what general lessons can be learned from them. And the most important lesson may be that we should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible. After a black swan like 9/11, we must look ahead, not in the rear-view mirror.

_____

A Talk with Nassim Nicholas Taleb

(NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB:) People say I'm a trader, which may be a strange designation for someone whose central belief is skepticism about the predictability of markets and people's biases in the attribution of skills, how we are "fooled by randomness". Some people call me a mathematician, which is not right either, because I specialize in a narrow branch of mathematics, models of uncertainty applied to the social sciences. But I focus instead on the breakdown of these models as they enter contact with reality; I spend my time doing empirical research on how and where these ambitious models fail us. So you cannot call a "mathematician" someone who uses mathematics to reject mathematical methods without proposing anything better than mere "humility" and the rare courage to say "I don't know" - both of which have no sophisticated equation and do not provide for technical papers. As I will discuss later I am extremely skeptical about our current ability to capture socio-economic randomness with models - but such information is vital in and by itself and can be used to get out of trouble. Being an inverse-trader and an inverse- mathematician (using the conventional sense), I tell people I am a scientific-philosophical essayist and people leave me alone.

One can study randomness, at three levels: mathematical, empirical, and behavioral. The first is the narrowly defined mathematics of randomness, which is no longer the interesting problem because we've pretty much reached small returns in what we can develop in that branch. The second one is the dynamics of the real world, the dynamics of history, what we can and cannot model, how we can get into the guts of the mechanics of historical events, whether quantitative models can help us and how they can hurt us. And the third is our human ability to understand uncertainty. We are endowed with a native scorn of the abstract; we ignore what we do not see, even if our logic recommends otherwise. We tend to overestimate causal relationships. When we meet someone who by playing Russian roulette became extremely influential, wealthy, and powerful, we still act toward that person as if he gained that status just by skills, even when you know there's been a lot of luck. Why? Because our behavior toward that person is going to be entirely determined by shallow heuristics and very superficial matters related to his appearance.

There are two technical problems in randomness - what I call the soft problem and the hard problem. The soft problem in randomness is what practitioners hate me for, but academics have a no-brainer solution for it - it's just hard to implement. It's what we call in some circles the observation bias, or the related data mining problem. When you look at anything - say the stock market - you see the survivors, the winners; you don 't see the losers because you don't observe the cemetery and you will be likely to misattribute the causes that led to the winning.

There is a silly book called A Millionaire Next Door, and one of the authors wrote an even sillier book called The Millionaire's Mind. They interviewed a bunch of millionaires to figure out how these people got rich. Visibly they came up with bunch of traits. You need a little bit of intelligence, a lot of hard work, and a lot of risk-taking. And they derived that, hey, taking risk is good for you if you want to become a millionaire. What these people forgot to do is to go take a look at the less visible cemetery - in other words, bankrupt people, failures, people who went out of business - and look at their traits. They would have discovered that some of the same traits are shared by these people, like hard work and risk taking. This tells me that the unique trait that the millionaires had in common was mostly luck.

This bias makes us miscompute the odds and wrongly ascribe skills. If you funded 1,000,000 unemployed people endowed with no more than the ability to say "buy" or "sell", odds are that you will break-even in the aggregate, minus transaction costs, but a few will hit the jackpot, simply because the base cohort is very large. It will be almost impossible not to have small Warren Buffets by luck alone. After the fact they will be very visible and will derive precise and well-sounding explanations about why they made it. It is difficult to argue with them; "nothing succeeds like success". All these retrospective explanations are pervasive, but there are scientific methods to correct for the bias. This has not filtered through to the business world or the news media; researchers have evidence that professional fund managers are just no better than random and cost money to society (the total revenues from these transaction costs is in the hundreds of billion of dollars) but the public will remain convinced that "some" of these investors have skills.

The hard problem of randomness may be insoluble. It's what some academics hate me for. It is an epistemological problem: we do not observe probabilities in a direct way. We have to find them somewhere, and they can be prone to a few types of misspecification. Some probabilities are incomputable - the good news is that we know which ones. Much of the mathematical models we have to capture uncertainty work in a casino and gambling environment, but they are not applicable to the complicated social world in which we live, a fact that is trivial to show empirically. Consider two types of randomness. The first type is physical randomness - in other words, the probability of running into a giant taller than seven, eight, or nine feet, which in the physical world is very low. The probability of running into someone 200 miles tall is definitely zero; because you have to have a mother of some size, there are physical limitations. The probability that a heat particle will go from here to China, or from here to the moon, is extremely small since it needs energy for that. These distributions tend to be "bell-shaped", Gaussian, with tractable properties.

But in the random variables we observe today, like prices - what I call Type-2 randomness, anything that's informational - the sky is the limit. It' s "wild" uncertainty. As the Germans saw during the hyperinflation episode, a currency can go from one to a billion, instantly. You can name a number, nothing physical can stop it from getting there. What is worrisome is that nothing in the past statistics could have helped you guess the possibility of such hyperinflation effect. People can become very powerful overnight on a very small idea.

Take the Google phenomenon or the Microsoft effect - "all-or-nothing" dynamics. The equivalent of Google, where someone just takes over everything, would have been impossible to witness in the Pleistocene. These are more and more prevalent in a world where the bulk of the random variables are socio-informational with low physical limitations. That type of randomness is close to impossible to model since a single observation of large impact, what I called a Black Swan, can destroy the entire inference.

This is not just a logical statement: these happens routinely. In spite of all the mathematical sophistication, we're not getting anything tangible except the knowledge that we do not know much about these "tail" properties. And since our world is more and more dominated by these large deviations that are not possible to model properly, we understand less and less of what's going on.

Quantitative economics, particularly finance, has not been a particularly introspective or empirical science. Wilfredo Pareto had the intuition of type two uncertainty in the social world (Black Swan style) more than 100 years ago with his nonGaussian distribution. Shamefully mainstream economists ignored him because his alternative did not yield "tangible" answers for academic careers. Financial economists built "portfolio theory" that is based on our ability to measure the financial risks. They used the Bell-Shaped (and similar) distribution which proliferated in academia and yielded a handful of Nobel medals.

Everything reposes on probabilities being stationary, that is, not changing after your observe them, assuming what you observed was true. They were all convinced of measuring risks as someone would measure the temperature. It led to series of fiascos, including the blowup of a fund called Long-term Capital Management, co-founded by two Nobel economists. Yet it has not been discredited - they still say "we have nothing better" and teach it in Business Schools. This is what I call the problem of gambling with the wrong dice. Here you have someone who is extremely sophisticated at computing the probabilities on the dice, but guess what? They have no clue what dice they are using and no mental courage to say "I don't know".

Social scientists have suffered from physics envy, since physics has been very successful at creating mathematical models with huge predictive value. In financial economics, particularly in a field called risk management, the predictive value of the models is no different from astrology. Indeed it resembles astrology (without the elegance). They give you an ex-post ad-hoc explanation. After seeing the reactions to the Long-Term Capital Fiasco I became puzzled with the reactions of regulators, central bankers and the financial establishment. They did not seem to learn the real lesson from the event. I then moved my intellectual energy into the more scientifically honest sciences of human nature.

~~

The puzzling question is why is it that we humans don't realize that we don't know anything about the significant brand of randomness? Why don't we realize that we are not that capable of predicting? Why don't we notice the bias that causes us not to realize that we're not learning from our experiences? Why do we still keep going as if we understand them?

A lot of insight that comes from behavioral and cognitive psychology - particularly with the work of Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and, of course, Daniel Gilbert - which shows that we don't have good introspective ability to see and understand what makes us tick. This has implications on why we don't know what makes us happy - affective forecasting - why we don't quite understand how we make our choices, and why we don't learn from our own experiences. We think we're better at forecasting than we actually are. Viciously, this applies particularly in full force to categories of social scientists.

We are not made for type-two randomness. How can we humans take into account the role of uncertainty in our lives without moralizing? As Steve Pinker aptly said, our mind is made for fitness, not for truth - but fitness for a different probabilistic structure. Which tricks work? Here is one: avoid the media. We are not rational enough to be exposed to the press. It is a very dangerous thing, because the probabilistic mapping we get from watching television is entirely different from the actual risks that we exposed to. If you watch a building burning on television, it's going to change your attitude toward that risk regardless of its real actuarial value, no matter your intellectual sophistication. How can we live in a society in the twenty-first, twenty-second, or twenty-third century, while at the same time we have intuitions made for probably a hundred million years ago? How can we accept as a society that we are largely animals in our behavior, and that our understanding of matters is not of any large consequence in the way we act?

Trivially, we can see it in the behavior of people. Many smokers know that what they're doing is dangerous, yet they continue doing it because visibly their cognition is of no big impact on their behavior. There is another bias: they believe that the probabilities that apply to others do not apply to them. Most people who want to look like Greek gods - and a lot of people want to look like Greek gods - know exactly what to do: buy a hundred dollar membership at some gym and show up three times a week.

Most people know exactly what the solutions are to the problem, including the problems of randomness. It is not sufficient. We need to protect ourselves from the modern environment in a far more effectual methods than we have today. Think of the risk of diabetes, which is emerging largely as a maladaptation to the world in which we live. But we have far more acute a problem in our risk-bearing. We scorn what we don't see. We take a lot of risks, but because we're comfortable we don't see them. We have no protocol of behavior, and this is far more dangerous than these physical diseases. The probabilistic blindness we have is an equivalent mental illness, far more severe than diabetes and obesity.

Take an example of this probabilistic maladjustment. Say you are flying to New York City. You sit next to someone on the plane, and she tells you that she knows someone whose first cousin worked with someone who got mugged in Central Park in 1983. That information is going to override any form of statistical data that you will acquire about the crime rate in New York City. This is how we are. We're not made to absorb abstract information. The first step is to make ourselves aware of it. But so far we don't have a second step. Should newspapers and television sets come with a warning label?

We have vital research in risk-bearing, done by people like Danny Kahneman Christopher Hsee, and Paul Slovic. The availability heuristic tells you that your perception of a risk is going to be proportional to how salient the event comes to your mind. It can come in two ways, either because it compressed a vivid image, or because it's going to elicit an emotional reaction in you. The latter is called the affect heuristic, recent developed as the "risk as feeling" theory. We observe it in trading all the time. Basically you only worry about what you know, and typically once you know about something the damage is done.

~~

I'm an activist and a proselyte for Edge as a platform for a new scientific-minded public intellectual dealing with social and historical events - in replacement to the "fooled by randomness" historian and the babbling journalistic public intellectual. There are two types of people, people worthy of respect who try to resist explaining things, and people who cannot resist explaining things. So we have a left column and a right column. In the left column, that of the people who take their knowledge too seriously, you first have historians: "This was caused by that. Why? Because two events coincided. The president came and suddenly we had prosperity, and hence, maybe having a tall president is something good for the economy." You can always find explanations.

The second one is a journalist. On the day when Saddam was caught, the bond market went up in the morning, and it went down in the afternoon. So here we had two headlines - "Bond Market Up on Saddam News", and in the afternoon, "Bond Market Down on Saddam News" - and then they had in both cases very convincing explanations of the moves. Basically if you can explain one thing and its opposite using the same data you don't have an explanation. It takes a lot of courage to keep silent.

One aspect of this left-column bias is well-known by empirical psychologists called the Belief in the Law of Small Numbers - how we tend to overestimate how much data we have to reach a conclusion. It might have been an optimal strategy in some simpler environment. You don't need to make sure that this is a tiger before your run for your life. If you see something that vaguely resembles a tiger, you run; it's far more efficient to overestimate the odds.

People in the humanities tend to compound our biases - they do not understand the basic concept of sampling error. You also have the businesspeople and their servant economists. Gerd Gigerenzer, paraphrasing George Orwell, has noted that every human being needs to learn to read, to write, and to understand statistical significance. He gave examples showing that the third step has proven so much more difficult than the first two. This is where understanding the significance of events is something that cannot be done without the rigor of scientific skepticism.

On the right side you have Montaigne, worthy of respect because he's intensely introspective, with the courage of resisting his own knowledge. That was before everything got wrecked with the Cartesian world, the quest for certainties, and encouraging people to explain. Add Hume, Popper, Hayek, Keynes, Peirce. In that category you also have the physicists and the scientists in the empirical world. Why? It's not because they don't have human biases, but because you have this huge infrastructure above them that prevents them from saying something that they cannot back up empirically. You also have many skeptical traders (or inverse-traders) in the right column, those who are aware of our inability to predict markets. We do not speculate but take advantage of imbalances and order-flow. We operate from a base of natural skepticism.

I want to aggressively promote this skeptical brand of probabilistic thinking into public intellectual life. This is beyond an intellectual luxury. Watching recent events and the politicians and journalists (of all persuasions) reacting to them, I am truly scared to live in this society.


Response by Stewart Brand

Taleb seems oddly innocent of "power law" behavior, in which Black Swans hold a much different position than "outlier", "tail", et cetera - all Bell Curve denotations. In power law phenomena, nothing is far from typical, because nothing whatever is typical.

The violence/incident of terrorist incidents can be charted on a power law curve, not a Bell curve.

(Stewart Brand is cofounder and co-chairman of The Long Now Foundation and author of How Buildings Learn (Penguin, 1995), and The Clock of the Long Now (Basic Books, 2000).


Reply to Stewart Brand by Nassim Taleb

I agree that, if we used the right distribution, nothing would be a Black Swan, but the inference about "power laws" is misguided, and I would like to go a little deeper into the discussion. Also, a "power law" is another name for what I referred to as Pareto's distribution in my discussion.

Black Swans come from an unexpected outcome conditional on the framework of analysis used, meaning one may be using the "wrong distribution". It is an epistemological problem. The right distribution can be: (a) Any distribution for which we may not have had a sufficient sample to know the parameters (this can easily apply to some members of the Gaussian family, such as a Poisson process); (b) A type-two distribution, one for which there are no defined properties or "typical deviations". One brand of these was first proposed by Wilfredo Pareto with his power law. He made us conscious of such intractability, but we should be warned against blindly using his distribution to define intractable processes: most power laws can deliver a "typical" deviation (and are not type-two); only a few power laws, those with a specific parametrization (where the power exponent is lower than two), belong to "wild" uncertainty.

Those who specialise in the statistical properties of large deviations and in their epistemology find it preferable to avoid the casual (and now journalistic) designation "power law" to characterize all manner of fat-tailed processes, particularly those for which we do not have ample sample size. We are experiencing enormous difficulties characterizing those, let alone calibrating them from nonphysical processes. The use of "power laws" for historical events (particularly terrorism) is a gross simplification: history is far more difficult to characterize than a collection of sandpiles; historical knowledge is not verifiable by experiments. As a skeptical empiricist I find it is far preferable to just plead ignorance in these situations and say "I don't know the distribution".

_____

Edge Foundation, Inc
John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
contact: editor@edge.org
Copyright © 2004 by Edge Foundation, Inc
All Rights Reserved.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/taleb04/taleb_indexx.html


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

Failure Beyond Finance

Clusterfuck Nation

by Jim Kunstler

Comment on current events by the author of
The Long Emergency (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005)

www.kunstler.com (December 17 2007)


Events are driving us now, not personalities or even policies. Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson, and the other characters in the headlines might pretend that they are managing things, but the truth is that problems in the financial sector have spun wildly out of control. The wheels are coming off and we are in that long sickening moment of sideways sliding motion when no attempt at steering will avail to avoid the crash. That it is happening at the very height of the Christmas season, when events have previously been controllable - the season of manufactured Santa Claus rallies and $50 million bonuses - shows how perilous the situation is.

The reason the financial sector is crashing is really pretty simple: it created too many fraudulent securities. What has been conspicuously absent so far is any sense of accountability for what may go down as history's greatest swindle. It's really impossible to imagine that a bunch of low-ranking worker bees in the banking hives spun out all these bundles of collateralized debt obligations, mortgage-backed securities, and similar trash on their own without the say-so of their bosses - a group that includes the current Secretary of the Treasury, Mr Paulson, formerly CEO of the Goldman Sachs organization. And, of course, the questions naturally follow: what about those in charge of the ratings agencies that awarded AAA status to high-risk junk investments; and where were the banking regulators when outfits like Countrywide Financial, Washington Mutual, and Ditech were handing out miracle mortgages to borrowers without normal qualifications; and where was the Securities and Exchange Commission when the wholesale trade in creatively-engineered debt instruments ramped up to high volume, and what was the board of directors at Merrill Lynch thinking when it allowed disgraced CEO Stan O'Neal to back a truck up to the company loading dock and fill it up with $160 million in bonus and termination payments after O'Neal presided over at least $8 billion in losses?

What we're also seeing is a crisis of authority on top of a crisis of capital, and it will probably lead to a crisis of legitimacy - by which I mean a catastrophic loss of faith that this society can govern itself at any level. Leadership across the board has failed, in government, in business, in what used to be called the press, and in education. Leadership in every sector went along with the program, marveling stupidly at their society's ability to get something for nothing.

The general public did not perform any more honorably - due to whatever failure of civic norms they operate within - and indeed the nation as a whole may deserve all the suffering it faces. But however bad the general public's behavior, or dark their fate, a failure of civic norms is ultimately a failure of leadership, which is about clearly stating the boundaries and terms of behavior. When anything goes, nothing matters. Since that was our leaders' attitude, the public did what it naturally does: it follows the example set by leadership.

We haven't begun to see where all this will lead yet. Since what is happening is basically the evaporation of trillions of dollars in supposed wealth. At the very least we're likely to see an impoverished nation very soon short of money to buy necessities. Historically this is known as a ruinous deflation. The last time America went through such an experience was the Great Depression of the 1930s. Like this situation, it came at the end of an extraordinary expansion of credit - loans largely made in that day for the purchase of stock "on margin".

One difference between then and now is that in 1929 a relative small minority of Americans were involved in stock purchases. Today, a relative large number of ordinary citizens own overpriced houses bought using extraordinarily risky loans, and a large number of institutions such as pension funds, banks, hedge funds, and money markets own fraudulent securities based on these house loans, worth a fraction of their face value. Some other differences this time around: in the background is a "real" economy of depleting natural resources (oil, soils, aquifers, et cetera) and the systematic disassembly of an industrial manufacturing infrastructure. In the 1930s, many people could return to family farms and get by, even with little money. Today there are far fewer family farms.

The nation is acting just now like a crowd of bystanders watching a car wreck that has nothing to do with them - as though they were just occupying the Nascar grandstand on a particularly bad day. They'll discover soon that it's their own society that's hit the wall out there on the track. It raises the question, under the circumstances, as towhether the next presidential election will have any legitimacy.

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/


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

Toxic Inaction

Why poisonous, unregulated chemicals end up in our blood

by Mark Schapiro

Harper's Magazine (October 2007)


In the late 1990s, citizens of several European countries learned from newspaper reports that their infants were constantly being exposed to a host of toxic chemicals. Babies were sleeping in pajamas treated with cancer-causing flame retardants; they were sucking on bottles laced with plastic additives believed to alter hormones; their diapers were glued together with nerve-damaging toxins normally used to kill algae on the hulls of ships. When European health officials tried to look into the matter, they were confounded by how little they actually knew about these and other potentially hazardous chemicals. Regulators discovered that they had no way of assessing the dangers of long-term exposure to everyday products. Some manufacturers of baby goods did not even know what was in their own products, since chemical producers were under no obligation to tell them. Such data, if it existed at all, was secreted away in the vaults of chemical companies and had never been submitted to any government authority.

In the years since those news reports, the nascent science of bio-monitoring has provided further insight into how the industrial chemicals that are in clothes, food packaging, cosmetics, toys, electronics, and just about every modern convenience are actually lodging in the human body. Greenpeace UK released a study in 2005 that found numerous toxic chemicals in the umbilical-cord blood of European infants. That same year, World Wildlife Fund International tested the blood of three generations of women from twelve European countries. The largest number of chemicals - sixty-three - was found in the group of grandmothers. Given the number of years they had had to accumulate exposure, this result was perhaps not surprising. But the next-highest level was among their grandchildren, aged twelve to twenty-eight, who in their short lifetimes had amassed fifty-nine different toxic chemicals. The blood of a nineteen-year-old Italian, who later sent me her test results, included brominated flame retardants, which are potential liver, thyroid, and neurological toxins that are used to coat many electronics; the pesticides DDT and lindane, the latter of which is suspected of contributing to breast and other cancers; perfluorinated chemicals, known carcinogens that are used as stain- and water-repellents on clothing, furniture, and non-stick cookware; and artificial musk aromas, found in soaps and perfumes, that scientists claim can reduce the body's ability to expel other toxins.

Bio-monitoring tests in the United States have revealed the same dangerous chemicals making their way into the blood of Americans. In 2005, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention completed screening for the presence of 148 toxic chemicals in the blood of a broad cross section of Americans; it found that the vast majority of subjects harbored almost all the toxins. In the same year, the CDC's National Survey on Family Growth concluded that rates of infertility were rising for women under the age of twenty-five, a spike many scientists attribute, at least in part, to routine exposure to toxic chemicals. The Environmental Working Group conducted tests on the umbilical cords often newborns in 2006 and discovered that cancer-causing, endocrine-disrupting, and gene-mutating chemicals had passed from the mothers to their fetuses through the placenta.

Up until the 1970s, no country had imposed any meaningful oversight of the tens of thousands of chemicals that had entered the marketplace since World War II. Then, in 1976, the US Congress passed the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), which granted the government the authority to track industrial chemicals and to place restrictions on any that proved harmful to humans or the environment. Because the United States was the world's preeminent economic power, other major chemical producers-Germany, France, and Britain-soon brought their national regulations into line with TSCA so as not to lose the US market. Shortly thereafter, Japan and other countries hoping to conduct trade with the West also had to adopt the central principles of the law as their own. Thus, America set the rules for chemical regulation across the globe.

But TSCA came with an enormous loophole, a caveat leveraged into it by the powerful chemical industry: every chemical already on the market before 1979 was exempted from the law's primary screening requirements. Three decades after TSCA came into being, 95 percent of all chemicals in circulation have never undergone any testing for toxicity or their impact on the environment. The extent to which TSCA has failed to regulate hazardous substances is now evident in the bio-monitoring results in Europe and America.

Europeans have recently decided to do something about all the untested chemicals that are ending up in their blood. "The assumption among Americans is, 'If it's on the market, it's okay'", explained Robert Donkers, an EU official who was asked to review Europe's regulatory laws after the baby-product scare. "That fantasy is gone in Europe". Donkers's efforts were the first steps in what became, seven years later, a new EU chemical regulation called REACH - Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals. REACH amounts to a revolution in how chemicals are managed, and in how production decisions around the world will be made from now on. Regulations set by the most powerful countries have quickly become, through trade, the international standard. And the European Union, with a market of 480 million people stretching across twenty-seven countries, is now significantly larger than the United States in both population and wealth; Europe's gross national product surged past that of the United States in 2005, and the gap increased when two more countries joined the EU earlier this year. The EU is now the most significant trading partner for every continent except Australia. The ripple effects from this shift in economic power have been one of the great untold stories of the new century.

Indeed, Europe is now compelling other nations' manufacturers to conform to regulations that are far more protective of people's health than those in the United States. Europe has emerged not only as the world's leading economic power but also as one of its moral leaders. Those roles were once filled by the United States.


When TSCA took effect in the late 1970s, the United States was seen as a pioneer of health and environmental regulation. The Environmental Protection Agency had been established only a few years before, and the government had recently set standards for fuel economy, hazardous-waste disposal, and many other factors affecting the country's air and water quality. Currently, some 42 billion pounds of chemicals are produced in or brought to America each day, but because of TSCA exemptions, fewer than 200 of all the chemicals on the market have ever undergone any serious risk assessments. Among the 62,000 chemicals the act excused from testing or review were thousands of highly toxic substances, such as ethyl benzene, a widely used industrial solvent suspected of being a potent neurotoxin; whole families of synthetic plastics that are potential carcinogens and endocrine disrupters; and numerous other chemicals for which there was little or no information.

The EPA is actually allowed to place restrictions on the chemicals grandfathered onto the market if the substances present an "unreasonable risk to human health". In order to demonstrate this risk, however, the agency must surmount tremendous legal and administrative obstacles. The EPA is required to weigh the "costs to industry" of any regulation, and it is obliged to impose restrictions that are the "least burdensome" to chemical manufacturers. According to a 2005 Government Accountability Office analysis, the EPA relies too heavily on industry test data when making safety assessments and allows companies to keep critical data from the public through "indiscriminate" claims that information is proprietary. Even for those few new chemicals brought to market after TSCA, the screening record is not reassuring. Ninety days before commercial-scale production of a chemical begins, manufacturers are required to provide the EPA with all exposure and toxicity data. Theoretically, this information enables the agency to determine whether regulatory action is warranted before chemicals hit the market. But according to the EPA's own figures, 85 percent of the notifications submitted contain no health data.

One result of this industry-friendly screening is that the EPA has banned only five chemicals since its inception in 1970. For a brief time the banned list included a sixth substance: asbestos. In 1989, the EPA prohibited nearly all uses of asbestos, which it classified as a "known carcinogen". The chemical industry challenged the agency, however, and in 1990 a federal court vacated the ban, asserting that the EPA had neither met TSCA's requirement that the conclusive dangers of the chemical should exceed its perceived usefulness nor demonstrated that the ban was the "least burdensome alternative" for eliminating the "unreasonable risk" of exposure. The EPA has not acted to ban a chemical since that decision, even though other countries have outlawed asbestos and numerous toxins that are still in use in the United States. (Since 2004, the EU has banned entire categories of hazardous chemicals from use in cosmetics, toys, electronics, and other consumer goods.) By making it easier to hang on to old chemicals than to develop new ones, TSCA provides no incentive for manufacturers to create less toxic alternatives. The absence of even minimal toxicity data insulates the industry from the normal supply-demand dynamic of the market; consumers, in other words, have no means of expressing their potential preference for a less toxic substitute.

Chemical companies have spent lavishly to preserve these lax standards. Since 1996, the industry has contributed $47 million to federal election campaigns, and it pays about $30 million each year to lobbyists in Washington. Lynn Goldman, who served as assistant administrator for toxic substances at the EPA from 1993 to 1998, told me that she and her colleagues knew TSCA was largely ineffectual. "There were thousands of chemicals out there, and we didn't know what they were. We weren't able to get the data, weren't able to assess the risks, nothing." Goldman recalls a party held in Washington to commemorate TSCA's twentieth anniversary. "Someone from the chemical industry got up to salute TSCA and said, 'This is the perfect statute. I wish every law could be like TSCA.'"


The primary target of Europe's new chemical regulation is the more than 60,000 compounds TSCA allowed to stay on the market without testing. Under REACH, these chemicals will have to be registered, evaluated for toxicity, and authorized before being permitted to remain in use. Fifteen hundred chemicals are expected to be placed on a 2008 list of "substances of very high concern". These toxins, which are known to cause cancer, alter genes, and affect fertility, will be the first to be removed from the market unless producers are able to prove that they can be "adequately controlled". In addition to assessing chemicals in their raw form, REACH also extends to the endless array of consumer goods that utilize these compounds; thus, tens of thousands of "downstream users", from construction companies to tennis-shoe manufacturers and fashion houses, will be forced to find out and report what chemicals are in their products and what effects they have on human health and the environment.

By the end of 2008, the first sets of risk data are to be submitted to the EU. Manufacturers will then have ten more years to complete what amounts to a scientific cataloguing of the chemical makeup of the global economy. Whereas US regulators are forced to find scientifically improbable definitive evidence of toxic exposure before acting, REACH acts on the basis of precaution. European authorities consider the inherent toxicity of a substance and, based on an accumulation of evidence, determine whether its potential to cause harm is great enough to remove it from circulation. Unlike TSCA, REACH places the burden of proof on manufacturers, who must demonstrate that their chemicals can be used safely. The law also proposes to drastically limit the amount of health-related data that companies can claim as proprietary.

Critics of stricter chemical regulations have long contended that the price of compliance would be far too steep. But the EU estimated that REACH would cost European chemical manufacturers about $4 billion over fourteen years - a figure that amounts to less than one percent of their combined yearly revenue. The EU further calculated that these expenses would be repaid many times over by the resulting health benefits. According to their figures, REACH would prevent some 4,500 occupational cancer cases each year and reduce European health-care costs from ailments related to chemical exposure by $69 billion over the next three decades. Moreover, by establishing what will be the first open, actually free market in chemicals, in which informed consumers will be able to make decisions as to what risks they are willing to take, REACH promotes new research into the development of safer chemicals. Chemists have already come up with substitutes for some of the most problematic toxic chemicals on the market, and the EU estimates that its environmental initiatives have spawned billions of dollars in "green" industries and technologies.

US companies could be put at a serious competitive disadvantage if they do not acknowledge the changes taking place across the Atlantic. Americans are already losing ground to Europeans in the chemical business, having slipped in the past decade from a trade surplus with European manufacturers to a more than $28 billion deficit. That deficit promises to increase as environmentally aware consumers are given the opportunity to choose between European goods with chemicals that have undergone toxicity screening and American goods with unscreened chemicals. Because American companies interested in exporting to the EU will also have to supply toxicity data to the European authorities, REACH does present opportunities for US consumers. Not only will these chemicals be subject to their first-ever health-and environmental-impact review but the findings will then be available on the European Chemical Agency's website. At that point, US consumers may no longer choose to use untested American goods.


The American public, along with the American media, has so far been mostly oblivious to the new chemical regulations coming out of Europe. The Bush Administration and US manufacturers, however, have been fixated on it for years. REACH is far more than just another foreign ban of a specific chemical with which US industry will have to contend; it strikes at the fundamental belief that the United States decides what can and cannot be contained in the goods sold all over the world. So as REACH was being debated in the European Parliament from 2003 to 2006, the US government and the nation's industries teamed up to undertake an unprecedented international lobbying effort to kill or radically weaken the proposal.

The assault came from an assortment of government and industry offices. A memo that circulated at the State Department's Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs denounced REACH as too "costly, burdensome, and complex" for industry to follow. If chemicals were put through the rigors of review, a Commerce Department brief warned, "hundreds of thousands of Americans could be thrown out of their jobs". US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick submitted a protest to the World Trade Organization asserting that REACH amounted to a "non-tariff" barrier to foreign exporters. A delegation of State Department officials joined two Dow Chemical executives in Athens to lobby the Greeks, who then held the presidency of the European Union. Colin Powell himself sent out a seven-page cable to US embassies throughout the world claiming that REACH "could present obstacles to trade" and cost American chemical producers tens of billions of dollars in lost exports. At the same time, Washington sent emissaries to such new EU members as Hungary, Poland, Estonia, and the Czech Republic - formerly Communist countries where environmental consciousness was far less developed than in Western Europe - in an effort to peel off support within the EU by claiming that REACH would hurt European firms competing in foreign markets. The State Department also recruited a coalition of allies to oppose REACH from countries heavily reliant on exports; pleas went out to Brazil, India, Japan, Malaysia, South Africa, and others to develop a "coordinated outreach" strategy among "EU trading partners". In EU parliamentary hearings on REACH that I attended, I was able to identity lobbyists not only for the US and European chemical industries but also for such downstream chemical users as cement, automobile, textile, and pharmaceutical companies. The US lobbying effort amounted to an historic intrusion into European affairs. Robert Donkers, who in 2003 was stationed in the United States to explain REACH to Americans, invited me to consider the reverse scenario: European officials descending on Washington to lobby against a bill being considered in Congress. "It wouldn't be tolerated", he said. "We wouldn't last ten minutes!"

By early 2006, REACH had already undergone a rewrite by the European Commission and had passed its first reading in the parliament. Nearly a thousand amendments had been voted on and consolidated. Environmentalists in Europe felt the standards had already been weakened in significant ways. Priority had been put on "high-volume chemicals" produced in excess of a thousand tons a year, with diminishing data requirements as the volume declined; broad exemptions were issued for certain plastics. But REACH still retained its core principles: that thousands of existing chemicals would be reviewed for their toxicity, that the data from those reviews would be made public, and that responsibility for demonstrating a chemical's safety would rest with the manufacturers.

In Washington, however, President Bush signaled that the struggle was far from over. He sent C Boyden Gray to Brussels in February as the new US ambassador to the EU. A veteran Republican operative and an heir to the R J Reynolds tobacco fortune, Gray had spent a career in and out of government rewriting the rules of environmental oversight to reduce the burden on business. As general counsel to the first President Bush, he helped transform how the EPA and other federal agencies were managed so that cost-benefit analyses would be given precedence over risk-based decisions. "This is the beast we have confined and tamed", he told me, referring to his success in limiting US regulatory laws.

One of Gray's first public undertakings as ambassador began at AmCham EU, an affiliate of the US Chamber of Commerce in Brussels. AmCham EU lobbies the EU on behalf of 140 US companies, including Apple, Boeing, Dow, DuPont, General Motors, and McDonald's. Environmental policies are one of their top concerns. In June 2006, Gray orchestrated a joint press release, from the United States and twelve other countries, that objected to REACH'S hazard-based system for assessing risks and called for weakening its registration requirements. That press release, it turns out, was written at the offices of AmCham EU and sent from the US Mission in Brussels. One morning that June, I received a leaked copy of the original draft, which, thanks to Microsoft tracking software, included the editorial changes that were written into the document as it made its way through various readers. Where AmCham EU's address had once been now ran the imprimatur of the United States Mission to the European Union. This edit and others offered a rare glimpse into the routine merging of the US government with American corporations. When US Representative Henry Waxman conducted an investigation into the Bush Administration's efforts to undermine REACH, he unearthed dozens of pages of diplomatic cable traffic showing how the government had coordinated its efforts with those of industry. Talking points, lobbying junkets, statistics (many of them proven inaccurate) had been shared. Instead of considering these reforms on their merits, or revising its own failed regulations, our government demonstrated once again that it puts business interests ahead of the safety of its own - and the world's - citizens.


The European Parliament finally voted to approve REACH on December 13 2006. By February, the US Department of Commerce, which had lobbied so vigorously against the proposed regulation, was hosting a seminar in Charlotte, North Carolina, to explain to companies doing business in Europe how to comply with the Law intended to protect Europeans. It was the first of a series of sessions to be held with American businesses across the country. In the same month, representatives from the Pentagon, defense contractors, US scientists, and California state officials met in Monterey to discuss the effects REACH would have on military hardware being used on US bases in Europe. Several major American electronics and cosmetics companies are already reformulating their products to meet the new EU standards. And DuPont, Dow, and other large US chemical manufacturers are busy preparing toxicity data to submit to the EU. In many instances, smaller American chemical companies and most downstream manufacturers that utilize chemicals will have to purchase this data from the big corporations, which now stand to profit from the REACH strictures.

Many American states, tired of waiting for direction from Washington, are new looking to Brussels for ideas on environmental reform. California, Massachusetts, and New York have begun exploring the possibility of implementing elements of REACH in their state regulations; Maine and Washington have cited Europe's precedent in their efforts to ban particular chemicals, such as those poly-brominated flame retardants found in children's sleepwear. Elsewhere in the world, governments have worked to bring their own policies into line with REACH. The Chinese Ministry of Commerce had REACH translated into Mandarin within days of its passage. European consultants also traveled to China to show industry and government officials there what exporters will have to do to abide by the chemical regulations. The Europeans were willing to aid their competitors in China, with whom they have a significant trade deficit, because just about anything made in Chinese factories can end up in the hands of Europeans. To protect its population, Europe is working backward, toward the potential sources of future chemical contamination. European consultants also fanned out to Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, South Korea, Thailand, and other major players in the world economy. And in the upcoming year, Robert Donkers, who had long tried to forewarn American businesses of this tectonic shift in environmental influence, is expected to be transferred to India, where he will be advising that up-and-coming economic powerhouse.

The European Union is demanding that its industries take responsibility for the collateral health damages that its products may cause, and it is doing so with innovations that are leading the world. In the process, American consumers are being put in a position that would have been unimaginable as little as a decade ago. Shortly after the EPA was founded, the United States imposed domestic restrictions on some of the most dangerous pesticides and other chemicals, and US companies responded by exporting millions of pounds of these toxins to Third World countries, where such regulations didn't exist. The irony is that our nation's steady retreat from environmental leadership means it may soon become a dumping ground for chemicals deemed too hazardous by more progressive countries. Meanwhile, Americans may also be the incidental beneficiaries of protective standards created by the government of a foreign country in which they have no say. In recent years the United States has opposed a multitude of environmental and human-rights initiatives that have gained international legitimacy without its participation. Indeed, this country is no longer where it likes to imagine itself to be - at the axis of influence around which the rest of the world revolves.

_____

Mark Schapiro is the editorial director of the Center for Investigative Reporting. His new book, Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Produces and What's at Stake for American Power, was published last month by Chelsea Green.


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

Great and Little Satan Free to Aggress and Ethnically Cleanse

Their Targets Have No Right of Self Defense ...

... or Any Other Right Questioned by the Satans {0}

by Edward Herman

ZNet Commentary (December 16 2007)


In the discussions about Iran among the leaders in the "international community", their expressed dire fears about Iran and its nuclear program never cause them to raise any questions about Israel's nuclear program, even though it is well known that Israel not only has a "program" but has several hundred nuclear weapons, built in secret but with US, French, and British aid, and of course done outside the authority of the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty (NPT) designed to prevent proliferation. Israel's acquisition of this arsenal is obviously disturbing to its Arab neighbors, who are placed at a great military disadvantage by this violation of NPT principles - and equity - accepted and even facilitated by Israel's Western allies. To see those Western allies greatly agitated over the possibility that Iran might have a nuclear program that at some future date would allow it to produce such weapons, while taking Israel's arsenal as a given not even worthy of mention, reflects a gross political double standard that is both racist and illustrative of that famous "clash of civilizations", with the clash coming from Western initiatives, actions and threats.


Gates and the Iranian Versus Israeli Threat

While this double standard is not even discussible in the Western mainstream it is considered a major issue and is debated in the Arab world. Thus, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates was confronted with the double standard at a conference in Bahrain organized by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, where Gates was urging the Arab states to press Iran to halt any nuclear activities. Gates was asked by Bahraini Minister of Labor Majeed al-Alawi whether Gates thought "the Zionist (Israeli) nuclear weapon is a threat to the region". Gates paused, and answered tersely: "No, I do not". AP reports that "Asked if US acceptance of that was a double standard in light of Washington's pressure on Iran, Gates again said 'no', and described the government in Jerusalem as more responsible than the one in Tehran. 'I think Israel is not training terrorists to subvert its neighbors. It has not shipped weapons into a place like Iraq to kill thousands of innocent civilians covertly', said Gates. 'So I think that there are significant differences in terms of both the history and the behavior of the Iranian and Israeli governments'." {1} This reportedly elicited a great deal of laughter among the Arab representatives present, but both the laughter and the issue at stake are outside the orbit of accepted thought in the West.

Gates's response is a mixture of ideology, lies, and evasion of information relevant to evaluating Israel's role and nuclear program. Even if Gates was correct in these claims he fails to address the fact that Israel's acquisition of nuclear weapons was a major violation of non-proliferation principles, and the inequality that it represents threatens other Arab states, apart from Iran. What is "responsible"? Is it responsible to invade one's neighbors in violation of the UN Charter, as Israel has done repeatedly in Lebanon? Was dropping a million cluster bombs on the Lebanon countryside in the last few days before the end of the 2006 war "responsible" behavior? Is systematically violating the Fourth Geneva Convention on the behavior of an occupying power and ignoring the International Court decision on the illegality of the apartheid wall responsible? {2} Is starving and denying medical aid to the civilian population of Gaza responsible? (The International Red Cross reports that "The Palestinian Territories face a deep human crisis, where millions of people are denied their human dignity. Not once in a while, but every day." {3} Isn't training an army to attack one's neighbors in violation of the UN Charter even worse than "training terrorists to subvert its neighbors?" Wasn't Israel's organization and support of a South Lebanese Army in Lebanon for many years a support of cross-border terrorism? Given the regular Israeli invasions of Lebanon, isn't any Iranian support of Hezbollah support of a resistance against aggression and state terrorism? Isn't the US provision of arms to Israel support of both state terrorism and massive ethnic cleansing? Hasn't the United States shipped weapons to Iraq that have been used to kill far more civilians than can possibly be attributed to Iran? Did the United States or Iran destroy Falluja?

The point is that Gates is speaking for an aggressor nation that has attacked three countries in the last decade, not in self defense, but in acts of aggression clearly violating the UN Charter and constituting the "supreme international crime". Little Satan is the partner-in-crime of the Great Satan, who protects it from any constraint on its crimes and allows it to violate international law, ignore International Court and UN rulings, and ethnically cleanse Palestinians, with complete impunity. Gates's answer on Israel's "responsibility" is laughable nonsense but is not even discussible in the brainwashed and cowed West. The Satans rule and their leaders can get away with anything, because in Great Satan's sphere of influence it is taken as a premise by leaders and elites that the Satans are good and/or must be accommodated and that their targets are - or must be taken as - genuine threats. Great Satan may have lied egregiously in justifying his last major invasion (Iraq), and he may have killed a million civilians and destroyed that target, but as he pushes for attacking his next victim the international community rushes to Satan's aid, to prevent that target from exercising its rights under the NPT that Satan says it should not have! Satan's aggressions and interventions may have destabilized the Middle East, with the help and collaboration of Little Satan, but he can accuse Iran of destabilizing the area, and this becomes the working "truth" in the US media and international community.

After the United States overthrew the democratic government of Iran by a coup in 1953 and installed the Shah of Iran, it then supported and helped refine a police state that was notorious for its torture chambers. But this regime was "responsible" enough for the United States to actually urge it to go nuclear, and the United States and its allies (and their private firms supplying nuclear materials) jumped in to help, never bothered by the Shah's 1974 claim that he would be producing nuclear weapons "without a doubt and sooner than the world thinks". {4} The successor Islamic-dominated state posed no threat to US "national security", but it did displace a puppet regime that helped the United States police its Middle East sphere of influence. It was certainly not more repressive than the Shah's Iran, nor did it intervene beyond its borders more than did the Shah's regime. But it was not a US client and it was not in US service - hence it became by political definition "irresponsible", and the United States and the "responsible" Israel both encouraged and supported the (at-that-time) "responsible" Saddam Hussein to attack Iran in the 1980s in a bloody war of attrition.

The non-client Iran has been a US target essentially since the 1979 ouster of the Shah and takeover by Ayatollah Khomeini and his associates, with "regime change" the oft-admitted objective. During the last half dozen years the Iran leadership has tried on several occasions to reach an accord with the United States, but each effort has been rejected, usually by a simple refusal to respond to Iranian overtures. {5} Iran did suspend its uranium enrichment program in an agreement with the EU-3 (Britain, France, and Germany) on October 21 2003, and on December 18 2003 signed an Additional Protocal with the IAEA allowing even more intensive inspections. What Iran received in return was their promise (not Washington's) to provide some unreported security assurances. But with the United States refusing to provide any such assurances or to make any concessions to Iran, putting ever more pressure on the IAEA to search for Iran violations, and threatening a military attack, Iran returned to its enrichment program in early 2006. At that point, the United States became "reasonable" and expressed a willingness to negotiate, but only on condition that Iran once again suspends enrichment. The United States insists on suspension first, talks later, at which Iran now balks given the unremitting US hostility and the unreasonableness of asking Iran to abandon a major bargaining chip before the problematic bargaining.

It should be understood that under the NPT, Iran has the legal right to research and develop nuclear energy for peaceful (that is, non-military) purposes. But the United States opposes this, allegedly on the grounds that it is a step toward nuclear weapons. I am not alone in believing that the United States is using this gambit, in which Iran would have to prove a negative, not out of any fear of an Iranian nuclear arsenal but to clear the ground for war. In order to get the international community to go along with its demand for action against Iran, and justification for a military attack, the United States has long claimed that Iran is definitely seeking nuclear arms. Although this is a claim by a country that has lied as a matter of course on such issues, and IAEA inspections have never uncovered any proof, the United States has been able to mobilize the IAEA and Security Council to focus on the Iran "threat" and impose sanctions on Iran. The fact that the United States played this same game, based on fabricated claims, in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that Iran has submitted itself to numerous and uniquely intensive IAEA inspections that have never found any evidence of weapons intent. It doesn't matter that both the United States and Israel are threatening to attack Iran, itself a violation of the UN Charter, and that both have committed acts of aggression in the Middle East and continue massive law violations in Palestine as well as Iraq.

Israeli analyst Martin Van Creveld has said that, given that Israel and the United States both have nuclear weapons and both are threatening Iran, Iran's leaders would be "crazy" not to seek nuclear arms as a matter of self defense. Van Creveld doesn't understand. Only the Great Satan and his clients have a "security" problem and a right to take action to protect that security (including the right of preemptive attack on an alleged threatening adversary). The world is very conscious of the fact that a big concern at the recent Annapolis Conference was Israel's "security", but no mention was made there of Palestinian security. Similarly, Iran's threat to Israel is a widespread concern, mentioned recently by French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and covered extensively in the Western mainstream media, but that the nuclear-armed Israel poses a threat to Iran and that Iran has a right to defend itself against such a threat is off the Western agenda. Once declared targets by the Great Satan or one of its clients, countries like Iran have no right of self-defense. In Iran's case, Satan has ruled, and the world's leaders and elites therefore genuflect and denounce the new target and victim.


The NIE Blow to the Hawks

Satan's accusations and its buildup to a war with Iran have taken a surprising hit with the recent disclosure of an National Intelligence Estimate ("NIE") report that claims that Iran has not had an operative nuclear weapons program since 2003. {6} The report asserts that Iran's nuclear weapons program was halted in the fall of 2003, and that its uranium conversion and enrichment activities were "voluntarily suspended" in October 2003. These activities were begun again in early 2006, but the NIE report states "with moderate confidence that Tehran has not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007", and "with high confidence that Iran will not be technically capable of producing and reprocessing enough plutonium for a weapon before about 2015". It even says that "This NIE does not assume that Iran intends to acquire nuclear weapons". As former CIA analyst Ray McGovern points out, "This, of course, pulls out the rug from under Cheney's claim of a 'fairly robust new nuclear program' in Iran, and President Bush's inaccurate assertion that Iranian leaders have even admitted they are developing nuclear weapons. Apparently, intelligence community analysts are no longer required to produce the faith-based intelligence that brought us the October 1 2002 NIE 'Iraq's Continuing Program for Weapons of Mass Destruction' - the worst in the history of US intelligence". {7}

The claim of an imminent threat has thus collapsed, and the hawks are given solace only by the NIE claim that Iran had an active nuclear weapons program prior to its suspension in 2003. This claim, vigorously denied by the Iranians, is apparently based on alleged intercepted Iranian phone messages and the testimony of an Iranian defector. {8} It calls for caution. Such evidence in the pre-Iraq war buildup turned out to be selective, forged, and in the case of defectors, fabricated (recall Curveball, the Iraq defector who brought the good news of Saddam's WMD); and it flies in the face of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's issuance of a religious ruling in 2003 (a Fatwah) stating that Islam forbids the building or stockpiling of nuclear weapons. Reese Erlich says that "Before dismissing such a ruling as propaganda, it's worth noting that similar religious reasoning stopped Iran from using chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq War, despite Saddam Hussein's numerous chemical assaults against Iranian troops and civilians". {9}

Doesn't the fact that Iran's uranium conversion and enrichment program was carried out covertly in the earlier years make a weapons project likely? Not necessarily, because Iran knew that the United States would object strenuously even to a non-weapons oriented program, as it has been doing with Iran's program that has been out in the open for several years. How easy it is to make that covert action a sinister proof of a weapons program, that of course is not sinister if the United States, Israel or Pakistan do it!

The current NIE shocker can be explained by the fact that the intelligence community resents the extent to which the Bush administration has twisted arms and fixed evidence in the process of making it conformable to predetermined policy, with the intelligence community discredited for having allowed itself to be coerced into supporting disinformation on Iraq. The NIE authors are also bolstered by the fact that significant numbers of powerful military personnel are against going to war with Iran, including Admiral William Fallon, the commander of US forces in the Middle East. The authors have therefore put up a fight for minimal truth, and although their findings were evidently delayed many months by opposition from the Cheney-Bush war faction, they could not be stopped, partly because some of them were clearly prepared to go public even at the cost of job loss.

The rightwing and neocons are fighting back furiously, and are strongly supported by Israel, whose leaders have been trying as hard as they could to get the United States into a war with Iran. They and their political agents and allies, including Democrats like Jane Harman {9], have been calling into question the NIE findings, some denouncing these as "guesswork", others claiming the NIE authors had fallen for clever Iranian disinformation, still others like John Bolton suggesting politicization and traitorous subversion of government policy - a "quasi-putsch"! Sixteen intelligence agencies in an anti-Bush conspiracy to misread evidence! Of course Bush and many other rightwingers have claimed that insofar as Iran has stopped its program, that is because of the US pressure and threats, which need to be maintained or intensified to keep this sinister threat at bay. Regime change is still needed because this evil regime has the capacity to build a nuclear weapon, so that the dire threat can only be removed by replacing the existing government with some "responsible" one like the former Shah, or a Musharraf, or a Bush-Cheney look-alike.

The probability of an attack on Iran has definitely not fallen to zero. The Israelis want it badly and this feeds into the positions of the Democratic Party leadership, which grovels before the pro-Israel lobby, with the Democrat-supported Kyle-Lieberman resolution in the Senate virtually giving Bush a blank check to attack. Furthermore, the demonization process has been furious and, as usual, effective, with the alleged Iranian "support of terrorism", illicit intervention in the Iraq war, alleged threats to "wipe out Israel", and sinister foot-dragging in reference to its nuclear program, continuously thrust before the public, with a consequent increasing public willingness to stop the New Hitler. With France and Germany now more closely aligned with the United States on sanctions, that line of pressure and buildup to attack and further demonization is not unlikely.

Meanwhile, the Great Satan is free to escalate in Iraq, continue to threaten Iran, chide and bully China, Russia and Venezuela, and push ahead on its own nuclear weapons upgrading program; and little Satan can threaten to attack Iran, reinvade Gaza, and continue its ethnic cleansing in Palestine and East Jerusalem, its own nuclear arsenal safe from criticism by the international community. The rule stays in place: what the Great Satan wants is treated with deference, and what the Little Satan does is nobody else's business. The new NIE report is a real setback for the leaders of the two Satans, but they are still in charge and they have overcome serious obstacles before.


Endnotes:

{0} It appears that the United States was first designated the "Great Satan" by Ayatollah Khomeini in early November 1979, shortly after the takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran. Usage of the phrase was based in large part on the US role in overthrowing the democratic government of Mohammad Mossadeq in 1953 and installing and steadily supporting the Shah dictatorship from 1953 to the Shah's forced departure in early 1979, and then protecting him and giving him refuge in his flight. The first two certainly were nasty actions, and the US record of ugly behavior is immense: in his latest Anti-Empire Report (December 11 2007) William Blum lists, among other US efforts since World War II, (1) attempting to overthrow more than fifty foreign governments, most of which were democratically elected; (2) attempting to assassinate more than fifty foreign leaders, and (3) dropping bombs on the people of some thirty countries. Little Satan has also compiled an impressive record of international law and human rights violations in the course of running a racist state and engaging in relentless ethnic cleansing of non-Jews in Palestine. Satanic is defensible rhetoric in describing these partners.

{1} "Remarks as Delivered by Secretary of Defense Robert M Gates, Manama, Bahrain", US Department of Defense (December 08 2007).

{2} Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, International Court of Justice (Advisory Opinion) July 09 2004.

{3} Dignity Denied in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, International Committee of the Red Cross (November 2007).

4. Quoted in Reese Erlich, The Iran Agenda (PoliPointPress, 2007).

5. For illustrations, see John Richardson, "The Secret History of Impending War", Esquire (October 10 2007).

6. Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities, US National Intelligence Council (November 2007).

7: Ray McGovern, "No Nuke Iran", CounterPunch (December 04 2007).

8. See, for example, Greg Miller, "CIA has recruited Iranians to defect", Los Angeles Times (December 09 2007).

9. Erlich, op cit.

10. Peter Hoekstra and Jane Harman, "The Limits of Intelligence", Wall Street Journal (December 10 2007).


http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2007-12/16herman.cfm


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

Britain's carbon strategy 'up in smoke'

by Steve Connor, Science Editor

Independent.co.uk (December 17 2007)


Britain's plans to build new coal-fired power stations as part of the country's efforts to address its looming energy crisis will completely undermine the Bali agreement on climate change and discredit Gordon Brown's commitments to reduce greenhouse gases, according to one of the world's leading climate scientists.

The warning will be made directly to the Prime Minister this week in a letter from James Hansen, the director of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, who will urge Mr Brown to block plans to build up to eight new coal-fired power stations - the first in thirty years.

Dr Hansen, one of the first scientists to warn of climate change twenty years ago, said that coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel and that building new power stations that burn it without capturing waste carbon dioxide will tip the planet towards irreversible warming.

He said that coal presents the biggest challenge in the fight against climate change because governments around the world appear to be dead set on using it as a cheap and easy source of energy without thinking about the long-term consequences.

In an interview with The Independent, Dr Hansen said Britain has a special responsibility to lead the world in banning new coal-fired power stations - and dismantling those already in operation - because of the country's long history of burning the fuel.

He claims that Britain, followed by the United States and Germany, has the highest per capita responsibility for climate change based on the cumulative emissions of carbon dioxide since the start of the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago.

Dr Hansen warned that if Britain, Germany and the United States go ahead with their plans to build new coal-fired power stations it will undercut attempts to convince India and China to build cleaner, more expensive power plants that capture carbon dioxide emissions.

But the technology of capturing and sequestering carbon dioxide from power stations chimneys - where the waste gas is caught and then buried underground for thousands of years - is still decades away, Dr Hansen warned. Until it had been shown to work there is could be no justification for burning coal because of its potential contribution to global carbon dioxide levels.

Gordon Brown, who supported the Bali agreement last week, needs to understand that his entire strategy on climate change will unravel if he ignores coal, Dr Hansen said. "If he doesn't understand this, then he doesn't yet get it", he said.

In his letter to the Prime Minister, Dr Hansen says that the energy departments of governments take it as a "God-given fact" that they can sanction the mining of all fossil fuels from the ground before moving on to other sources of energy.

If that is done for existing coal deposits, we would end up creating a different planet to the one that has nurtured the development of human civilisation over the past 10,000 years with a relatively stable climate, he added.

"Frankly, it's difficult to exaggerate the importance of phasing out coal use except where the carbon dioxide is captured and sequestered because there is no viable strategy for stabilising climate without doing that", Dr Hansen said.

"There is much more carbon dioxide in coal than there is in oil, and oil is going to run out. There is enough carbon dioxide in coal to take us far beyond the dangerous level to produce a different planet", he said.

The Prime Minister is considering a call from his own advisers to build up to eight new coal-fired power plants over the coming decade. "The strange thing is that in the countries that talk the greenest, like Germany and Britain, the policymakers just don't yet get it. In Germany, they are replacing nuclear power plants with coal-fired plants that don't capture and sequester carbon dioxide. That's a recipe for disaster", Dr Hansen said.

"It makes sense not to build new coal-fired power plants and it also makes sense to bulldoze those that we have already within the next few decades. That's when the science will tell us that we are close to the range of dangerous climate change", he said.

Dr Hansen said that it is wrong to say that a few more coal-fired power stations in Britain, Europe or the United States will not matter when China and India are planning to build hundreds of similar power plants over the next ten or twenty years.

"We're responsible for most of what's up there already [in terms of atmospheric carbon dioxide] and China and India have every reason to expect us to take the first step. Unless we put a moratorium on our own coal-fired power plants we have no hope to sitting down at the same table as China and India. So I think this is the most important issue.

"[There is] a critical need to shut down coal-fired power plants until we have the technology to capture and sequester the carbon dioxide", Dr Hansen added.

A recent study by Dr Hansen and his colleagues suggests that it is possible to keep levels of carbon dioxide - which currently have reached about 383 parts per million (ppm) - from rising above a "dangerous" 450 ppm if there is a moratorium on building new coal-fired power stations and if existing plants are phased out by mid-century. "We argue that a rising price on carbon emissions is needed to discourage conversion of the vast fossil reserves into usable reserves, and to keep carbon dioxide beneath the 450 ppm ceiling", he said.

"We show that it is feasible to keep atmospheric carbon dioxide from exceeding about 450 ppm by 2100, provided that emissions from coal and unconventional fossil fuels are constrained. Coal-fired power plants without sequestration must be phased out before mid-century to achieve this carbon dioxide limit."

In his letter to the Prime Minister, Dr Hansen warns that we have passed, or are on the verge of passing, several tipping points, when large-scale changes of the climate are inevitable. But if the world abandons coal burning, there is still a chance.

"If we stopped adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere today we'd still get large climate impacts but we've not yet passed the point of no return", he said.


Extracts of James Hansen's draft letter to Gordon Brown

"You have the potential to influence the future of the planet ... If we continue to build coal-fired power plants without carbon capture, we will lock in future climate disasters associated with passing climate tipping points."

"If Great Britain and Germany halted construction of coal-fired power plants that do not capture and sequester the carbon dioxide, it could be a tipping point for the world. There is still time to find that tipping point, but just barely."

"Coal and unconventional fossil fuels such as tar shale contain enough carbon to produce a vastly different planet than the one on which civilisation developed ..."


Have Your Say

Should Mr Brown's strategy be welcomed? Or should we rely more on renewable energy sources? Tell us what you think. Email haveyoursay@independent.co.uk or go to www.independent.co.uk/haveyoursay.


http://environment.independent.co.uk/climate_change/article3258007.ece


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

We've been suckered again by the US

So far the Bali deal is worse than Kyoto

America will keep on wrecking climate talks as long as those with vested interests in oil and gas fund its political system

by George Monbiot

Guardian (December 17 2007)


"After eleven days of negotiations, governments have come up with a compromise deal that could even lead to emission increases. The highly compromised political deal is largely attributable to the position of the United States, which was heavily influenced by fossil fuel and automobile industry interests. The failure to reach agreement led to the talks spilling over into an all-night session."

These are extracts from a press release by Friends of the Earth. So what? Well it was published on December 11 - I mean to say, December 11 1997. The US had just put a wrecking ball through the Kyoto protocol. George Bush was innocent; he was busy executing prisoners in Texas. Its climate negotiators were led by Albert Arnold Gore.

The European Union had asked for greenhouse gas cuts of fifteen per cent by 2010. Gore's team drove them down to 5.2% by 2012. Then the Americans did something worse: they destroyed the whole agreement.

Most of the other governments insisted that the cuts be made at home. But Gore demanded a series of loopholes big enough to drive a Hummer through. The rich nations, he said, should be allowed to buy their cuts from other countries. When he won, the protocol created an exuberant global market in fake emissions cuts. The western nations could buy "hot air" from the former Soviet Union. Because the cuts were made against emissions in 1990, and because industry in that bloc had subsequently collapsed, the former Soviet Union countries would pass well below the bar. Gore's scam allowed them to sell the gases they weren't producing to other nations. He also insisted that rich nations could buy nominal cuts from poor ones. Entrepreneurs in India and China have made billions by building factories whose primary purpose is to produce greenhouse gases, so that carbon traders in the rich world will pay to clean them up.

The result of this sabotage is that the market for low-carbon technologies has remained moribund. Without an assured high value for carbon cuts, without any certainty that government policies will be sustained, companies have continued to invest in the safe commercial prospects offered by fossil fuels rather than gamble on a market without an obvious floor.

By ensuring that the rich nations would not make real cuts, Gore also guaranteed that the poor ones scoffed when we asked them to do as we don't. When George Bush announced, in 2001, that he would not ratify the Kyoto protocol, the world cursed and stamped its foot. But his intransigence affected only the US. Gore's team ruined it for everyone.

The destructive power of the American delegation is not the only thing that hasn't changed. After the Kyoto protocol was agreed, the then British environment secretary, John Prescott, announced: "This is a truly historic deal which will help curb the problems of climate change. For the first time it commits developed countries to make legally binding cuts in their emissions." Ten years later, the current environment secretary, Hilary Benn, told us that "this is an historic breakthrough and a huge step forward. For the first time ever, all the world's nations have agreed to negotiate on a deal to tackle dangerous climate change." Do these people have a chip inserted?

In both cases, the US demanded terms that appeared impossible for the other nations to accept. Before Kyoto, the other negotiators flatly rejected Gore's proposals for emissions trading. So his team threatened to sink the talks. The other nations capitulated, but the US still held out on technicalities until the very last moment, when it suddenly appeared to concede. In 1997 and in 2007 it got the best of both worlds: it wrecked the treaty and was praised for saving it.

Hilary Benn is an idiot. Our diplomats are suckers. American negotiators have pulled the same trick twice, and for the second time our governments have fallen for it.

There are still two years to go, but so far the new agreement is even worse than the Kyoto protocol. It contains no targets and no dates. A new set of guidelines also agreed at Bali extend and strengthen the worst of Gore's trading scams, the clean development mechanism. Benn and the other dupes are cheering and waving their hats as the train leaves the station at last, having failed to notice that it is travelling in the wrong direction.

Although Gore does a better job of governing now he is out of office, he was no George Bush. He wanted a strong, binding and meaningful protocol, but American politics had made it impossible. In July 1997, the Senate had voted 95-0 to sink any treaty which failed to treat developing countries in the same way as it treated the rich ones. Though they knew this was impossible for developing countries to accept, all the Democrats lined up with all the Republicans. The Clinton administration had proposed a compromise: instead of binding commitments for the developing nations, Gore would demand emissions trading. But even when he succeeded, he announced that "we will not submit this agreement for ratification [in the Senate] until key developing nations participate". Clinton could thus avoid an unwinnable war.

So why, regardless of the character of its leaders, does the US act this way? Because, like several other modern democracies, it is subject to two great corrupting forces. I have written before about the role of the corporate media - particularly in the US - in downplaying the threat of climate change and demonising anyone who tries to address it. I won't bore you with it again, except to remark that at 3 pm eastern standard time on Saturday, there were twenty news items on the front page of the Fox News website. The climate deal came twentieth, after "Bikini-wearing stewardesses sell calendar for charity" and "Florida store sells 'Santa Hates You' T-shirt".

Let us consider instead the other great source of corruption: campaign finance. The Senate rejects effective action on climate change because its members are bought and bound by the companies that stand to lose. When you study the tables showing who gives what to whom, you are struck by two things.

One is the quantity. Since 1990, the energy and natural resources sector - mostly coal, oil, gas, logging and agribusiness - has given $418 million to federal politicians in the US. Transport companies have given $355 million. The other is the width: the undiscriminating nature of this munificence. The big polluters favour the Republicans, but most of them also fund Democrats. During the 2000 presidential campaign, oil and gas companies lavished money on Bush, but they also gave Gore $142,000, while transport companies gave him $347,000. The whole US political system is in hock to people who put their profits ahead of the biosphere.

So don't believe all this nonsense about waiting for the next president to sort it out. This is a much bigger problem than George Bush. Yes, he is viscerally opposed to tackling climate change. But viscera don't have much to do with it. Until the American people confront their political funding system, their politicians will keep speaking from the pocket, not the gut.

monbiot.com

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2228527,00.html


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

Coal fires threaten the globe

Under the right conditions, coal ignites spontaneously, and fires burn downwards, acquiring oxygen through fissures in the rock

by Lindsey Hilsum

New Statesman (November 29 2007)


Winter comes swiftly to China's far west, and the firefighters of Xinjiang are striking camp. For eight months a year, before snow and ice make their work impossible, they battle a deadly menace - raging coal fires, which throw up as much greenhouse gas as all the cars and trucks in the US.

At the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali, starting on 3 December, China's reliance on coal will come under closer examination than ever before. Yet few other than specialists realise that (according to the Netherlands Earth Observation Network), China's coal fires produce between one and three per cent of global carbon emissions.

China is blessed - or cursed - with abundant coal reserves. Rich seams run for 3,000 miles from the border with Kazakhstan to the East China Sea. Under the right conditions, coal ignites spontaneously, and fires burn downwards, acquiring oxygen through fissures in the rock and tiny spaces in the earth. Some fires have been blazing for centuries; Marco Polo wrote of "burning mountains along the Silk Road".

In shallow fires, flames lick up from caverns and smoke rises from vents. But others burn unseen far below, sometimes reaching temperatures of 1,000 degrees Celsius, travelling several metres a month and consuming millions of tonnes of coal.

The firefighters manoeuvre bulldozers over the burning surface coals, billowing dust mingling with smoke in a haze of methane, sulphur and other toxic gases, the temperature in the cab rising to fifty degrees Celsius in summer. Men in flimsy masks pump water to cool the ground, injecting mud and slurry down cracks in the rock to block the oxygen that feeds the fires. They cover the ground with soil, and measure the underground temperature through a tube until it has cooled to seventy degrees Celsius, when the fire can be deemed extinguished.

"The Chinese government is under pressure to reduce emissions, so we firefighters are also under pressure to speed up our work", said Cao Jianwen, a geologist with the Xinjiang Coal Fire Administration. In the past, the emphasis was on the pollutants produced, the hazards to people who lived in the vicinity and the wasted coal reserves, but now, with climate change in mind, the whole world is watching.

In Beijing, 1,500 miles away, Professor Li Jing stared at his computer screen, in effect looking down on the fires from on high. He is involved in a Sino-German project using remote sensing from satellites and aircraft to pinpoint coal fires. "When coal burns underground, the temperature rises on the surface. By using remote sensing imagery, especially thermal infrared technology, we can clearly locate the rising heat and quickly identify the fire area", he said.

China relies on coal for two-thirds of its energy. Such is the pace of economic growth, that its carbon emissions now exceed those of the US. Professor Li believes that extinguishing coal fires will reduce emissions far more rapidly than trying to save energy. But his images tell him that the fires are spreading. "In the Fifties and Sixties, coal mines were owned and operated by the state. Safety and fire prevention were a big part of a strict management regime, and there weren't many coal fires", he said. "But in the last few decades, many private mine businesses appeared, which ignore safety and fire prevention. As a result, we see fires everywhere now."

In the Wuda coalfield in Inner Mongolia, most fires did not erupt spontaneously but were sparked by careless mining. At a typical open-cast mine, diggers scrape away the soil to expose the seam. In the scooped-out section below, where coal has already been removed, smoke and flames escape from fissures; the soil has not been pushed back to prevent fire.

Government inspectors visit once a year, but reportedly make only half-hearted attempts to close unsafe or illegal mines. Most stop operations for just a few weeks. Mine bosses, in league with local officials, flout environmental laws with impunity. China's demand for coal is so high that power stations may not ask the provenance of supplies. Running a small mine is an easy way to get rich, and private mine owners either do not know or do not care about fires.

In Xinjiang, Cao Jianwen showed off the smooth, strangely whitish surface of Liuhanggou, Sulphur Valley, where the country's biggest fire used to consume an estimated 1.8 million tonnes of coal a year. A plaque mounted on a hill praises the firefighters who battled for four years until it was extinguished in 2004.

But, hidden by hills a few hundred yards away, smoke was pouring from vents in the ground. Tyre marks and hastily raked soil told the story - illegal miners had appeared, probably at night, hacked away a few tonnes, and reignited the coal.

Extinguishing coal fires is a major contribution China could make to cutting carbon emissions, but if the government fails to regulate mining, the work of its firefighters will be in vain.

_____

Lindsey Hilsum is China correspondent for Channel 4 News

http://www.newstatesman.com/200711290024


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

Peak Phosphorus

by Bill Totten (December 16 2007)


In an article I posted here on December 9th entitled "What Will We Eat as the Oil Runs Out?" Richard Heinberg refers to the peaking of another valuable, but finite, resource:

"Phosphorus is set to become much more scarce and expensive, according to a study by Patrick Dery, a Canadian agriculture and environment analyst and consultant. Using data from the US Geological Survey, Dery performed a peaking analysis on phosphate rock, similar to the techniques used by petroleum geologists to forecast declines in production from oilfields. He found that 'we have already passed the phosphate peak (of production)
for United States (1988) and for the World (1989)'. We will not completely run out of rock phosphate any time soon, but we will be relying on lower-grade ores as time goes on, with prices inexorably rising."

Heinberg was referring to "Peak phosphorus" by Patrick Dery and Bart Anderson posted last August 13th at http://energybulletin.net/33164.html .

Dery and Anderson point out that phosphorus is a very special non-renewable resource, a nutrient essential for agriculture, and describe its role and nature as follows:

"Phosphorus (chemical symbol P) is an element necessary for life. Because phosphorus is highly reactive, it does not naturally occur as a free element, but is instead bound up in phosphates. Phosphates typically occur in inorganic rocks.

"As farmers and gardeners know, phosphorus is one of the three major nutrients required for plant growth: nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P) and potassium (K). Fertilizers are labelled for the amount of N-P-K they contain (for example 10-10-10).

"Most phosphorus is obtained from mining phosphate rock. Crude phosphate is now used in organic farming, whereas chemically treated forms such as superphosphate, triple superphosphate, or ammonium phosphates are used in non-organic farming.

"Philip H Abelson writes in Science: 'The current major use of phosphate is in fertilizers. Growing crops remove it and other nutrients from the soil ... Most of the world's farms do not have or do not receive adequate amounts of phosphate. Feeding the world's increasing population will accelerate the rate of depletion of phosphate reserves.' and '...resources are limited, and phosphate is being dissipated. Future generations ultimately will face problems in obtaining enough to exist'.

"It is sobering to note that phosphorus is often a limiting nutrient in natural ecosystems. That is, the supply of available phosphorus limits the size of the population possible in those ecosystems."


Dery goes on to apply the technique developed by M King Hubbert for Peak Oil to data available from the United States Geological Survey for phosphorus production in the following:

* The small Pacific island nation of Nauru, a former phosphate exporter.
* The United States, a major phosphate producer.
* The world.

He applied the Hubbert technique first on data from Nauru to see whether he could have predicted the year of its peak phosphate production in 1973. Satisfied with the results, he applied the method to United States and the world. He estimates that US peak phosphorus occurred in 1988 and for the world in 1989.

I was curious WHY we've gone well past the production peak of a resource so essential to our food supply, and I think I found the answer in a part of "Creating the Third World", Chapter 10 of A Green History of the World (Penguin, 1991) by Clive Ponting. Here it is:


"Mineral exploitation has also been an important factor in the creation of the Third World . . .

". . . European demand for resources was not confined to metal ores. In the late nineteenth century the use of fertilizers to increase agricultural output rose dramatically. The United States had its own internal sources of supply but Europe turned to Morocco and Tunisia and also the large guano deposits off the Pacific coast of South America. The latter were originally part of Bolivia but Chile's victory in the war of 1881 (fought over the deposits) gave it control of the coast and the offshore guano islands and turned Bolivia info a landlocked country. The guano was worked in dreadful conditions by Chinese labourers; Chile was soon exporting over one million tons a year and the tax on the exports made up over eighty per cent of the government's revenue. The British empire was dependent on external supplies until the discovery in the early twentieth century of huge phosphate deposits in the Pacific on Nauru and Ocean Island. This opened up the prospect of an easily accessible and cheap source of fertilizer, with which to increase agricultural output from Australia and New Zealand, for the benefit not just of their economies but also that of Britain, which relied heavily on imported food from the empire. The story of these two islands illustrates in dramatic form many of the consequences of the developed world's demand for resources and the far-reaching impact it could have both on the environment and the people of the Third World.

"Ocean Island was small (three miles long and two-and-a-half miles wide), covered in lush, tropical vegetation and inhabited by about 2,000 Banabans following a typically Polynesian way of life. Nauru was slightly bigger (eight-and-a-half square miles) with about 1,400 people. Ocean Island was formally annexed by Britain in 1901 whereas Nauru was a German possession until 1914. The islands consisted almost entirely of solid phosphate deposits, perhaps the richest in the world. In 1900 the British owned Pacific Islands Company bought the rights to all minerals on Ocean Island in return for a payment of GBP 50 a year (in practice made in over-priced company trade goods) in a 'treaty' of dubious legality - made with the local chief even though it was well understood that he did not have authority to lease land belonging to other individuals. The company began to export large quantities of phosphates - shipments from Ocean Island amounted to 100,000 tons a year by 1905. Mining rights on Nauru were obtained from the German authorities and, after the necessary works were completed by Chinese labourers, mining began there in 1907. On both islands the company did not employ the islanders but brought in about 1,000 outsiders to work as labourers, about eighty Europeans to supervise operations and a detachment of Fijian police to keep order. In 1919 the company was bought out and the British, Australian and New Zealand governments established the jointly owned British Phosphate Commission to take over the work and provide them with phosphate at cost price (and therefore well below the world market price).

"By the early 1920s mining was producing about 600,000 tons of phosphates a year and it was evident to the native inhabitants what was happening to their islands as a result. The operations involved clearing away the vegetation and stripping out the top fifty feet or so of land, leaving an uninhabitable wasteland of jagged pinnacles on which nothing would grow. It was obvious that if the mining continued the islands would be ruined. Seeking to safeguard their future, the Banabans refused to sell or lease any more land to the Commission. But the pressure from Australia and New Zealand for cheap phosphate was growing. In 1927 the British government authorised deep mining over the whole of Nauru and the next year took powers to confiscate all land from the Banabans that they refused to make available for mining. By the 1930s phosphate output had reached about one million tons a year. On the outbreak of war with Japan the Europeans and most of the Chinese labourers were evacuated but the islanders were left behind. The Japanese occupied both islands and transported the natives to the Caroline Islands. Before the war the British authorities had considered removing the Banabans from Ocean Island in order to further extend mining operations and the Japanese action provided a convenient opportunity. The Banabans were not allowed to return and were resettled on Rambi Island (part of Fiji), 1,500 labourers were brought in to reopen the phosphate works and in 1947 deep mining over the whole of Ocean Island was authorised. The Nauru islanders were allowed home after the war, but in a second class capacity. Like the 1,300 Chinese labourers brought to the island, the natives were excluded from the company facilities (shops and recreation), which were restricted to the elite white workers. Throughout the 1950s about one million tons of phosphate a year were being extracted from the islands, rising to nearly three million tons a year by the mid-1960s. It was clear that at this rate the deposits would soon be exhausted. The last shipment from Ocean Island was made in 1980 and the Nauru deposits were then only expected to last until the 1990s. In eighty years of mining twenty million tons of phosphate were extracted from Ocean Island, and Nauru had provided almost three times that figure, giving a total of about eighty million tons from the two tiny Pacific islands.

"The imminent exhaustion of the deposits on the ravaged islands raised in an acute form the question of how to treat their owners. In the case of Nauru (administered by the Australians under a United Nations mandate) the government wanted to resettle the islanders on the mainland and abandon the island when mining ceased. The islanders rejected this idea in 1965 when, for the first time, they were given the right to apportion the royalties they received on each ton of phosphate as they wanted rather than as the Australian government decided on their behalf. After a long struggle Nauru was granted independence in 1968 and management of the phosphate operation was transferred to them in 1970. The islanders now live long a narrow coastal fringe, the only part of the island not devastated by mining. Their traditional way of life has gone and their only means of subsistence comes from royalties and profits from the phosphates. These have been sufficient to provide almost a parody of western style development. The islanders do not need to work and their material standard of living is high. There is one road on the island, which goes nowhere, but there is one of the highest rates of car ownership in the world. The population depends on imported western food and many have started to develop the health problems normally found in people who live in the industrialised world.

"The Nauru islanders faced enormous problems but the treatment of the dispossessed Banabans, who did not have the United Nations to protect their interests, was far worse. In 1911 the British government suggested that a trust fund should be set up for the Banabans, to be financed from the phosphate earnings. The British Phosphate Company proposed a munificent total annual payment of GBP 250 at a time when it was making a profit of GBP 20 million a year and paying dividends of forty to fifty per cent every year to its shareholders. Eventually the British government persuaded the company to pay royalties of six pence a ton, supposedly to be held as a fund for the Banabans when the phosphates ran out. The government's action was less philanthropic than it seemed. They incorporated Ocean Island into the Gilbert and Ellice Islands colony, even though there were no natural links between the two and allocated most of the phosphate royalties to pay for the administration of the colony that had previously run at a loss. The Banabans were not told that 85 per cent of their royalties were being spent in this way. Indeed they were not told how much they were earning or what was done with any of the money and only very small sums were handed over because the government thought that they were 'feckless'. Some of the money was used to buy Rambi island on their behalf (the proceeds going to the colonial administration of Fiji), although they were not consulted about the purchase. After 1946 they were left on Rambi, an island with a totally different climate from their home. Eventually the British offered the islanders GBP 500,000 as a final settlement for the effects of all the mining. The islanders rejected the offer and took the British government through the British courts in the 1970s in the longest civil case ever heard. They failed in the main part of the case because the court held that the 1900 agreement giving the company the right to mine the island in return for GBP 50 a year was a legally binding contract. The court did find that the British government had breached its obligation to care for the islanders but refused to make any award of compensation. Eventually the phosphate commissioners offered a sum that just covered the costs the islanders had incurred in bringing the protracted legal case. By 1980 Ocean Island had been destroyed by the mining and the deposits exhausted. The islanders had lost their home and had received pitifully small compensation for their loss. That was the real price of the cheap fertilizers for Australian and New Zealand agriculture and cheap food imports for Britain."


These few paragraphs comprise only about a tenth of the marvelous chapter in which Ponting describes how Europeans and their white colonies created what we now call the "Third World". I heartily recommend the book to anyone who hasn't read it. A new edition, A New Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations is due to be published this month.


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

Agriculture: The Price of Transition

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (December 12 2007)

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


One of the great gifts of crisis is supposed to be the way it helps sort out the difference between what's essential and what's not. As we move deeper into the crisis of industrial civilization, that particular gift is likely to arrive in horse doctor's doses. Those who insist that the first priority in an age of declining petroleum production is finding some other way to fuel a suburban SUV lifestyle, or who hope to see some favorite technology - the internet, say, or space travel - privileged in the same way, risk finding out the hard way that other things come first.

At the top of the list of those other things are the immediate necessities of human life: breathable air, drinkable water, edible food. Lacking those, nothing else matters much. The first two are provided by natural cycles that industrial civilization is doing its best to mess up, but so far the damage has been localized. There are still crucial issues to consider and work to be done, but the raw resilience of a billion-year-old biosphere that has shrugged off ice ages and asteroid impacts is a powerful ally.

Food is another matter. Unlike air and water, the vast majority of the food we eat comes from human activity rather than the free operation of natural cycles, and the human population has gone so far beyond the limits of what surviving natural ecosystems can support that attempting to fall back on wild foods at this point would be a recipe for dieoff and ecological catastrophe. At the same time, most of the world's population today survives on food produced using fossil fuels and other nonrenewable resources such as mineral phosphate and ice age aquifers. As the end of the fossil fuel age approaches, other arrangements have to be made.

This poses a challenge, because nearly every resource currently used in industrial agriculture, from the petroleum that powers tractors and provides raw materials for pesticides, through the natural gas and phosphate rock that go into fertilizer, to the topsoil that underlies the whole process, is being depleted at radically unsustainable rates. Some peak oil theorists, noting this, have worried publicly that the consequences of declining petroleum production will include the collapse of industrial agriculture and worldwide starvation.

Still, this is one of those places where one of the central themes of recent Archdruid Report posts - the theme of adaptation - is particularly useful. If today's industrial agriculture were to keep chugging away along its present course into the future, the results could be disastrous. One of the few things that can be said for certain, though, is that this sort of straight-line extrapolation is the least likely trajectory for the agriculture of the future.

The certainty here comes from two sources. First, the industrial agriculture we have today did not pop fully formed out of a John Deere plant like Athena from the head of Zeus. It evolved as farmers and agricultural corporations took advantage of the abundant energy supplies made available by the exploitation of oil reserves in the 20th century. At that time, increasing energy inputs into agriculture was adaptive; it made use of an abundant resource - cheap fossil fuel energy - to make up for other resources that were more expensive or less available. That same equation, though, works equally well the other way. As energy and other fossil fuel products become more expensive, farmers have a strong incentive to use less of them, and to replace them with other resources.

The second source of certainty comes from the simple fact that adaptations in the other direction are already taking place. The organic farming revolution, the most important of these, may be the most promising and least often discussed of the factors shaping the future of industrial society. It's not a small factor, either. In 2005, the most recent year for which I have been able to get data, some four million acres of land completed the transition from chemical to organic agriculture, about a million acres over the previous year's figure.

Because it uses no chemical fertilizers and no pesticides, organic agriculture is significantly less dependent on fossil fuels than standard agriculture, and yet it produces roughly comparable yields. It has huge ecological benefits - properly done, organic agriculture reverses topsoil loss and steadily improves the fertility of the soil rather than depleting it - but it also translates into a simple economic equation: a farmer can get comparable yields for less cost by growing crops organically, and get higher prices for the results. As the prices of petroleum, natural gas, phosphate rock, and other feedstocks for the agrichemical industry continue to climb, that equation will become even harder to ignore - and in the meantime the infrastructure and knowledge base necessary to manage organic farming on a commercial scale is already solidly in place and continues to expand.

As fuel prices continue to climb, tractor fuel and transportation costs are likely to become the next major bottlenecks. The adaptive responses here are already taking shape, though they're back further in the development curve - more or less where organic agriculture was in the 1970s.

The renaissance of horsedrawn agriculture is one adaptive response moving steadily toward the takeoff point. After a long period when diesel was so much cheaper than feed that horses no longer made economic sense, the balance is swinging the other way, and farmers are waking up to the advantages of "tractors" that run on grain and hay, rather than expensive diesel fuel, and can be manufactured in a horse barn by the simple expedient of letting a stallion in among the mares. The percentage of North American acreage farmed by horsedrawn equipment is still very small, but it's many times larger than it was even a decade ago, and the infrastructure and knowledge base needed to expand further are coming into being.

Transportation, at least in North America, is a thornier problem. The railroad system that once connected North American farmland to the rest of the planet, and enabled it to become the world's breadbasket, was effectively abandoned decades ago, and it's an open question whether enough of it can be rebuilt in the teeth of catabolic collapse to make any kind of difference. In the meantime, though, another set of adaptive responses is taking shape. All over the US, though it's especially common on the west coast, local farmers markets have sprung up over the last decade, and much of the produce sold in them comes from small local farms.

In cities where the farmers market movement has set down strong roots - I'm thinking particularly of Seattle, where five weekly farmers markets and the seven-days-a-week Pike Place Market supply local shoppers with produce of every kind - the economics of modern farming have been turned on their heads, and truck farms from ten to a hundred acres located close to the city have become profitable for the first time in many decades. Once again, the infrastructure and knowledge base needed for further expansion is taking shape.

All these transformations and the others that will come after them, though, have their price tag. The central reason why modern industrial agriculture elbowed its competitors out of the way was that, during the heyday of fossil fuel consumption, a farmer could produce more food for less money than ever before in history. The results combined with the transportation revolution of the 20th century to redefine the human food chain from top to bottom. For the first time in history, it became economical to centralize agriculture so drastically that only a very small fraction of food was grown within a thousand miles of the place where it was eaten, and to turn most foodstuffs into processed and packaged commercial products in place of the bulk commodities and garden truck of an earlier era. All of this required immense energy inputs, but at the time nobody worried about those.

As we move further into the twenty-first century, though, the industrial food chain of the late twentieth has become a costly anachronism full of feedback loops that amplify increases in energy costs manyfold. As a result, food prices have soared - up more than twenty percent on average in the United States over the last year - and will very likely continue to climb in the years to come. As industrial agriculture prices itself out of the market, other ways of farming are moving up to take its place, but each of these exacts its price. Replace diesel oil with biodiesel, and part of your cropland has to go into oilseeds; replace tractors altogether with horses, and part of your cropland has to go into feed; convert more farmland into small farms serving local communities, and economies of scale go away, leading to rising costs. The recent push to pour our food supply into our gas tanks by way of expanded ethanol production doesn't help either, of course.

All this will make life more challenging. Changes in the agricultural system will ripple upwards through the rest of society, forcing unexpected adjustments in economic sectors and cultural patterns that have nothing obvious to do with agriculture at all. Rising prices and shrinking supplies will pinch budgets, damage public health, and make malnutrition a significant issue all through the developed world; actual famines are possible, and may be unavoidable, as shifting climate interacts with an agricultural economy in the throes of change. All this is part of the price of adaptation, the unavoidable cost of changing from a food system suited to the age of fossil fuels to one that can still function in the deindustrial transition.

The same process can serve as a model for other changes that will be demanded of us as the industrial system moves deeper into obsolescence. Adaptation is always possible, but it's going to come with a price tag, and the results will likely not be as convenient, abundant, or welcome as the equivalents were in the days when every American had the energy equivalent of 260 slaves working night and day for his or her comfort. That can't be helped. Today's industrial agriculture and the food chain depending on it, after all, were simply the temporary result of an equally temporary abundance of fossil fuel energy, and as that goes away, so will they. The same is true of any number of other familiar and comfortable things; still, the more willing we are to pay the price of transition, the better able we will be to move forward into the possibilities of a new and unfamiliar world.

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The Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA), John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books, including The Druidry Handbook (Weiser, 2006). He lives in Ashland, Oregon.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2007/12/agriculture-price-of-transition.html


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

Why Al Gore's Nobel speech rates just a "B"

by Jan Lundberg

Culture Change Letter #176 (December 12 2007)


With the US government's willful, Earth-h(e)ating position befitting a rogue state - as 190 countries meet to cut greenhouse gas emissions - Al Gore is already the moral leader of the US in the eyes of the world. He hits the Bali United Nations meeting full of momentum, fresh from receiving the world's top honor in Oslo. On Monday he gave an historic speech on the state of the global climate and what is to be done about it, when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Nevertheless, I'd give Al Gore's speech no better than a "B" grade, to encourage a better rating very soon. He has come a long way, even since An Inconvenient Truth, by calling for a ninety percent cut in greenhouse gases - but, by the time he wants to see it phased in, 2050, it would be too late. At root, his message is compromised by his imperative to push for acceptable notions of environmental economic reforms. If you believe he is your savior of the planet, examine his assumptions and priorities, and be prepared to be your own leader as soon as you finish reading this (and use our tools in the first link).

The strengths of Al Gore's Nobel Prize acceptance speech were worthy of the highest grade for his revealing what our world's environmental crisis is about, and how serious it is. Also, he scored points for not calling for economic growth as the solution, although he still cheer-leads for global economic opportunity. His improvement over the years is heartening, but is it quick enough? Is he still trying to be both a corporate-state player and tree-hugger?

Gore's failure to turn in an A+ performance in his speech rests mainly on his omissions (for example, reduce the birth rate big-time, deal with peak oil). Another error was his implying that mainly we have available to us a technological approach to reverse drastically our greenhouse gas emissions. Although changing our technological capabilities to make across-the-board replacements of machines and other items of manufacture - principally petroleum-derived/enabled - is partially underway, it is too limited and not nearly so effective as slashing consumption and restructuring our way of life. Gore implies that we can have it both ways: ongoing energy use and consumerism, and save the planet along with all manner of ills such as AIDS. He stated,

"This new consciousness requires expanding the possibilities inherent in all humanity. The innovators who will devise a new way to harness the sun's energy for pennies or invent an engine that's carbon negative may live in Lagos or Mumbai or Montevideo. We must ensure that entrepreneurs and inventors everywhere on the globe have the chance to change the world."


Al, the bicycle has already been invented. If you want to promote the hell out of it, we don't even mind if you take credit for inventing it. (Sorry, couldn't resist a cheap joke.)

Just as disturbing may be Gore's endorsement of carbon credits. Although the system worked "well" for cutting back on acid-rain pollutants, we are no longer in those innocent days where we can afford to accommodate powerful corporate polluters and their corrupting, financial clout. Now that we are facing extinction of ourselves and perhaps most species, it is time to turn off the power - while a minimum is produced for basic subsistence. If that sounds outrageous and barbaric, what would you prefer: subsistence or extinction?

Would you rather be an obedient tax-payer, and wait for "leaders" to do the right thing for the climate? News item: "Washington rejected stiff 2020 targets for greenhouse gas cuts by rich nations at UN talks in Bali on Monday ..." (Reuters, December 10). Who is your friend and who is your enemy now, in our changing, precarious world? Should your government be rewarded with taxes and maximum consumption to keep the economy going? Ask Al Gore about this, as he believes the crisis is such that we have a seven-year window to start reversing carbon dioxide emissions, as reiterated by his co-awardee of the Nobel Peace Prize, IPCC's chairman Rajendra Pachauri, with Gore in Oslo on December 9.

Let's give a hearty "Bravo!" for Al Gore's advocating a carbon tax. But wait a minute, what if we didn't buy stuff? Then the products would tend not to be made or transported with all that petroleum.

An inconvenient truth is that people will keep doing what is convenient, such as running the hot water tap freely, or hopping in that car for whatever anthropocentric purpose. Does this hard reality about human nature (or is it our culture?) spell the end of the world as we know it? Maybe, but it definitely means energy-shortage-related collapse just ahead, given that global peak oil extraction has hit. As long as there is petroleum and money available, there will be little change. What Al Gore is not yet grokking is that a culture change is what he should really want. (Give him time; he may call for it soon.) But in his acceptance speech, he sees losing our civilization as the biggest risk:

"We, the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency - a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential even as we gather here".

[Editor's note: this statement can be read two ways: the civilization is gathering ominous and destructive potential, or the threat to our survival is. It is both, but let's ask Al Gore if he knows.]

The day before, he told the world press, "carbon dioxide increases anywhere are a threat to the future of civilization everywhere", as he drew a parallel with Martin Luther King Jr's statement that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Gore also quoted Gandhi in the Nobel acceptance speech. But Gore needs to personally "walk a talk of simplicity and sufficiency, rather than opulence and excess ... What if Gore were to sail to Bali, having planned and traveled for months to get there? Then he would be making a leap and his words would be much more powerful, and he would get an "A-Plus" (peace activist Brian Willson, Arcata, California).

Gore also sees and encourages "the world's first people-power movement" to save the climate (December 9, Reuters), and earlier this year he called for civil disobedience to shut down coal-fired power plants. However, can the engine of global warming be turned part way off, or does it function on-or-off only?

The change from our culture to a sustainable one - however that can be accomplished, as fairly as possible - won't happen without bringing down the old one. Will Al Gore ever advocate that? The Al Gore we knew would not allow it, and would use his establishment clout - just as he used it to make sure the present occupant of the White House was not challenged over taking office, when in the US Senate where Gore presided, he opted to ratify the election-selection. As much as Gore is a hero today on the climate issue, we must never forget that it's relative to the bumbling planet killers who are part of the same political system and dominant culture as Al Gore. The begs the question, what would we really like to see happen, if we didn't settle for compromising the climate and Mother Nature?

So, brothers and sisters, while a friend of the earth can revel in Gore's eloquence and well-crafted speech for his deserved Peace Prize, and one can applaud his life purpose, what happens when Gore has distracted us from making radical change? Is that not the role of politicians ensconced in the status quo? Oops, we got fooled again. What are you going to do now? Try taking the Pledge for Climate Protection (link below) and pass along your results. Get an A+ in the eyes of your Mother Earth.

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Pledge for Climate Protection
http://www.culturechange.org/global_warming_pledge.html

Al Gore's Nobel acceptance speech
http://thinkprogress.org/gore-nobel-speech

"The inconvenient truth about 'An Inconvenient Truth': Why Al Gore is part dangerous politician", by Jan Lundberg, Culture Change Letter #138
http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=66&Itemid=33

Al Gore's ten-point climate plan: scroll down in "Al Gore and the Wedges Game" by Kelpie Wilson http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/032407A.shtml

Al Gore sees hope in "people power" by John Acher and Wojciech Moskwa (Reuters, December 09 2007)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUKL0931985620071209

"US Rejects Stiff 2020 Greenhouse Goals in Bali - Washington Wants Two More Years of Negotiations" by Emma Graham-Harrison (Reuters, December 10 2007)
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=3976306

"Where the '08 Contenders Stand on Global Warming" by Brad Knickerbocker, Christian Science Monitor and Truthout.org http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/101507EA.shtmlf
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Join the Global Warming Crisis Council listserve, a comprehensive series of postings on cllimate and energy news and opinion. To receive from and post to gwcc "at" lists.riseup.net, email Wanda B. The Raging Grannie: wsb70 "at" comcast.net

_____

A reader wrote back to us right away:

Gore's biggest omission (in his speech and film) is the insanely destructive environmental impact of the US military machine - close that down and we are well on the way to reducing GGE by half !!

Please talk about this - Close our bases world wide, and we have a HUGE effect. Driving Priuses means nothing if the military machine stays open for business.

Thanks - DR


http://culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=138&Itemid=2#cont


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

The Anti-Empire Report

Read this or George W Bush will be president the rest of your life

by William Blum

www.killinghope.org (December 11 2007)


Another peace scare. Boy, that was close.

The US intelligence community's new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) - "Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities" - makes a point of saying up front (in bold type): "This NIE does not (italics in original) assume that Iran intends to acquire nuclear weapons". The report goes on to state: "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program".

Isn't that good news, that Iran isn't about to attack the United States or Israel with nuclear weapons? Surely everyone is thrilled that the horror and suffering that such an attack - not to mention an American or Israeli retaliation or pre-emptive attack - would bring to this sad old world. Here are some of the happy reactions from American leaders:

Senate Republicans are planning to call for a congressional commission to investigate the NIE's conclusion that Iran discontinued its nuclear weapons program in 2003. {1}

National Security Adviser, Stephen J Hadley, said: The report "tells us that the risk of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon remains a very serious problem". {2}

Defense Secretary Robert Gates "argued forcefully at a Persian Gulf security conference ... that US intelligence indicates Iran could restart its secret nuclear weapons program 'at any time' and remains a major threat to the region". {3}

John R Bolton, President Bush's former ambassador to the United Nations and pit bull of the neo-conservatives, dismissed the report with: "I've never based my view on this week's intelligence". {4}

And Bush himself added: "Look, Iran was dangerous, Iran is dangerous, and Iran will be dangerous if they have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon. The NIE says that Iran had a hidden - a covert nuclear weapons program. That's what it said. What's to say they couldn't start another covert nuclear weapons program? ... Nothing has changed in this NIE that says, 'Okay, why don't we just stop worrying about it?' Quite the contrary. I think the NIE makes it clear that Iran needs to be taken seriously. My opinion hasn't changed." {5}

Hmmm. Well, maybe the reaction was more positive in Israel. Here's a report from Uri Avnery, a leading Israeli columnist: "The earth shook. Our political and military leaders were all in shock. The headlines screamed with rage ... Shouldn't we be overjoyed? Shouldn't the masses in Israel be dancing in the streets? After all, we have been saved! ... Lo and behold - no bomb and no any-minute-now. The wicked Ahmadinejad can threaten us as much as he wants - he just has not got the means to harm us. Isn't that a reason for celebration? So why does this feel like a national disaster?" {6}

We have to keep this in mind - America, like Israel, cherishes its enemies. Without enemies, the United States appears to be a nation without moral purpose and direction. The various managers of the National Security State need enemies to protect their jobs, to justify their swollen budgets, to aggrandize their work, to give themselves a mission, to send truckloads of taxpayer money to the corporations for whom the managers will go to work after leaving government service. And they understand the need for enemies only too well, even painfully. Here is US Colonel Dennis Long, speaking in 1992, just after the end of the Cold War, when he was director of "total armor force readiness" at Fort Knox:

"For fifty years, we equipped our football team, practiced five days a week and never played a game. We had a clear enemy with demonstrable qualities, and we had scouted them out. [Now] we will have to practice day in and day out without knowing anything about the other team. We won't have his playbook, we won't know where the stadium is, or how many guys he will have on the field. That is very distressing to the military establishment, especially when you are trying to justify the existence of your organization and your systems." {7}

In any event, all of the above is completely irrelevant if Iran has no intention of attacking the United States or Israel, even if they currently possessed a large stockpile of nuclear weapons. As I've asked before: What possible reason would Iran have for attacking the United States or Israel other than an irresistible desire for mass national suicide?


The crime of GWS: Governing while socialist

In Chile, during the 1964 presidential election campaign, in which Salvador Allende, a Marxist, was running against two other major candidates much to his right, one radio spot featured the sound of a machine gun, followed by a woman's cry: "They have killed my child - the communists". The announcer then added in impassioned tones: "Communism offers only blood and pain. For this not to happen in Chile, we must elect Eduardo Frei president." {8} Frei was the candidate of the Christian Democratic Party, the majority of whose campaign costs were underwritten by the CIA according to the US Senate. {9} One anti-Allende campaign poster which appeared in the thousands showed children with a hammer and sickle stamped on their foreheads. {10}

The scare campaign played up to the fact that women in Chile, as elsewhere in Latin America, are traditionally more religious than men, more susceptible to being alarmed by the specter of "godless, atheist communism".

Allende lost. He won the men's vote by 67,000 over Frei (in Chile men and women vote separately), but amongst the women Frei came out ahead by 469,000 ... testimony, once again, to the remarkable ease with which the minds of the masses of people can be manipulated, in any and all societies.

In Venezuela, during the recent campaign concerning the constitutional reforms put forth by Hugo Chavez, the opposition played to the same emotional themes of motherhood and "communist" oppression. (Quite possibly because of the same CIA advice.) "I voted for Chavez for President, but not now. Because they told me that if the reform passes, they're going to take my son, because he will belong to the state", said a woman, Gladys Castro, interviewed in Venezuela before the December 2 vote which rejected the reforms; this according to a report of Venezuelanalysis.com, an English-language news service published by Americans in Caracas. "Gladys is not the only one to believe the false rumors she's heard", the report added. "Thousands of Venezuelans, many of them Chavez supporters, have bought the exaggerations and lies about Venezuela's Constitutional Reform that have been circulating across the country for months. Just a few weeks ago, however, the disinformation campaign ratcheted up various notches as opposition groups and anti-reform coalitions placed large ads in major Venezuelan papers. The most scandalous was ... (a) two-page spread in the country's largest circulation newspaper, Ultimas Noticias, which claimed about the Constitutional Reform: 'If you are a Mother, YOU LOSE! Because you will lose your house, your family and your children. Children will belong to the state'". This particular ad was placed by a Venezuelan business organization, Camara Industrial de Carabobo, which has among its members dozens of subsidiaries of the largest US corporations operating in Venezuela. {11}

Chavez lost the December 2 vote (in part, I believe, because of his unrelenting bravado, which turned off any number of his supporters) but he's still a marked man in Washington, which can not stomach the prospect of five more years of the man and his policies. It's not because the United States is looking to grab Venezuela's oil. It's because Chavez is completely independent of Washington and has used his oil wealth to become a powerful force in Latin America, inspiring and aiding other independent-minded governments in the region, like Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Ecuador, as well as carrying on close relations with the likes of China, Russia, and Iran. The man does not show proper understanding that he's living in the Yankee's back yard; indeed, in the Yankee's world. The Yankee empire grew to its present size and power precisely because it did not tolerate men like Salvador Allende and Hugo Chavez and their quaint socialist customs. Despite their best efforts, the CIA was unable to prevent Allende from becoming Chile's president in 1970. When subsequent parliamentary elections made it apparent to the Agency and their Chilean conservative allies that they would not be able to oust the left from power legally, they instigated a successful military coup, in 1973.

Here for the record is a brief summary of Washington's charming history in relation to such men, their foreign ideas, and their dubious governments since the end of World War Two:

* Attempted to overthrow more than fifty foreign governments, most of which were democratically-elected; successful a majority of the time.

* Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least thirty countries.

* Attempted to assassinate more than fifty foreign leaders.

* Dropped bombs on the people of some thirty countries.

* Helped to suppress dozens of populist/nationalist movements. {12}

Although Chavez has spoken publicly about his being assassinated, and his government has several times uncovered what they perceived to be planned assassination attempts, from both domestic and foreign sources, the Venezuelan president has continued to take repeated flights and attend numerous conferences and meetings all over the world, exposing himself and his airplane again and again. The cases of Jaime Roldos, president of Ecuador, and Omar Torrijos, military leader of Panama, should perhaps be considered. Both were reformers who refused to allow their countries to become client states of Washington or American corporations. Both were firm supporters of the radical Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua; both banned an American missionary group, the Summer Institute of Linguistics - long suspected of CIA ties - because of suspicious political behavior; both died in mysterious plane disasters during the Reagan administration in 1981, Torrijos' plane exploding in mid-air. {13} Torrijos had earlier been marked for assassination by Richard Nixon. {14}


Who would have thought? Bush has been vindicated.

We're making progress in Iraq! The "surge" is working, we're told. Never mind that the war is totally and perfectly illegal. Not to mention totally and perfectly, even exquisitely, immoral. It's making progress. That's a good thing, is it not? Meanwhile, the al Qaeda types have greatly increased their number all over the Middle East and South Asia, so their surge is making progress too. Good for them. And speaking of progress in the War on Terror, is anyone progressing faster and better than the Taliban?

The American progress is measured by a decrease in violence, the White House has decided - a daily holocaust has been cut back to a daily multiple catastrophe. And who's keeping the count? Why, the same good people who have been regularly feeding us a lie for the past five years about the number of Iraqi deaths, completely ignoring the epidemiological studies. (Real Americans don't do Arab body counts.) A recent analysis by the Washington Post left the administration's claim pretty much in tatters. The article opened with: "The US military's claim that violence has decreased sharply in Iraq in recent months has come under scrutiny from many experts within and outside the government, who contend that some of the underlying statistics are questionable and selectively ignore negative trends". The article then continued in the same critical vein. {15}

To the extent that there may have been a reduction in violence, we must also keep in mind that, thanks to this lovely little war, there are several million Iraqis either dead or in exile abroad or in bursting American and Iraqi prisons; there must be as well a few million more wounded who are homebound or otherwise physically limited; so the number of potential victims and killers has been greatly reduced. Moreover, extensive ethnic cleansing has taken place in Iraq (another good indication of progress, n'est-ce pas? nicht wahr?) - Sunnis and Shiites are now living more in their own special enclaves than before, none of those stinking mixed communities with their unholy mixed marriages, so violence of the sectarian type has also gone down. {16} On top of all this, US soldiers have been venturing out a lot less (for fear of things like ... well, dying), so the violence against our noble lads is also down. Remember that insurgent attacks on American forces is how the Iraqi violence all began in the first place.

Oh, did I mention that 2007 has been the deadliest year for US troops since the war began? {17} It's been the same worst year for American forces in Afghanistan.

One of the signs of the reduction in violence in Iraq, the administration would like us to believe, is that many Iraqi families are returning from Syria, where they had fled because of the violence. The New York Times, however, reported that "Under intense pressure to show results after months of political stalemate, the [Iraqi] government has continued to publicize figures that exaggerate the movement back to Iraq"; as well as exaggerating "Iraqis' confidence that the current lull in violence can be sustained". The count, it turns out, included all Iraqis crossing the border, for whatever reason. A United Nations survey found that 46 percent were leaving Syria because they could not afford to stay; 25 percent said they fell victim to a stricter Syrian visa policy; and only fourteen percent said they were returning because they had heard about improved security. {18}

How long can it be before vacation trips to "Exotic Iraq" are flashed across our TVs? "Baghdad's Beautiful Beaches Beckon". Just step over the bodies. Indeed, the State Department has recently advertised for a "business development/tourism" expert to work in Baghdad, "with a particular focus on tourism and related services". {19}

We've been told often by American leaders and media that the US forces can't leave because of the violence, because there would be a bloodbath. Now there's an alleged significant decrease in the violence. Is that being used as an argument to get out - a golden opportunity for the United States to leave, with head held high? Of course not.

I almost feel sorry for them. They're "can-do" Americans, accustomed to getting their way, accustomed to thinking of themselves as the best, and they're frustrated as hell, unable to figure out "why they hate us", why we can't win them over, why we can't at least wipe them out. Don't they want freedom and democracy? At one time or another the can-do boys have tried writing a comprehensive set of laws and regulations, even a constitution, for the country; setting up mini-bases in neighborhoods; building walls to block off areas; training and arming "former" Sunni insurgents to fight Shias and al Qaeda; enlisting Shias to help fight, against whomever; leaving weapons or bomb-making material in public view to see who picks it up, then pouncing on them; futuristic vehicles and machines and electronic devices to destroy roadside bombs; setting up their own Arabic-language media, censoring other media; classes for detainees on anger control, an oath of peace, and the sacredness of life and property; regularly revising the official reason the United States is in the country in the first place ... one new tactic after another, and when all else fails they call it a "success" and give it a nice inspiring action name, like "surge" ... and nothing helps. They're can-do Americans, using good ol' American know-how and Madison Avenue savvy, sales campaigns, public relations, advertising, selling the US brand, just like they do it back home ... and nothing helps. And how can it if the product you're selling is toxic, inherently, from birth, if you're totally ruining your customers' lives, with no regard for any kind of law or morality. They're can-do Americans, accustomed to playing by the rules - theirs; and they're frustrated as hell.


Once is an accident; twice is a coincidence; three times is a conspiracy.

"All science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided". -- Karl Marx {20}

I believe in conspiracies. So do all of you. American and world history are full of conspiracies. Watergate was a conspiracy. The cover-up of Watergate was a conspiracy. So was Enron. And Iran-Contra. The October Surprise really took place. For a full year, George W Bush and Dick Cheney conspired to invade Iraq while continually denying that they had made any such decision. The Japanese conspired to attack Pearl Harbor while negotiating with Washington to find peaceful solutions to the issues separating the two governments. There are many people sitting in prison at this very moment in the United States for having been convicted of "conspiracy" to commit this or that crime.

However, it doesn't follow that all conspiracy theories are created equal, all to be taken seriously. Many people send me emails which I'm unable to take seriously. Here are a few examples:

If they try to access my website a few times and keep getting an error message, they ask me if the FBI or Homeland Security or America Online has finally gotten around to shutting me down.

If they send me an email and it's returned to them, for whatever reason, they wonder if AOL is blocking their particular mail or perhaps blocking all my mail.

If they fail to receive a copy of this report, they wonder if AOL or some government agency is blocking it.

If they come upon a news item on the Internet which exposes really bad behavior of the "powers that be", they point out how "the mainstream media is completely ignoring this", even though I may already have read it in the Washington Post or the New York Times. To make the claim that the mainstream media is completely ignoring a particular news item, one would need to have access to the full version of a service like Lexis-Nexis and know how to use it expertly. Google often won't suffice if the news item has not appeared on the website of any mainstream media even though it may be in print or have been broadcast, although the recent creation of Google News has improved chances of finding an item.

With every new audiotape or videotape from Osama bin Laden my correspondents are sure to inform me that the man is really dead and that the tape is a CIA fabrication. In January 2006, when bin Laden, on an audiotape, recommended that Americans read my book Rogue State, the mainstream media was eager to interview me. But a number of my correspondents were quick to inform me and the entire Internet that the tape was phony, implying that I was being naive to believe it; this continues to this day. When I ask them why the CIA would want to publicize and enrich a writer like myself, who has been exposing the intelligence agency's crimes his entire writing life, I get no answer that's worth remembering, often not even understandable.

"Why do you criticize Bush? He's not the real power. He's just a puppet", they ask me. The real power behind the throne, I'm told, is Dick Cheney, David Rockefeller, the Federal Reserve, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberger Group, the Trilateral Commission, Bohemian Grove, et al. Why, I wonder, are the annual meetings of the Bilderberger Group, et al, thought to be so vital to their members and so indicative of their power? To the extent that the Bilderbergerites have access to those in power and are able to influence them, they have this access and power all year long, whether or not they gather together in a once-a-year closed meeting. I think their meetings are primarily a social thing. Money and power likes to enjoy cocktails with money and power. Of course many important political and historical events are indeed the result of certain people of money and power talking to each other and secretly deciding what course of action would be most advantageous to their collective interests, but it doesn't necessarily follow that those who hold public office are merely puppets of these interests. Bush displays his independence every day of the week - independence from Congress, the Constitution, the Republican Party, classic conservative economic policies, the American people, election results, the facts, logic, humanity. George W is his own [sociopathic] man.

Finally, there's September 11 2001. Amongst those in the "9/11 Truth Movement" I am a sinner because I don't champion the idea that it was an "inside job". I think it more likely that some individuals in the Bush administration knew that something was about to happen involving airplanes - perhaps an old fashioned hijacking with political demands - and they let it happen, to make use of it politically, as they certainly have. But I do wish you guys in the 9/11 Truth Movement luck; if you succeed in proving that it was an inside job, that would do more to topple the empire than anything I have ever written.


Notes

{1} Washington Post, December 7 2007, page 8

{2} New York Times, December 3 2007

{3} Washington Post, December 9 2007, page 27

{4} Washington Post, December 4 2007, page 1

{5} Washington Post, December 5 2007, page 23

{6} "How they stole the bomb from us", December 8 2007, http://zope.gush-shalom.org/index_en.html

{7} New York Times, February 3 1992, page 8

{8} Paul Sigmund, The Overthrow of Allende and the Politics of Chile, 1964-1976 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977) page 297

{9} "Covert Action in Chile, 1963-1973, a Staff Report of The Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (US Senate)" 18 December 1975. page 4

{10} Sigmund, op cit, page 34

{11} Venezuelanalysis.com, November 27 2007, article by Michael Fox

{12} In sequence, details of the five items can be found in Blum's books: Freeing the World, chapter 15; Rogue State, chapters 18, 3, 11, 17; see also Killing Hope for further details.

{13} For further information, see John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man"(2004), passim

{14} Newsweek magazine, June 18 1973, page 22

{15} Washington Post, September 6 2007, page 16

{16} For a good discussion of this see the Inter Press Service report of November 14 2007 by Ali al-Fadhily

{17} Associated Press, November 6 2007

{18} New York Times, November 26 2007

{19} Washington Post, December 5 2007, page 27

{20} Capital, Volume III


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 with "add" in the subject line. I'd like your name and city in the message, but that's optional. I ask for your city only in case I'll be speaking in your area.

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://members.aol.com/bblum6/aer52.htm

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

The Next Fifteen Years

by Hazel Henderson

GreenMoney Journal (Summer 2007)

Futurists do not have crystal balls. The best of us seek to identify trends, ahead of conventional wisdom, economic forecasting and market research. The trick is to widen the focus and map all these longer-term trends identified as keys to the future and see how they may amplify or dampen each other. Of course, this depends on the values and goals of the futurists and their clients. As with all research and scientific enquiry, the first step is normative: what to pay attention to in our diverse societies and our living planet. I believe that futurists need to be independent systems thinkers and like me, self-employed. When futurists are employed in-house, whether in business or government, or as contractors, too often they narrow their enquiry, for example, the future of General Motors or of the US Department of Energy. As the old joke has it: economists can't even get their hindsight right!

My focus has always been the human family's prospects on planet Earth. So what do I see from this multi-disciplinary perspective over the next fifteen years?

* Increasing multilateralism, as all countries come to realize that the planet's current problems - from global warming, widening gaps between haves and have-nots and new pandemics to terrorism, extinction of other species and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction - cannot be solved by any one nation or even groups of nations acting alone. National sovereignty will increasingly be pooled to address these new issues of globalization. Just as the European Union now painstakingly hammers out standards and harmonizes rules among its 27 member nations, we will see this model adapted elsewhere. Latin America is well along the path of integration and may well have its own currency, the mercosur, in the next decade. Asia with its groups including ASEAN, APEC and the SCO (the Shanghai Cooperation Organization) may also have a regional currency and certainly its own Asian version of the IMF.

* Today's resource-nationalism will grow, as more countries see that their own natural resources are more valuable than colored pieces of paper or blips on computer screens. Commodities prices will continue upward and will increasingly become the benchmark of other asset prices. Many developing countries have also realized that the old game of hoarding US dollar reserves is foolish ... it just over-values the US currency and locks them in to Washington Consensus policies. This is one of the reasons behind their shedding US dollar reserves in favor of euros, pounds, yens and other strong currencies and why the euro has now become a rival reserve currency, representing 35% of trade and investment in the world. Other reasons include tacit disapproval of US foreign policy and the new currency risk in the US dollar, which will continue its slide for this and other reasons (including our loss of prestige and increasingly obvious vulnerabilities). Along with major reserve currencies: the US dollar, the euro, Asia's yuan/yen area and the mercosur in Latin America, we may see a new global currency issue of "paper gold" by the IMF, that is, Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) for global development and public goods.

* As countries exhaust the possibilities of collective action through the new regional blocs, the United Nations will increasingly be seen as the only forum for planetary concerns and global security. The UN is already accepted as such in most countries in the world, with only the USA dragging its heels or obstructing this world body with 191 member countries. The UN-bashers' "propaganda" in the USA about wasteful bureaucracy ignores the realities. The UN's administrative budget is about the size of the New York City Fire Department. Its special agencies: the UN Development Program, UNICEF for children, WHO for health, the ILO for workplace standards, UNEP for the environment and its protocols on climate change, ozone depletion, the use of outer space, the oceans, telecommunications, and many other international agreements forged over its sixty-year history, are the vital infrastructure underpinning global travel, communications, markets and commerce. They also help level the playing field upward and reward the most ethical players.

So I expect the UN will be re-invigorated, reformed and the Security Council expanded to include Brazil, India, South Africa, Japan and Malaysia becoming permanent members - and no longer stymied by the vetoes of the winners of World War Two. This should make peace-keeping more effective, especially if the proposed United Nations Security Insurance Agency (UNSIA), in partnership with the insurance industry is enacted, which would allow countries, like Costa Rica (which gave up its army in 1947) to purchase peace-keeping insurance with their premiums going to fund a well-trained standing contingent of peace-keepers and peace-makers {1}. As nations are realizing, already, many conflicts can not be solved militarily, so it is logical to expect that weapons budgets will be reduced and the long-awaited "peace dividend" may materialize. Most countries now understand that in this 21st century, the weapons of choice are currencies.

* Economic and technological globalization will increasingly be subject to binding agreements and global standards. Covering corporate accountability, these will include core labor standards, a global minimum wage (in purchasing power parity), transparency and the internalizing of social and environmental costs and impacts into prices, company balance sheets, and capital asset pricing models. ESG (environmental, social and governance) issues will be material to all asset evaluation, risk and securities analyses. Beyond micro-indicators of ethical performance at the corporate and municipal level, macro-indicators will also have been overhauled. A conference on new indicators of national wealth, progress, sustainability and quality of life, "Beyond GDP" will be held in the European Parliament, November 2007 (I am honored to serve on its advisory board).

* Taxation will have shifted from incomes and payrolls to waste, pollution, resource depletion and planned obsolescence. Current subsidies to advertising will be removed to curb impulse buying, credit-card abuse and to boost personal savings rates - in recognition of new findings in brain research. Taxes will be progressively harmonized to reduce jurisdictional arbitrage, money-laundering and tax havens. For example, the European Commission's March 28 2007 Green Paper on Market-Based Instruments endorses such tax shifts for EU countries {2}. Taxation of global "bads": arms sales, currency speculation, excessive exploitation of the global commons and pollution will be collected by national governments under international treaties and allocated to the provision of global public goods: health, education, environmental restoration and peace-keeping, as Inge Kaul outlines in Global Public Goods (1999) and Providing Public Goods (2005). Emissions trading of pollution allowances will have been reformed to prevent today's windfall profits, by allocating rights to everybody, since the air is a public resource and auctioning rights, rather than giving them only to polluters. The proposed International Bank for Environmental Settlements {3} will manage global carbon trading to allow both rich and poor people and countries to participate in vastly expanded environmental finance markets.

* The shift beyond fossil fuels and nuclear power toward renewable energy, efficiency, re-use, re-manufacturing, recycling and better process controls will continue its double digit growth of 2006-07. The drivers: Institutional investors (including the UN Principles of Responsible Investing with $6 trillion of assets; the Carbon Disclosure Project with $31 trillion of assets, and CERES) and others including concerned shareholders, SRI mutual funds, labor unions, employees, citizens and consumers, as well as global civic groups such as those of the World Social Forum and socially-responsible business organizations from the UN Global Compact to Brasil's Instituto Ethos (on whose board I am honored to serve). In Europe and most countries the shifts will be led by governments reducing the $235 billion of current subsidies to fossil fuels and the billions more subsidies to nuclear power. In the USA the shifts will still be led by the private sector and by state and local governments. The last holdout in the world with its for-profit medical system, the US will gradually have moved to a more efficient, tax-based, single-payer national health insurance system, such as used in every other major advanced democracy. Most of these countries enjoy similar or better outcomes at half the US cost of sixteen percent of GDP. Business leaders will continue to spearhead this change, so as to remain competitive with other global companies enjoying tax-supported medical insurance. As GDP national accounts are corrected to deduct social and environmental costs and add infrastructure, education and health into new asset accounts, voters will see the benefits of these tax-supported, public investments and the avoided costs (that is, calculatable benefits) they deliver to both public and private sectors.


Of course, I also see plenty of worrying counter-trends, from those global problems already mentioned to the consequences of money corrupting politics and democracy, the dearth of visionary leadership, global mediocracy and monopoly over the public airwaves. Yet we have all the tools we need to make the transition to global sustainability. The planet is holding up a mirror to humanity and we are slowly learning that our values must change to reflect planetary realities. Stress has always been evolution's tool. We humans have three main resources to develop ourselves and our societies: information, matter and energy. As we move deeper into the Information Age, we know that information, knowledge and wisdom control how efficiently we use matter and energy. Globalization since the 1980s has ridden on the slogans of "market reforms": privatization, open borders, free trade and $1.5 trillion of daily currency trading - overwhelming the efforts of even the democratically-elected governments to manage their domestic economies. This led to the race to the bottom that began to reverse itself in the ensuing decades. The new mantra became "reform markets!" The new global financial architecture and prudential regulation called for in the meltdowns of the 1990s, was slowly enacted in the first two decades of our new century. More ethical markets and cleaner, greener economies are already going mainstream. In a planetary perspective, all human self-interests are similar. Morality has become pragmatic!

Links:

{1} More information on UNSIA at www.HazelHenderson.com.

{2} More information at www.EthicalMarkets.com.

{3} More information at www.undp.org.

_____

Hazel Henderson, independent futurist, creator of the "Ethical Markets" TV series and the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators, with the Calvert Group, has authored nine books, including Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy (Chelsea Green, 2006).

Article originally published in the GreenMoney Journal’s special 15th Anniversary issue (Summer 2007). More information at www.greenmoney.com.

Contact: Hazel Henderson's Library
PO Box 5190, St Augustine, Florida 32085
Tel: 904/ 826-1381 | Fax: 904/ 826-0325

© Copyright 2005 Hazel Henderson

http://www.hazelhenderson.com/recentPapers/next15years.html


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

Beware when reading F William Engdahl

On December 11th, I posted here the "Doomstay Seed Vault" article by F William Engdahl. It included this statement:

Margaret Sanger, a rapid eugenicist, the founder of Planned Parenthood International and an intimate of the Rockefeller family, created something called The Negro Project in 1939, based in Harlem, which as she confided in a letter to a friend, was all about the fact that, as she put it, 'we want to exterminate the Negro population'. {11}

I assume he meant "rabid" instead of "rapid". But the quotation, 'we want to exterminate the Negro population' startled me, so I read the article he cited at {11}, which is: Tanya L Green, The Negro Project: Margaret Sanger's Genocide Project for Black American's at www.blackgenocide.org/negro.html.

After reading the entire article carefully, I searched it for the word "exterminate". The only sentences I found were these:

"The aim of the program was to restrict - many believe exterminate - the black population".

"We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members".

The first sentence is deceptive enough: The "aim" of anything can be very different from what "many people believe" the aim is.

But note the huge difference between the second sentence and what Engdahl wrote. The difference is as great as that between "I don't want anyone to think I hate you" and "I hate you", or "I don't want anyone in the crowd to think I am the one who farted" and "I am the one who farted".

This is deceptive writing. From here on, I will be very careful when reading anything written by F William Engdahl.

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

All That Ugly Stuff

by Hunter S Thompson

Harper's Magazine (November 2007)

From "Fear & Loathing: Corrections, Retractions, Apologies, Cop-Outs, Etc", a 1972 memo to Rolling Stone editor Jann S Wermer. Thompson's reportage during that year is collected in Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 (Straight Arrow Books, 1973). The memo appears in Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S Thompson, an oral biography compiled by Wermer and Corey Seymour, published this fall by Little, Brown. El Ropo is Charles Perry, then copy chief of Rolling Stone.


For various reasons that probably don't mean shit to anybody but me, I want to get straight - for the record, as it were - with regard to some of the most serious of the typographical errors that have marred the general style, tone & wisdom of "Fear & Loathing".

I have tried to blame various individuals in the San Francisco office for these things, but each time we trace one of the goddamn things back to its root, it turns out to have been my fault. This is mainly because I never seem to get my gibberish in to El Ropo, who has to cope with it, until the crack of dawn on deadline day - at which time I have to get him out of bed and keep him awake by means of ruses, shocks, and warnings while I feed my freshly typed pages into the Mojo Wire, which zaps them across the nation to El Ropo at the rate of one page every four minutes.

This is a fantastic machine, and I carry it with me at all times. All I need is the Mojo Wire and a working telephone to send perfect Xerox copies of anything I've written to anybody else with a Mojo Wire receiver - and anybody with $50 a month can lease one of these things. Incredible. What will they think of next?

The only real problem with the Mojo Wire is that it tends to miss or skip a line every once in a while, especially when we get one of those spotty phone connections. If you're playing "New Speedway Boogie" in the same room, for instance, the Mojo machine will pickup the noise and garble a name like "Jackson" so badly that El Ropo will get it as "Johnson" - or "Jackalong" - or maybe just a fuzzy gray blank.

Which would not be a problem if we had time to check back & forth on a different phone line - but by the time El Ropo can assemble my gibberish & read it I am usually checked out and driving like a bastard for the nearest airport.

So he has to read the whole thing several times, try to get a grip on the context, and then decide what I really meant to say in that line that came across garbled.

This is not always easy. My screeds tend to wander, without benefit of such traditional journalistic landmarks as "prior references" and "pyramid reverse-build foundations".


I still insist "objective journalism" is a contradiction in terms. But I want to draw a very hard line between the inevitable reality of "subjective journalism" and the idea that any honestly subjective journalist might feel free to estimate a crowd at a rally for some candidate the journalist happens to like personally at 2,000 instead of 612 - or to imply that a candidate the journalist views with gross contempt, personally, is a less effective campaigner than he actually is.

Hubert Humphrey, for instance: I don't mind admitting that I think sheep dip is the only cure for everything Humphrey stands for. I consider him not only a living, babbling insult to the presumed intelligence of the electorate, but also a personally painful mockery of the idea that Americans can learn from history.

But if Hubert meets a crowd in Tampa and seventy-seven ranking business leaders each offer him $1,000 for his campaign, I will write that scene exactly as it happened - regardless of the immense depression it would plunge me into.

No doubt I would look around for any valid word or odd touches that might match the scene to my bias. If any of those seventy-seven contributors was wearing spats or monocles I would take care to mention it. I would probably follow some of them outside to see if they had AMERICA - LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT bumper stickers on their cars. If one of them grabbed a hummingbird out of the air and bit its head off, I think it's safe to say I would probably use that --

-- but even if I did all that ugly stuff, and if the compilation of my selected evidence might persuade a reader here and there to think that Humphrey was drawing his Florida support from a cabal of senile fascists, well, I probably wouldn't get much argument from any of the "objective" journalists on the tour, because even the ones who would flatly disagree with my interpretation of what happened would be extremely reluctant to argue that theirs or anyone else's was the flat objective truth.

On the other hand, it's also true that I will blow a fact here and there. A month ago I wrote that a registered independent in Colorado could vote in either the GOP or Democratic primary - which was true last year, but the law was recently changed. Somebody wrote to curse me for that one, and all I can do is apologize. In 1970 I knew every clause, twist, subsection & constitutional precedent that had anything to do with voter-eligibility laws in Colorado. (When you run for office on the Freak Power ticket, the first thing you do is learn all the laws.) But when I moved to Washington and got into the Presidential Campaign I stopped keeping track of things like that.

The only other serious error that I feel any need to explain or deal with at this time has to do with a statement about Nixon. What I wrote was: "There is still no doubt in my mind that he could never pass for human ..."

But somebody cut the word "never". El Ropo denies it, but our relationship has never been the same. He says the printer did it. Which is understandable, I guess; it's a fairly heavy statement either way.

Is Nixon "human"? Probably so, in the technical sense. He is not a fish or a fowl. There is no real argument about that. Most juries would accept, prima facie, the idea that the President of the United States is a mammal.

He is surely not an Insect; and not of the Lizard family. But "human" is something else. A mammal is not necessarily human. Rodents are mammals. An extremely intelligent Bayou Rat called "Honeyrunner" was once elected to the city council in DeFuniak Springs, Florida. Nobody called him "human", but they say he did okay on the job.

It would take a really sick and traitorous mind to compare the President of the United States to a Bayou Rat, regardless of intelligence. So maybe El Ropo was right. By almost any standard of responsible journalism the President must be referred to as "human". It is one of those ugly realities - like the Amnesty Question - that we will all have to face & accept.


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

The cyber guardians of honest journalism

No longer trusting what they read, see and hear, people in western democracies are questioning as never before, particularly via the internet

by John Pilger

New Statesman (November 29 2007)


What has changed in the way we see the world? For as long as I can remember, the relationship of journalists with power has been hidden behind a bogus objectivity and notions of an "apathetic public" that justify a mantra of "giving the public what they want". What has changed is the public's perception and knowledge. No longer trusting what they read and see and hear, people in western democracies are questioning as never before, particularly via the internet. Why, they ask, is the great majority of news sourced to authority and its vested interests? Why are many journalists the agents of power, not people?

Much of this new thinking can be traced to a remarkable UK website, www.medialens.org. The creators of Media Lens, David Edwards and David Cromwell, assisted by their webmaster, Olly Maw, have had such an extraordinary influence since they set up the site in 2001 that, without their meticulous and humane analysis, the full gravity of the debacles of Iraq and Afghanistan might have been consigned to bad journalism's first draft of bad history. Peter Wilby put it well in his review of Guardians of Power: the Myth of the Liberal Media (2005), a drawing-together of Media Lens essays published by Pluto Press, which he described as "mercifully free of academic or political jargon and awesomely well researched. All journalists should read it, because the Davids make a case that demands to be answered."

That appeared in the New Statesman. Not a single national newspaper reviewed the most important book about journalism I can remember. Take the latest Media Lens essay,